U.S. stocks are set to begin the week leaning higher, coming off a monster rally on Friday, when Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell opened the door to rate cuts next month. But doubts have grown about the AI boom, and Wall Street’s faith in its prospects could be tested when Nvidia reports quarterly earnings on Wednesday.
Stock futures edged up on Sunday evening as Wall Street looks ahead to another big week that will feature earnings from AI chip leader Nvidia and another inflation update.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 24 points, or 0.05%. S&P 500 futures were up 0.05%, and Nasdaq futures added 0.06%. On Friday, the Dow hit a new all-time high, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq closed in on their records.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury was flat at 4.256% after diving Friday on rate-cut expectations. The U.S. dollar was down 0.02% against the euro and flat against the yen.
Gold fell 0.13% to $3,413.80 per ounce. U.S. oil prices rose 0.2% to $63.79 per barrel, and Brent crude added 0.15% to $67.83.
Friday’s stock surge came after a big selloff that was led by tech giants, as doubts have grown about the AI boom and how much it will actually help companies.
That’s after a recent report from MIT found that 95% of AI pilot programs at businesses are failing to produce much of a return.
Wall Street’s faith in the staying power of AI as an investment thesis will be put to the test when Nvidia reports quarterly earnings after the close on Wednesday.
The report also comes after Nvidia and AMD agreed to an unprecedented deal where they give the federal government a 15% cut of their chip sales to China.
For now, demand from U.S. companies remains high as so-called hyperscaler tech giants Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta Platforms alone are expected to deploy $400 billion in capital expenditures this year, and most of that is going to AI.
On Friday, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge is due as policymakers wait and see how much of an effect on inflation President Donald Trump’s tariffs are having.
Earlier updates on the consumer price index and the producer price index were mixed, and analysts expect the personal consumption expenditures index for July to rise 0.2% on a monthly basis and 2.6% on a yearly basis, the same annual rate as June.
But the core PCE is seen climbing 0.3% on a monthly basis and 2.9% on a yearly basis, accelerating from June’s 2.8% annual rate.
Still, some Fed officials, including Powell, have indicated that tariff-related impacts on inflation may be short term and that more attention should go to the labor market, which has shown signs of weakening.
Congressional Republicans are embracing Donald Trump’s tariff campaign as a way to advance home-state causes, lobbying the president to impose more import duties to protect local companies.
The rank-and-file GOP lawmakers’ entreaties, which often present trade actions shoring up favored manufacturers as a winning tactic for midterm elections, bolster the political case for broadening US tariffs.
Trump announced two sweeping expansions of trade barriers in recent days, on Tuesday wideningsteel and aluminum tariffs to include more than 400 types of items that contain the metals. On Friday, he announced a trade investigation into furniture imports, which he said would lead to new tariffs within 50 days.
In a social media post announcing the furniture trade action, he cited the boost it would provide to manufacturers in North Carolina and Michigan, two states with potentially pivotal Senate races next year.
More than a dozen Republican lawmakers have pushed for fresh or higher tariffs to protect local industries. Several of the lawmakers said Trump granted their requests or said White House officials signaled they would approve the asks.
Republican Senator Bernie Moreno pressed Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to expand steel tariffs to include steel-based products like washing machines and refrigerators. The administration moved in June to impose duties on home appliances based on their steel content, benefiting companies including Whirlpool Corp., which has five manufacturing plants in Moreno’s home state of Ohio.
Representative Mike Kelly, a Pennsylvania Republican, pushed the administration to raise tariffs on electrical steel laminations and cores on behalf of Cleveland-Cliffs Inc., an effort to protect a manufacturing facility in his district.
The items were included in the broader tariffs on products made from steel and aluminum that the administration announced in a notice posted Tuesday.
Spokespeople for the White House and US Commerce Department didn’t respond to requests for comment on the role lawmakers’ requests played in the tariff decisions.
In the protectionist lobbying by Trump allies, tariffs are cast as the economic savior for struggling local industries and political boost for the GOP. It’s a stark example of how to successfully lobby in today’s murky trade environment, even as Trump has openly claimed that his unpredictability gives him leverage.
The tariff decisions suggest the White House is open to input on the trade matters from outsiders friendly to the administration. Trump’s announcements on trade deals regularly arrived in the form of letters posted to trading partners on social media, excluding Congress from direct involvement in negotiations.
Senator Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican, said before Trump’s furniture trade action was announced that the White House has been receptive to his lobbying for a tariff of at least 60% on wood cabinets — echoing local manufacturers’ pleas.
Tuberville said he expects the administration ultimately will fulfill the request, though it wasn’t immediately clear whether the furniture trade probe will lead to tariffs on wood cabinets.
Cabinet makers were “about to go under” during Trump’s first term and he saved them, Tuberville said in a July interview. “He’s doing the same thing now.”
Republican Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina and Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama are among other lawmakers pushing for tariffs on products made of wood. Some local manufacturers in their states want a duty of at least 100% on cabinets.
The lawmakers’ lobbying doesn’t occur in a vacuum. They’re often relaying requests from companies and trade groups that also have their own connections with the Trump administration.
Stephen Vaughn, a senior trade adviser during Trump’s first term, represented Cleveland-Cliffs in the company’s efforts to secure the tariffs on products made from steel.
Cleveland-Cliffs chief executive officer Lourenco Goncalves praised the expansion of tariffs. The action “gives us certainty that the American domestic market will not be undercut by unfairly traded steel embedded in derivative products,” he said.
Lobbying is a bipartisan act and occurs during every presidency, but these efforts are different because of Trump’s emphasis on personal relationships, according to Matthew Foster, a professional lecturer at American University’s School of Public Affairs.
Trump sometimes amplifies the positions of the last person he’s talked to, which explains how his close allies could benefit when they ask for favors, he added.
It’s all about having an advocate with a history of access to the president to get the issue at hand through the door, said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Under Trump, that’s the normal way of doing business, he added.
Moreno, an Ohio Republican, is an active member in the president’s inner circle. The freshman senator said he talks to the president once a week, often reiterating his desire for Trump to force out Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.
Moreno praised Lutnick for understanding business demands, touting the need to protect Whirlpool from cheaper imported steel.
“The reality is Whirlpool Corporation, which has a massive presence in Ohio, is the last appliance manufacturer in America,” Moreno said in an interview, adding that the Chinese are “interested in building industries that will dominate the world and crush American companies. We can’t allow them to do that.”
The lawmakers efforts on behalf of tariffs offer a clear potential political benefit: a message to voters that their manufacturing jobs will be protected. But they also threaten to raise the cost of living for consumers.
The tariffs “may work politically, but they may not work economically, and those are two different fields,” Hufbauer said.
A sizable bloc of Trump voters have reservations about the president’s tariffs. About one in four self-identified Trump voters said they thought the tariffs were hurting rather than helping the US in negotiating better trade deals, according to a Politico-Morning Consult poll in July.
Retaliatory tariffs during Trump’s first term prompted domestic turmoil for some key industries in Republican-lean states, including Kentucky bourbon and Wisconsin-based Harley-Davidson motorcycles. That’s prompted Republican senators Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul to publicly oppose the trade war as harmful to their constituents.
Credit investors are pouring billions of dollars into artificial intelligence investments, just as industry executives and analysts are raising questions about whether the new technology is inflating another bubble.
JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group are leading the sale of a more than $22 billion loan to support Vantage Data Centers’ plan to build a massive data-center campus, people with knowledge of the matter said this week. Meta Platforms Inc., the parent of Facebook, is getting $29 billion from Pacific Investment Management Co. and Blue Owl Capital Inc. for a massive data center in rural Louisiana, Bloomberg reported this month.
And plenty more of these deals are coming. OpenAI alone estimates it will need trillions of dollars over time to spend on the infrastructure required to develop and run artificial intelligence services.
At the same time, key players in the industry acknowledge there is probably pain ahead for AI investors. OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said this week that he sees parallels between the current investment frenzy in artificial intelligence and the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. When discussing startup valuations he said, “someone’s gonna get burned there.” And a Massachusetts Institute of Technology initiative released a report indicating that 95% of generative AI projects in the corporate world have failed to yield any profit.
Altogether, it’s enough to make credit watchers nervous.
“It’s natural for credit investors to think back to the early 2000s when telecom companies arguably overbuilt and over borrowed and we saw some significant writedowns on those assets,” said Daniel Sorid, head of U.S. investment grade credit strategy at Citigroup. “So, the AI boom certainly raises questions in the medium term around sustainability.”
The early build-out of the infrastructure needed to train and power the most advanced AI models was largely funded by the AI companies themselves, including tech giants like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Meta Platforms Inc. Recently, though, the money has been increasingly coming from bond investors and private credit lenders.
The exposure here comes in many shapes and sizes, with varying degrees of risk. Many large tech companies — the so-called AI hyperscalers — have been paying for new infrastructure with gold-plated corporate debt, which is likely safe due to the existing cash flows that secure the debt, according to recent analysis from Bloomberg Intelligence.
Much of the debt funding now is coming from private credit markets.
“Private credit funding of artificial intelligence is running at around $50 billion a quarter, at the low end, for the past three quarters. Even without factoring in the mega deals from Meta and Vantage, they are already providing two to three times what the public markets are providing,” said Matthew Mish, head of credit strategy at UBS.
And many new computing hubs are being funded through commercial mortgage-backed securities, tied not to a corporate entity, but to the payments generated by the complexes. The amount of CMBS backed by AI infrastructure is already up 30%, to $15.6 billion, from the full year total in 2024, JPMorgan Chase & Co. estimated this month.
Sorid and a colleague at Citi put out a report on Aug. 8 focusing on the particular risks for the utility firms that have boosted borrowing to build the electrical infrastructure needed to feed the power-hungry data centers. They and other analysts share a commonly held concern about spending so much money right now, before AI projects have shown their ability to generate revenue over the long term.
