Financial Mindset

Water levels on the Danube River, the second longest in Europe, have dropped so low because of drought that the hulks of dozens of World War II German battleships are emerging into view. They are a curious distraction from the summer heat crisis. The Danube’s  record low water levels  also have forced power plants to the brink of shutting down, and governments across Central and Eastern Europe are taking steps to conserve electricity. In the middle of the river separating Serbia and Romania near the Serbian port of Prahovo, a rusty hull is now visible along with a broken mast where the Nazi flag used to fly. The ships, some still laden with weapons, belonged to Nazi Germany’s Black Sea fleet that the Germans deliberately sank as they retreated from Romania and as Soviet forces advanced deeper into Europe near the end of the war. Historians say up to 200 German warships were scuttled in September 1944 near Prahovo in the Danube gorge as they came under Soviet ...

A record-breaking hot and dry summer tightened its grip on Europe on Monday, as water-dropping planes swooped over a major wildfire in Greece, firefighters in France sought to stabilize a blaze in Provence, and much of the United Kingdom recorded its driest July in nearly two centuries. Wildfires west of Athens jumped containment lines a day after  a midair collision  between two helicopters killed two crew members. A Greek and a Danish national died and two others were hospitalized following the collision on Sunday. All four were private operators chartered by the Greek firefighting service. In France, firefighters in the region around Bordeaux guarded against potential flare-ups inside a still-burning scar  four times the size of Paris . A prolonged heat wave and lack of rainfall led to the driest July in England and Wales in nearly 200 years of recordkeeping, according to provisional statistics, the U.K.’s weather service said Monday. All of Wales ...

At Goldman Sachs , Morgan Stanley , and Bank of America , the fastest route from the Ivy league to a corner office might not run through the career center at all, but through the football roster.  That’s the implication of a new National Bureau of Economic Research study from Harvard, Duke, and Wharton researchers who tracked the first jobs of 120,306 Ivy League graduates between 1950 and 2020. The team—Paul Gompers, George Hu, Will Levinson and Sachin Srivastava—set out to test something Wall Street recruiters have long insisted anecdotally, namely that being a college athlete is a hiring edge.  What they found was more specific: the team bond is a far more potent career driver than the diploma itself, sharpening the narrative about elite college graduates hiring each other on Wall Street into something more concrete.  “Broad school ties do relatively little; the pull comes from intensive shared experiences like a varsity team,” Srivastava, a co-autho...

One in three Singaporean business owners still use their personal bank accounts for their company banking needs, trying to escape high transaction fees, according to a survey from MariBank, a digital bank owned by Southeast Asian tech firm Sea . That creates tax and legal headaches , as business owners find it difficult to deduce their legitimate profit and deductions come tax season.  “Our local banks are good, and international banks also have a strong presence here,” Natalia Goh, MariBank’s CEO, told Fortune . “But there are certain banking needs that are still underserved.” MariBank’s answer is a business account with zero transaction fees and a single app that lets customers toggle between personal and business banking. “These needs are the white spaces that nobody’s really addressing,” Goh explains. “That’s what makes it exciting, and that’s where I think we have room to play.” The origins of MariBank MariBank launched in 2023 as a wholly-owned subsidia...

Jeff Bezos won’t pretend he didn’t see this day coming. Sure, when he was sitting in his Bellevue, Wash., garage in 1995 , at a makeshift desk made from a wooden door slab, he probably wasn’t imagining that his nascent online bookshop would grow into the largest company in the world. Instead, he may have been puzzling over how to set up extension cords to keep his computers and servers running without tripping his home’s circuit breakers. Or he may have been mulling over changing the name of his tiny startup, then called Cadabra, to Amazon . But three decades later, now that his startup has become an “everything company” that reportedly delivers as many packages as the U.S. Postal Service; now that the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud business powers a third of the internet; and now that Amazon has topped the Fortune 500 and ascended to the No. 1 spot in the Global 500 —making it the biggest company in the world—Bezos admitted to Fortune : “It’s not like it’s a complete surprise.”...

President  Donald Trump  said late Saturday that he would halt new planned attacks on Iran pending renewed talks to  wind down the war  and revive stalled cargo traffic through the  Strait of Hormuz . It was the latest in a pattern of announcements the U.S. president has made to first threaten massive strikes and then later call them off. The abrupt shifts have been a defining feature of the five-month conflict that has  sent prices of oil and basic goods soaring  — and the announcements to date have been upended by renewed attacks days or even hours afterward. Here is a look at some of Trump’s past major announcements about pausing strikes against Iran: April 7 The United States and Iran  agree to a two-week ceasefire  to end the intense fighting that began on Feb. 28  with Israeli and U.S. attacks . Trump makes the announcement less than two hours before a  deadline he had set  for Tehran to capitulate or fac...

UK employers are creating jobs for experienced staff with artificial intelligence skills and cutting back elsewhere, according to new figures that show how the technology is starting to create a two-track labor market.  British firms posted about 10% fewer vacancies this month than in January 2025, data from job search website Indeed shared with Bloomberg shows. However, the fall disguised wide disparities as firms increasingly adopt AI to cut costs and boost productivity.  Software developers, whose profession has been transformed by AI and suffered dramatic job losses since 2022, are back in demand with postings rising 14%. Much of the increase came from senior roles and those directly linked to AI.  Meanwhile, occupations such as IT and engineering, where AI enhances the value of experience by taking over routine tasks, are among the few that have held up since last summer.  Elsewhere, from retail and manufacturing to white-collar roles that are m...