Economy
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Spring Hamptons traffic nightmare as Long Island Rail Road workers go on strike
North America’s largest commuter rail system was shut down Saturday after unionized workers in the New York City area went on strike. The Long Island Rail Road that serves the city’s eastern suburbs ceased operations early Saturday morning after five unions representing about half its workforce walked off the job. The two sides have been…
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The prophet of the ‘Wired Belt’ says capitalism is finally eating itself
I told you this was coming. On May 20, about 8,000 Meta employees will be told their jobs no longer exist, while 6,000 job listings have vanished. The reason? Redirecting funds toward AI. While Meta hasn’t directly acknowledged AI’s role in displacing workers, as so many others have done, the writing is on the wall: capitalism…
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Demand for longer-term U.S. debt gets weaker as one shock after another stokes fear that high inflation is here to stay
Bonds sold off sharply around the world on Friday as investors brace for persistently elevated inflation amid the ongoing energy crisis. Oil jumped after the U.S.-China summit wrapped up without any signs that Beijing will lean on ally Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. That followed a series of U.S. debt auctions this past…
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Dominoes are steadily falling in the path of the rate cuts Trump wants to see from Kevin Warsh
Incoming Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh has made it clear he has made the president no promises: Despite being more bullish on the outlook for the economy, the new boss of the central bank says he hasn’t committed to rate cuts. However, everyone from Washington, D.C. to Washington state knows that President Trump wants lower interest…
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Lebanon’s economy minister on the ‘existential nature’ of the Iran War shock: companies closing, people losing jobs, no tourism
Ayman al-Zain watched on a recent afternoon as a bulldozer cleared the rubble of what used to be his sports clothing store, which was one of dozens of buildings destroyed in Israeli strikes against the Hezbollah militant group. With a nominal truce in place that has reduced but not halted the fighting, Al-Zain tried to…
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Meta’s $10 billion Louisiana data center is getting $3.3 billion in tax breaks—more than seven years of the state’s entire police budget
Data centers—the computing infrastructure required to power the country’s AI, on which companies are shelling out nearly $700 billion to build this year alone—are quickly popping up in rural and suburban towns across the country, some of which are more than two times the size of Manhattan’s Central Park. But the massive footprint of these…
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Scott Bessent made a fortune spotting currency manipulation. He says Beijing’s $2.5 trillion black hole is ‘a problem for the Europeans’
In 1992, a 29-year-old Scott Bessent looked at the Bank of England and saw something no one else did. The Bank of England couldn’t afford to keep its promises. It had committed to keeping the pound trading within a narrow radius against the German mark, requiring it to spend whatever it took to defend the…
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Wall Street no longer believes Kevin Warsh can do what President Trump wants
Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today: Markets: Full steam ahead! Wall Street simply doesn’t believe Kevin Warsh can deliver a cut. AI data center companies are stealing water. There is no jet fuel shortage, this CEO says. It took 8 years to create Google Sheets. AI cloned it in days. Chart: AI is a convenient…
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Boeing lost China. Trump—and 500 jets—may be about to win it back
President Trump has declared that the main focus of the China Summit is trade, specifically unveiling big transactions for signature U.S. enterprises that further swell our flow of exports, and Washington-Beijing accords that mark a defrosting of the icy standoff between the world’s two biggest economies. The stateside player most likely to land a trophy…
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Top economist says $39 trillion national debt leaves government worse prepared for recession than ever
The U.S. has run into recessions with a messy fiscal situation before, but never this bad. That’s the warning from Apollo chief economist Torsten Slok, who wrote in his Daily Spark newsletter on Tuesday the country is approaching a potential downturn “with this little fiscal buffer” for the first time in modern history. Gross national…