“Data center deals are 20 to 30 year tenor fundings for a technology that we don’t even know what they will look like in five years,” said Ruth Yang, global head of private market analytics at S&P Global Ratings. “We are conservative in our assessment of forward cash flows because we don’t know what they will look like, there’s no historical basis.”
The stress has begun to appear in the rise of payment-in-kind loans to tech-oriented private credit lenders, UBS Group noted. In the second quarter, PIK income in BDCs reached the highest level since 2020, climbing to 6%, according to UBS.
But the fire hose of money is unlikely to stop anytime soon.
“Direct lenders are constantly raising capital, and it has to go somewhere,” said John Medina, senior vice president in Moody’s Global Project and Infrastructure Finance Team. “They see these hyperscalers, with this massive capital need, as the next long-term infrastructure asset.”
Entrepreneur Emil Barr said he completely eliminated any work-life balance as he was building up his companies and put himself through a punishing work schedule, arguing that young people can maximize their “peak physical and cognitive years.” Otherwise, the traditional work-life balance is a trap that will keep ambitious people “comfortably mediocre,” he said.
What would you sacrifice to become a billionaire by the time you turn 30 years old?
For 22-year-old entrepreneur Emil Barr, it means doing away completely with any semblance of a work-life balance while you’re young enough to pull off a work-only life.
In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, he weighed in on the debate that’s raging through leadership circles, with some CEOs convinced that a healthy balance is good for workers and business, while others like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang insist on maintaining an always-on mentality.
Barr—founder of Step Up Social, managing partner of Candid Network and a cofounder of Flashpass—said he’s already built two companies with a combined value of more than $20 million, as he delayed gratification while his peers partied.
“When you front-load success early, you buy the luxury of choice for the rest of your life,” he wrote.
That came at a steep price. While building up Step Up Social in his dorm room at Miami University in Ohio, he said he averaged just 3½ hours of sleep a night and worked 12½ hours a day on his business during its first year.
In the process, he gained 80 pounds and struggled with anxiety as he crushed Red Bull energy drinks to power through his marathon days.
“But this level of intensity was the only way to build a multimillion-dollar company,” Barr added.
Narrow window
Adding to the urgency of this frenetic pace, he argued there’s a narrow window for “building something meaningful.”
At the same time, young people today have the means for achieving success, such as easy access to information, global markets and productivity tools.
“The median starting salary for U.S. college graduates is $55,000, which means earning your first million takes years,” Barr said. “But if you optimize ruthlessly during your peak physical and cognitive years, you could achieve financial freedom by 30 and buy yourself choices for the rest of your life.”
He listed five ways he was ruthless:
The first was outsourcing nonessential tasks, like cleaning around the house, preparing meals, and getting groceries.
Second was trimming his social commitments, even as he acknowledged that he lost some friends and suffered through isolation.
Third was optimizing school by taking courses that were related to his business ventures or business interests, while also avoiding classes that banned laptops and prevented him off from attending to clients.
Fourth was a “zero-base calendar” where every social commitment, including family gatherings, had to be weighed against his business obligations.
Fifth was saving time on transportation, even if that meant paying extra for a 20-minute flight to avoid driving for three hours.
‘Comfortably mediocre’
“I’m not suggesting that everyone eliminate work-life balance, but rather arguing that for ambitious young people who want to build wealth, traditional balance is a trap that will keep you comfortably mediocre,” Barr said.
Still, he also suggested his brutal hamster wheel of non-stop activity would eventually slow down. He said he plans to become a billionaire by 30—and by then he expects to have the time and resources for more personal causes like climate change, species extinction and economic inequality.
Barr is the latest leader to offer a perspective on work-life balance. Former President Barack Obama told The Pivot Podcast last year that “if you want to be excellent at anything—sports, music, business, politics—there’s going to be times of your life when you’re out of balance, where you’re just working and you’re single-minded.”
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has also said work-life balance doesn’t exist for leaders, adding that he’s given up hobbies entirely to dedicate himself to his $20 billion company.
But he still draws a line with it comes to his family. “Whenever there’s a conflict, guess what? Family first. That’s it,” he told the Grit podcast in June.
Meanwhile, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said last year that the bank encourages employees to “take care of your mind, your body, your spirit, your soul, your friends, your family, your health.”
He added that if you work efficiently and not waste time, there will be opportunities to do other things.
“I still get my exercise,” Dimon said. “I still get my time. I take all my vacations. So you can do it. Sometimes you just can’t do it all at the time.”
"I’m not suggesting that everyone eliminate work-life balance, but rather arguing that for ambitious young people who want to build wealth, traditional balance is a trap that will keep you comfortably mediocre," entrepreneur Emil Barr said.
Federal Reserve governors typically step down before their 14-year terms expire, but they may stay on until a president from their political party is in the White House, according to Ian Katz at Capital Alpha Partners. Meanwhile, unanimous votes on Fed rates could become less common, with split decisions becoming more of the norm.
As President Donald Trump ramps up pressure on the Federal Reserve, the typically staid, consensus-driven institution could take on some qualities of the more bitterly divided Supreme Court.
Since returning to the White House, he has demanded that the Fed cut rates and routinely insults Chairman Jerome Powell for not doing so. After teasing that he could fire Powell then backing off, Trump has threatened to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook if she doesn’t resign.
For her part, Cook said she won’t be bullied into stepping down and plans to rebut accusations of mortgage fraud from a Trump administration housing official. That’s raised the question of how long she might choose to serve.
Cook joined the Fed in 2022 after being tapped by President Joe Biden to fill an unexpired term that ended in 2024, then getting reappointed. So she can stay on the Fed board until 2038, though governors typically don’t serve out their entire 14-year terms.
“However, the Fed has increasingly become a political football,” Ian Katz, managing partner at Capital Alpha Partners, said in a note Wednesday. “Trump has been clear that he wants to put loyalists on the board. As a result, some governors may choose to remain on the board until a president from their same political party is in the White House — making the Fed in that way more like the Supreme Court.”
Meanwhile, Trump has named Stephen Miran, chair of the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers, to fill a vacancy on the board left by Adriana Kugler, who stepped down before her term was due to expire in January.
He has backed Trump’s call for lower rates. More notably, Miran also cowrote a paper in 2024 calling for an overhaul of the Fed that reduces its independence.
That could factor into Cook’s decision on how long she will stay. In his note, Katz observed that “governors in the past have stepped down without concern that the president would nominate a replacement who isn’t a strong believer in Fed independence.”
Similarly, Powell’s own plans have come under scrutiny. While his term as board chair expires in May, his term as a governor extends to January 2028.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said Powell should step down as governor when his term as chairman ends, saying that has been the tradition. Powell has declined to say what he will do.
The stakes could go well beyond how much the Fed lowers rates. Analysts at JPMorgan have even warned that Miran’s appointment represents an “existential threat” to the Fed as it signals an intention to amend the Federal Reserve Act and alter the central bank’s authority.
Split decisions
It’s not clear if Miran will be reappointed to the Fed board as the White House looks for someone to replace Powell as chairman. But either way, the Fed will have three Trump-appointed governors.
To be sure, that’s not enough to sway rate decisions on the 12-member Federal Open Market Committee, which is also comprised of regional Fed presidents. But if Trump is able to name a fourth governor, that’s enough to tip the balance on the seven-member board.
As Axios recently pointed out, a board majority would give Trump appointees power over the Fed’s budgets, staffing, and even selection of regional Fed presidents. Those presidents are appointed by directors of the regional Fed banks, but they are subject to the approval of the board. And in February, the five-year terms for all the bank presidents are scheduled to expire.
With composition of the Fed in flux, a more divided era may be looming that also resembles the Supreme Court.
Fed rate decisions are usually unanimous with even one dissenting vote being rare. By contrast, the high court rarely has unanimous votes, while split decisions along ideological lines are common.
July’s Fed meeting may have been a preview of what’s to come as two Trump-appointed governors voted to lower rates, going against the majority that kept rates steady.
That sets up another FOMC meeting with dissenting votes. In addition, the pace of any subsequent cuts isn’t clear, providing more fodder for debate at the central bank as Trump-appointed officials push for dovish policy.
Like the chief justice of the Supreme Court, the Fed chair represents just one vote but is also a first among equals who carried outsized influence. So whoever replaces Powell may need to rely on their powers of persuasion on a Fed with more conflicting views.
Summer weddings are in full swing and the peak fall season is approaching, with September and October accounting for one-third of all marriages annually, according to The Knot. While trends in the ideal months to marry rarely change, women marrying in 2025 have fundamentally different financial profiles than previous generations.
Today’s brides are CEOs, startup founders, creators and brand builders, engineers, physicians, real estate investors, scientists, and small business owners. They have negotiated complex equity packages, are growing businesses and brands, and have acquired significant assets, with women outpacing men in attaining advanced post-graduate degrees and purchasing single family homes. They will reap the benefits of an estimated $80 trillion “Great Wealth Transfer” of inherited assets from Baby Boomer parents, a wave that will significantly reshape our economy and financial landscape.
But when it comes to the institution of marriage, many of us are still operating by the rules of an outdated playbook that treats transparent conversations about financial planning as unromantic. It is time for that narrative to change. In fact, the first legal experience that every couple should have isn’t a will – it’s a prenup.
The modern marriage paradox
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: while women now out-earn or make the same as their partners in nearly half of marriages, with this share having approximately tripled over the past 50 years, many are entering marriage with less financial protection than they’d accept in a business partnership. We would never launch a startup without equity agreements or join a company without understanding our compensation package. Why are any of us willing to say “I do” without a clear financial framework?
