SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The man shot and killed while participating in the “No Kings” protest in Salt Lake City was a successful fashion designer and former “Project Runway” contestant who devoted his life to celebrating artists from the Pacific Islands.
Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, 39, was killed Saturday night when two men shot at a person allegedly brandishing a rifle at demonstrators, and one accidentally struck Ah Loo in the stomach, authorities said. Ah Loo later died at the hospital.
Salt Lake City police said it remained unclear Monday whether the individuals, one of whom identified himself as part of a “peacekeeping” team for the protest, were brought in by the event organizers or acted on their own initiative.
Arturo Gamboa, 24, never shot the rifle he pointed at protesters, but police arrested him on murder charges and said he created the dangerous situation that led to Ah Loo’s death. Police said they were investigating whether the man who shot at Gamboa — and fatally hit Ah Loo — was justified in firing his gun. He has not been identified publicly.
Victim was a self-taught designer
Ah Loo leaves behind a wife and two young children, according to a GoFundMe page for his family that raised over $100,000 in 48 hours.
The self-taught fashion designer known to many as Afa devoted his life to doing “good things for his neighbors and community,” state Rep. Verona Mauga, a close friend, told The Associated Press. Their families were from the small village of Lotopa in Samoa, she said.
Ah Loo was born in Samoa and has lived in Utah for about a decade, his friend Benjamin Powell said.
Mauga, who was born in Hawaii, was at the “No Kings” protest a few blocks from where Ah Loo was shot. The Democratic lawmaker said she only realized something was wrong when she saw the crowd scattering.
Peaceful protest turns deadly
The protest Saturday was one of hundreds in cities nationwide to counter President Donald Trump’s military parade in Washington, which marked the Army’s 250th anniversary and coincided with Trump’s birthday.
There is no record in the Salt Lake City event permit indicating that armed security would be present, police said.
Carl Moore, a 49-year-old Indigenous advocate, was filming the protest when three gunshots rang out through the crowd estimated at 10,000 people. Moore said he observed confusion among police as protesters hid behind barriers and took shelter inside parking garages and nearby businesses.
“They don’t know what they’re looking for. They’re just yelling like, ‘What does he look like?’” Moore recalled.
Weaving culture and community through fashion
Mauga said Ah Loo would have been proud that his last moments were spent advocating for what he believed in.
“If Afa was going to go out any other way than natural causes, it would be standing up for marginalized and vulnerable communities and making sure that people had a voice,” she said.
Powell, a hair salon innovator from Fiji, co-founded Create Pacific with Ah Loo shortly after they met four years ago. The organization uplifts artists from the Pacific Islands, allowing a new generation to connect with their heritage.
The two artists were friends with a rare creative synergy, Powell said. Ah Loo’s vibrant work weaves traditional Pacific Island attire with modern silhouettes and design. He used flowers indigenous to Samoa as motifs and frequently incorporated Tapa, a cloth traditionally made from tree bark in the Pacific Islands, into the garments he created.
Powell admired Ah Loo’s attention to detail that made his work distinctive.
“You would know right away that it was an Ah Loo design,” he said.
Ah Loo was a contestant in 2019 on Bravo’s “Project Runway,” a reality show where fashion designers compete in front of celebrity judges to create runway looks on tight deadlines.
Recently, he designed a garment for the star of the animated Disney movie “Moana 2,” Hawaiian actor Auliʻi Cravalho. According to an interview with Vogue, Cravalho wore the outfit inspired by the Hawaiian ʻahu ʻula — a feather cloak worn by ancient Hawaiian royalty — to the film’s red carpet premiere in Hawaii last November.
A posthumous honor
In an Instagram post Monday, Cravalho said there were “no words to hold the grief of losing” Ah Loo.
“My deepest condolences, sympathies and Aloha to his family, and all who felt his impact,” Cravalho wrote.
Powell and Ah Loo were working on an upcoming August fashion show when he died. Powell said the show will continue and will honor Ah Loo’s unwavering commitment to his community.
Ah Loo also volunteered his time and resources to tailor clothing for people who needed help, often refusing to let people compensate him for his work, Mauga said. Sometimes, he would playfully criticize the outfits the state lawmaker wore on the campaign trail and invite her to his studio so he could make her new blazers or dresses.
“He was just very involved in whatever was going on in the community,” Mauga said. “He cared about making a difference.”
Louisiana is poised to hike taxes on sports betting to pump more than $24 million into athletic departments at the state’s most prominent public universities.
Legislation pending before Gov. Jeff Landry would make Louisiana the first state to raise taxes to fund college sports since a judge approved a landmark settlement with the NCAA allowing schools to directly pay athletes for use of their name, image and likeness (NIL). Anticipating the court’s approval, Arkansas this year became the first to waive state income taxes on NIL payments made to athletes by higher education institutions.
More states seem almost certain to adopt their own creative ways to gain an edge — or at least keep pace — in the rapidly evolving and highly competitive field of college sports.
“These bills, and the inevitable ones that will follow, are intended to make states ’college-athlete friendly,’” said David Carter, founder of the Sports Business Group consultancy and an adjunct professor at the University of Southern California. But “they will no doubt continue to stoke the debate about the `perceived’ preferential treatment afforded athletes.”
The new NCCA rules allowing direct payments to college athletes kick in July 1. In the first year, each Division I school can share up to $20.5 million with its athletes — a figure that may be easier to meet for big-time programs than for smaller schools weighing whether to divert money from other purposes. The settlement also continues to allow college athletes to receive NIL money from third parties, such as donor-backed collectives that support specific schools.
Louisiana bill sponsor: ‘We love football’
The Louisiana legislation won final approval just two days after a judge approved the antitrust settlement between the NCAA and athletes, but it had been in the works for months. Athletic directors from many of Louisiana’s universities met earlier this year and hashed out a plan with lawmakers to relieve some of their financial pressures by dividing a share of the state’s sports betting tax revenue.
The biggest question for lawmakers was how large of a tax increase to support. The initial proposal sought to double the state’s 15% tax on net proceeds from online sports betting. But lawmakers ultimately agreed on a 21.5% tax rate in a compromise with the industry.
One-quarter of the tax revenue from online sports wagering — an estimated $24.3 million — would be split equally among 11 public universities in conferences with Division I football programs. The money must be used “for the benefit of student athletes,” including scholarships, insurance, medical coverage, facility enhancements and litigation settlement fees.
The state tax money won’t provide direct NIL payments to athletes. But it could facilitate that indirectly by freeing up other university resources.
The legislation passed overwhelmingly in the final days of Louisiana’s annual session.
“We love football in Louisiana – that’s the easiest way to say it,” said Republican state Rep. Neil Riser, who sponsored the bill.
Smaller universities are feeling the squeeze
Many colleges and universities across the country have been feeling a financial squeeze, but it’s especially affected the athletic departments of smaller schools.
Athletic departments in the top Division I football conferences take in millions of dollars from media rights, donors, corporate sponsors and ticket sales, with a median of just 7% coming from student fees and institutional and government support, according to the Knight-Newhouse College Athletics Database.
But the remaining schools in Division I football bowl conferences got a median of 63% of the revenue from such sources last year. And schools without football teams got a median of 81% of their athletic department revenues from institutional and governmental support or student fees.
Riser said Louisiana’s smaller universities, in particular, have been struggling financially and have shifted money from their general funds to their sports programs to try to remain competitive. At the same time, the state has taken in millions of dollars of tax revenue from sports bets made at least partly on college athletics.
“Without the athletes, we wouldn’t have the revenue. I just felt like it’s fairness that we do give something back and, at the same time, help the general funds of the universities,” Riser said.
Other states are investing in college sports
Louisiana would become the second state behind North Carolina to dedicate a portion of its sports wagering revenues to colleges athletics. North Carolina launched online sports wagering last year under a state law earmarking part of an 18% tax on gross gaming revenue to the athletic departments at 13 public universities. The state’s two largest institutions were excluded. But that might be about to change.
Differing budget plans passed by the state House and Senate this year both would start allotting sports betting tax revenue to the athletic programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University. The Senate version also would double the tax rate. The proposals come a year after University of North Carolina trustees approved an audit of the athletics department after a preliminary budget projected about $100 million of debt in the years ahead.
Other schools also are taking actions because of deficits in their athletic departments. Last week, University of Kentucky trustees approved a $31 million operating loan for the athletics department as it begins making direct NIL payments to athletes. That came after trustees in April voted to convert the Kentucky athletics department into a limited-liability holding company — Champions Blue LLC — to more nimbly navigate the emerging financial pressures.
Given the money involved in college athletics, it’s not surprising that states are starting to provide tax money to athletic departments or — as in Arkansas’ case — tax relief to college athletes, said Patrick Rishe, executive director of the sports business program at Washington University in St. Louis.
