Financial Mindset

The two biggest U.S. oil companies joined the growing chorus of voices sounding the alarm on the imminent doom global markets could soon face. With the Strait of Hormuz still effectively closed, top oil-consuming countries have been rapidly draining their reserves, helping keep crude prices in check. But Exxon Senior Vice President Neil Chapman warned at an industry conference on Thursday that such drawdowns can’t go on indefinitely. “We’re approaching unheard of inventory levels,” he said, according to CNBC . “I mean really, really low levels. You can debate whether that’s going to hit those really low levels in two weeks or three weeks. Once you get to that point, then you’ll see price shoot up.” For now, the U.S.-Iran ceasefire talks are deadlocked while the Strait of Hormuz remains a contested waterway. That was on display Saturday, when U.S. forces fired a missile at a blockade runner to disable it after ignoring repeated warnings. Iran has also kept up ...

President Donald Trump  on Saturday branded the federal judge who  blocked his renovation  of the Kennedy Center as “an anti Trump Hater” and predicted that the nation’s premier performing arts center he wanted  to shutter for a two-year overhaul  will “soon be closed, probably never to open again.” In a lengthy post on his Truth Social platform, Trump fumed about the Friday decision from U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper who also ordered  Trump’s name  removed from the center. Clearly angered by his latest legal setback, he said it was “impossible for me to be treated fairly,” tying Cooper’s ruling to earlier losses, including the Supreme Court’s rejection in February of his  sweeping tariffs . His post aimed to make the case for the project but did not clarify whether he would continue to defend it in court. Hours after Cooper’s decision, Trump said he was backing away from the renovations and making arrangements ...

When Silicon Valley and the Holy See agree, it is worth asking what they know that governments do not. On Monday, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, calling for AI to be disarmed and regulated in the service of humanity. Standing beside him at the Vatican was Christopher Olah, co-founder of Anthropic, who acknowledged that AI companies operate “inside a set of incentives and constraints that can sometimes conflict with doing the right thing.” Separately, Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei has stated that “the next tier of risk is actually AI companies themselves” — and that AI leaders, including himself, should not be the ones deciding the technology’s future. This is the architects of the most capable AI systems in existence telling the world they cannot govern themselves alone. The question is no longer whether global AI governance is necessary. It is whether it will be designed before a crisis makes the answer obvi...

In the days before the Memorial Day weekend, rates on 30 year Treasury bonds hit their highest level in 19 years at 5.2%, and the benchmark 10-year reached 4.7%, the top reading since mid-2007. If those kinds of yields take hold, the scenario for federal interest expense posited in the CBO’s “Budget and Economic Outlook: 2026 to 2036,” released in February, descends from dire to near-disastrous . Takeaway: America’s track to fiscal safety has lost all margin for error, and nothing demonstrates that better than the long-term impact of loftier than expected rates. America’s got so little room to maneuver that even yields that modestly exceed the CBO’s “baseline,” as the numbers compound in the years ahead, deliver a huge extra blow by crowding out big chunks of revenue that would otherwise go towards funding such essentials as Defense, Social Security and Medicare. The CBO forecasts that yields on the 30 and 10-year Treasuries will res...

The cigarette smoking rate among U.S. adults dropped to another all-time low last year, with 1 in 11 adults saying they were current smokers, according to government survey data released this week. Cigarette smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer, heart disease and stroke, and it’s long been considered  the leading cause of preventable death . The  preliminary findings  from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were based on survey responses from more than 24,200 adults. In the survey, CDC officials defined current cigarette smoking as smoking at least 100 cigarettes in a lifetime and now smoking every day or some days. In the mid-1960s, 42% of U.S. adults were smokers. The rate has been gradually dropping for decades, due to cigarette taxes, tobacco product price hikes, smoking bans, public education campaigns and changes in the social acceptability of lighting up in public. In 2024, the percentage of current adult smokers fell below 10% for ...

David Trainer, CEO of research firm New Constructs, is taking a highly contrarian view of the looming SpaceX IPO that’s generating more excitement than any debut in stock market history. And that’s across the spectrum, from institutions anticipating their biggest payday ever from underwriting the shares, to the funds clamoring to get the way-underpriced allocations that should “pop” big the first day of trading, to the Elon Musk fans clamoring to pile in after the bell rings at the Nasdaq market site, probably in mid-June. Trainer’s got a different take: SpaceX is really skewering investors by raising tens of billions that instead of building profits will going to paying down debt, and “fund an increasingly costly AI race” that SpaceX claims it will totally dominate while in fact, it will encounter powerful competition, and intense pricing pressure, from the likes of Amazon , Google and Microsoft . Put simply, Trainer brands SpaceX proje...

Salesforce really wants to counter the narrative that an AI-related “saaspocalypse” has endangered its growth.  So, alongside its record first-quarter fiscal 2027 results on Wednesday, the cloud software giant commenced its largest-ever accelerated share repurchase at $25 billion. In doing so, the company juiced its earnings per share but cut its full-year cash flow growth outlook roughly in half to account for the debt issued to fund the block share repurchase.  The $25 billion accelerated share repurchase (ASR) is part of a $50 billion stock buyback authorization the Salesforce board approved in February 2026. In the first quarter of fiscal 2027, Salesforce returned $27.5 billion to shareholders, including $27.1 billion in the mega-share block purchase plus $365 million in dividends. The ASR included upfront delivery of 103 million shares and drove Salesforce’s diluted share count down 10% year over year.  Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on Wednesday’s...