The modern marriage paradox has conditioned us to view prenuptial agreements as an instrument of mistrust that represents planning for failure, rather than success. This framing is not just fundamentally flawed, it’s financially dangerous.
This means businesses
After divorce, women experience nearly two times the income drop (41%) compared to men (23%), creating long-term financial exposure. For business owners and equity-holders, the stakes are even more significant: divorce can mean losing control of a company built from the ground up.
Among the customers of our online prenup platform, First, roughly 50% of our prenup initiators are women. They come with an understanding that having the most important financial conversations before marriage strengthens the foundation of their relationships, rather than weakening them. Dialogue about values, goals, expectations, and personal finances serves couples throughout their union. These couples understand that the prenup is a joining point, not a breaking point.
Modern women have discovered that prenups offer something more valuable than asset protection. They provide a strategic advantage and thoughtful framework for financial partnership. Think of the prenup as a business plan for the financial future of a marriage.
Meet today’s modern bride
Today’s modern couples are using prenups to address student loan debt, protect family businesses, clarify expectations about inheritance, and establish financial boundaries around spending and saving. A teacher marrying an AI engineer might use a prenup to protect one’s pension while clarifying how they’ll handle the other’s stock options. A freelance designer might want to ensure their creative business remains separate property while building shared wealth with their marketing executive partner.
I recently spoke with Rachel, a creative entrepreneur and technology executive who signed a prenup before her April 2025 wedding. Her prenup wasn’t about keeping assets from her partner. It was about creating clear expectations for how they’d build wealth together while protecting what each brought to the relationship, including social media channels and business ideas they dream up together or separately.
“I love that we live in a time where prenups are being reclaimed by wealth-building, entrepreneurial women,” Rachel told us. “Prenups aren’t just about who gets the house or the car. As women, it’s time we remove the stigma around prenups, not just for us and our assets, but for our partners and [their assets], too.”
Equally important is Melanie, who told me, “I didn’t want individual financial mistakes to become our financial mistakes.”
A Mindset Shift For Millennial and Gen Z Couples
Millennial and Gen Z women are approaching marriage with a fundamentally different mindset. They’ve witnessed their parents navigate difficult divorces without adequate protection. They’ve seen friends lose businesses or inheritance in messy separations. Importantly, they understand that love and financial planning aren’t mutually exclusive. They’re complementary.
This shift is particularly pronounced among high earners. About 47% of newlyweds and engaged couples between the ages of 18 and 34 are now considering prenups, recognizing that their financial success requires protection, just like any other valuable asset.
Normalizing prenups
The path forward requires us to shift our mindset to consider the prenuptial agreement as a standard tool in money management and as essential to career planning as negotiating one’s salary or equity in a job offer. This shift has already started to take place because of successful, modern women who are demonstrating that financial planning and romantic love can coexist harmoniously.
Women rewriting the financial playbook for marriage are not pessimists planning for divorce. They are modern, savvy optimists that believe their relationships can handle honest and transparent conversations about money. These modern couples are more likely to weather financial storms because they have started out by planning for sunny skies and rainy days alike.
In a world where financial independence is more within reach than ever before, protecting that independence is not selfish. It is smart. And smart people deserve marriages built on clarity, equity, and mutual respect.
The question is not about whether you’re planning for the worst. It is about whether you trust yourself enough to plan for the future you deserve.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
First it was the release of GPT-5 that OpenAI “totally screwed up,” according to Sam Altman. Then Altman followed that up by saying the B-word at a dinner with reporters. “When bubbles happen, smart people get overexcited about a kernel of truth,” The Verge reported on comments by the OpenAI CEO. Then it was the sweeping MIT survey that put a number on what so many people seem to be feeling: a whopping 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing.
A tech sell-off ensued, as rattled investors sent the value of the S&P 500 down by $1 trillion. Given the increasing dominance of that index by tech stocks that have largely transformed into AI stocks, it was a sign of nerves that the AI boom was turning into dotcom bubble 2.0. To be sure, fears about the AI trade aren’t the only factor moving markets, as evidenced by the S&P 500 snapping a five-day losing streak on Friday after Jerome Powell’s quasi-dovish comments at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, as even the hint of openness from the Fed chair toward a September rate cut set markets on a tear.
Gary Marcus has been warning of the limits of large language models (LLMs) since 2019 and warning of a potential bubble and problematic economics since 2023. His words carry a particularly distinctive weight. The cognitive scientist turned longtime AI researcher has been active in the machine learning space since 2015, when he founded Geometric Intelligence. That company was acquired by Uber in 2016, and Marcus left shortly afterward, working at other AI startups while offering vocal criticism of what he sees as dead-ends in the AI space.
Still, Marcus doesn’t see himself as a “Cassandra,” and he’s not trying to be, he told Fortune in an interview. Cassandra, a figure from Greek tragedy, was a character who uttered accurate prophecies but wasn’t believed until it was too late. “I see myself as a realist and as someone who foresaw the problems and was correct about them.”
Marcus attributes the wobble in markets to GPT-5 above all. It’s not a failure, he said, but it’s “underwhelming,” a “disappointment,” and that’s “really woken a lot of people up. You know, GPT-5 was sold, basically, as AGI, and it just isn’t,” he added, referencing artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical AI with human-like reasoning abilities. “It’s not a terrible model, it’s not like it’s bad,” he said, but “it’s not the quantum leap that a lot of people were led to expect.”
Marcus said this shouldn’t be news to anyone paying attention, as he argued in 2022 that “deep learning is hitting a wall.” To be sure, Marcus has been wondering openly on his Substack on when the generative AI bubble will deflate. He told Fortune that “crowd psychology” is definitely taking place, and he thinks every day about the John Maynard Keynes quote: “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent,” or Looney Tunes’s Wile E. Coyote following Road Runner off the edge of a cliff and hanging in midair, before falling down to Earth.
“That’s what I feel like,” Marcus says. “We are off the cliff. This does not make sense. And we get some signs from the last few days that people are finally noticing.”
Building warning signs
The bubble talk began heating up in July, when Apollo Global Management’s chief economist, Torsten Slok, widely read and influential on Wall Street, issued a striking calculation while falling short of declaring a bubble. “The difference between the IT bubble in the 1990s and the AI bubble today is that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued than they were in the 1990s,” he wrote, warning that the forward P/E ratios and staggering market capitalizations of companies such as Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, and Meta had “become detached from their earnings.”
In the weeks since, the disappointment of GPT-5 was an important development, but not the only one. Another warning sign is the massive amount of spending on data centers to support all the theoretical future demand for AI use. Slok has tackled this subject as well, finding that data center investments’ contribution to GDP growth has been the same as consumer spending over the first half of 2025, which is notable since consumer spending makes up 70% of GDP. (The Wall Street Journal‘s Christopher Mims had offered the calculation weeks earlier.) Finally, on August 19, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt co-authored a widely discussed New York Times op-ed on August 19, arguing that “it is uncertain how soon artificial general intelligence can be achieved.”
This is a significant about-face, according to political scientist Henry Farrell, who argued in the Financial Times in January that Schmidt was a key voice shaping the “New Washington Consensus,” predicated in part on AGI being “right around the corner.” On his Substack, Farrell said Schmidt’s op-ed shows that his prior set of assumptions are “visibly crumbling away,” while caveating that he had been relying on informal conversations with people he knew in the intersection of D.C. foreign policy and tech policy. Farrell’s title for that post: “The twilight of tech unilateralism.” He concluded: “If the AGI bet is a bad one, then much of the rationale for this consensus falls apart. And that is the conclusion that Eric Schmidt seems to be coming to.”
Finally, the vibe is shifting in the summer of 2025 into a mounting AI backlash. Darrell West warned in Brookingsin May that the tide of both public and scientific opinion would soon turn against AI’s masters of the universe. Soon after, Fast Company predicted the summer would be full of “AI slop.” By early August, Axios had identified the slang “clunker” being applied widely to AI mishaps, particularly in customer service gone awry.
History says: short-term pain, long-term gain
John Thornhill of the Financial Times offered some perspective on the bubble question, advising readers to brace themselves for a crash, but to prepare for a future “golden age” of AI nonetheless. He highlights the data center buildout—a staggering $750 billion investment from Big Tech over 2024 and 2025, and part of a global rollout projected to hit $3 trillion by 2029. Thornhill turns to financial historians for some comfort and some perspective. Over and over, it shows that this type of frenzied investment typically triggers bubbles, dramatic crashes, and creative destruction—but that eventually durable value is realized.
He notes that Carlota Perez documented this pattern in Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages. She identified AI as the fifth technological revolution to follow the pattern begun in the late 18th century, as a result of which the modern economy now has railroad infrastructure and personal computers, among other things. Each one had a bubble and a crash at some point. Thornhill didn’t cite him in this particular column, but Edward Chancellor documented similar patterns in his classic Devil Take The Hindmost, a book notable not just for its discussions of bubbles but for predicting the dotcom bubble before it happened.
Owen Lamont of Acadian Asset Management cited Chancellor in November 2024, when he argued that a key bubble moment had been passed: an unusually large number of market participants saying that prices are too high, but insisting that they’re likely to rise further.
Wall Street is cautious, but not calling a bubble
Wall Street banks are largely not calling for a bubble. Morgan Stanley released a note recently seeing huge efficiencies ahead for companies as a result of AI: $920 billion per year for the S&P 500. UBS, for its part, concurred with the caution flagged in the news-making MIT research. It warned investors to expect a period of “capex indigestion” accompanying the data center buildout, but it also maintained that AI adoption is expanding far beyond expectations, citing growing monetization from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Alphabet’s Gemini, and AI-powered CRM systems.