“If you can attract better athletes to your schools and your states, then this is more visibility to your states, this is more potential out-of-town economic activity for your state,” Rishe said. “I do think you’re going to see many states pursue this, because you don’t want to be the state that’s left exposed or at a disadvantage.”
Pioneering computer scientist and ex-Googler Geoffery Hinton predicts the healthcare industry will weather the AI storm that’s coming for most jobs. The Godfather of AI warns only “very skilled” workers will stay employed—echoing Anthropic CEO’s job wipeout warnings, and Deepmind leader Demis Hassabis, who sees healthcare staying human.
CEOs and experts agree that AI is creating a new world of work, but many are starkly divided on what it’ll look like. As AI agents and robots enter the picture, the pioneering computer scientist dubbed the Godfather of AI, Geoffery Hinton, has predicted one industry will be safe from the potential jobs armageddon: healthcare.
“If you could make doctors five times as efficient, we could all have five times as much health care for the same price,” he continued. “There’s almost no limit to how much healthcare people can absorb—[patients] always want more healthcare if there’s no cost to it.”
The Nobel Prize winning scientist is one of many experts who anticipate that healthcare will be buoyed in this digital transformation—but many others won’t be so lucky.
Hinton believes that jobs that perform mundane tasks will be taken over by AI, as roles like receptionists and customer service representatives are already vulnerable. That, Hinton predicted, will wipe out a high number of roles right off the bat: “You’d have to be very skilled to have a job that it couldn’t just do.”
Most jobs will be replaced by tech, and only the ‘skilled’ will stay employed
Tech leaders with rosy lenses like Jensen Huang contend that humans won’t be replaced by AI, but rather their AI-enabled coworkers will take their jobs. But the Godfather of AI thinks that’s too optimistic.
“There are jobs where you can make a person with an AI assistant much more efficient, and you won’t lead to less people, because you’ll just have much more of that being done,” Hinton said. “But most jobs are not like that.”
He concluded that AI will likely lead to companies needing far fewer workers and that the new technology’s impact can’t be compared to previous technological advances, which created an explosion of new jobs.
“This is a very different kind of technology. If it can do all mundane human intellectual labor, then what new jobs is it going to create?” Hinton said. “You’d have to be very skilled to have a job that it couldn’t just do.”
It isn’t just leading scientists, CEOs, and workers ringing the alarm bills—even major consulting firms and banks are projecting a bleak labor market. McKinsey predicted that by 2030, 30% of current U.S. jobs could be automated; Goldman Sachs projected that up to 50% of jobs could be fully automated by 2045, driven by generative AI and robotics.
Other CEOs agree that healthcare jobs are safe from AI disruption
It’s been estimated by leaders like Anthropic’s CEO that nearly half of entry-level white collar jobs are on the chopping block thanks to AI—and Klarna’s CEO admitted that “a lot of the jobs are going to be threatened.” But many healthcare roles will be safe and sound.
Healthcare is a key industry expected to thrive amid the U.S.’s digital workplace disruption, according to a 2024 report from McKinsey. AI still can’t perform a majority of tasks that healthcare workers can—like sterilizing surgical equipment, or administering at-home aid.
Plus, there’s something much more comforting about a human handling your medical care over a cold, metal robot. Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google’s AI research lab DeepMind, also echoed Hinton’s prediction that healthcare workers will be optimized—but not fully replaced—by AI. The tech executive believes the tools will help us cure disease, and create “superhuman” productivity. But people will still be at the heart of medical care.
“There’s a lot of things that we won’t want to do with a machine,” Hassabis told Wired in a recent interview. “You wouldn’t want a robot nurse—there’s something about the human empathy aspect of that care that’s particularly humanistic.”
Ex-Google AI boss Geoffery Hinton has a stark prediction for workers: Most of you are about to get replaced. Anthropic and Klarna’s CEOs have issued similar warnings
President Donald Trump suggested on Tuesday that he would likely extend a deadline for TikTok’s Chinese owner to divest the popular video sharing app.
Trump had signed an order in early April to keep TikTok running for another 75 days after a potential deal to sell the app to American owners was put on ice.
“Probably yeah, yeah,” he responded when asked by reporters on Air Force One whether the deadline would be extended again.
“Probably have to get China approval but I think we’ll get it. I think President Xi will ultimately approve it.”
He indicated in an interview last month with NBC that he would be open to pushing back the deadline again.
If announced, it would be the third time Trump has extended the deadline. The first one was through an executive order on Jan. 20, his first day in office, after the platform went dark briefly when the ban approved by Congress — and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court — took effect. The second was in April, when White House officials believed they were nearing a deal to spin off TikTok into a new company with U.S. ownership that fell apart after China backed out following Trump’s tariff announcement.
It is not clear how many times Trump can — or will — keep extending the ban as the government continues to try to negotiate a deal for TikTok, which is owned by China’s ByteDance. Trump has amassed more than 15 million followers on TikTok since he joined last year, and he has credited the trendsetting platform with helping him gain traction among young voters. He said in January that he has a “warm spot for TikTok.”
Billionaire Mark Cuban isn’t a believer in taking a day off if you’re serious about building a business. The former Shark Tank star admitted that the secret to success is outperforming your competition and with it comes the expectation that somebody else is working 24 hours a day to “kick your ass.” Cuban adds that he looks to Warren Buffett’s grind for inspiration.
Gen Z may be known as the FOMO generation—driven by fear of missing out on parties, trends, or social movements. But for business leaders, FOMO takes on higher stakes: It’s the fear of missing the next big innovation or investment opportunity.
That pressure to stay ahead is a driving force of motivation for billionaire Mark Cuban, so much so that he said work-life balance isn’t achievable for those on the grind to success.
“There is no balance,” Cuban said on “The Playbook,” a series from Sports Illustrated bringing together athletes and business leaders.
“If you want to work nine-to-five, you can have work-life balance,” he told Dallas Cowboys’ Micah Parsons. “If you want to crush the game, whatever game you’re in, there’s somebody working 24 hours a day to kick your ass.”
The former Shark Tank star knows a thing or two about finding success the hard way. After all, he recently admitted he didn’t take a vacation and lived with five roommates when he first started out in entrepreneurship.
All roads lead to Warren Buffett
Cuban’s grind begins each morning by reading and answering messages on his phone or laptop, something that takes between eight and 10 hours of his day, he recently told People.
Despite having over $8 billion to his name as an investor in hundreds of companies, there’s no sign Cuban is slowing down his embrace of the hustle culture. In fact, the 66-year-old just launched a new $750 million sports-focused private equity fund.
“I want to see what he’s going to do next,” Cuban said. “That’s the way I look at things. I’ve accomplished a lot in my life, I want to change health care, but that’s not the end-all, be-all.”
Other leaders like Apple CEO Tim Cook and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon have also sung the Berkshire Hathaway founder’s praises. But what might truly differentiate Buffett from all others is that his work-life balance is reportedly relatively healthy. He avoids technology, has minimal meetings, and gets plenty of rest.
“I’ve created a good environment,” Buffett told the Wall Street Journal. “All I have to do is think and not be influenced by others.”
Fortune reached out to Cuban for comment.
CEOs and presidents agree: Work-life balance isn’t always achievable
Cuban is far from the first leader to have strong feelings about work-life balance. In fact, former President Barack Obama weighed in on the work-life debate earlier this year, admitting that finding balance isn’t possible while seeking excellence.
“If you want to be excellent at anything—sports, music, business, politics—there’s going to be times in your life when you’re out of balance, where you’re just working and you’re single-minded,” Obama admitted on The Pivot Podcast.
Moreover, for Zoom’s CEO, Eric Yuan, whose company has arguably blurred the boundaries between work and life by making it easier than ever to work from literally anywhere, “There’s no way to balance. Work is life, life is work.”
But there’s one exception for Yuan: “Whenever there’s a conflict, guess what? Family first. That’s it.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — Retail sales fell sharply in May as consumers pulled back from a spending surge early this year to get ahead of President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs on nearly all imports.
Sales at retail stores and restaurants dropped 0.9% in May, the Commerce Department said Tuesday, after a decline of 0.1% in April. The figure was pulled down by a steep drop in auto sales, after Americans ramped up their car-buying in March to get ahead of Trump’s 25% duty on imported cars and car parts. Excluding autos, sales fell 0.3%.
The sales drop is hitting after sharp declines in consumer confidence this year. Still, inflation has cooled steadily and unemployment remains low, which could fuel steady spending in the coming months, as the economy has remained mostly solid.
A category of sales that excludes volatile sectors such as gas, cars, and restaurants rose last month by 0.4%, a sign that consumers are still spending on some discretionary items.
Overall, the report suggests consumers have pulled back a bit but not dramatically so. The retail sales report covers about one-third of consumer spending, with the other two-thirds consisting of spending on services. Economists expect overall consumer spending to grow in the April-June quarter.
