Financial Mindset

President  Donald Trump  announced Sunday that his new White House counsel will be  Will Scharf , the staff secretary who as the Trump-appointed head of the National Capital Planning Commission  helped secure approval  for the $400 million ballroom project. Trump said that, beginning Sept. 1, Scharf will be replacing David Warrington, who will be leaving the administration to join the private sector. Trump noted that Scharf previously served as a federal prosecutor and represented him in a number of cases, including at the Supreme Court. “Will is Tough, Strong, and Smart! He also loves our Country, and respects the Law,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Will Scharf will do a great job as White House Counsel!” The shakeup in the White House counsel’s office comes at a critical juncture — just months ahead of the  midterm elections , where Trump’s Republican Party will be fighting to hold on to control of Congress. Democrats have vowed t...

Last week’s attempt to boost the sagging yen wasn’t the first time the U.S. and Japan took such joint action, but the way they did it revealed weakness in the dollar’s global status, according to a top currency expert. In a Financial Times op-ed on Tuesday, University of California at Berkeley economist Barry Eichengreen pointed to both sides of the currency intervention , which he said reflected concern about long-term yields going up. On the U.S. end, the New York Fed sold euros instead of dollar-denominated assets to buy yen. Eichengreen said that allowed the U.S. to avoid calling on financial markets to absorb more Treasury securities. That’s as the federal government must finance a $2 trillion budget deficit this fiscal year, meaning it’s already issuing a flood of Treasury debt. Meanwhile, it’s also competing against AI hyperscalers who are selling a mountain of their own bonds. The tsunami of public and private debt as well a...

US Senator Jim Banks joined a handful of Republican senators in calling for embattled Representative Max Miller to step down over allegations he physically abused his former wife and his two-year-old daughter. Banks told NBC’s  Meet the Press  on Sunday that the allegations — which Miller has denied — are “deeply troubling.” At least four other Republican senators, including Miller’s former father-in-law, Bernie Moreno, have called for him to step down.  Ohio’s other senator, Jon Husted, Montana Senator Tim Sheehy and Kansas Senator Roger Marshall have also said Miller, who represents northeast Ohio, should quit. No Republicans who serve with Miller in the US House have made such calls. “If the allegations are true and watching this play out publicly, of course he should resign,” Banks, a first-term senator from Indiana, said. Banks suggested that Miller, a Republican who’s running for a third term, could lose a seat crucial to maintaining a majority in t...

Weight-loss drugs are becoming a popular employee perk, with almost a third of workers saying they’d switch jobs to get GLP-1 coverage. Now, Bank of America is spending $250 million or more yearly on the drugs for its staffers—and CEO Brian Moynihan says the upsides are well-worth the eye-watering cost.  “What we see is a great impact on the employees,” Moynihan recently said in an interview with CNBC . “We’ve always been about mental wellness, physical wellness.” It’s part of a wider $2 billion a year wellness packaged for employee healthcare at the $436 billion bank. Staffers may have to cover the premium or copay for their GLP-1s, but the Wall Street titan is picking up the rest of the bill, amounting to nearly a quarter of a billion dollars annually. And Moynihan says the health investment is worth it to support a healthier workforce.  “It’s lowering near-term incidents of heart issues for people taking, even if they don’t have all the attribu...

Baby boomers are sitting on immense wealth after benefiting from a historic era of economic growth and financial gains, but heirs shouldn’t get their hopes up too much. Estimates of the so-called Great Wealth Transfer vary, reaching as high as $124 trillion. A report last month from Visa Business and Economic Insights  put the number at a more modest $93 trillion, though that’s still three times the size of U.S. GDP. But millennials and Gen Xers with great expectations for inheriting that wealth may be setting themselves up for great disappointment. Visa likened it to winning the lottery, then seeing the eventual check whittled down drastically. “You hit the jackpot, but you immediately lose half by—smartly—taking the lump sum,” the report said. “Next, you lose another 30–40% through taxes and fees. The advertised jackpot is enormous, but after the lump-sum haircut, taxes and fees, the take‑home number is much lower. A similar dynamic app...

Iran  issued dramatic new demands around the reopening of the  Strait of Hormuz , and the United Arab Emirates said one of its ships was targeted by an Iranian missile. Yemen’s military attacked the country’s Iranian-backed  Houthi rebels . And Turkey’s Kurdish  peace bill won approval in parliament . Here’s a look at developments across the Middle East on Saturday. Full coverage can be found  here . Iran says strait won’t open until the US ‘corrects’ behavior Iran’s politburo-like body known as the Supreme National Security Council said the Strait of Hormuz will not open until the United States “corrects its behavior,” issuing new demands that could shake up talks on a deal to manage the waterway and traffic on it. Iran’s state broadcaster published the statement by the council’s secretary, Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who is also a commander in the powerful Revolutionary Guard. The United States must never threat...

Temperatures in Central Europe soared to  extreme levels again  on Wednesday with Slovakia and Austria both having their  hottest day on record . For Slovakia, it was also the third time this summer that temperatures reached a record high. The country’s south recorded temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit) in the latest heat wave, with a new record of 41.4 C (106.5 F) in the town of Kamenica nad Hronom in southern Slovakia, the Slovak Meteorological Institute said. The previous records were set on two days — June 29 and June 30 — with 41.0 C (105.8 F) in the town of Turna nad Bodvou, and 41.3 C (106.3 F) in Kamenica nad Hronom. That smashed a 2007 high of 40.3 C (104.5 F) in the town of Hurbanovo. The night of Tuesday into Wednesday was also the hottest on record, with 28.4 degrees Celsius (83 F) in the town of Skalica in southwestern Slovakia. In Austria, the all-time high of 41.2 C (106.1 F) was measured in Bad Deutsch...