Bloomberg News

It’s not often that investors encounter something truly new in markets. But they will soon when Space Exploration Technologies Corp., OpenAI and Anthropic PBC go public with trillion-dollar valuations, or close to it. No company listed in the US has ever come to market so extravagantly priced — by a long shot.

Mentioning artificial intelligence to the graduating class of 2026 has been sure to get you booed. And why not? Fresh graduates have spent the past few years being told about the wonders of AI and watched seniors struggle to get a toehold in the labor market.

The industry is entering a more customized phase of liability-driven investing, he said. While earlier stages focused on adding duration and raising fixed-income allocations, better-funded plans are now tinkering at the margins to more precisely match their holdings with their obligations.

US stocks headed for a positive open on Monday as traders remained hopeful that Washington and Tehran would strike a peace deal, even amid a rise in oil prices.

Nvidia Corp. is entering the PC market with a new chip aimed at loosening the stranglehold of Intel Corp. technology in that arena and modernizing the machines for the AI era.

Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. agreed to have Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. reinsure a book of life insurance policies, freeing up about $6 billion of reserves.

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index is up 0.7% so far in May, as investors ramped up bets that the Federal Reserve will raise rates by early 2027, boosting the appeal of US assets. The gauge is on track for only its fourth monthly gain since the greenback’s 2025 downtrend began.

If you want a blueprint for how countries can survive this era of great power rivalry, look no further than Vietnam.

Growing excitement around the burgeoning space economy is increasingly favoring companies positioned to benefit not only from Elon Musk’s SpaceX filing for a public offering, but also from rising enthusiasm for space exploration and increased funding.

Large asset managers are rolling out a wave of actively managed emerging-market ETFs, pitching them as alternatives to benchmarks increasingly dominated by AI stocks.

Treasuries rallied back to be little-changed on the day, erasing earlier declines spurred by higher oil prices, after a key US inflation gauge rose less than expected.

Shares of retailers spanning Kohl’s Corp. to Best Buy Co. and Dollar Tree Inc. rose on Thursday amid optimism that shoppers are still spending when they see what they want at the right price.

An abundance of cash in US funding markets appears to be driven by deeper structural shifts that are unlocking billions of dollars in balance-sheet capacity at the biggest banks, Wall Street strategists say.

Coverage of prediction platform Polymarket has recently converged on a single statistic, delivered with the cadence of a verdict: Most users lose money. The top 1% of accounts capture roughly three-quarters of the gains, while most traders since 2022 are underwater.

Bankers are preparing to sell a jumbo debt package to support the $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. It’s a risky deal and comes at a moment when the bond markets have been wobbling.

The breakneck surge in memory-chip stocks is intensifying, sending the market capitalizations of SK Hynix Inc. and Micron Technology Inc. above $1 trillion for the first time, as investors bet the AI boom will lead to a sustained revaluation of the industry.

Despite the pickup, India’s municipal paper still makes up for less than 1% of the total rupee bond sales. By comparison, the segment represents 7% of the overall bond market in the US, according to CareEdge Ratings’ January report.

Almost two-thirds of fund managers permit some level of “nuclear exposure,” with 34% allowing investments in nuclear weaponry, according to Jefferies Financial Group Inc.’s fourth-annual ESG and defense survey.

The White House’s decision to take a 9.9% stake in Intel Corp. is looking like very shrewd business indeed. Since the government bought in at $20.47 a share last August, the American chipmaker’s surging stock price has delivered the US a $43 billion return.

The SpaceX initial public offering prospectus is more than 400 pages of rocket fuel-grade ambition. It is also an extended warning for investors in Tesla Inc. who aren’t named Elon Musk.

Quantinuum Inc., a quantum computing company backed by Honeywell International Inc., is seeking to raise $1.05 billion in its US initial public offering, capitalizing on investor enthusiasm for the technology.

Prudential Financial Inc.’s asset-management arm has financed about $4 billion of land-banking projects through a partnership with Domain Real Estate Partners, part of a push to gain exposure to the US homebuilding industry.

As Kevin Warsh takes the helm at the Federal Reserve, bond investors are betting he’ll prioritize the central bank’s inflation-fighting credibility over President Donald Trump’s push for lower interest rates.

It’s been more than three years since Silicon Valley Bank lost a quarter of its deposits in a day, kicking off a string of bank rescues. The shocking speed of that run was attributed, in part, to the rapid spread of information on social media and the efficiency of digital banking.