Bank of America Research wrote a note in early August, before the launch of GPT-5, seeing AI as part of a worker productivity “sea change” that will drive an ongoing “innovation premium” for S&P 500 firms. Head of U.S. Equity Strategy Savita Subramanian essentially argued that the inflation wave of the 2020s taught companies to do more with less, to turn people into processes, and that AI will turbo-charge this. “I don’t think it’s necessarily a bubble in the S&P 500,” she told Fortune in an interview, before adding, “I think there are other areas where it’s becoming a little bit bubble-like.”
Subramanian mentioned smaller companies and potentially private lending as areas “that potentially have re-rated too aggressively.” She’s also concerned about the risk of companies diving into data centers too such a great extent, noting that this represents a shift back toward an asset-heavier approach, instead of the asset-light approach that increasingly distinguishes top performance in the U.S. economy.
“I mean, this is new,” she said. “Tech used to be very asset-light and just spent money on R&D and innovation, and now they’re spending money to build out these data centers,” adding that she sees it as potentially marking the end of their asset-light, high-margin existence and basically transforming them into “very asset-intensive and more manufacturing-like than they used to be.” From her perspective, that warrants a lower multiple in the stock market. When asked if that is tantamount to a bubble, if not a correction, she said “it’s starting to happen in places,” and she agrees with the comparison to the railroad boom.
The math and the ghost in the machine
Gary Marcus also cited the fundamentals of math as a reason that he’s concerned, with nearly 500 AI unicorns being valued at $2.7 trillion. “That just doesn’t make sense relative to how much revenue is coming [in],” he said. Marcus cited OpenAI reporting $1 billion in revenue in July, but still not being profitable. Speculating, he extrapolated that to OpenAI having roughly half the AI market, and offered a rough calculation that it means about $25 billion a year of revenue for the sector, “which is not nothing, but it costs a lot of money to do this, and there’s trillions of dollars [invested].”
So if Marcus is correct, why haven’t people been listening to him for years? He said he’s been warning people about this for years, too, calling it the “gullibility gap” in his 2019 book Rebooting AI and arguing in The New Yorker in 2012 that deep learning was a ladder that wouldn’t reach the moon. For the first 25 years of his career, Marcus trained and practiced as a cognitive scientist, and learned about the “anthropomorphization people do. … [they] look at these machines and make the mistake of attributing to them an intelligence that is not really there, a humanness that is not really there, and they wind up using them as a companion, and they wind up thinking that they’re closer to solving these problems than they actually are.” He said he thinks the bubble inflating to its current extent is in large part because of the human impulse to project ourselves onto things, something a cognitive scientist is trained not to do.
These machines might seem like they’re human, but “they don’t actually work like you,” Marcus said, adding, “this entire market has been based on people not understanding that, imagining that scaling was going to solve all of this, because they don’t really understand the problem. I mean, it’s almost tragic.”
Subramanian, for her part, said she thinks “people love this AI technology because it feels like sorcery. It feels a little magical and mystical … the truth is it hasn’t really changed the world that much yet, but I don’t think it’s something to be dismissed.” She’s also become really taken with it herself. “I’m already using ChatGPT more than my kids are. I mean, it’s kind of interesting to see this. I use ChatGPT for everything now.”
A World War II veteran from Nebraska believed to be America’s last surviving “ace” pilot because he shot down five enemy planes has died at age 103.
Donald McPherson served as a Navy fighter pilot aboard the aircraft carrier USS Essex in the Pacific theater, where he engaged Japanese forces during the final years of the war. He earned the Congressional Gold Medal and three Distinguished Flying Crosses for his service
However, his daughter Beth Delabar said his loved ones always felt McPherson preferred a legacy reflecting his dedication to faith, family and community instead of his wartime feats.
“When it’s all done and Dad lists the things he wants to be remembered for … his first first thing would be that he’s a man of faith,” she told the Beatrice Daily Sun, a southeast Nebraska newspaper that first reported McPherson died on Aug. 14.
“It hasn’t been till these later years in his life that he’s had so many honors and medals,” she said.
McPherson was listed as the conflict’s last living U.S. ace by both the American Fighter Aces Association and the Fagen Fighters WWII Museum. He was honored at the museum’s Victory at Sea event last weekend in Minnesota. To be considered an ace, a pilot has to shoot down five or more enemy planes.
McPherson enlisted in the Navy in 1942 when he was 18. Trainees weren’t allowed to marry, so he and his wife Thelma tied the knot right after he completed the 18-month flight program in 1944. He flew F6F Hellcat fighters against the Japanese as part of fighter squadron VF–83.
He recounted one mission where he shot down two Japanese planes after he noticed them low near the water on a converging course. In a video the Fagen museum played in his honor, McPherson described how he shoved his plane’s nose down and fired on the first aircraft, sending that pilot into the ocean.
“But then I did a wingover to see what happened to the second one. By using full throttle, my Hellcat responded well, and I squeezed the trigger and it exploded,” McPherson said. “Then I turned and did a lot of violent maneuvering to try to get out of there without getting shot down.”
When he returned to the aircraft carrier, another sailor pointed out a bullet hole in the plane about a foot behind where he was sitting. His daughter, Donna Mulder, said her father told her that experiences like that during the war gave him the sense that “Maybe God is not done with me.”
So after he returned home to the family farm in Adams, Nebraska, he dedicated himself to giving back by helping start baseball and softball leagues for the kids in town and serving as a Scoutmaster and in leadership roles in the Adams United Methodist Church, American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars.
The community later named the ballfield McPherson Field in honor of Donald and his wife, Thelma, who often kept score and ran the concession stand during games.
Former NBA star Shawn Kemp was sentenced Friday to 30 days of electronic home monitoring for shooting at two men inside a vehicle in a Washington state mall parking lot.
Kemp must begin home monitoring within two weeks, The Seattle Times reported. He must also serve one year of state Department of Corrections supervision and complete 240 hours of community service.
Prosecutors had recommended the six-time NBA All-Star be sentenced to nine months in jail, a year of supervision and pay restitution.
Judge Michael Schwartz of Pierce County Superior Court found the circumstances surrounding the crime warranted a lesser sentence, allowing Kemp to avoid incarceration.
Kemp looked at the ceiling and blew a huff of air when Schwartz announced the sentence. He then repeatedly made the sign of the cross with his hand.
Kemp, who played for the Seattle SuperSonics from 1989 to 1997, pleaded guilty to an assault charge in May as part of a plea agreement.
No one was hurt in the March 2023 shooting.
Kemp said he acted in self-defense and returned fire after one of the men shot at him from inside their Toyota 4Runner vehicle.
The defense also claimed that the two men Kemp shot at provoked the shooting by stealing Kemp’s truck, his cellphone and memorabilia in Seattle. The judge agreed.
Using a phone-tracking app, Kemp located and briefly tried to talk to the driver of the 4Runner that was circling a casino parking lot, according to the trial brief. The men in the vehicle afterward dumped some of Kemp’s belongings but hung on to the phone, the brief says.
Kemp later saw his phone was near the Tacoma Mall. He drove there, spotted the same 4Runner and “expressed his understandable frustration” with the driver, according to the brief. The man in the back seat “fired off a round from a handgun at Mr. Kemp. Mr. Kemp returned fire and attempted to disable the Toyota. It did not work,” the document said.
The 4Runner fled, and when the vehicle was found abandoned days later, an empty holster was found inside but there was no gun, according to court documents.
After the hearing, Kemp said in an interview that “the last three years have been tough.” He said he plans to be an advocate against gun violence, especially among youth.
“Think twice,” he said. “Think twice when you get mad. Think twice when you get a little upset.”
Several people sent letters of support to the court on Kemp’s behalf. About 30 people attended the hearing, including his pastor and former NFL star Marshawn Lynch.
Kemp debuted in the NBA during the 1989-90 season as a 20-year-old who had never played college basketball. He also played for Cleveland, Portland and Orlando and was known for his high-flying dunks.
Former Seattle Sonics basketball player Shawn Kemp, left, and defense attorney Timothy Lear, speak following Kemp's sentencing at Pierce County Superior Court in Tacoma, Wash., Friday, Aug. 22, 2025.
Administrators at the state university’s campus in Colorado Springs thought they stood a solid chance of dodging the Trump administration’s offensive on higher education.
Located on a picturesque bluff with a stunning view of Pikes Peak, the school is far removed from the Ivy League colleges that have drawn President Donald Trump’s ire. Most of its students are commuters, getting degrees while holding down full-time jobs. Students and faculty alike describe the university, which is in a conservative part of a blue state, as politically subdued, if not apolitical.
That optimism was misplaced.
An Associated Press review of thousands of pages of emails from school officials, as well as interviews with students and professors, reveals that school leaders, teachers and students soon found themselves in the Republican administration’s crosshairs, forcing them to navigate what they described as an unprecedented and haphazard degree of change.
Whether Washington has downsized government departments, clawed back or launched investigations into diversity programs or campus antisemitism, the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs has confronted many of the same challenges as elite universities across the nation.
The school lost three major federal grants and found itself under investigation by the Trump’s Education Department. In the hopes of avoiding that scrutiny, the university renamed websites and job titles, all while dealing with pressure from students, faculty and staff who wanted the school to take a more combative stance.
“Uncertainty is compounding,” the school’s chancellor told faculty at a February meeting, according to minutes of the session. “And the speed of which orders are coming has been a bit of a shock.”
The college declined to make any administrators available to be interviewed. A spokesman asked the AP to make clear that any professors or students interviewed in this story were speaking for themselves and not the institution. Several faculty members also asked for anonymity, either because they did not have tenure or they did not want to call unnecessary attention to themselves and their scholarship in the current political environment.
“Like our colleagues across higher education, we’ve spent considerable time working to understand the new directives from the federal government,” the chancellor, Jennifer Sobanet, said in a statement provided to the AP.
