Financial Mindset

Tyler Sherman, a nurse at a rural Nebraska hospital, is used to the area’s aging farmers delaying care until they end up in his emergency room. Now, with Congress planning around $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts over 10 years, he fears those farmers and the more than 3,000 residents of Webster County could lose not just the ER, but also the clinic and nursing home tied to the hospital. “Our budget is pretty heavily reliant on the Medicaid reimbursement, so if we do see a cut of that, it’ll be difficult to keep the doors open,” said Sherman, who works at Webster County Community Hospital in the small Nebraska town of Red Cloud just north of the Kansas border. If those facilities close, many locals would see their five-minute trip to Webster County hospital turn into a nearly hour-long ride to the nearest hospital offering the same services. “That’s a long way for an emergency,” Sherman said. “Some won’t make it.” Already struggling hospitals would be hit particularly hard States and ...

In a Fortune interview facilitated by a Seoul, South Korea NGO that supports North Korean defectors, “Mr. Kim Ji-min” describes his experience as a software developer inside North Korea’s IT worker scheme. Kim uses an alias to protect the lives of his friends and family who could be in danger from the regime because he spoke to Western media about his time as a developer. His remarks offer a rare glimpse into the way North Korea has weaponized the global remote-work economy to fund its nuclear program.  For years, Kim Ji-min served as an IT worker inside a vast global scheme devised by North Korea’s authoritarian leadership to evade crushing financial sanctions . Kim has since defected to South Korea. Now, he is sharing his experience as a cog in the IT worker conspiracy employed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to amass billions to fund its weapons of mass destruction program .  The North Korean IT worker scheme has become one of the most urgent cybersec...

The 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs is set to expire on July 9 , and U.S. consumers and investors are left waiting in limbo as President Donald Trump negotiates deals with trade partners. Experts tell Fortune Trump’s next moves could put his credibility in question, as he’s already walked back on previous tariff hikes after his “Liberation Day” announcement. The countdown to the 90-day freeze on sweeping Liberation Day tariffs expires next week, and President Donald Trump’s administration is a far cry from its “90 deals in 90 days” goal. Trump’s self-imposed July 9 deadline follows his sweeping reciprocal tariffs address in April, which sparked global panic and caused the S&P to shed $5 trillion in value in about two days. As next week’s deadline approaches, the Trump administration has announced new trade agreements with countries including China, the U.K., Vietnam and Indonesia—but details about these agreements are scant, and no word of further deals being made yet has ...

Stocks climbed higher on Thursday after news that employers ramped up hiring in June, setting another all-time record to start the holiday weekend. Stock indexes hit a fresh record on Thursday heading into the long weekend after a jobs report showed a stronger hiring picture in June than Wall Street had feared. The S&P 500 rose 0.8%, setting an all-time high for the fourth time in five days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 344 points, or 0.8%, and the Nasdaq composite gained 1%. The market’s gains were widespread, and companies whose profits can get the biggest boosts when workers are feeling confident helped lead the way. Expedia climbed 3.2%, and Norwegian Cruise Line steamed 2.9% higher. Bank stocks were also strong, with Citigroup up 2.3%, and JPMorgan Chase up 1.9%. The reaction was bigger in the bond market following the report from the U.S. government, which said employers added 147,000 more jobs to their payrolls last month than they cut. A separate repor...

Lululemon is joining many of your older coworkers in being tired of hearing about your dupe haul. The athleisure giant is  suing Costco , alleging that the wholesale retailer is selling illegal knockoffs of its products, the Associated Press reported. The lawsuit is Lululemon’s most high-profile attempt at fighting back against Gen Z-driven “dupe culture.” Lulu says Costco is intentionally confusing shoppers by slapping its Kirkland brand on clothes that are thinly veiled copies of much more expensive Lulu items. Per the lawsuit: Costco’s $20 Hi-Tec Men’s Scuba Full Zip is a copy of Lulu’s Scuba jackets, which retail for over $100. Costco’s $10 Kirkland 5-Pocket Performance Pants are a duplicate of Lululemon’s $128 men’s ABC 5 Pocket Pants, which at least one person at your office is currently wearing. Lululemon also alleges that Costco stole its “Tidewater Teal” color. The brand is asking for a jury trial and wants Costco to stop selling the items in question. Can Lulu wi...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said in a recent interview that AI now does up to 50% of all work at the company, in key functions like engineering, coding, and customer support. In May, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said 20% to 30% of the tech giant’s code is now written by AI coding assistants. And in April, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said over 30% of code at Google is now generated by AI. It’s the latest CEO flex: Citing numbers showing that AI is doing heavy lifting internally. The move presents the company as being ahead of the AI curve—–and invariably grabs the attention of people who matter. Investors hear the magic words that the business is on track to save money, presumably accomplished, but rarely explicitly stated, through future job cuts. It also signals to the clients of the Big Tech companies making the pronouncements that they should open their wallets, pronto, to incorporate more AI into their operations, or risk falling behind.    But how significant the...