I’ve lost count of the praise heaped on US hedge funds for their “historic performance” in April on artificial intelligence-related bets and alleged foresight of a ceasefire in the Iran war.

Elon Musk has bucked the trend of industrial conglomerate breakups, including such illustrious companies as General Electric and Honeywell International Inc., and decided to form a somewhat unwieldy company that makes rockets, spacecraft, satellites, antennas, modems and now computer chips. With SpaceX’s purchase of Musk’s xAI in February, the world’s leading space company was married to an AI startup and the X social media platform.

While US financial markets brace for what could be the three biggest initial public offerings ever, most entrepreneurship in the US is headed in the opposite direction: New businesses are shrinking.

There is a growing risk of economic overheating in the US as the artificial intelligence boom expands beyond semiconductors and spills into the broader economy — never mind the tame wage growth and house prices that would typically point in the opposite direction.

The average size of a single-family house built in the 1960s was about 1,500 square feet, and homes within multifamily units were about 800 square feet. Now those figures are more than 2,000 square feet and more than 1,200 square feet, respectively.

Private credit managers are increasingly turning to the once-unthinkable: Trading in and out of loans to dump troubled assets and hunt for bargains amid the industry’s first stress test after years of breakneck growth.

US stocks advanced as investors struck an upbeat tone ahead of a long holiday weekend, with optimism fueled by hopes for resolution of hostilities in the Middle East, resilient economic data and relentless enthusiasm for artificial intelligence-linked trades.

Hedge funds have been selling the scorching rally in US semiconductor stocks to book profits, while keeping their overall exposure to the AI theme, according to traders at Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

Even if armchair investors are fleeing private credit or panicking that their unlisted shares in Anthropic PBC are now invalid, the long-term trend is clear: Public markets keep losing ground to private funds.

At first glance, the retreat of foreign asset managers is ominous. Signs of a domestic retail frenzy are everywhere. Cash deposits in local brokerage accounts have reached 137 trillion won ($91 billion), a two-third jump from six months ago.

There’s a whiff of panic among investors these days. US Treasury yields have climbed to levels unseen in more than a year at the same time as a furious rally has left stocks near all-time highs. Surely, both moves can’t coexist for long, goes the narrative.

Wall Street is racing to turn computing power into a tradable commodity with the first ETFs being filed even before the futures contracts they would track have started to trade.

Nvidia Corp., facing more investor skepticism, used its latest quarterly report to tout progress in diversifying the company, which aims to rely less on the giant data center operators that have fueled its runaway growth.

Najimah Roberson, a lifelong renter, spent the past two years searching around Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, for a home she could afford — getting outbid nearly 30 times along the way.

Space has evolved from a niche corner of the stock market into an area that offers the potential for diversity and growth. The euphoria around SpaceX’s market entry is driving fresh investor flows into the sector. Since the news of the offering first became public in early December, smaller space and related stocks have soared.

Turns out, loading up on technology giants isn’t the only route to better returns. Value companies, too, stand a decent chance of trouncing the market — as long as several conditions are met.

For much of the year, chip stocks have been powering the market higher. Now, Nvidia Corp.’s earnings have a chance to confirm that the rally has more room to run — or add another brick to investors’ wall of worry.

Veteran strategist Jeff Currie said the world is in the early stages of a commodity supercycle that may last another decade or more as the artificial intelligence buildout collides with chronic underinvestment in energy and materials capacity.

The Texas Permanent School Fund bought more than 29 million shares totaling about $740 million worth of the State Street IG Public & Private Credit ETF, trading under the ticker PRIV, in the first quarter, according to a filing Friday.

The 30-year rate increased six basis points to 5.18% on Tuesday, a level last seen on the brink of the global financial crisis in 2007, rising alongside US government yields across maturities.

Investors are pouring money into commodities funds as the US-Iran war stokes inflation, according to Invesco Ltd.

The nothing-burger that came out of the Xi-Trump summit drove home a new reality for global investors. The NACHO trade, which stands for “not a chance Hormuz opens,” is on. Prospects of prolonged inflation have risen, sending global bond yields higher and the US dollar stronger.

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell steps down this month after proving himself an exemplary public servant. Compelled to deal with a president intent on telling the central bank what to do, his response was exactly right. Reluctant to confront the White House until he had no choice, he then did so firmly, without needless drama or any trace of ego.

We’ve all been in meetings that “could have been an email,” so why not have a jury trial that could have been an AI prompt?

I was in West Texas recently to witness firsthand the emerging practical applications of artificial intelligence. What I saw bolstered my conviction about the technology’s progress and the need to mold it rather than resist the change.

