Financial Mindset

Steve Harvey is everywhere. He hosts Family Feud (including its celebrity and African editions), he stars in his own courtroom comedy show Judge Steve Harvey , and runs a four-hour weekday radio program. Add to that a clothing line, investments, a foundation, and a sprawling resume of other venues, and it’s clear Harvey has built his own personal empire. But it wasn’t always glitz and success for the now 68-year-old. Long before becoming worth some $200 million, Harvey spent nearly three years homeless —sleeping in his Ford Tempo, keeping food cold in an Igloo cooler, and living on bologna sandwiches from making just $50 a week. The experience , while grueling, proved eye-opening and formative, teaching Harvey the value of never losing sight of the future. “Because today is temporary; if it all goes right, today will be called yesterday, and if it all goes really right, tomorrow is going to be today,” Harvey told The Pivot Podcast in an interview released last week.  “If you...

By the beginning of this year, the world’s leading gas exporter, the United States, grew the capacity to ship nearly 100 million metric tons of liquefied natural gas per year—incredibly rapid growth for a U.S. industry that only started exporting a decade ago. By 2030, a little-known startup, Venture Global, is projected to exceed that volume all by itself. It only began shipping three years ago. The oil and gas outsiders at Venture Global are doing so by upending project design norms, upsetting the Big Oil hierarchy, and dominating the nascent gas export industry. The business of exporting natural gas—it needs to be liquefied to be shipped overseas in tankers—has taken off thanks to the nation’s ongoing shale gas boom , the world’s growing power needs, and the desire to rely less on Russian gas. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is the biggest sector of U.S. oil and gas growth, responding to more gas demand than even the burgeoning AI data center construction surge. Just from 2024 to 202...

Acclaimed Italian actor Claudia Cardinale, who starred in some of the most celebrated European films of the 1960s and 1970s, has died, AFP reported Tuesday. She was 87. She starred in more than 100 films and made-for-television productions, but she was best known for embodying youthful purity in Federico Fellini’s “8½,” in which she co-starred with Marcello Mastroianni in 1963. Cardinale also won praise for her role as Angelica Sedara in Luchino Visconti’s award-winning screen adaption of the historical novel “The Leopard” that same year and a reformed prostitute in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western “Once Upon a Time in the West” in 1968. She died in Nemours, France, surrounded by her children, her agent Laurent Savry told AFP. Savry and his agency did not immediately return emailed requests for comment from The Associated Press. Cardinale began her movie-career at the age of 17 after winning a beauty contest in Tunisia, where she was born of Sicilian parents who had emigrated to No...

Infection rates from drug-resistant “nightmare bacteria” rose almost 70% between 2019 and 2023, according to a new  report  from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientists. Bacteria that are difficult to treat due to the so-called NDM gene primarily drove the increase, CDC researchers wrote in  an article published Monday  in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Only two antibiotics work against those infections, and the drugs are expensive and must be administered through an IV, researchers said. Bacteria with the gene were once considered exotic, linked to a small number of patients who received medical care overseas. Though the numbers are still small, the rate of U.S. cases jumped more than fivefold in recent years, the researchers reported. “The rise of NDMs in the U.S. is a grave danger and very worrisome,” said David Weiss, an Emory University infectious diseases researcher, in an email. It’s likely many people are unrecognized carriers of the drug-...

In Abilene, Texas—in the heart of what locals call the Big Country, long defined by ranching, farming, shale oil exploration, and now dotted with wind turbines—OpenAI and Oracle staged a carefully crafted media showcase on Tuesday to talk about the latest boom underway. Throngs of journalists from across the country were escorted by police to a half-completed 800-acre data center complex, guided through halls packed with tens of thousands of state-of-the-art Nvidia GPUs, and greeted by the company CEOs and by policymakers including Texas Senator Ted Cruz. The event was a victory lap of sorts, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Oracle’s new co-CEO Clay Magouryk pushed back against critics who have questioned the progress of their high-profile and ambitious “Stargate” AI infrastructure project .  At Tuesday’s event, the two companies, joined by Japan’s SoftBank, announced a big step forward for Stargate, touting an expansion of the Abilene site, as well as plans to build five mas...

Good morning, everyone, it’s finance editor Jeff John Roberts pinch-hitting for Allie. In my day job, I talk to a lot of folks in the fintech and crypto space who are actively disrupting the legacy financial stack. So when MoneyGram reached out to tell me how they are staying competitive in this fast-evolving market, I was skeptical, to say the least. But after speaking with new CEO Anthony Soohoo—who cut his teeth at Apple and led digital transformation initiatives at Walmart and CBS—I came away with a different impression. MoneyGram, if you’re unfamiliar, is a textbook case of the innovator’s dilemma. The company started out in 1940 as Travelers Express, which specialized in money orders, and was acquired by Greyhound to be part of the bus company’s suite of services. In 1988, that firm bought a smaller slinger of paper-based money services called MoneyGram, and a few years later adopted its name. You can probably guess how MoneyGram, with a distribution model that relied heavily...

The likelihood that one of your friends could hem your pants for you has never been higher. Sewing has become “cool” again, according to  the New York Times , with classes filling up faster than they can be offered and TikToks about  pinned hems  snagging over 11 million views. Mending, hemming, and altering are especially popular among Gen Zers who hope to pick up a hobby that forces them off their phones—and saves them money by teaching them valuable skills. And sharing a well-edited “thrift flip”—a genre of sewing video where people transform  old bedsheets  or  shapeless cardigans  into trendy outfits—is also a surefire way to go viral on any platform. The upcycled fashion market is growing.  Including everything from sustainable fashion brands to companies that recycle materials, the market was worth $8.54 billion last year and is expected to grow to roughly $20.65 billion by 2034, according to Precedence Research. Big picture:  Other...