“Today’s data suggests consumers are downshifting, but they haven’t yet slammed the brakes,” Ellen Zentner, chief economic strategist for Morgan Stanley wealth management, said in an email. “Like the economy as a whole, consumer spending has been resilient in the face of tariff uncertainty.”
Yet many categories saw sharp declines. Car sales plunged 3.5%, while sales at home and garden centers dropped 2.7%. They fell 0.6% at electronics and appliance stores and 0.7% at grocery stores. There were some bright spots: Sales rose 0.9% at online retailers, 0.8% at clothing stores, and 1.2% at furniture stores.
Sales at restaurants and bars, a closely watched indicator of discretionary spending, fell 0.9% in May, though that followed a solid gain of 0.8% in April.
It is a difficult time for retailers, many of whom built up large inventories this spring after Trump warned that he would impose widespread import taxes. Traffic at the port in Los Angeles has fallen sharply in recent weeks, suggesting fewer goods are entering the United States.
Some consumer products companies say they are seeing the impact of tariffs on their own costs and sales.
Paul Cosaro, CEO of Picnic Time, Inc, which makes picnic accessories like baskets, coolers, and folding chairs, said that orders from retailers are down as much as 40% this summer compared with a year ago. His company sells to a variety of stores like Target and Williams-Sonoma.
Cosaro noted that some stores have been cautious because they’re not sure how shoppers will react to higher prices. Some cancelled orders because Cosaro couldn’t tell them how much the new prices would be due to all the uncertainty. Roughly 80% of the company’s goods are made in China, with the rest in India and Vietnam.
The company, founded roughly 40 years ago and based in Moorpark, California, was forced to raise prices on average from 11% to 14% for this summer selling season, Cosaro said.
A folding outdoor chair now costs $137 this month, up from $120 in late 2024, he added. The company’s sales are still down this year, even though some shoppers accelerated their purchases out of concern that prices would rise.
“Shoppers are very price sensitive,” Cosaro said.
The company has implemented a hiring freeze because of all the extra tariff costs, he added. So far this year the company, which employs from 70 to 100 people, has had to pay $1 million in tariffs. A year ago at this time, the bill was a third of that amount.
The retail sales report comes as other evidence indicates shoppers have been pulling back more amid worries about higher prices from Trump’s tariffs.
Naveen Jaggi, president of retail advisory services in the Americas for real-estate firm JLL, said that he’s hearing from malls that sales are slowing down heading into the official summer months. Retailers are pushing up back-to-school promotions to this month from July, he said. They want to get shoppers in early for fear consumers may not want to spend in the later months when prices will likely go up, he said.
So far, Trump’s tariffs haven’t yet boosted inflation. Consumer prices rose just 2.4% in May compared with a year ago, the government said last week.
Many stores and brands, including Walmart, Lululemon, and J.M. Smucker Co., have said they plan to or have raised prices in response to tariffs.
Deckers Outdoor, which is behind such shoe labels as Hoka and Uggs, said late last month that it plans price increases, which will likely hurt sales.
“We expect to absorb a portion of the tariff impact,” Chief Financial Officer Steven Fasching told analysts. “We also believe there is potential to see demand erosion associated with the combination of price increases and general softness in the consumer spending environment.”
Duracell has filed a lawsuit against Energizer. The battery companies are battling over Energizer’s claims that its Max batteries last 10% longer than Duracell. Duracell, which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, says it has suffered “irreparable reputational harm” because of the ads. The companies have a long history of lawsuits against each other.
Warren Buffett is suing the Energizer Bunny.
Battery maker Duracell, which has been owned by Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway since 2014, has filed suit against Energizer, saying the rival battery maker ran a deceptive advertising campaign that caused “irreparable reputational harm” to the brand.
The complaint, filmed June 13 in a Manhattan federal court, is the latest in a long series of legal battles between the two companies. (They were last in court five years ago over similar claims on a different line of batteries. Those suits were voluntarily dismissed.)
Duracell alleges Energizer has falsely claimed its Energizer Max batteries last 10% longer than Duracell’s Power Boost brand.
“The Energizer MAX False Advertising is a clear effort by Energizer to expand its market share—at Duracell’s expense—by confusing and misleading consumers about the comparative performance of Energizer MAX batteries and Duracell Power Boost batteries with blatantly false advertising in a transparent, and unfair, effort to drive sales,” the complaint said.
Duracell is hoping to end the ad campaign and is seeking monetary damages.
An Energizer Holdings spokesperson said the company does not comment on active litigation.
The battles between the two companies go back almost 80 years when Duracell first entered the market in 1946. Energizer, then known as Ever Ready, had invented the AA battery in 1907, and the battle was on.
The annual fee on the Sapphire Reserve card is jumping 45% to $795 per year. With that increase come a wave of new perks. JPMorgan Chase is looking to take a bigger share of the premium credit card market.
Carrying a Sapphire Reserve credit card in your wallet is about to get a lot more expensive
JPMorgan is raising the annual fee on the Sapphire Reserve card to $795 per year, a 45% increase over the current cost. Even for a luxury credit card, that’s steep, but the bank is seemingly hoping that new perks that come with the Sapphire Reserve will make it worth it.
JPMorgan argues cardholders will get $2,700 in annual benefits when the updated card launches on June 23. Some of those are tied with existing benefits, but there are plenty of additions.
Dining at restaurants that are part of the Sapphire Reserve Exclusive Tables network will gather up to a $300 credit, for example. And subscriptions to Apple TV+ and Apple Music will be included (a $275 value). Use your card for select travel offers and you could earn a $500 credit as well.
If you’re a frequent user of the card and spend more than $75,000 annually on it, you’ll unlock other perks, such as top-tier status at Southwest Airlines and IHG Hotels and Resorts.
A business version of the Sapphire Reserve card features all of these perks, as well as credits for ZipRecruiter and Google Workspace.
All of these rewards come on top of existing incentives for cardholders, who earn 3X points on dining and travel purchases, as well as elevated rates through Chase Ultimate Rewards. There’s also a $300 annual travel credit that applies automatically to any travel purchase—including flights, hotels and rideshares.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate is expected to approve legislation Tuesday that would regulate a form of cryptocurrency known as stablecoins, the first of what is expected to be a wave of crypto legislation from Congress that the industry hopes will bolster its legitimacy and reassure consumers.
The fast-moving legislation, which will be sent to the House for potential revisions, comes on the heels of a 2024 campaign cycle where the crypto industry ranked among the top political spenders in the country, underscoring its growing influence in Washington and beyond.
Eighteen Democratic senators have shown support for the legislation as it has advanced, siding with the Republican majority in the 53-47 Senate. If passed, it would become the second major bipartisan bill to advance through the Senate this year, following the Laken Riley Act on immigration enforcement in January.
Still, most Democrats oppose the bill. They have raised concerns that the measure does little to address President Donald Trump’s personal financial interests in the crypto space.
“We weren’t able to include certainly everything we would have wanted, but it was a good bipartisan effort,” said Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., on Monday. She added, “This is an unregulated area that will now be regulated.”
Known as the GENIUS Act, the bill would establish guardrails and consumer protections for stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency typically pegged to the U.S. dollar. The acronym stands for “Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stablecoins.”
It’s expected to pass Tuesday, since it only requires a simple majority vote — and it already cleared its biggest procedural hurdle last week in a 68-30 vote. But the bill has faced more resistance than initially expected.
There is a provision in the bill that bans members of Congress and their families from profiting off stablecoins. But that prohibition does not extend to the president and his family, even as Trump builds a crypto empire from the White House.
Last month, Trump hosted a private dinner at his golf club in Virginia with top investors in a Trump-branded meme coin. His family holds a significant stake in World Liberty Financial, a crypto project that launched its own stablecoin, USD1.
Trump reported earning $57.35 million from token sales at World Liberty Financial in 2024, according to a public financial disclosure released Friday. A meme coin linked to him has generated an estimated $320 million in fees, though the earnings are split among multiple investors.
The administration is broadly supportive of crypto’s growth and its integration into the economy. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent last week said the legislation could help push the U.S. stablecoin market beyond $2 trillion by the end of 2028.
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase — the nation’s largest crypto exchange and a major advocate for the bill — has met with Trump and praised his early moves on crypto. This past weekend, Coinbase was among the more prominent brands that sponsored a parade in Washington commemorating the Army’s 250th anniversary — an event that coincided with Trump’s 79th birthday.
But the crypto industry emphasizes that they view the legislative effort as bipartisan, pointing to champions on each side of the aisle.
“The GENIUS Act will be the most significant digital assets legislation ever to pass the U.S. Senate,” Senate Banking Committee Chair Tim Scott, R-S.C., said ahead of a key vote last week. “It’s the product of months of bipartisan work.”
The bill did hit one rough patch in early May, when a bloc of Senate Democrats who had previously supported the bill reversed course and voted to block it from advancing. That prompted new negotiations involving Senate Republicans, Democrats and the White House, which ultimately produced the compromise version expected to win passage Tuesday.