Investors were forced to pay attention Friday, when the most interest-rate sensitive corners of the market saw big plunges in an ugly market selloff. The small-cap Russell 2000 Index dropped 2.4% for the biggest single-day decline since November.

NextEra Energy Inc. agreed to pay about $67 billion in stock for Dominion Energy Inc. in the biggest power acquisition ever, creating a giant utility extending from Florida to the data centers clustered in Virginia.

Yields on US bonds dipped as much as three basis points Monday after Iran’s semi-official Tasnim reported that Washington proposed a temporary waiver on Iran oil sanctions until the final agreement, citing a source close to the negotiation team.

In the race to build the infrastructure that powers artificial intelligence, Alphabet Inc.’s Google has an enviable position: The company has a healthy cloud computing business, makes its own chips, and has struck deals to share them with companies like Anthropic PBC and Meta Platforms Inc.

America is fast becoming a country with two economies: a stagnant one for men and a growing one for women. So far this year, the US has created more than 165,000 private-sector jobs, and 72% of them went to women. To some extent this reflects a structural change in the economy, as growth is in industries more likely to employ women, such as healthcare.

Rising bond yields curbed traders’ appetite for risky bets early Friday, sending stocks lower following a weeks-long record-setting rally driven by a rush of cash into all things artificial intelligence.

Investors shed government bonds around the world, propelling borrowing costs to multi-year highs from Japan to the US amid intensifying fears that war-driven inflation will force central banks to pursue higher interest rates.

Elon Musk’s ambitions for artificial intelligence are coming together in a former vacuum-cleaner factory in Memphis, Tennessee.

With stocks near all-time highs, the need for change is hardly obvious. Proponents argue that requiring fewer reports will reduce the time and cost of compliance. Some blame an increase in disclosure demands over the last three decades for a sharp decline in the number of public companies.

While US stocks have been going from one record to the next, global asset allocators haven’t quite kept up. And that may keep the market’s upward momentum intact as fund managers try to catch up.

Investors are growing increasingly optimistic about Amazon.com Inc.’s position in artificial intelligence, lighting a fire under the stock and sending the company’s market capitalization soaring toward the rarefied $3 trillion level.

In today’s war-torn market, both are the supplier of last resort. One provides dollars; the other barrels. But that’s where the similarities end. The central bank can print the currency at ease; the drillers cannot.

Ford Motor Co. has finally hit upon an electric strategy that shouldn’t lose money. The key element is that it doesn’t involve vehicles — not for now, anyway.

Apollo Global Management Inc. announced last week that it will soon provide daily pricing for its private credit. It may not sound like a big move, but its decision to lift the veil on these assets could be the most impactful development in financial markets and investing in a long time.

State revenues are softening, and rainy day fund capacity has declined for the first time since the Great Recession, he wrote in his second quarter outlook report released Wednesday. The end of pandemic-era stimulus programs, slowing tax collections and rising costs are all adding to the weakness.

US equity futures pushed higher early Wednesday as traders snapped up technology shares after a pullback in the group, with enthusiasm around strong earnings outweighing a resurgence in inflation.

The nuclear power industry is booming. With electricity demand surging, dozens of nations have set a goal of tripling the world’s capacity by 2050. And the US, which has the biggest fission fleet, is pushing to quadruple output from its reactors.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google introduced a new high-end laptop segment called "Googlebook" that will run Android and prominently showcase Gemini artificial intelligence. Hardware partners Dell Technologies Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd. and HP Inc. will debut models built on the platform in the coming months.

Mamdani called the pied-à-terre tax and the change in the unincorporated business tax credit, which would mostly affect affluent taxpayers, “common-sense measures.” He said the city is working with Albany on plans to administer the second-home levy.

Nvidia Corp. co-founder Jensen Huang joined US President Donald Trump on his visit to China as a last-minute addition, thrusting AI and technology into the spotlight before a high-stakes Beijing summit.

AI infrastructure costs just keep on rising. Big tech firms are likely to invest several trillion dollars over the next few years to satisfy your ChatGPT and Claude habit.

The nearly $13 trillion market isn’t the flashiest outpost on Wall Street, but it’s the vital plumbing that keeps the money flowing. Through repurchase agreements, or repos, firms exchange Treasuries for cash — typically overnight — providing the short‑term funding that underpins trading, settlement and market‑making across the financial system.

China investors are counting on the summit between Xi Jinping and Donald Trump to deliver just enough to sustain the detente trade underpinning stocks and the yuan.