Students said they have been able to sense the stress being felt by school administrators and professors.
“We have administrators that are feeling pressure, because we want to maintain our funding here. It’s been tense,” said Ava Knox, a rising junior who covers the university administration for the school newspaper.
Faculty, she added, “want to be very careful about how they’re conducting their research and about how they’re addressing the student population. They are also beholden to this new set of kind of ever-changing guidelines and stipulations by the federal government.”
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
Misplaced optimism
Shortly after Trump won a second term in November, UCCS leaders were trying to gather information on the Republican’s plans. In December, Sobanet met the newly elected Republican congressman who represented the school’s district, a conservative one that Trump won with 53% of the vote. In her meeting notes obtained by the AP, the chancellor sketched out a scenario in which the college might avoid the drastic cuts and havoc under the incoming administration.
“Research dollars — hard to pull back grant dollars but Trump tried to pull back some last time. The money goes through Congress,” Sobanet wrote in notes prepared for the meeting. “Grant money will likely stay but just change how they are worded and what it will fund.”
Sobanet also observed that dismantling the federal Education Department would require congressional authorization. That was unlikely, she suggested, given the U.S. Senate’s composition.
Like many others, she did not fully anticipate how aggressively Trump would seek to transform the federal government.
Conservatives’ desire to revamp higher education began well before Trump took office.
They have long complained that universities have become bastions of liberal indoctrination and raucous protests. In 2023, Republicans in Congress had a contentious hearing with several Ivy League university leaders. Shortly after, the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania resigned. During the presidential campaign last fall, Trump criticized campus protests about Gaza, as well as what he said was a liberal bias in classrooms.
His new administration opened investigations into alleged antisemitism at several universities. It froze more than $400 million in research grants and contracts at Columbia, along with more than $2.6 billion at Harvard. Columbia reached an agreement last month to pay $220 million to resolve the investigation.
When Harvard filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s actions, his administration tried to block the school from enrolling international students. The Trump administration has also threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status.
Northwestern University, Penn, Princeton and Cornell have seen big chunks of funding cut over how they dealt with protests about Israel’s war in Gaza or over the schools’ support for transgender athletes.
Trump’s decision to target the wealthiest, most prestigious institutions provided some comfort to administrators at the approximately 4,000 other colleges and universities in the country.
Most higher education students in the United States are educated at regional public universities or community colleges. Such schools have not typically drawn attention from culture warriors.
Students and professors at UCCS hoped Trump’s crackdown would bypass the school and others like it.
“You’ve got everyone — liberals, conservatives, middle of the road,” said Jeffrey Scholes, a professor in the philosophy department. “You just don’t see the kind of unrest and polarization that you see at other campuses.”
The purse strings
The federal government has lots of leverage over higher education. It provides about $60 billion a year to universities for research. In addition, a majority of students in the U.S. need grants and loans from various federal programs to help pay tuition and living expenses.
This budget year, UCCS got about $19 million in research funding from a combination of federal, state and private sources. Though that is a relatively small portion of the school’s overall $369 million budget, the college has made a push in recent years to bolster its campus research program by taking advantage of grant money from government agencies such as the U.S. Defense Department and National Institutes for Health. The widespread federal grant cut could derail those efforts.
School officials were dismayed when the Trump administration terminated research grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Defense Department and the National Science Foundation, emails show. The grants funded programs in civics, cultural preservation and boosting women in technology fields.
School administrators scrambled to contact federal officials to learn if other grants were on the chopping block, but they struggled to find answers, the records show.
School officials repeatedly sought out the assistance of federal officials only to learn those officials were not sure what was happening as the Trump administration halted grant payments, fired thousands of employees and shuttered agencies.
“The sky is falling” at NIH, a university official reported in notes on a call in which the school’s lobbyists were providing reports of what was happening in Washington.
There are also concerns about other changes in Washington that will affect how students pay for college, according to interviews with faculty and education policy experts.
While only Congress can fully abolish the U.S. Department of Education, the Trump administration has tried to dramatically cut back its staff and parcel out many of its functions to other agencies. The administration laid off nearly 1,400 employees, and problems have been reported in the systems that handle student loans. Management of student loans is expected to shift to another agency entirely.
In addition, an early version of a major funding bill in Congress included major cuts to tuition grants. Though that provision did not make it into the law, Congress did cap loans for students seeking graduate degrees. That policy could have ripple effects in the coming years on institutions such as UCCS that rely on tuition dollars for their operating expenses.
DEI and transgender issues hit Campus
To force change on campus, the Trump administration has begun investigations targeting diversity programs and efforts to combat antisemitism.
The Education Department, for example, opened an investigation in March targeting a Ph.D. scholarship program that partnered with 45 universities, including UCCS, to expand opportunities to women and nonwhites in graduate education. The administration alleged the program was only open to certain nonwhite students and amounted to racial discrimination.
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news UCCS is included on the list” of schools being investigated, wrote Annie Larson, assistant vice president of federal relations and outreach for the entire University of Colorado system.
“Oh wow, this is surprising,” wrote back Hillary Fouts, dean of the graduate school at UCCS.
UCCS also struggled with how to handle executive orders, particularly those on transgender issues.
In response to an order that aimed to revoke funds to schools that allowed transwomen to play women’s sports, UCCS began a review of its athletic programs. It determined it had no transgender athletes, the records show. University officials were also relieved to discover that only one school in their athletic conference was affected by the order, and UCCS rarely if ever had matches or games against that school.
“We do not have any students impacted by this and don’t compete against any teams that we are aware of that will be impacted by this,” wrote the vice chancellor for student affairs to colleagues.
Avoiding the Spotlight
The attacks led UCCS to take preemptive actions and to self-censor in the hopes of saving programs and avoiding the Trump administration’s spotlight.
Emails show that the school’s legal counsel began looking at all the university’s websites and evaluating whether any scholarships might need to be reworded. The university changed the web address of its diversity initiatives from www.diversity.uccs.edu to www.belonging.uccs.edu.
And the administrator responsible for the university’s division of Inclusive Culture & Belonging got a new job title in January: director of strategic initiatives. University professors said the school debated whether to rename the Women’s and Ethnic Studies department to avoid drawing attention from Trump but so far the department has not been renamed.
Along the same lines, UCCS administrators have sought to avoid getting dragged into controversies, a frequent occurrence in the first Trump administration. UCCS officials attended a presentation from the education consulting firm EAB, which encouraged schools not to react to every news cycle. That could be a challenge because some students and faculty are seeking vocal resistance on issues from climate change to immigration.
Soon after Trump was sworn in, for example, a staff member in UCCS’s sustainability program began pushing the entire University of Colorado system to condemn Trump’s withdrawal from an international agreement to tackle climate change. It was the type of statement universities had issued without thinking twice in past administrations.
In an email, UCCS’s top public relations executive warned his boss: “There is a growing sentiment among the thought leadership in higher ed that campus leaders not take a public stance on major issues unless they impact their campus community.”
—-
AP Education Writer Collin Binkley in Washington contributed to this report.
Professor Jeffrey Scholes, who is co-director for the Center for the Study of Evangelicalism as well as director for the Center for Religious Diversity and Public Life at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, poses for a portrait on the school's campus Tuesday, Aug. 12, 2025, in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Artificial intelligence is no longer just a buzzword thrown around in the boardroom. This technology now powers modern finance, shaping how money moves and how decisions are made. Through rapid trading, personalized wealth management, algorithmic credit scoring, and automated back-office functions, AI is helping financial institutions reduce costs and deliver greater value to their clients.
Yet these benefits will primarily help those that already have access to a bank—and not the more than one billion that still lack access to formal financial systems. A staggering $5.2 trillion credit gap prevents small businesses in emerging markets from growing. Financial inclusion is stubbornly out of reach for these business and individuals.
AI, combined with Web 3.0 technologies, could expand access to unbanked and underbanked populations, but only if it’s not treated as an afterthought. Financial institutions must harness AI, develop advanced methods to determine consumers’ intent to repay loans, and use alternative datasets to unlock collateral-free credit for those most in need. Collaboration, not disruption, is the way forward.
In Kenya, Indonesia, and Brazil, startups are utilizing alternative datasets, such as mobile usage and merchant transactions, to deliver microloans and insurance to last-mile customers overlooked by traditional banks. In India, multilingual AI chatbots are already breaking down language barriers. In Latin America, fintech platforms have leveraged AI to reach millions of customers, making financial services accessible at scale.
But financial exclusion won’t be eliminated by just another app. Instead, policymakers need to create inclusion frameworks that embed equity and access directly into the financial system.
This requires building global infrastructure where inclusion is the norm, not the exception. For example, the UPI-PayNow bridge between India and Singapore is a real-time payments corridor allowing instant transfers with just a mobile number. But this bridge wasn’t built overnight; it’s the result of years of policy coordination, regulatory alignment, and public-private trust.
Furthermore, in banking, collateral remains the cornerstone of traditional lending: If you want a loan, you must pledge an asset. This approach excludes low-income individuals—millions without property or savings—from accessing formal credit.
While banks use AI mainly for efficiency today, the real potential lies elsewhere. Banks could develop strong behavioral data models using AI, serving as proxies for collateral and indicators of creditworthiness, thereby opening access for those left behind.
Lasting change in any sector requires sustained collective action, not just individual brilliance. Disruptive breakthroughs spark innovation, but when multiple stakeholders work together toward common goals, they can overcome resistance, manage complexities, ensure everyone’s input, and keep up momentum to make progress resilient and deeply rooted.