“There were many, many changes that were made. And ultimately, it’s a much better deal because we were all at the table,” Alsobrooks said.
Still, the bill leaves unresolved concerns over presidential conflicts of interest — an issue that remains a source of tension within the Democratic caucus.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has been among the most outspoken as the ranking member on the Senate Banking Committee, warning that the bill creates a “super highway” for Trump corruption. She has also warned that the bill would allow major technology companies, such as Amazon and Meta, to launch their own stablecoins.
If the stablecoin legislation passes the Senate on Tuesday, it still faces several hurdles before reaching the president’s desk. It must clear the narrowly held Republican majority in the House, where lawmakers may try to attach a broader market structure bill — sweeping legislation that could make passage through the Senate more difficult.
Trump has said he wants stablecoin legislation on his desk before Congress breaks for its August recess, now just under 50 days away.
A cutout of US President Donald Trump holding a Bitcoin is displayed on a group of servers during The Bitcoin Conference at The Venetian Las Vegas in Las Vegas, Nevada, on May 27, 2025.
Prime Day will return from July 8-11 in 2025. This is the first time the company has run the promotion for four days. This year marks the 10th anniversary of Prime Day.
On July 15, 2015, Amazon launched an experiment. Would a flashy sale, in the retail desert of summer, turn people’s attentions away from outdoor activities and captivate them in a way akin to Black Friday? The company called that event Prime Day—and the results speak for themselves.
Now, as the 10th anniversary of that retail event comes up, Amazon is ramping things up even further. Prime Day 2025 will last an unprecedented four days, Amazon announced Tuesday. And it’s offering a slew of deals long before things get started.
Prime Day 2025 will take place from July 8 through July 11. The offers for Prime members, though, start a week earlier. Amazon will cut prices on a number of its own brands by 30% on July 1, dropping school supplies and “household essentials” to as low as $3 and dresses to $12.
The big draw for Prime members, though, might be the offer that will run from July 3 to 6. During that time, Prime members can get $1 off per gallon for up to $35 gallons at over 7,500 bp, Amoco and select ampm locations.
Other offers for Prime members include:
Save $10 on a Grubhub+ delivery order over $20 with the code “PRIME10” now through July 7
Get a $200 Amazon Gift Card instantly upon approval for Prime Visa (through July 14) or an $80 Amazon Gift Card instantly upon approval for Prime Store Card (from July 2–11).
Rent a car with Avis and get up to 30% off base rates and 10% back in an Amazon.com gift card.
Beyond the usual Prime accounts, Amazon also announced an enhanced membership for people 18-24. Prime for Young Adults, as it’s called, will cost $69 per year (or $7.49 per month) and will include 5% cash back savings on popular categories (and 10% cash back during Prime Day) in addition to all of the usual Prime perks. New members can get 6 months for free.
NEW YORK (AP) — Former U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez arrived at a federal prison on Tuesday to begin serving an 11-year sentence for accepting bribes of gold and cash and acting as an agent of Egypt. The New Jersey Democrat has been mocked for the crimes as “Gold Bar Bob,” according to his own lawyer.
The federal Bureau of Prisons confirmed that Menendez was in custody at the Federal Correctional Institution, Schuylkill in Minersville, Pennsylvania. The facility has a medium-security prison and a minimum-security prison camp. Given the white-collar nature of his crimes, it’s likely he’ll end up in the camp.
The prison is about 118 miles (190 kilometers) west of New York City. It’s home to about 1,200 inmates, including ex-New York City organized crime boss James Coonan and former gas station owner Gurmeet Singh Dhinsa, whom the New York Post dubbed “Gas-Station Gotti” for his ruthless, violent ways.
Menendez, 71, maintains his innocence. Last week, a federal appeals court rejected his last-ditch effort to remain free on bail while he fights to get his bribery conviction overturned. A three-judge panel on the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied his bail motion.
Pleading for leniency, Menendez told a judge at his sentencing in January: “I am far from a perfect man. I have made more than my share of mistakes and bad decisions. I’ve done far more good than bad.”
Menendez has also appeared to be angling for a pardon from President Donald Trump, aligning himself with the Republican’s criticisms of the judicial system, particularly in New York City.
“This process is political and it’s corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores the integrity to the system,” Menendez told reporters after his January sentencing.
In posts Tuesday on the social platform X that were later deleted, Menendez criticized prosecutors as politically motivated and opposed to his foreign policy views and praised Trump for “rising above the law fare.”
Menendez resigned last year after he was convicted of selling his clout for bribes. FBI agents found $480,000 in cash in his home, some of it stuffed inside boots and jacket pockets, along with gold bars worth an estimated $150,000 and a luxury convertible in the garage.
In exchange, prosecutors said, Menendez performed corrupt favors for New Jersey business owners, including protecting them from criminal investigations, helping in business deals with foreign powers and meeting with Egyptian intelligence officials before helping Egypt access $300 million in U.S. military aid.
Menendez, who once chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, resigned a month after his conviction. He had been in the Senate since 2006.
Two business owners were also convicted last year along with Menendez.
His wife, Nadine Menendez, was convicted in April of teaming up with her husband to accept bribes from the business owners. Her sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 11.
At his sentencing, Menendez’s lawyers described how the son of Cuban immigrants emerged from poverty to become “the epitome of the American Dream” — rising from mayor of Union City, New Jersey, to decades in Congress — before his conviction “rendered him a national punchline.”
“Despite his decades of service, he is now known more widely as Gold Bar Bob,” defense lawyer Adam Fee told the judge.
– Sponsor her. Women in the workplace need both mentorship and sponsorship. The latter is someone who advocates for you when you’re not in the room, explains Rosalind Chow, an advocate for sponsorship and the author of the new book The Doors You Can Open.
But sponsorship often isn’t a small ask of senior leaders—and it can be an even bigger ask of women. Rising women are more likely to need “protection” from their sponsors.
“Women proteges tend to get criticized more often—so women sponsors need to engage in protection more often than male sponsors do,” says Chow, who teaches organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University. “But protection is a very costly sponsorship behavior. … It means they’re using up their social capital. Every time they do this, it knocks their credibility just a little bit more.” Over time, that can hurt up-and-coming women in the workplace—their sponsors’ efforts “might start being less effective,” Chow says.
She shares an example in her book; a director of a women’s leadership program recommended a part-time instructor for a full-time position. The instructor was passed over, with the college administration citing her lack of a PhD as a determining factor—even though the school had recently promoted a male instructor without a PhD. On top of this, the director was met with accusations that she had gone against hiring processes and against the wishes of other faculty members. “For her efforts, she was rewarded with damaged relationships and broken trust,” writes Chow.
Rosalind Chow writes about the surprising rules of sponsorship in her new book “The Doors You Can Open.”
Courtesy of PublicAffairs
This is just one of the differences that comes up for women seeking allies to support their career advancement. The discrepancy starts with who women seek out as sponsors—often other women. With men still dominating most corporate leadership, that can mean the “power level of the sponsor” can be different for rising women compared to men.
Efforts to counteract those gaps—like networking—can come with their own penalties. “Networking is manipulative when it’s done by women, and when it’s done by men it’s just kind of like, ‘Yeah, this is what people do,’” says Chow. Women who actively network often receive lower leadership ratings than men, and their connections with high-status people are viewed— negatively—as strategic.
It’s ironic how sponsorship can hurt senior women—given that women often view it as a more “palatable” form of networking. “The focus is not on you. It’s about helping others … as opposed to trying to maximize everything for yourself,” she says.
Chow previously developed a mentorship program for Black professionals at the Advanced Leadership Institute, where she aimed to push leaders from mentorship to sponsorship—to go from trying to change the behavior of a mentee, to getting others to see how great that person already was.
That’s why she says one of the most critical ways men can support women in the workplace is to sponsor them. Men can tap the power they have accrued and take risks that senior women often can’t, without the risk of hurting their own careers. Senior male leaders should ask themselves, “How many women do I know? How many women do I trust, spend time with, respect?” she advises. “All those women that you know and respect, you should be sponsoring.”
The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Today’s edition was curated by Nina Ajemian. Subscribe here.
People have a natural fear of showing weakness, especially during job interviews when they’re trying to present their best selves. That’s exactly why Nickle LaMoreaux, the CHRO of technology giant IBM, asks every candidate she speaks with the same question: “Can you talk about a time you failed?”
LaMoreaux says she’s looking for people who can show resilience, especially now that AI has totally upended white-collar work as we know it, and employees are being forced to learn new skills to keep up with the times. In other words, can someone fail, pick themselves back up, learn from their mistakes, and quickly move on? It is a quality that LaMoreaux calls “learning agility,” or the ability to constantly pivot and build skills. It’s also what she calls the “single biggest critical success factor” in business today.