A scorching rally in Intel Corp. shares is threatening huge losses for traders wagering that they’re due to fall. But that isn’t stopping them from placing those bets.

United Airlines Holding Inc. is returning to the municipal bond market with a junk-rated $256 million sale, after last year’s volatility forced it to postpone the deal.

Copper headed toward its highest close ever — and other metals advanced — as traders shrugged off the apparent deadlock between the US and Iran to join a broader rally for risk assets.

Oil rose after US President Donald Trump rejected Iran’s response to his latest peace proposal, prolonging the effective closure of the crucial Strait of Hormu

Retail traders largely sat out a record-setting advance in chip stocks in April. Now they’re diving in just as worries mount that the group’s rally may be losing steam.

Cerebras Systems Inc. increased the size of its initial public offering, now seeking to raise as much as $4.8 billion, as demand for the artificial intelligence chipmaker and data center operator’s shares continues to build

Putting money directly into Trump accounts is fundamentally different: It goes directly to the beneficiaries. Whether it will be more effective at improving prosperity or reducing populist anger is unclear. The public/nonprofit model can be better targeted and address specific societal needs, such as hunger or education.

DoubleLine Capital’s Jeffrey Gundlach is repositioning some of his funds for the extreme scenario that the US government could choose to restructure its debt in response to a potential future recession.

US stocks were on track for a record closing high, buoyed by semiconductor stocks, strong monthly payrolls figures and a US-Iran ceasefire that appeared intact even with overnight clashes near the Strait of Hormuz.

US employers added more jobs than expected for a second month and the unemployment rate held steady in April, indicating the labor market is holding up despite rising energy costs sparked by the Iran war.

Warren Buffett shared his usual wisdoms about patience, diligence, prudence and kindness in a CNBC interview the morning of Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s annual meeting last Saturday, the first in many decades that the oracle did not lead. But the sign that hung above him spoke loudest.

The Artemis II mission was a glorious moment for space exploration and a sign of a potential $1 trillion investment boom in the global space industry over the next decade.

Exchange-traded funds can be the source of liquidity that retail investors need after ramping up exposure to private assets, BlackRock Inc. executives wrote in a report.

An historic surge in US stocks has pushed equities to fresh highs, yet signs of overheating sentiment suggest that the rally may be entering a slower phase.

For a bunch of unremarkable warehouses, they’re generating a lot of controversy. Data centers — low-slung facilities that house the server racks and energy systems that underpin the digital economy — have become a heated issue on the campaign trail. Politicians from both parties are pushing bills to restrict them. Some want a nationwide “moratorium.” That would be a historic mistake.

Wall Street banks are getting ready to raise billions of dollars taking data center companies public, even after IPO investors have already piled into anything that looks like a bet on artificial intelligence spending.

The thinking behind space solar makes some sense: The sun doesn’t always shine on Earth, which means solar panels on the ground aren’t always gathering energy. There are no clouds to block the sun in space, so aside from a couple of times per year around the equinoxes, panels in GEO are constantly bombarded with solar rays.

Sometimes small changes speak loudly. Deutsche Bank AG’s new chief financial officer, Raja Akram, put the German lender’s consumer and asset management businesses before its corporate and investment banking units in his first earnings presentation last week.

Is good news about the economy bad news for the stock market once again?

Investors are piling into municipal bonds at the fastest rate in five years, drawn by attractive yields and the promise of a safe harbor from recent market volatility.

SpaceX also is ramping up its spending. The company said in April it’s struck an agreement for the right to acquire artificial intelligence startup Cursor for $60 billion later this year, or to pay $10 billion for the companies’ work together.

Microsoft Corp. may shelve one of the industry’s most ambitious clean-energy targets as it tries to remove hurdles that could hold it back in the race to power data centers, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Affordability is a major problem that is finally getting the attention it needs. As important is directing that attention at the root cause of America’s cost-of-living crisis: inadequate wages.

Throughout Europe, companies are facing a quandary: How can they afford immense investments in decarbonization when a combination of now-surging energy prices, Chinese overproduction and US tariffs threatens to undermine their existing businesses?

Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are leading the process, according to people familiar with the matter. A large majority of the financing is expected to be in the form of debt, with the rest equity, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information.

Abel, known as a shrewd operator who’s always looking for ways to improve profits at the $1 trillion conglomerate’s varied businesses, said he had just one thought at the time: The company had already shelled out the money to book the arena for the annual meeting in 2026.

