Financial Mindset

President Donald Trump may have signed a memorandum of understanding with Iran to end the war late Wednesday, but it doesn’t resolve a much darker issue: Iran’s nuclear weapons.   While Iran affirms that it won’t develop nuclear weapons in the agreement , curbing the actual process of making those weapons—stockpiling and enriching uranium—is left to be finalized later. Crucially, the MOU states that in the meantime, Iran will “maintain the current status quo of its nuclear program.” “What the negotiators are trying to capture is that Iran takes no further advances with its nuclear program, but they should have considered that the status quo is pretty poor,” Andrea Stricker , a national security expert specializing in nuclear weapons, told Fortune . “If I were negotiating, I would have insisted that restoration of monitoring and access would have to be something that Iran had to do in the MOU because it’s so important.” Iran hasn’t allowed the UN watchdog responsible for mo...

U.S. and Iranian negotiators headed to a Swiss venue Saturday for talks on adding key details to their  interim agreement to halt  the war , hours after Tehran said it closed the  Strait of Hormuz because of Israel’s attacks in  Lebanon  and warned that little might be achieved if the fighting doesn’t stop. U.S. President Donald Trump , in response, unleashed a new threat to impose American tolls in the crucial waterway if a final deal with Iran isn’t reached in 60 days, saying the money would be for “services rendered as the Guardian Angel to the countries of the Middle East.” The agreement calls for toll-free travel for 60 days. The announcements indicated a rough start to the technical-level talks that key mediator Pakistan said will begin Sunday, with Qatari mediators also participating. U.S. Vice President  JD Vance  left for Switzerland on Saturday evening, just as Iranian state TV posted video showing Iran’s negotiators arriving there. They are led ...

There’s growing alarm among European leaders over the flood of Chinese exports threatening their home-grown industries, and their response could resemble something from President Donald Trump’s trade war. Frustration is boiling over as China’s goods trade surplus with the European Union hit 360.6 billion euros ($414 billion) in ​2025, up 15% from 2024. And in the first four months of this year, the gap has expanded by 10%. In fact, French President Emmanuel Macron even suggested a course of action that’s straight out of Trump’s own playbook. “We must take protective measures, safeguard measures,” he said last month, calling for “the European equivalent of Section 301.” Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 allows the U.S. to impose tariffs in response to unfair or discriminatory trade practices. After the Supreme Court struck down the global duties Trump levied last year under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, he plans to use ...

When Jim Fitterling of Dow and Tim Cook of Apple step down as CEOs in July and September respectively, the Fortune 500 will lose two widely respected leaders who led their companies through transformational eras.  The exits of the two men, who both identify as gay, will also mark a dispiriting step backward for LGBTQ+ representation in the C‑suite. After September, there will be only one out LGBTQ+ chief executive left in the Fortune 500: Land O’ Lakes’ Beth Ford. It’s a reminder of how the highest echelons of corporate America remain largely straight, white, and male—and how difficult it is to maintain gains in representation. Only three years ago, there were four LGBTQ+ CEOs when Macy’s was still led by Jeff Gennette, who stepped down in 2024. Outside of the Fortune 500, there have also been recent exits: Coty , the beauty products maker giant, saw its CEO Sue Nabi, a rare transgender executive, leave her job late last year.  Other historically underrepresented gro...

Singapore has spent decades selling the world on the promise that it can be trusted by all sides. For a new generation of AI companies, that pledge has never been more valuable. OpenAI and Google DeepMind both established applied AI labs in the city-state over the past year, while Anthropic began advertising local positions in finance, product support, and economic research. Chinese firms like Tencent have also deepened their investment in the country. “All the AI companies I work with, whether they’re from China, Korea or Japan, all use Singapore as a hub,” Gunja Gargeshwari, the chief revenue officer of Israel-headquartered web scraping firm Bright Data, told Fortune on the sidelines of the SuperAI summit in Singapore. “It’s easiest to operate in the region if I have people in Singapore—it’s where conversations are happening, and where the innovation hubs for different providers are being set up.” Bright Data, for instance, has chosen to position Singapore as its APAC he...

The moment that triggered the Trump administration’s dramatic crackdown on Anthropic , and may completely reset the ground rules for U.S. regulation of AI, happened almost by accident.  And it was sparked by one of Anthropic’s top investors: Amazon .  Last week, researchers at Amazon were busy stress-testing Anthropic’s newly released Fable 5 , a “safe” version of Anthropic’s Mythos AI model. Anthropic had repeatedly said that its Mythos-class models had superhuman software hacking skills that were too dangerous to be released to the general public. Fable 5, which Anthropic launched on June 9, was equipped with what it said were robust safeguards against cybersecurity risks.  The Amazon researchers testing Fable, however, discovered a “jailbreak” that they documented as allowing users to bypass safety rails and access information that could be used in a cyberattack. Amazon promptly notified Anthropic. But the situation suddenly escalated when Amazon Chief E...

Singapore is one the smaller countries in Southeast Asia, but its companies continue to dominate the rankings of the Fortune Southeast Asia 500. The list, which ranks Southeast Asia’s largest companies by revenue, covers seven different economies: Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Cambodia and the Philippines. Thailand and Indonesia lead the list when it comes to the number of companies, with 105 and 104 firms on the list respectively. The two countries have switched places compared to last year’s ranking with 109 Indonesian companies and 100 Thai companies. Singapore has just 82 companies on the list, putting it in fourth place. But measure by revenue, and the country’s footprint gets much larger. Singaporean companies on this year’s ranking generated $657.6 billion in 2025 revenue, 35% of the total $1.88 trillion generated by all Southeast Asia 500 firms. (In second place is Thailand, with $358.2 billion in revenue). Half of the top 10 companies on ...