“We’re in an environment where you cannot predict what the next thing is,” she said on a panel at Tech Week 2025 in New York City earlier this month. “What if you spend two years learning something that doesn’t pan out, what are you going to do? What’s your personal resilience then, to pick yourself up and learn the next thing?”
The HR leader says that the workforce of IBM as a whole is trying to not only discuss the idea of failure, but embrace it. CEO Arvind Krishna now holds monthly office hours that are broadcast to the company where he calls out AI trails that haven’t worked out. It’s an internal attempt to “normalize” failure, says LaMoreaux, because there will be plenty of trials and tribulations that come along with adopting the new technology. She adds that it’s just as important to note what doesn’t work as to highlight what does, so that others are less likely to make the mistake.
While that kind of culture is endemic to startups, she says, it’s less common at established Fortune 500 companies. “For big organizations that have been around a long time, this idea of failing and celebrating it isn’t as easy,” she says. “It is a cultural shift for many organizations. People have a hard time with the word fail.”
Central banks from the Global South are actively shifting their own reserves toward gold at a much faster rate than advanced economies to reduce their exposure to the U.S. dollar amid growing trade protectionism, according to a survey by the World Gold Council. “The recent market developments around tariffs have raised questions on the safe-haven status of USD/UST, but have bolstered that of gold,” one response read.
Roughly every second central bank in the Global South plans to expand its own gold reserves over the coming 12 months, new data shows, and the currency most likely to pay the price for the shift is the U.S. dollar.
Results from the Central Bank Gold Reserves Survey 2025published on Tuesday by the World Gold Council (WGC) found geopolitical instability and potential trade conflicts as chief reasons why emerging economies are shifting toward gold at a much faster rate than advanced economies.
Asked more broadly about their expectations regarding how their international peers will behave in the coming 12 months, there was near unanimity regardless of the country of origin. Of the 15 central banks from advanced economies and 58 central banks from emerging markets and dynamic economies, or EMDE, polled, 95% expected overall gold reserves to increase in the next 12 months.
This helps explain why the precious metal—despite its lack of a yield versus other assets as well its physical storage costs—touched $3,446 an ounce, close to its April record, while the U.S. dollar index is near three-year lows.
“The uncertainty stemming from the tariffs implemented and committed by the USA regarding trade policies in the recent period may reduce the interest in USD and USD-denominated assets as a reserve currency,” one anonymous central bank is quoted as saying in the report.
Of all institutions polled, 48% of those in the Global South expected their own gold reserves to grow in the immediate future versus just 21% in advanced economies. Respondents argued the de-dollarization trend that favors a shift to gold would continue owing to increased tariffs and trade protectionism, but any decline would likely be gradual as a result of the U.S.’s deep financial markets, comparatively strong legal institutions, and the lack of any obvious substitute.
Tariffs raise concerns over safe-haven status of U.S. dollar and Treasury bonds
In 2024, central banks bought 1,045 metric tons of gold, accounting for about a fifth of global demand. This marked the third straight year during which they accumulated over 1,000 tons, according to figures from the WGC, up sharply from the 400- to 500-ton average over the preceding decade.
According to the survey, 72% of all respondents believe gold reserves held by the world’s central banks will increase moderately over the next five years versus 66% the previous year. Another 4% of respondents, coming entirely from non-advanced economies, predict the gain will be significant, up one percentage point from before.
“Central banks are expected to continue purchasing gold as they look for ways to reduce dependence on USD,” one central bank replied in the survey. “The recent market developments around tariffs have raised questions on the safe-haven status of USD/UST, but have bolstered that of gold.”
By comparison, 45% expect a moderate drop in U.S. dollar holdings over the same time period. While this represents an improvement over the 49% a year earlier, the number replying dollars would see a significant decline soared—to 28% from 13% previously.
Dollar’s 43% share of global central bank reserve assets expected to drop
The sharpest divergence in responses between advanced economies and the Global South related to the trend in de-dollarization and how great a role geopolitical tensions play in fueling it.
When asked how much of total global reserves would still be denominated in dollars five years from now, more central banks from non-advanced economies anticipated a slight decrease from the current 43% share than their peers in advanced economies.
For comparison, gold accounted for only 19% of total reserves, with 15% allocated in euros and 2% in Chinese renminbi.
Among those that expected no change in the share of dollar-denominated reserves, the relationship was flipped: Far more advanced economies believed this to be the case than those elsewhere.
“This resonates with the recent trend in reported central bank holdings, where we see a stronger appetite for gold accumulation from [emerging markets’ and dynamic economies’] central banks,” the World Gold Council concluded.
Good morning. In a year defined by uncertainty, CFOs must stay agile and make proactive decisions to navigate a financial landscape where market sentiment can “flip on a dime”.
That was the focus of an interesting conversation I had with Amol Dhargalkar, chairman and managing partner of Chatham Financial, a global financial risk management advisory and technology firm. Dhargalkar shared insights from his discussions with CFOs, highlighting three major issues.
Financing now, not later
“If there’s one big theme I can point to, it’s that when there is an opportunity for financing, CFOs are taking advantage of it,” Dhargalkar said.
He explained that this bias toward immediate action is less about the U.S. Federal Reserve’s moves on interest rates and more about market sentiment, which can shift rapidly due to geopolitical or policy changes. Many CFOs prefer to secure deals now rather than risk adverse developments, such as new tariffs, that could negatively affect their businesses.
Recent data shows a significant amount of issuance in the first half of the year, reflecting this proactive approach, Dhargalkar noted. Even if interest rates might decline modestly in the coming months, the risk of waiting often outweighs the potential benefit for many finance leaders.
Navigating volatile bond yields
“We’ve seen a lot of volatility in government bond yields, which has played into the market in a variety of ways,” Dhargalkar explained. CFOs are closely monitoring these fluctuations, though uncertainty about future movements remains high. While this doesn’t mean investors are abandoning U.S. markets, it is a key area of concern for finance leaders.
Concerns about the potential impact of President Trump’s tax bill rattled bond markets last month, primarily due to fears it would sharply increase the U.S. national debt, Fortune reported.
The dollar’s impact and currency risk
The strength—or weakness—of the U.S. dollar is also top of mind, especially for multinational companies, Dhargalkar said. Many CFOs are asking whether the recent dollar weakness is temporary or a longer-term trend, and how they should manage related currency risks. This environment has prompted some companies to implement or expand foreign exchange hedging programs, particularly those that previously had limited exposure, he explained.
Managing currency risk is more challenging for smaller multinationals, which are less likely to have robust hedging programs in place, Dhargalkar said. For companies with significant overseas earnings, a weaker dollar can be a net positive, as foreign revenues translate into more dollars, he explained. However, the rapid movement of the dollar in either direction typically sparks extensive internal discussions about hedging strategies and financial forecasts.
When I asked Dhargalkar his biggest piece of advice for CFOs, he said: “Rethink their approach to capital structure and financing tools.” As companies move beyond “firefighting mode,” they should consider diversifying their issuance base—such as issuing debt abroad or exploring private credit markets—rather than relying solely on traditional U.S. financing options, he suggested.
Today’s financing tools are more flexible, though often more expensive due to higher rates compared to several years ago. “Don’t feel like you’re stuck with the tools of yesterday,” Dhargalkar said.
The man charged with killing one Minnesota lawmaker and wounding another in what prosecutors have described as a meticulously planned attack, had dozens of apparent targets, including officials in at least three other states.
Vance Boelter allegedly made it to the homes of two other legislators on the night of the attacks, but one was on vacation and the suspect left the other house after police arrived, acting U.S. Attorney Joseph Thompson said Monday.
All of the politicians named in his writing were Democrats, including more than 45 state and federal officials in Minnesota, Thompson said. Elected leaders in Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin said they, too, were mentioned in his writings.
In Minnesota, Boelter carried out surveillance missions, took notes on the homes and people he targeted, and disguised himself as a police officer just before the shootings, Thompson said.
“It is no exaggeration to say that his crimes are the stuff of nightmares,” he said.
Boelter surrendered to police Sunday night after they found him in the woods near his home after a massive two-day search. He is accused of fatally shooting former Democratic House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in their home early Saturday in the northern Minneapolis suburbs.
Authorities say he also shot and wounded Sen. John Hoffman, a Democrat, and his wife, Yvette, who lived a few miles away.
Federal prosecutors charged Boelter, 57, with murder and stalking, which could result in a death sentence if convicted. He already faces state charges, including murder and attempted murder. At a federal court hearing Monday in St. Paul, Boelter said he could not afford an attorney. A federal public defender was appointed to represent him, and he was being held without bail pending a court appearance next week.
Manny Atwal, his lead attorney, declined to comment, saying the office just got the case.
Notebooks show careful planning
Boelter had many notebooks full of plans, Thompson said. Underscoring what law enforcement officials said was the premeditated nature of the attacks, one notebook contained a list of internet-based people search engines, according to court records.