Anne Marie Darling, one of several high-profile partners who exited Goldman Sachs last year, was named, along with Craig Bright, group co-COO for Barclays . Darling and Bright are replacing Alistair Currie, who is leaving the UK bank to pursue a board portfolio career. Darling and Bright will also serve as co-CEOs of Barclays execution services, the bank’s back-office services company, according to a July 1 statement . Darling joined Barclays in April following a 25-year career at Goldman where she was a partner for the last 12 years. Bright, a former Citi executive who also worked at Westpac, has served as Barclays group chief information officer since 2020. “Craig and Anne Marie each have a vast and rich professional experience and complement each other well. We will benefit from their collaborative leadership,” said C.S. Venkatakrishnan, Barclays CEO, in a statement. Barclays is one of the world’s largest banks, reporting 1.5 trillion pounds (about $2 trillion) in total assets a...

In a Fortune interview facilitated by a Seoul, South Korea NGO that supports North Korean defectors, “Mr. Kim Ji-min” describes his experience as a software developer inside North Korea’s IT worker scheme. Kim uses an alias to protect the lives of his friends and family who could be in danger from the regime because he spoke to Western media about his time as a developer. His remarks offer a rare glimpse into the way North Korea has weaponized the global remote-work economy to fund its nuclear program.  For more than a decade, Kim Ji-min served as an IT worker inside a vast global scheme devised by North Korea’s authoritarian leadership to evade crushing financial sanctions . Kim has since defected to South Korea. Now, he is sharing his experience as a cog in the IT worker conspiracy employed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea to amass billions to fund its weapons of mass destruction program .  The North Korean IT worker scheme has become one of the most ur...

U.S. President Donald Trump’s 90-day tariff pause expires next week—and his administration hasn’t notched too many wins on the deals front. In fact, his administration has unveiled just one trade deal with the UK ahead of July 9, when the U.S.’s so-called reciprocal tariffs are meant to return.   On Tuesday, Trump told reporters that he wasn’t interested in extending the deadline to allow for more time to negotiate, and will soon be sending letters announcing tariff rates “to a lot of countries.” Still, administration officials have been publicly hopeful that they can unveil more deals in the coming days, with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggesting last week that there were 10 deals ready to go. (He did not specify which countries were ready to sign a trade deal.) Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, recently said that trading deals may be announced after the July 4 holiday. On April 2, Trump slapped steep tariffs on the rest of the world...

In potentially the biggest threat to Starbucks since other companies figured out that they, too, could market pumpkin-spice flavored treats, Luckin Coffee, China’s biggest coffee chain,  opened  its first US stores yesterday with two outposts in New York City. If you haven’t heard of Luckin, it’s probably because you’ve never tried to get a cup of joe in China, where it’s grown massive by offering super cheap drinks and quirky flavors. The chain, which opened in 2017, surpassed the number of stores Starbucks had in China in 2019. It now has 22,000+ locations in its home country, per CNN. In 2023, Luckin’s revenue in China exceeded what Starbucks made there for the first time, bouncing back from an accounting scandal that got Luckin booted from the Nasdaq in 2020. Meanwhile… things haven’t looked so good for Starbucks in China recently, and not just because its baristas can’t spell names in Chinese characters, either. The chain positioned itself as the high-end option, ...

About a year and a half after Adobe’s attempted $20 billion acquisition of design software unicorn Figma collapsed , Figma has taken a step towards a new future in the public markets.  On Tuesday, when the company filed paperwork to go public on the New York Stock Exchange, in a prospectus larded with more than 200 references to AI, Figma set the stage for one of the most anticipated IPOs of 2025.  The San Francisco-based company, which will trade under the ticker “FIG”, did not provide details of how much it expects to raise in the offering or the valuation it is seeking. But its S-1 filing comes at a moment when the market for venture-backed IPOs looks better than it has in some time, from the meteoric debuts of AI infrastructure company CoreWeave (up 290% from its IPO price) to the blowout triumph of stablecoin firm Circle (up 519%).  As Figma moves to capitalize on the bullish conditions for new issuers, a key question for its venture investors and employees is ...