Financial Mindset

Buried in the Federal Reserve’s June policy statement—the shortest of Kevin Warsh’s young tenure as chair—is a single sentence with no qualifiers, no hedges, and, according to at least one longtime Fed watcher, more signal than anything in the minutes released Wednesday : “The Committee will deliver price stability.” “There’s not a qualifying statement after that,” said Laura Ullrich, a former senior regional economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond who now directs economic research at the Indeed Hiring Lab. “It doesn’t say the committee will deliver price stability while also blah blah blah blah. It doesn’t have a qualifying statement.” Despite its brevity, she called it “a very short, but very strong statement.” It read as an unhedged commitment that doesn’t usually appear in a document over which every word is fought over by the 19 people who make up the Federal Open Market Committee...

Billionaire philanthropist John Arnold has spent years actually sticking to the Giving Pledge , which many others in his cohort have failed to follow through on . As of February, he and his wife, Laura, had donated more than $2.3 billion , mainly to criminal justice and education causes, according to Forbes . But now Arnold Ventures, the foundation founded by the Arnolds, is going after an unsuspecting cause: sports betting. The foundation announced Tuesday it has awarded roughly $2.6 million in new research grants to 12 universities and think tanks studying the fast-growing sports betting industry.  The main motivation is figuring out what online sports betting is doing to the people who use it. The projects, which are housed at institutions including Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Wisconsin, will examine how gambling affects financial well-being, household formation, mental health, and consumer behavior—and, in some cases, w...

President Donald Trump’s personal appeal to FIFA president Gianni Infantino may have helped suspend a red card for one of the U.S. men’s national team’s top strikers, but it may have also put FIFA’s credibility on the line and its billions of advertising dollars at risk. Folarin Balogun, the U.S. striker who, until the contentious Monday night game, scored in every match he has played in at the 2026 World Cup, was expected to miss the round of 16 match against Belgium after he was awarded a red card for a tackle during the Americans’ 2-0 win over Bosnia and Herzegovina last week. But after Trump and his team gave Infantino a call and FIFA subsequently suspended Balogun’s one-match ban, many pointed to the federation’s strict political interference rules and how FIFA enforced it in the past—and didn’t this time around. By Sunday, FIFA had suspended Balogun’s one-match ban for a probationary period of one year, clearing the U.S.’ No. 20 to play Monday while slap...

Tad Devine was in a car driving from Rhode Island to Washington when he told 125 reporters that Hillary Clinton was going to lose the general election. It was 2016, Bernie Sanders had just won New Hampshire in a landslide, and Devine—Sanders’s chief strategist, a 30-year Democratic operative who had worked for Al Gore and John Kerry—was making the case that the party was about to nominate the wrong person. Look at Clinton’s weakness in open primaries, where independents could cross over and vote, Devine said. Those same voters would hand the election to Donald Trump in November. “I said on that phone call that I thought Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate in the general election,” he told Fortune . “And then I was lambasted for the next two weeks. Called a misogynist and everything else because they said I was calling a woman a weak candidate.” Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan, and New Hampshire. Every state Devine had flagged. A decade...

A federal judge ordered the Pentagon to give  Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.  a reprieve from a law that caused all of its lobbyists to drop it as a client while she considers the constitutionality of the measure, in a case set to test the US’s ability to curtail Chinese companies’ activities. Washington’s most powerful lobbying firms rushed to sever ties with Alibaba and other Chinese tech giants after a new law targeting entities allegedly aiding China’s military took effect last week, Bloomberg News previously  reported .    The restriction bars the Defense Department from working with any company represented by lobbyists who also work for entities blacklisted by the Pentagon for allegedly aiding the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. In practice, the provision forced lobbyists to choose between the sanctioned Chinese companies and US defense contractors, causing them to abandon the former. US District Judge Eumi K. Lee, who is overseeing a lawsuit ...

David Senra will tell you he doesn’t care if you listen to his podcast. And he means it. For five and a half years after he launched Founders in 2016, almost nobody did listen. He read one business biography per week—hard copy, with a pen and a six-inch ruler and a stack of Post-its— photographed his annotations, recorded his thoughts alone in a room, and published the result. No audience. No income. No feedback worth mentioning. “I told everyone, from day one, even with a single listener, that I was going to do this whether anybody listened or not,” he told me over FaceTime the first time we spoke. The proof is in the RSS feed. Hidden inside the code for Founders is a single line still bearing the podcast’s original title: “Autotelic”—a word that means an activity done purely for its own sake. Senra chose the name when he launched the show and never changed it, not even after the audience arrived. Courtesy of David Senra Founders began in Senra’s Miami kitc...

Former House Speaker  Nancy Pelosi ‘s husband was involved in a hit and run on Friday in California’s wine country that left one car with “major damage,” according to local authorities, who said that the 86-year-old could face misdemeanor charges for the collision. Paul Pelosi was driving his brown convertible in Yountville, a small town in the heart of wine country in Napa County, when he struck a legally parked car on the side of the road, briefly stopped and then drove away, Napa County Sheriff’s department said in a news release on Saturday. There were no reported injuries. A witness saw the collision and called 911. Shortly after, sheriff’s deputies then found Paul Pelosi with severe damage to the front of his car on a nearby road roughly one quarter of a mile away. The octogenarian told officers that he knew he hit something but wasn’t sure when or what caused the damage to his car. Paul Pelosi didn’t have any alcohol in his s...