In finance, AI can have unintended consequences due to opaque algorithms, biases that reinforce risks, and systems that are hard to understand. For AI to promote inclusion, it must be transparent and understandable to regulators. Institutions that use such AI need to be accountable. This involves rigorous bias testing, built-in human oversight, and clear channels for appealing major decisions. Trust is essential: Without it, liquidity dries up, credit markets freeze, and economic growth slows.
As the world enters a new technological age, AI, digital token networks, and quantum information systems are poised to transform global financial inclusion. AI will redefine financial services. Digital token networks will enable borderless, low-cost transactions through asset tokenization, eliminating the need for traditional infrastructure. And quantum information systems will enhance cybersecurity and streamline digital identification, payments, and smart contracts.
Together, these technologies will build a trustworthy financial infrastructure, providing everyone, regardless of location, literacy, or economic status, with safe and affordable access to the global economy.
By embedding inclusion into our financial infrastructure, we’ll have another opportunity to create a system that meets the needs of the world’s eight billion people.
The Trump administration halted construction on a nearly complete offshore wind project near Rhode Island as the White House continues to attack the battered U.S. offshore wind industry that scientists say is crucial to the urgent fight against climate change.
Danish wind farm developer Orsted says the Revolution Wind project is about 80% complete, with 45 out of its 65 turbines already installed.
Despite that progress — and the fact that the project had cleared years of federal and state reviews — the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management issued the order Friday, saying the federal government needs to review the project and “address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States.”
It did not specify what the national security concerns are.
President Donald Trump has made sweeping strides to prioritize fossil fuels and hinder renewable energy projects. Trump recently called wind and solar power “THE SCAM OF THE CENTURY!” in a social media post and vowed not to approve wind or “farmer destroying Solar” projects. “The days of stupidity are over in the USA!!!” he wrote on his Truth Social site this week.
Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee criticized the stop-work order and said he and Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont “will pursue every avenue to reverse the decision to halt work on Revolution Wind” in a post on X. Both governors are Democrats.
Construction on Revolution Wind began in 2023, and the project was expected to be fully operational next year. Orsted says it is evaluating the financial impact of stopping construction and is considering legal proceedings.
Revolution Wind is located more than 15 miles (24 kilometers) south of the Rhode Island coast, 32 miles (51 kilometers) southeast of the Connecticut coast and 12 miles (19 kilometers) southwest of Martha’s Vineyard. Rhode Island is already home to one offshore wind farm, the five-turbine Block Island Wind Farm.
Revolution Wind was expected to be Rhode Island and Connecticut’s first commercial-scale offshore wind farm, capable of powering more than 350,000 homes. The densely populated states have minimal space available for land-based energy projects, which is why the offshore wind project is considered crucial for the states to meet their climate goals.
“This arbitrary decision defies all logic and reason — Revolution Wind’s project was already well underway and employed hundreds of skilled tradesmen and women. This is a major setback for a critical project in Connecticut, and I will fight it,” Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, said in a statement.
“Today, the U.S. has only one fully operational large-scale offshore wind project producing power. That is not enough to meet America’s rising energy needs. We need more energy of all types, including oil and gas, wind, and new and emerging technologies,” said Erik Milito, president of the National Ocean Industries Association, a group that supports offshore oil, gas and wind.
Green Oceans, a nonprofit that opposes the offshore wind industry, applauded the BOEM’s decision. “We are grateful that the Trump Administration and the federal government are taking meaningful action to preserve the fragile ocean environment off the coasts of Rhode Island and Massachusetts,” the nonprofit said in a statement.
This is the second major offshore wind project the White House has halted. Work was stopped on Empire Wind, a New York offshore wind project, but construction was allowed to resume after New York Sen. Chuck Schumer and Gov. Kathy Hochul, both Democrats, intervened.
“This administration has it exactly backwards. It’s trying to prop up clunky, polluting coal plants while doing all it can to halt the fastest growing energy sources of the future – solar and wind power,” said Kit Kennedy, managing director for the power division at Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement. “Unfortunately, every American is paying the price for these misguided decisions.”
The end of an exemption on tariff duties for low-value packages coming into the United States is causing multiple international postal services to pause shipping as they await more clarity on the rule.
The exemption, known as the “de minimis” exemption, allows packages worth less than $800 to come into the U.S. duty free. A total of 1.36 billion packages were sent in 2024 under this exemption, for goods worth $64.6 billion, according to data from the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agency.
It is set to expire on Friday. On Saturday, postal services around Europe announced that they are suspending the shipment of many packages to the United States amid confusion over new import duties.
Postal services in Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Italy said they will stop shipping most merchandise to the U.S. effective immediately. France and Austria will follow on Monday.
The U.K.’s Royal Mail said it would halt shipments to the U.S. on Tuesday to allow time for those packages to arrive before duties kick in. Items originating in the United Kingdom worth over $100 — including gifts to friends and family — will incur a 10% duty, it said.
“Key questions remain unresolved, particularly regarding how and by whom customs duties will be collected in the future, what additional data will be required, and how the data transmission to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection will be carried out,” DHL, the largest shipping provider in Europe, said in a statement.
The company said starting Saturday it “will no longer be able to accept and transport parcels and postal items containing goods from business customers destined for the US.”
The U.S. duty-free exemption for goods originating from China ended in May as part of the Trump administration’s efforts to curb American shoppers from ordering low-value Chinese goods. The exemption is being extended to shipments from around the world.
Many European postal services say they are pausing deliveries now because they cannot guarantee the goods will enter the U.S. before Aug. 29. They cite ambiguity about what kind of goods are covered by the new rules, and the lack of time to process their implications.
Postnord, the Nordic logistics company, and Italy’s postal service announced similar suspensions effective Saturday.
“In the absence of different instructions from US authorities … Poste Italiane will be forced, like other European postal operators, to temporarily suspend acceptance of all shipments containing goods destined for the United States, starting August 23. Mail shipments not containing merchandise will continue to be accepted,” Poste Italiane said Friday.
Shipping by services such as DHL Express remains possible, it added.
Björn Bergman, head of PostNord’s Group Brand and Communication, said the pause was “unfortunate but necessary to ensure full compliance of the newly implemented rules.”
In the Netherlands, PostNL spokesperson Wout Witteveen said the Trump administration is pressing ahead with the new duties despite U.S. authorities lacking a system to collect them. He said that PostNL is working closely with its U.S. counterparts to find a solution.
“If you have something to send to America, you should do it today,” Witteveen told The Associated Press.
Austrian Post, Austria’s leading logistics and postal service provider, stated that the last acceptance of commercial shipments to the U.S., including Puerto Rico, will take place Tuesday.
France’s national postal service, La Poste, said the U.S. did not provide full details or allow enough time for the French postal service to prepare for new customs procedures.
″Despite discussions with U.S. customs services, no time was provided to postal operators to re-organize and assure the necessary computer updates to conform to the new rules,″ it said in a statement.
PostEurop, an association of 51 European public postal operators, said that if no solution can be found by Aug. 29 all its members will likely follow suit.
Vladimir Putin has staved off additional U.S. sanctions, for now, as he bought more time to prosecute his war on Ukraine by meeting with President Donald Trump in Alaska last week, sparking a flurry of diplomatic activity as European allies try to forge security guarantees for Kyiv. But time may not be Russia’s ally as its economy comes under increased strain.
Russia could slip into a recession soon and is having its worst harvest in 17 years, further straining an economy that’s already seen energy revenue plunge.
For now, Vladimir Putin has staved off additional U.S. sanctions, as he bought more time to prosecute his war on Ukraine by meeting with President Donald Trump in Alaska last week, sparking a flurry of diplomatic activity as European allies try to forge security guarantees for Kyiv.
But time may not be Russia’s ally.
While Trump didn’t follow through on his threats to penalize Moscow for failing to reach a ceasefire agreement, there’s also been no sign of talks to remove existing sanctions and revive economic cooperation.
“So it’s too early to adopt a more optimistic view on the Russian economy, which we think is teetering on the brink of a recession,” Tatiana Orlova, lead economist at Oxford Economics, said in a note on Monday.
Since the Alaska meeting produced nothing that would move the needle, she reaffirmed her forecast for Russian GDP growth to slow sharply this year to just 1.2% from 4.3% in 2024.
And after that, the economy will stagnate even further, coming to a near standstill with growth dropping below 1% in 2026 and 2027.
“We also think there’s a significant probability of Russia’s economy slipping into a technical recession in the coming quarters,” Orlova added.
Similar alarms have been piling up this year. In June, Economy Minister Maxim Reshetnikov warned that Russia was “on the brink” of a recession. Russian banks have also raised red flags on a potential debt crisis as high interest rates weigh on borrowers’ ability to service loans.
Last month, the central bank slashed interest rates by 200 basis points to revive stalling growth, after hiking them to sky-high levels to fight inflation that’s been stoked by Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Harvest season and Russia’s economy
Meanwhile, Russia is having a disastrous harvest despite being an agricultural powerhouse, putting further pressure on the economy and the Kremlin’s finances.
The country’s grain and fertilizer exports haven’t been sanctioned due to concerns about food shortages and have been a source of economic strength for Russia.
But July saw the lowest grain exports for that month since 2008, according to Peter Frankopan, associate fellow on Russia and Eurasia at International Institute for Strategic Studies, who attributed it to intensifying climate volatility.
This year, crops have been damaged by unseasonable frost in the spring as well as record heat and drought conditions in the summer, he explained in a recent post. Total grain production is now expected to fall to 130 million metric tons, down 18% from a 2022 peak.
“Russia’s bad 2025 harvest is more than a weather event: it reveals the structural fragility of Russia’s war economy and the growing risks to a system built on fiscal buffers and fossil fuels,” Frankopan wrote.
In fact, Russia’s fiscal buffer is disappearing as cash from energy dwindles. The Kremlin’s oil and gas revenue, which is its main source of funds, tumbled 27% in July from a year ago to 787.3 billion rubles, or about $9.8 billion.