But authorities have not found any writings that would “clearly identify what motivated him,” Thompson said. He said it was also too soon to speculate on any sort of political ideology.
Democratic Rep. Esther Agbaje, whose district includes parts of Minneapolis, said she stayed with friends and family over the weekend after learning that her name appeared on the list of targets.
In texts, the suspect said he ‘went to war’
Authorities declined to reveal the names of the other two lawmakers whose homes were targeted but escaped harm. Democratic Sen. Ann Rest said she was told the suspect parked near her home early Saturday. She said in a statement that the “quick action” of law enforcement officers saved her life.
Boelter sent a text to a family group chat after the shootings that said: “Dad went to war last night … I don’t wanna say more because I don’t wanna implicate anybody,” according to an FBI affidavit.
His wife got another text that said: “Words are not gonna explain how sorry I am for this situation … there’s gonna be some people coming to the house armed and trigger-happy and I don’t want you guys around,” the affidavit said.
Police later found his wife in a car with her children. Officers found two handguns, about $10,000 in cash and passports for the wife and her children, according to the affidavit.
Just hours after the shootings Saturday, Boelter bought an electric bike and a Buick sedan from someone he met at a bus stop in Minneapolis, the federal affidavit said. Police found the sedan abandoned on a highway Sunday morning.
In the car, officers found a cowboy hat Boelter had been seen wearing in surveillance footage as well as a letter written to the FBI, authorities said. The letter said it was written by “Dr. Vance Luther Boulter” and he was “the shooter at large.”
The car was found in rural Sibley County, where Boelter owned a home.
Coordinated attacks on legislators
The Hoffmans were attacked first at their home in Champlin. Their adult daughter called 911 to say a masked person had come to the door and shot her parents.
Boelter had shown up carrying a flashlight and a 9 mm handgun and wearing a black tactical vest and a “hyper-realistic” silicone mask, Thompson said.
He first knocked and shouted: “This is police.” At one point, the Hoffmans realized he was wearing a mask and Boelter told them “this is a robbery.” After Sen. Hoffman tried to push Boelter out the door, Boelter shot him repeatedly and then shot his wife, the prosecutor said.
A statement released Sunday by Yvette Hoffman said her husband underwent several surgeries after being hit by nine bullets.
After hearing about a lawmaker being shot, officers arrived just in time to see Boelter shoot Mark Hortman through the open door of the home, according to the complaint. They exchanged gunfire with Boelter, who fled into the home before escaping, the complaint said. Melissa Hortman was found dead inside, according to the document. Their dog also was shot and had to be euthanized.
Search for motive continues
Writings recovered from the fake police vehicle included the names of lawmakers and community leaders, along with abortion rights advocates and information about health care facilities, said two law enforcement officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of the ongoing investigation.
Friends and former colleagues interviewed by the AP describe Boelter as a devout Christian who attended an evangelical church and went to campaign rallies for President Donald Trump.
Boelter also is a former political appointee who served on the same state workforce development board as Hoffman, records show, though it was not clear if they knew each other.
Vance Boelter, right, who is charged with killing one Minnesota lawmaker and wounding another, is seen at a federal court hearing on June 16, 2025, in St. Paul, Minn.
Enterprise SaaS M&A is caught between rebound and a rut.
Consider, first, the good news, of which there’s quite a bit: Q1 2025 saw 210 enterprise SaaS mergers and acquisitions get done, a number on par with the 211 deals inked in Q4 2024, according to recent PitchBook data. That’s also a sizable jump from the beginning of Q1 2024, which saw 165 enterprise SaaS mergers and acquisitions.
Additionally, the total value for VC-backed M&A in enterprise SaaS went up in Q1—hitting $14.6 billion, according to PitchBook—while private equity-led deal count hit a new quarterly record for the sector at 73 deals.
Now, consider the less-good news: The total deal value for enterprise SaaS M&A in Q1 2025 is down quarter-over-quarter by about 24.8%—from $38.7 billion in Q4, to $29.1 billion this past quarter. What’s more, five deals account for about half of the total transaction value across the quarter: Clearlake Capital Group’s $5.3 billion buyout of medical software company ModMed, KKR-backed Cotiviti’s $3.1 billion buyout of healthcare data entity Edifecs, ServiceNow’s $2.9 billion acquisition of enterprise AI tool unicorn Moveworks, CoreWeave’s $1.7 billion acquisition of AI developer startup Weights & Biases, and DNEG Group’s $1.4 billion buyout of Hollywood-focused generative media startup Metaphysic. (Though jarring, we’ve seen skews like this before, notably when it comes to how AI investing is shaking out—a landscape where it looks like there’s lots of action in total deal value, but upon closer inspection, the data reveals a gravitation towards surer, more established bets.)
So, what does all this mean? I think it comes down to two things. The first: AI is underpinning a new wave of enterprise SaaS deals and, despite lingering regulatory and macro pressures, dealmakers are getting comfortable rolling the dice again on market-moving transactions. And second: At the same time, the future remains uncertain, both in terms of how regulatory scrutiny will look in the U.S. and abroad over the company years, and the level of macroeconomic volatility that may (or may not) be coming down the pike.
And that’s how you end up, for now, between a full-fledged rebound and a persistent rut. My guess, here and now, on June 17: We could see a more decisive recovery by the end of the year. Any takers? As always, I would love to hear what you think.
At Web Summit last week, Fortune's Jeremy Kahn moderated a discussion of whether "the AI bubble is about to burst" with Moveworks CEO Bhavin Shah (left) and Sarah Myers West, co-executive director of the AI Now Institute.
Unemployment rates for recent college graduates have surged in recent data, with the rate for those holding a bachelor’s degree rising to 6.1%—and even higher for those with advanced degrees or some college but no degree—contrasting with a national rate of 4.2%. This may strengthen the argument of top CEOs like Jamie Dimon, Ted Decker, and John Furner who have urged young people and employers to prioritize job-ready skills and alternative career paths over traditional college degrees.
Graduates choose to attend college instead of heading straight into the workforce for a range of reasons, be it furthering their studies in a specific field or gaining qualifications needed for a certain role. But their motives often boil down to one thing: landing a career in the profession of their choice.
According to the most recent data published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED), the unemployment rate for college graduates with a bachelor’s degree sat at 6.1% in May—up from 4.4% just a month prior.
Likewise, the unemployment rate for those ages 20 to 24 with some college experience but no degree, as well as those of the same age demographic with a master’s degree or higher, spiked last month.
FRED reports that Gen Z with a master’s or higher now have an unemployment rate of 7.2% while those with some college experience have an unemployment rate of 9.4%.
According to analysis by the Wall Street Journal, that picture is even more dire. Citing micro data from the Labor Department, the WSJ estimates graduates have an unemployment rate of 6.6% over the past 12 months ending in May, the highest level in a decade with the exception of the pandemic spike.
This trend of increasing unemployment is at odds with the picture of the rest of the U.S., where unemployment held steady at 4.2% from April to May, elevated only a little from the rate 12 months ago.
As researchers from Oxford Economics reflected in a study last month: “Those in the professional, scientific, and technical services are less likely than their peers to seek employment in a different industry, though they are more likely to accept underemployment—defined as a college graduate who is employed in a job where more than 50% of workers in the same role do not have a bachelor’s degree or higher.”
Indeed, while some young potential staffers are willing to take sideways steps in order to earn an income, the analysts suggested Gen Z grads are having a harder time than most: “The upshot is that the unemployment rate for recent college graduates will remain elevated in the near term without a surge in demand from tech companies or a mass exodus from the labor force by these individuals, both of which seem unlikely.
“While these workers only account for around 5% of the workforce, they have played an oversize role in pushing the national unemployment higher.”
Alternative routes
An argument could be made that the data suggests employers aren’t finding the skills they need in newly minted grads, despite the tens of thousands of dollars many will have forked over to achieve their degrees.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, for example, has pushed for education reform to rank colleges based on whether its students land jobs as opposed to how many of them graduate.
“If you look at kids they gotta be educated to get jobs. Too much focus in education has been on graduating college…It should be on jobs. I think the schools should be measured on, Did the kids get out and get a good job?” Dimon told Indianapolis-based WISH-TV last year.
The idea that college is the only way to land a well-paid job is also inaccurate, he added, saying 17-year-old bank tellers can take home $40,000 a year “and if you happen to have a family at 18 or whatever, you get $20,000 in medical benefit for your family. You can be a welder, you can be a coder, you could be cyber, you could be automotive—all of those jobs are $40,000 to $60,000, $70,000 a year.”
Dimon, a veteran of Wall Street, has also argued educators should focus on skills which will stand individuals in good stead for the rest of their lives such as nutrition and financial literacy.
The JPMorgan Chase boss isn’t alone. In a WSJ op-ed last year titled “Not Everyone Needs a College Degree,” the CEOs of Home Depot and Walmart U.S., Ted Decker and John Furner, wrote: “Young people have been told for decades that achieving the American dream requires a college degree…While a college degree is a worthwhile path to prosperity, it isn’t the only one.”
