Financial Mindset

Rudy Giuliani  is recovering from a fractured vertebra and other injuries following a car crash in New Hampshire in which he was a passenger, a spokesperson for the former New York City mayor said Sunday. Giuliani was being driven in a rented Ford Bronco by his spokesperson Ted Goodman when their vehicle was struck from behind by a Honda HR-V driven by a 19-year-old woman late Saturday evening, New Hampshire State Police said in a statement. Troopers witnessed the crash, which caused both vehicles to hit the highway median and left them “heavily damaged,” state police said. Goodman and the 19-year-old suffered “non-life-threatening injuries” and were taken to hospitals for treatment, the agency added. State police said they are investigating the crash and no charges have been filed. Giuliani, 81, was taken to a nearby trauma center and was being treated for a fractured thoracic vertebra, multiple lacerations and contusions, as well as injuries to his left arm and lower leg, ac...

Amid the raging debate over the proper role of generative AI in schools , a vice provost at New York University suggested colleges revive some educational practices that date back to medieval times, namely focusing on oral instruction and examination in the classroom. That comes as students have increasingly relied on chatbots to complete assignments. Educators have been struggling over how students should or should not use artificial intelligence, but one New York University official suggests going old school—really, really old school. In a New York Times op-ed on Tuesday, NYU’s vice provost for AI and technology in education, Clay Shirky, said he previously had counseled more “engaged uses” of AI where students use the technology to explore ideas and seek feedback, rather than “lazy AI use.” But that didn’t work, as students continued using AI to write papers and skip the reading. Meanwhile, tools meant to detect AI cheating produce too many false positives to be reliable,...

When Suzy Welch walked into the first meeting of the first university course she had ever taught, in the fall of 2022, she looked out onto 20 students. She and the dean of New York University’s Stern School of Business had agreed that the new course, which Welch had created and intriguingly named “Becoming You,” should be offered to two sections of no more than 40 students each–one section for full-time MBA students and one for part-time students. Neither section had reached its modest limit. She recalls, “I went to that classroom saying to myself, ‘What made you think you could do this?’” One week later, the full-time section alone had a wait list of 150 students, all from word of mouth. From then until now, Becoming You has been a phenomenon. An administrator recalls, “People were breaking down the door trying to get into the course. I cannot tell you the impact.” Welch will teach the course again this fall, now offered to undergraduates, full-time and part-time MBA candidates, and...

When the Homer City power plant—the largest coal-fired facility in Pennsylvania—shuttered in 2023, it marked the end of a dirty era for the coal plants that dominated America’s electric grid for over half a century. Now, in a whirlwind turnaround, many of them are being revived to fuel the AI era. Earlier this year, developers announced they would take the coal plant’s corpse—and its invaluable grid interconnections—and resurrect it into the Homer City Energy Campus, a sprawling AI data center complex powered by the largest natural gas-fired power plant in the country, opening on a fast-tracked timeline in 2027. With U.S. electricity demand projected to surge by as much as 60% through 2050 to fuel the AI boom—initiating a race against time to build sufficient power generation—the strong old bones of closed or retiring coal plants offer a shortcut to get new power projects online much more quickly. They can skip the two-year queue for high-voltage grid connections—regardless of whethe...

Home prices aren’t keeping up with inflation , representing a drag on wealth in real terms, according to S&P Global. That’s as home prices have been falling on a monthly basis, while President Donald Trump’s tariffs have kept inflation sticky and still-high mortgage rates have weighed on demand. High home prices and mortgage rates have created unaffordable conditions for many Americans, but the housing market’s ability to create more wealth has sputtered. That’s because even as home prices continue to hover around record levels, they are also edging lower and lagging behind the rate of inflation, which has heated up amid President Donald Trump’s tariffs. “For the first time in years, home prices are failing to keep pace with broader inflation,” said Nicholas Godec, head of Fixed Income Tradables & Commodities at S&P Dow Jones Indices, in a statement on Tuesday . The last time that happened was mid-2023. The latest S&P Cotality Case-Shiller home price data showed ...

Agricultural trade groups have sounded the alarm recently on the state of farmers, who are grappling with a continued slump in prices for their crops and worsening credit conditions. They have asked lawmakers to help increase access to export markets, including China, which is still locked in a trade war with the U.S. U.S. producers of corn and soybeans have sent dire warnings as prices for their crops have crashed in recent years while President Donald Trump’s trade war whipsaws farmers. On Thursday, the  National Corn Growers Association raised alarms about “the economic crisis hitting rural America, as commodity prices drop at a time when input costs remain at near-record highs.” Corn prices have plunged more than 50% from their 2022 peak, while production costs are down just 3% in that span, translating to a loss of 85 cents per bushel, the NCGA said, adding that the outlook for next year is worse with even lower prices and higher costs. The NCGA called on Congress...

Julie Sweet is one of the most powerful executives in the world, overseeing a 770,000-person workforce at consulting giant Accenture . In her role, she speaks to more Fortune 500 CEOs than almost anyone—dozens of companies pay Accenture $100 million-plus in a single quarter to help them solve their biggest problems—so she has her finger on the pulse of the biggest issues in business today. I sat down with Sweet for the launch of a new vodcast I’m hosting, Fortune 500: Titans and Disrupters of Industry (watch the full episode here , and subscribe on YouTube or Spotify ). You can think of it as CEO Office Hours: If you get to spend a full hour with the most experienced business leaders on the planet, what wisdom can you extract? Here’s some of what we discussed in our hour-long sit down: On AI: How she uses AI in her personal life and in her CEO job. How long it will really take AI projects to pay off for businesses. (A recent market-moving MIT report suggested 95% of generative...

Derrick Hayes, the millennial boss of multimillion-dollar chain Big Dave’s Cheesesteaks , grew up in “survival mode” selling bean pies and newspapers as a kid living in Philadelphia. Just like Gen Z, he juggled multiple side gigs growing up before getting a 9-to-5 in the postal service. But he quit it all to be by his dying father’s side who wished that he would start his own business. It inspired Hayes to launch Big Dave’s Cheesesteaks—and now, the multimillion-dollar brand boasts 12 locations across the U.S., selling $12 cheesesteaks every 58 seconds. Today, Big Dave’s Cheesesteaks is serving up the Philly classic to millions of hungry customers all across Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. But the multimillion-dollar operation is far from being the first hustle of its founder and CEO, Derrick Hayes . Growing up in Philadelphia, the entrepreneur made ends meet by selling bean pies and newspapers as a kid.  “I was in survival mode my whole life, from bei...