As war spending soars, the result has been widening budget deficits. Russia has had to tap reserves in its National Wealth Fund, which has shrunk from $135 billion in January 2022 to just $35 billion this past May.
“Russia’s economy is fast approaching a fiscal crunch that will encumber its war effort,” economist and Russia expert Anders Åslund wrote in a Project Syndicate op-ed earlier this month. “Though that may not be enough to compel Putin to seek peace, it does suggest that the walls are closing in on him.”
While markets focused on the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, minutes from the central bank’s last meeting revealed concern among some policymakers about the housing market, which has been raising alarms on Wall Street as a slowdown drags on. Fresh data also pointed to more worrying signs, especially in new homes.
Wall Street has been laser-focused on the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy this past week, but minutes from the central bank’s last meeting revealed concern among some policymakers about the housing market.
Minutes from the Fed’s earlier meetings didn’t include such concerns. But that changed during the July 29-30 gathering.
“Participants observed that growth of economic activity slowed in the first half of the year, driven in large part by slower consumption growth and a decline in residential investment,” the minutes, which were released on Wednesday, said.
To be sure, housing was just one of several concerns that policymakers raised. Others included the labor market, the effect of tariffs on inflation, real income growth, elevated asset valuations, and low crop prices.
But Fed officials were also specific about their housing market worries, suggesting they were starting to pay more attention to the data.
“A few participants noted a weakening in housing demand, with increased availability of homes for sale and falling house prices,” the minutes said.
And not only did housing show up on the Fed’s radar, policymakers flagged it as a potential risk to jobs, along with artificial intelligence technology.
“In addition to tariff-induced risks, potential downside risks to employment mentioned by participants included a possible tightening of financial conditions due to a rise in risk premiums, a more substantial deterioration in the housing market, and the risk that the increased use of AI in the workplace may lower employment,” the minutes added.
Housing market data
The fact that the housing market is emerging as a worry at the Fed means that it could also weigh more on rate decisions, which influence mortgage rates.
In his Jackson Hole speech on Friday, Chairman Jerome Powell opened the door to a rate cut at the central bank’s meeting in September after months of maintaining a more hawkish stance, stoking a furious rally on Wall Street and sending the 10-year Treasury yield down sharply.
But in the meantime, fresh data show that the housing market remains stuck as elevated borrowing costs have kept would-be buyers on the sidelines.
Sales of existing homes rose in July but have largely been flat for most of the year, even as the number of listings has climbed, suggesting demand is weak. That’s suppressed home prices, with a gauge of median prices falling in all but one month this year.
“Weekly data suggests home prices may remain subdued in coming months, close to flat on the year or rising only very modestly,” analysts at Citi Research wrote on Thursday. “Home price declines are rare outside of hiking cycles or recessions.”
In addition, construction of new single-family homes remains lethargic, and data for July showed that building permits have declined in six out of seven months this year. In fact, permits—a volatile but leading indicator of future activity—fell to the lowest level since 2019, excluding the pandemic.
That was reflected in the NAHB homebuilder confidence index, which fell in August to reverse a modest uptick earlier. It also showed that the share of homebuilders offering sales incentives hit a post-pandemic high.
“As housing demand remains weak with high mortgage rates and high home prices, we expect further softening in housing activity this year,” Citi said in a separate note on Tuesday.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell opened the door to a rate cut at the central bank’s meeting in September after months of maintaining a more hawkish stance, stoking a furious rally on Wall Street. But don’t expect a unanimous decision among policymakers, and Powell may be the decisive factor, according to JPMorgan.
A consensus view on Wall Street for a rate cut next month doesn’t mean there will be a consensus on the Federal Reserve as policymakers still appear divided.
His emphasis on growing risks to the labor market coupled with a more muted warning on the inflationary impact of tariffs marked a shift in his tone. But not everyone on the Federal Open Market Committee sounded as dovish, including Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid.
That sets up another FOMC meeting with dissenting votes, after two policymakers voted to lower rates last time, going against the majority that kept rates steady.
While Powell counts as one vote on the FOMC, he carries outsized influence as the chairman and could prove to be decisive in another split vote.
“Guidance from a range of Fed speakers was mixed this week, while the July minutes struck a modestly hawkish tone,” JPMorgan economists led by Bruce Kasman wrote in a note on Friday. “A consensus decision in September looks unlikely, and it is Chair Powell who holds the key to the meeting’s outcome.”
Another contested meeting would mark further deviation from the Fed’s traditional consensus-driven, decision-making process, which typically results in unanimous votes.
But future meetings could see continued division as hawks point to inflation still running above the Fed’s 2% target and other economic data signaling resilience. Indeed, the composition of the Fed is in flux, potentially leading to more push and pull among policymakers.
Stephen Miran, who has previously blasted the Fed’s consensus-based approach, is set to join the board of governors and add to the dovish votes. Meanwhile, Powell’s term as chair expires in May, and President Donald Trump has threatened to fire Governor Lisa Cook if she doesn’t resign.
Outlook for Fed rate cut cycle
And even if the Fed lowers rates next month, the pace of future cuts isn’t clear, providing more fodder for debate at the central bank as Trump-appointed officials push for dovish policy.
Some Wall Street analysts don’t see an aggressive easing cycle on the horizon, and Powell indicated any rate cuts would happen in a cautious manner.
“This message may not be welcomed by an administration looking for immediate aggressive easing,” JPMorgan said.
Capital Economics chief markets economist John Higgins said in a note Friday that Powell “poured three cups of cold water” on hopes for a major loosening of Fed policy.
They include indications that the current rate is only modestly restrictive, that the neutral level may be higher than in the 2010s, and that a revised policy framework would return to a more symmetric approach to upside and downside inflation risks.
Similarly, Ryan Sweet, chief US economist at Oxford Economics, said a rate cut in September would be more akin to an “insurance” move as Powell has previously vowed not to be late on labor market signals.
In fact, his stance veers away from others at the Fed as he puts greater emphasis on the employment side of the dual mandate while tariffs are expected to cause a short-lived bump in inflation.
“Powell appears to be setting the stage, assuming the economy performs as he expects and risks do not change appreciably, for a gradual approach to normalizing interest rates,” Sweet said in a note. “In other words, one cut at every other remaining meeting this year.”
Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, from right, Kazuo Ueda, governor of the Bank of Japan, Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, and Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, during the Jackson Hole symposium on Friday.
The world tends to see Europe as fragmented, bureaucratic, and underfunded — a tough place to build global companies. But those very constraints are why Europe is producing some of the most resilient billion-dollar businesses today. Scarcity forces discipline. Fragmentation gives startups diverse talent. And limited funding pushes founders to act globally from day one.
In today’s market, where investors reward efficiency over hype and customers demand solutions that work across borders, Europe’s supposed weaknesses have become its greatest strengths. Our own $1 billion journey proves it.
Progress beats polish every time
In DataSnipper’s early days, our founders didn’t have much capital, brand recognition, and certainly no fancy office. They had a few laptops, a shared workspace that doubled up as the lunchroom, and a product that barely worked. That might sound like a list of disadvantages, but I believe they’re the main reasons why the business moved fast enough to win.
When you don’t have extensive resources, you must turn to being creative, resourceful, and fast. Instead of over-engineering, you test ideas quickly. Instead of waiting for the “perfect” conditions, you take action with what you have.
For example, they ruthlessly focused on getting our product into customers’ hands as quickly as possible. Often, far too early. This was intentional. It created a very swift feedback loop to build and improve our offering. They moved fast and iterated rapidly.
Scrappiness changes your psychology. Every obstacle becomes a puzzle to solve, not a reason to pause. They didn’t have the budget for big-ticket marketing campaigns, so they built an army of customer advocates by personally solving their problems. They didn’t have a data science team, so they taught themselves analytics at night to understand the metrics. They didn’t have a dedicated Quality Assurance department, so every single employee diligently tested features, including the founders themselves.
That constant bias toward progress over polish allowed us to iterate in weeks what typically took larger companies months to decide on. The lean and scrappy approach they used out of necessity became part of our DNA. Even when we could afford to spend more resources down the line, we strived to operate with the same mindset.
Use your European location to sell globally
Unlike U.S. startups that can grow large while staying domestic, European founders operate globally from day one. They have to and it’s an advantage.
From a single HQ, we could sell across Europe’s diverse markets, hire multilingual talent, and reach customers in three continents within 24 hours. A morning call with Asia, a midday demo with Madrid, and an afternoon pitch to New York, all without leaving Amsterdam.
Europe’s diverse talent pool makes this even more powerful. You can hire native speakers for your key markets without opening foreign subsidiaries. You can easily hire from outside the EU and sponsor their visa without any of the H1-B visa challenges you would face in the United States. It’s one of the reasons we were able to expand revenue globally while still being headquartered in Europe. Geography, diversity, and time zones turned into strategic advantages.
Think globally when fundraising
Too many European founders confine fundraising to their home turf. That’s a mistake. If you want to build a global company, you need global capital.
That means reaching out to investors in the U.S., Asia, and the Middle East. Not just the individuals a friend can introduce you to over coffee. One of our biggest backers came from cold outreach. You should be picking up the phone (or sending a well-researched email) to explain why your product has worldwide potential.
Raising from global investors also signals ambition to your team and your market. It’s not about asking for money; it’s about showing that you’re building something that transcends local markets. The right investors aren’t just writing a check, they’re opening doors to customers, talent, and partnerships in their regions.
Why Europe can compete with (and even beat) Silicon Valley
Would we have grown faster in the U.S.? Maybe. But “faster” isn’t always better. Europe’s constraints forced discipline. We didn’t raise too much too soon. We didn’t hire ahead of revenue. We didn’t chase shiny features no one needed.