They added: “The American dream isn’t dead, but the path to reach it might look different for job seekers today than it did for their parents. We owe it to younger generations to open our minds to the different opportunities workers have to learn new skills and achieve their dreams.”
In hindsight, it was an exchange that encapsulated years of shopper frustration.
On an earnings call in January, a Wall Street analyst asked Walgreens Boots Alliance CEO Tim Wentworth about his efforts to ease the strain that the U.S. drugstore chain’s security measures were putting on its sales. As millions of American shoppers know, and many deeply resent, a great many items in a typical Walgreens are locked up behind glass—obtainable only with help from a clerk. (And, by the way, good luck finding a clerk.)
Wentworth responded that countering shoplifting was like “hand-to-hand combat.” He then made a comment that earned him countless headlines: “When you lock things up, you don’t sell as many of them. We’ve kind of proven that pretty conclusively.”.
“No sh*t, Sherlock,” was the general flavor of reactions in countless comment sections, as critics noted that the CEO of the company that owns the 8th-largest U.S. retailer ought to have understood that equation intuitively.
Wentworth, a well-regarded executive, went on to explain that the loss to theft was hurting the company’s profit too much, hence the draconian lockdowns. But investors’ annoyance over his answers pointed to Walgreens’ much deeper problems.
In 2024, Walgreens drugstores generated non-pharmacy revenue—called “front-of-store sales” in the industry—of some $27 billion, from items like toothpaste, soda, aspirin and potato chips; and another $89 billion from filling prescriptions and other pharmacy services. Pharmacy has historically had lower margins than front-of-store, and in recent years, under pressure from insurance companies and rivals, those pharmacy margins have only gotten lower. In the old days, front-of-stores’ better profits helped raise overall margins. But alas for Walgreens, its retail business, left on autopilot for years, analysts say, has slipped—and in 2023 and 2024, the company posted a total of $11.7 billion in losses, among the highest totals of any Fortune 500 company.
Wentworth will likely soon be spared from having to publicly field any more investor questions. In March, Walgreens Boots Alliance announced that it had reached a deal to be bought by a private equity firm, Sycamore Partners, for $10 billion, in a transaction that will take it off the U.S. stock market after 98 years. The deal is expected to close in late 2025.
For Walgreens, going private is the culmination of an epic fall from grace. A decade ago, it was worth $100 billion, riding high on the buzz of a bold albeit controversial merger. But since then, its failings have sent shares down 91%. The company has been weakened by years of bad deal-making that left it with too many stores; detritus from failed efforts to become a successful player in healthcare; and a heavy debt burden.
In early 2024, Walgreens was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a sign of its rapidly declining relevance. Another indignity: in January, Walgreens suspended its quarterly dividend, one it had paid without fail for 91 years, to hold on to desperately needed cash.
On the bright side, going private will give the venerable chain’s leaders an opportunity to fix its many problems. Since taking the helm in 2023, Wentworth has repeatedly warned investors that many elements of the company need a time-consuming turnaround—from its tired stores, ill-equipped for the e-commerce era, to shrinking reimbursement rates, to demoralized staff. All that work will be more easily and quickly done away from Wall Street’s klieg lights.
“It’s hard to do under the microscope of quarterly check-ins with the investor community, so hopefully they can get back up there with the hard decisions they’re going to have to make,” says Michael Cherny, an analyst at Leerink Partners, an investment bank focused solely on health care.
Walgreens has in recent years undone, or is preparing to undo, some of its ill-advised acquisitions. It has already taken a $5.8 billion write-down on its acquisition of primary care provider VillageMD. But such changes leave the company extremely reliant on its core drugstore businesses, selling general merchandise and filling prescriptions to get out of the hole it has fallen into. Wentworth has won credit from analysts for his early progress in improving Walgreens’ cost structure, and his willingness to close money-sapping stores. But Wentworth, or whoever becomes CEO if Sycamore brings in someone else, faces a long, tough slog. (Walgreens declined to make Wentworth available for an interview; Sycamore declined to comment.)
“The next few quarters are about laying bricks, not finishing walls, to set the foundation for the company’s next chapter,” Jonathan Palmer, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote in a research note.
A long history, and grand ambitions
Walgreens, the U.S. druggist that is the biggest component of Walgreens Boots Alliance, was founded in 1901 when Chicago pharmacist Charles R. Walgreen bought the store at which he worked. By the time the Great Depression hit, the company was already a 500-store chain with locations far afield from Chicago, many of them anchored by lunch counters whose malted milkshakes and hot meals helped make the chain beloved.
A Walgreen Co store window in New York in 1929.
Irving Browning/The New York Historical Society/Getty Images
Later, Walgreens pioneered features like drive-through pharmacies and in 1999, an online pharmacy. It also became a front-runner in the pharmacy wars, along with CVS (initially called Consumer Value Stores) and Rite Aid. As these national chains emerged, they absorbed countless local drugstores along the way. By the early 2010s, after years of industry consolidation, CVS and Walgreens were duking it out for the top spot, each with about 10,000 locations at their peak, and Rite Aid a distant third.
By that point, the two behemoths, long interchangeable, were going in different directions. Walgreens believed that its scale and its millions of customers gave it clout with pharmacy benefits managers, or PBMs, which function as a type of go-between, negotiating how patients pay for drugs, what insurers owe drugmakers, and how much pharmacies are reimburses. It believed that clout would only grow if it continued its drugstore pharmacy land grab.
But CVS had already started to pursue ambitions well beyond its drugstore roots. The company bought Caremark, a leading PBM, in 2007 for $21 billion. Seven years later, CVS garnered big headlines when it stopped selling cigarettes and changed its name to CVS Health, making its new orientation unmistakable. It followed that move with several big acquisitions of clinics and specialty pharmacies.
While CVS reinvented itself, Walgreens kept fumbling the ball. In 2011, it overplayed its hand in a dispute with Express Scripts, a major PBM, and lost the business of millions of customers for years. That stoked investor interest in a new catalyst for growth and new management. Enter Italian billionaire Stefano Pessina, the largest shareholder in British druggist chain Alliance Boots.
In 2012, Walgreens bought a minority stake in Alliance Boots; it then bought the rest of it two years later for $10 billion in all. The deal was something of a reverse merger, with Pessina and his posse becoming CEO and top managers, respectively, of the newly minted Walgreens Boots Alliance. The idea was to create the first ever international drugstore chain operator and drug wholesaling company. And the plan might have worked—had it been executed well.
A pharmacy technician gives a customer their order at a Walgreens drive-thru window in Texas in 2000.
Karen Warren/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
The Bad News Bears of M&A
Pessina, an M&A enthusiast (some might even say addict) was still caught up in the Walgreens vs. CVS race to be the chain with the most stores. Not long after the Boots Alliance merger, he set his eyes on Rite Aid, the third-place pharmacy contender, which had been struggling for years under $3 billion debt stemming from a 2006 deal to buy rival chains Eckerd and Brooks. The interest expense had been impeding Rite Aid from investing in keeping stores enticing enough to keep up with its bigger roles.
In 2015, Walgreens made a bid to buy Rite Aid and its 5,000 stores for $9.4 billion. But in a case of antitrust regulators saving a company from itself, the Federal Trade Commission blocked the deal but ultimately allowed Walgreens to buy only 2,100 stores. The result was a larger Walgreens store footprint—but one with tons of overlap, given the proximity of many Rite Aids to nearby Walgreens.
Walgreens had bragged for years about having the stores on the best corners: Now, it often had two stores within blocks of each other, cannibalizing each other’s sales. Last year, Wentworth announced Walgreens would close 1,200 stores out of 8,700. While he didn’t specify which ones had been Rite Aid locations, the store closures announcement was a tacit admission that much of the $4 billion Walgreens had plunked down for 40% of Rite Aid’s fleet had been a waste of money.
Even as Walgreens expanded its store footprint, some analysts were bemoaning the lack of innovation at and updating of its existing fleet. When Walgreens bought Boots, a chain beloved in Great Britain for sleek stores with cool beauty areas and for its No. 7 store brand, it touted how it could borrow from Boots’ playbook. But that never took place. “It was a massive missed opportunity to elevate Walgreens,” says Neil Saunders, managing director of GlobalData. He also sees Walgreens inertia as contributing to it losing much of its beauty industry market share to Ulta Beauty.
For both Walgreens and CVS, retail seemed to become an afterthought by the late 2010s. For both chains, the traditional retail piece should be a bonanza of easy, profitable sales, given how many people come into a Walgreens or a CVS to pick up their prescriptions. And excellent retail in turn should entice people to choose one store over another and visit often. That opportunity is even greater given the ubiquity of their stores: Some 78% of Americans live within 10 miles of a Walgreens. But consumers have choices, and Walmart, Amazon and Target have been more than happy to pick up that casual retail business, given their stronger e-commerce muscles and, Saunders says, much better prices.