Today, our HQ is still in Europe. Our team spans continents. Our customers are in 170 countries. The next billion-dollar story might not come from California. It could come from a city where the coffee is stronger, the buildings older, and the team is already thinking globally from day one.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
Innovation has a blind spot — and it’s not in the boardroom. It’s behind the counter, in the clinic, and on the shop floor before sunrise. While much of the tech world races toward the next big breakthrough, it’s overlooking something even bigger: the 2.7 billion people who make up the global shift-based workforce. These are the people who clock in, not just log on.
I grew up watching two of them every day — my mother working long hours in a shoe factory, and my father driving a truck through all kinds of weather. Their work wasn’t glamorous, but it was essential. I saw first-hand how unpredictable schedules, physical demands, and economic pressures shaped not only their jobs but also our family’s daily life. Those experiences taught me about the gap between the way technology is designed and the way most of the world actually works.
This disconnect isn’t just personal — it’s systemic. The next era of innovation shouldn’t start with code or capital. It should start with people. When I look at how to bridge this gap, I keep coming back to Harvard professor Clayton Christensen’s “Jobs to Be Done” theory: people hire products to solve real, everyday problems. But too many solutions are still dreamed up in conference rooms, far away from the break rooms and shop floors where those problems live.
Nearly 80% of the global workforce is shift-based, yet they remain largely invisible to the innovation economy. While knowledge workers enjoy the benefits of remote tools, flexible hours, and automation, frontline industries are still grappling with burnout, staffing shortages, and unpredictable hours. And that gap is only widening, with less than 1% of technology investment going toward the people who work on their feet.
What shadowing a barista showed me
Recently, I spent a day shadowing baristas at one of our customers’ locations. I watched how something as small as a confusing schedule or a delayed break could ripple through the day, affecting not just the worker’s mood but also the team’s energy and the customer’s experience. Real progress requires proximity; you have to see the friction to understand it.
One barista told me, “I want to be the person who guides you through your order and gets you exactly what you want.” That’s not just about coffee — it’s about pride in the work. The question for us as innovators is: Are we building systems that protect that pride or chip away at it?
Christensen’s framework offers a way forward: start with the real “job” people are hiring your product to do. Not the imagined job in your pitch deck, but the actual one in their lives. If we applied that lens to the workforce, we’d see the problem clearly: Many decision-makers have never experienced the unpredictability of shift work, the juggling of multiple jobs, or the anxiety of waiting for next week’s schedule — yet they’re designing solutions for these very challenges.
The goal shouldn’t be to replace people — it should be to make work more stable, predictable, and dignified for those whose jobs require them to be on site. Issues like unpredictable shifts and last-minute callouts aren’t just operational inefficiencies — they’re human costs. More than 85% of hourly workers say unpredictable scheduling impacts their health and ability to plan ahead. And for many, that unpredictability also ripples into their families. From the healthcare worker trying to arrange last-minute childcare to retail managers missing school pickup, or baristas trading shifts to care for an aging parent – these are real jobs technology must help solve if we want a society that can thrive inside and outside of work.
I’ve seen the difference when technology actually works for people: when workers can see their hours and earnings clearly, swap a shift without stress, and count on a schedule that doesn’t change at the last minute. The appetite for better solutions is clear: 80% of hourly workers believe digital tools would improve their performance, and 70% of frontline workers want better tech. The demand is there, and so is the opportunity.
My challenge to builders, investors, and innovators is this: broaden your definition of “user.” Go to the cafe at 6 a.m. Talk to a nurse on their break. Watch a store manager handle a last-minute change from the parking lot. Listen. Then design with that reality in mind.
The same care we bring to designing for desk workers – intuitive tools, real-time insights, delight in the details — should be the baseline for the people who keep the world running. When we start there, we don’t just make work better. We build a future of work that actually reflects how most of the world works.
Because if we’re serious about shaping the future, we have to start where the work actually happens — with the real jobs to be done.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
On the Mercator projection, one of the world’s most popular maps, Greenland and Africa appear to be about the same size. But on the Equal Earth projection showing continents in their true proportions, 14 Greenlands would easily fit inside the African continent.
Criticism that the Mercator projection does not accurately reflect Africa’s real size is not new.
However, a recent campaign by African advocacy groups is gaining momentum online as it urges organizations and schools to adopt the Equal Earth projection, which they say more accurately displays the size of the continent of more than 1.4 billion people.
The African Union, the continent’s diplomatic organization with 55 member countries, endorsed the campaign last week in what advocates call a major milestone.
Here is what to know about the effort to show Africa’s real size to the world.
Africa appears too small on most modern maps
The Mercator map was created in the 16th century by Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator. Designed to help European navigators at sea, the map distorted landmasses by enlarging regions near the poles such as North America and Greenland while shrinking Africa and South America.
The 2018 Equal Earth projection is a modern map that follows the Earth’s curvature and shows continents in their true proportions, unlike the distorted Mercator map.
The Mercator projection is still common in classrooms and tech platforms. Google Maps dropped the widely used projection for a 3D globe on desktop in 2018, but users can switch back to the old map. The mobile app still defaults to the Mercator projection.
Groups campaign to replace the global map
Two African advocacy groups, Africa No Filter and Speak Up Africa, launched a campaign in April to push schools, followed by international organizations and media outlets, to use the Equal Earth projection, which it says more accurately reflects the true size of Africa.
“Correcting the map is not only an African issue. It is a matter of truth and accuracy that concerns the entire world. When whole generations, in Africa and elsewhere, learn from a distorted map, they develop a biased view of Africa’s role in the world,” said Fara Ndiaye, co-founder and deputy executive director of Speak Up Africa.
For non-Africans, a shrunken representation of Africa minimizes its demographic, economic and strategic significance, Ndiaye added.
The African Union endorsed the campaign on Aug. 14, the largest body to sign on to the campaign so far, marking a significant milestone for the Change The Map campaign.
Geographers say the Mercator projection is outdated
Mark Monmonier, a Syracuse University professor of geography, said the Mercator projection is obsolete and geographers have long advised people to not use it as a world map.
“It was a useful navigation tool in the 16th century, because it has straight lines, giving navigators a line of constant direction to sail along,” Monmonier said. “But outside of that very narrow navigation application, there is no point in using it.”
While maps following the curvature of the earth, like the Equal Earth projection, offer a more accurate scale of continents true sizes, he nonetheless warned that bar graphs remain the best way to compare the sizes of different continents.
“When you put irregularly shaped areas on a flat paper, people are going to have a hard time accurately comparing the size of landmasses,” Monmonier said.
Frank Caprio, a retired municipal judge in Rhode Island who found online fame as a caring jurist and host of “Caught in Providence,” has died. He was 88.
His official social media accounts said Wednesday that he “passed away peacefully” after “a long and courageous battle with pancreatic cancer.”
Caprio billed his courtroom as a place “where people and cases are met with kindness and compassion.” He was known for dismissing tickets or showing kindness even when he handed out justice.
Last week, Caprio posted a short video on Facebook about how he had “a setback,” was back in the hospital and was asking that people “remember me in your prayers.”
During his time on the bench, Caprio developed a persona at odds with many TV judges — more sympathetic and less confrontational and judgmental.
In his bite-sized segments on YouTube, Caprio is often seen empathizing with those in his courtroom. Many of the infractions are also relatively minor, from failing to use a turn signal to a citation for a loud party.
Caprio also used his fame to address issues like unequal access to the judicial system.
“The phrase, ‘With liberty and justice for all’ represents the idea that justice should be accessible to everyone. However it is not,” Caprio said in one video. “Almost 90% of low-income Americans are forced to battle civil issues like health care, unjust evictions, veterans benefits and, yes, even traffic violations, alone.”
Caprio’s upbeat take on the job of a judge drew him millions of views. His most popular videos have been those where he calls children to the bench to help pass judgment on their parents. One shows him listening sympathetically to a woman whose son was killed and then dismissing her tickets and fines of $400.
In another clip, after dismissing a red-light violation for a bartender who was making $3.84 per hour, Caprio urged those watching the video not to duck out on their bills.
“If anyone’s watching I want them to know you better not eat and run because you’re going to get caught and the poor people who are working hard all day for three bucks an hour are going to have to pay your bill,” he said.
His fame reached as far as China, where clips of his show have been uploaded to social media in recent years. Some fans there posted about his death, recalling and praising the humanity he showed in his rulings.
His family described Caprio “as a devoted husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather and friend.”
“Beloved for his compassion, humility, and unwavering belief in the goodness of people, Judge Caprio touched the lives of millions through his work in the courtroom and beyond,” the family wrote online. “His warmth, humor, and kindness left an indelible mark on all who knew him.”
State and local politicians mourned his passing and celebrated his life.
“Judge Caprio not only served the public well, but he connected with them in a meaningful way, and people could not help but respond to his warmth and compassion,” Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee said in a statement. “He was more than a jurist — he was a symbol of empathy on the bench, showing us what is possible when justice is tempered with humanity.”
Robert Leonard, who co-owned a restaurant with Caprio, said he was “going to be sorely missed” and was “all around wonderful.”
“There is nothing he wouldn’t do for you if he could do it,” Leonard said.
Caprio retired from Providence Municipal Court in 2023 after nearly four decades on the bench.
According to his biography, Caprio came from humble beginnings, the second of three boys growing up in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island.
“I hope that people will take away that the institutions of government can function very well by exercising kindness, fairness, and compassion in their deliberations. We live in a very contentious society,” he said in 2017. “I would hope that people will see that we can dispense justice without being oppressive.”
___
LeBlanc, an Associated Press journalist who retired in January, was the primary writer of this obituary. Associated Press writers Michael Casey in Boston, Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu and Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed.
Login