“The drugstore is an ecosystem of a number of different parts of the business, from healthcare to prescriptions to retail and it only really works if you have all those engines whirring,” says Saunders. “Both CVS and Walgreens took their eyes off the ball ages ago and it’s had a detrimental impact on their pharmacy businesses.”
Both CVS and Walgreens have seen their front-of-store sales struggle for years, aside from a COVID bump fueled by vaccine-driven foot traffic in 2021. But retail is much more important to Walgreens than it is to CVS. (CVS has begun to see improvements in its retail business.)
Walgreens Boots Alliance executive chairman Stefano Pessina, the company’s former CEO; and current CEO Tim Wentworth.
Courtesy of Walgreens Boots Alliance
While Pessina doggedly pursued Rite Aid, CVS was head down, continuing to build out its health care empire and buying health insurer Aetna in 2018 for a whopping $69 billion. (That same year, Cigna bought Express Scripts in another mega-deal, shelling out $67 billion.) CVS’s ownership of Caremark, the biggest PBM in the U.S., had spurred millions of member customers to get their scripts filled at CVS stores, a hold made even stronger with the Aetna deal. (Still, that deal is at the center of CVS’s own current travails: Aetna’s profitability has sagged because of rising health care costs.)
Walgreens did eventually pivot its M&A more toward healthcare, but to little success. In fact, those deals have weakened it further and were the key reasons behind its stock’s implosion.
In 2013, in a move that ultimately hurt its reputation, Walgreens made a big investment in the health technology company Theranos, hoping to open dozens of its blood-testing clinics within its drugstores; but Theranos fell apart in scandal as its main product failed amid a fraud scandal. In 2020, Walgreens invested in VillageMD; the next year, it grabbed a controlling stake for $5.2 billion. It is now trying to offload that network of primary medical care clinics.
Also in 2022, under then-CEO Rosalind Brewer, previously of Walmart and Starbucks, VillageMD paid $9 billion for CityMD, another clinic chain, in another deal that has not paid off. Brewer abruptly left Walgreens in 2023, and Walgreens has unwound or is unwinding much of the M&A it has conducted in recent years.
Wentworth, who had earlier been CEO of Express Scripts and had a long career as a pharmacy and healthcare executive, replaced Brewer. Though he didn’t have much pure retail experience, he has made clear the caliber of Walgreen’s drugstores had to be taken up a notch for the company to emerge from its slump.
“The stores are central to our strategy,” he told a healthcare conference in March 2024.
Squeezing out savings
Wentworth has so far concentrated on cost cutting, with an initial goal of hitting $1 billion in savings, and focused Walgreens on being better at its core pharmacy business. One early move was to announce those 1,200 store closings over three years (some 500 of them are slated to happen this year), on top of the hundreds it has closed in recent years, the better to focus on the 80% of its stores that do turn a profit.
Neither Walgreens nor Sycamore has said whether Wentworth will stay on once the take-private deal is done. But it’s telling that Wentworth was chosen as CEO despite his inexperience with retail. That suggested that Pessina, who will keep a 17% stake in Walgreens after the Sycamore acquisition, and the rest of the board valued Wentworth’s PBM chops as a former PBM CEO himself, above all else.
And indeed, those shrinking pharmacy reimbursements have been a major source of Walgreens’ malaise. Leerink’s Cherney has said that is Walgreens’ biggest problem to solve.
CVS, tapping its Caremark clout, recently found a promising solution to shrinking pharmacy margins. Starting this year, all commercial prescriptions filled at a CVS will be reimbursed at the cost of the drug plus a predetermined markup and a handling fee. This model is called “CostVantage,” and Cherney says Walgreens could easily have its own version. “It wouldn’t be at all surprising if Walgreens became a fast follower,” he said. After all, Wentworth knows the PBM world intimately.
As for Wentworth’s lack of a retail background, this is where Sycamore’s extensive expertise in that industry could be useful. Sycamore has a long history of buying distressed retailers and helping them optimize their store operations. It has done so for such retailers as Belk department stores, The Limited, Staples, and Talbots.
At a Walgreens in Miami Beach, Florida, laundry detergent is under lock and key security for shoplifting prevention.
Jeffrey Greenberg—Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Walgreens has already taken some encouraging steps on the retail side. It has begun to beef up its roster of store brands with 300 new products; it is also remodeling many drugstores and is offering faster delivery than before. On the pharmacy side, Walgreens is trying to squeeze out costs with initiatives like using automated robotic prescription filling; it hopes to have that service in place by year-end in more than 5,000 of its stores.
On the other hand, Sycamore has never done a deal involving healthcare, raising some concerns about its ability to improve Walgreens’ underlying business. Media reports have suggested that Sycamore may break Walgreens into three pieces—its international business, its healthcare and its retail— essentially undoing almost all its M&A since the Boots deal.
Sycamore, and by extension Walgreens, will be taking on an enormous amount of debt—$12 billion—to make this acquisition happen. (Bloomberg estimates Walgreens could be facing an additional, separate liability of $1.5 billion from the opioid litigation against it; the chain has been accused by a number of state governments and the Justice Department of making millions of illegal opioid prescriptions, accusations it has denied.) Given Rite Aid’s recent bankruptcy, its second in consecutive years, because of the combination of deteriorating business and high debt, it’s not surprising to hear some alarms about the deal’s financing.
But bankruptcy theories aside, the even higher debt load and service post transaction certainly mean that Walgreens will have an even smaller margin of error in the near future. “They haven’t really cared for the business internally, and that’s led to the crunch they are in now,” says Saunders. It took a little over 10 years for the company to tumble from its Boots-merger heights to its current lows; its leadership probably doesn’t have 10 more years to right the ship.
Israel and Iran continued to bomb each other today, a scenario that used to be regarded as potentially disastrous for asset markets. But while the price of oil has risen as a result of the conflict, the rise has been moderate, and stock investors have been taking it easy. The U.S. dollar, however, has reached historically low levels of enthusiasm among institutional investors, according to Bank of America.
The Stoxx Europe 600 was down 0.9% in early trading but that was the only drama on global asset markets so far today. The VIX volatility index is in retreat after the S&P 500 put in a solid performance yesterday. S&P 500 futures were off only 0.7% this morning, premarket.
In Japan, stocks rose, but in China they were flat.
The major surprise this week seems to be the relaxed, almost upbeat attitude of investors toward the Israel-Iran conflict. U.S. stocks have been up over the last five trading sessions as traders await the U.S. Federal Reserve’s interest rate decision tomorrow. Fed chair Jerome Powell is expected to keep rates the same—it will be any change in his commentary that moves the markets.
Why are stocks shrugging off the bombing? The institutional bulls are back, according to Bank of America’s most recent survey of global fund managers. The survey calls on 222 panellists who have $587 billion under management. “The Bottom Line: investor sentiment recovers to pre-Liberation Day ‘Goldilocks bull’ levels as trade war & recession fears abate,” BofA’s Michael Hartnett and his team told clients in a note seen by Fortune.
Nonetheless, there’s still one asset that investors hate right now and that’s the U.S. dollar. The dollar has lost nearly 10% of its value against foreign currencies this year, according to the DXY index. Investors are now the most underweight in the dollar in 20 years, according to BofA. “[The] biggest summer pain trade is long the buck,” Hartnett et al said.
Antonio Ruggiero of Convera also noted feebleness of the dollar: “Surging oil prices—up as much as 12% on Friday amid escalating geopolitical tensions in the Middle East—have further exposed the dollar’s fading safe-haven appeal. A clear divergence is taking shape: oil rallies, yet the dollar fails to follow. This underscores how sentiment toward the US economy is acting as a stronger drag than what has historically been a dollar-positive force—higher oil prices, especially in periods of geopolitical risk. The result? Renewed selling pressure as confidence in US assets continues to erode,” he told clients.
“The dollar’s only meaningful support for now remains a hawkish Fed, now back in full alert mode – leaving those softer CPI prints in a distance past. Whether tariff-induced or driven by surging oil prices looming inflationary pressures put the Fed in a tougher position to deliver the rate cuts sought by the Trump administration—reinforcing the case for policy to remain steady for now.”
Here’s a snapshot of the action prior to the opening bell in New York:
S&P 500 futures were off 0.7% this morning. The index itselfclosed up 0.94% yesterday.
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![](https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/AP25167604833122-e1750177118711.jpg?w=300 "Utah State Rep. Verona Mauga stands next to Arthur Afa Ah Loo, who was shot and killed in the "No Kings" protest")
![](https://fortune.com/img-assets/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/AP25167604833122-e1750177118711.jpg?w=2048 "Utah State Rep. Verona Mauga stands next to Arthur Afa Ah Loo, who was shot and killed in the "No Kings" protest")