There’s no doubt that Amazon will begin to take market share now that it has declared that its third-party logistics business is here to stay. This move allays concerns among potential customers that Amazon’s offerings wouldn’t be permanent or would take a back seat to its own volume during periods of peak freight.

There is also a popular notion that bond traders can see the future, that they know what inflation will be or if a recession is coming. But bond markets are often wrong. And they may be wrong now because bond yields are low relative to the risks the economy faces.

It may be a cliche to invoke the pick-and-shovel sellers of the California Gold Rush, but what better way is there to frame what’s happening to Apple Inc.?

Alphabet Inc. is selling its biggest-ever euro-denominated bond and tapping the Canadian dollar debt market just months after record-breaking deals in other currencies, showing the huge funding needs of its ambitions in artificial intelligence.

As the first-quarter reporting season winds down, companies are emerging from an earnings-related blackout. About 40% of corporates are currently in the so-called open buyback window, which is expected to remain open until June 12, according to Goldman Sachs’s buyback desk.

US transportation stocks plunged Monday morning after Amazon.com Inc. announced expanded logistics offerings that will turn it into a major competitor for parcel carriers and air freight companies, and also impact truckers and third-party brokers.

The world’s biggest technology companies posted strong earnings last week, showing that the artificial intelligence boom is alive and well. But in the stock market, investors are getting more granular as they try to divvy up the winners and losers in the AI trade.

The part of the bond ETF complex that’s growing fastest isn’t that part. It’s the active and outcome-oriented funds — multisector strategies, flexible income vehicles, securitized credit funds, options-overlay products — that charge 0.30 to 1 percentage point and promise more yield, less duration, or both. And the marketing pitch behind them quietly elides something important.

It’s happening. California looks likely to put a “one-time” tax of 5% on wealth above $1 billion on the ballot in November, and polls suggest it could pass — despite opposition from some economists (not so surprising) and Democratic politicians (more so).

One of private equity’s biggest challenges right now is getting money back to investors. Advent and Cinven have just made a small dent in the industry’s mountain of unsold assets by agreeing the sale of TK Elevator to Finland’s Kone Oyj.

Streamlining the rules is undoubtedly appealing. The new proposal would do this, in part, by allowing the largest banks to use one method to calculate the risk of their assets instead of two, as currently required. That makes sense as far as it goes. Yet other requirements — including leverage ratios and certain capital surcharges — are being loosened or otherwise made more bank-friendly at the same time.

Artificial intelligence might be the most transformative technology ever devised. Exactly how its effects will work through the economy is impossible to say, but serious disruption of one kind or another seems likely. Millions of jobs — in the end, maybe most jobs — could radically change, and many will disappear entirely.

The Pentagon has struck agreements with four more technology companies for expanded use of advanced artificial intelligence tools on classified military networks, according to a Defense Department statement and two defense officials briefed on the matter.

President Donald Trump will sign an executive order aimed at expanding access to retirement plans for workers whose employers don’t offer that benefit, according to a White House official, a bid to refocus the administration’s messaging on economic issues.

When Jamie Dimon turned to competitive threats in his shareholder letter this year, the chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. did something unusual: He named some. Citadel Securities LLC and Revolut Ltd. were two of the firms Dimon picked out.

Eli Lilly & Co. surprised Wall Street by raising its annual sales and profit forecast, as demand for obesity medications soared and thousands of patients started taking its new weight-loss pill before advertising for the drug had even begun.

The AI hyperscalers are lumped together for obvious reasons, but after the four largest reported their earnings on Wednesday night, it became abundantly clear that one of these big-spending giants is not like the others.

Days before his first annual meeting as the chief executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., Greg Abel is facing a problem that seldom confronted his legendary predecessor: a floundering stock price.

Applications for US unemployment benefits plunged to the lowest level in decades, a sign that job-cut announcements have not yet meaningfully translated into layoffs.

Inflation-adjusted gross domestic product increased an annualized 2% in the first quarter after the longest-ever federal government shutdown limited growth in the closing months of 2025, according to an initial estimate issued Thursday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Meta Platforms Inc. is looking to sell between $20 billion and $25 billion of investment-grade bonds, according to people with knowledge of the transaction, as the Facebook parent boosts spending on infrastructure for the artificial intelligence boom.

The stakes for OpenAI are existential at worst and a serious burden at best as it seeks to go public. In preparation, the company has taken spring cleaning to the next level — embarking on a culling of “side quests” like the video creator Sora, ending some science research and even putting on hold its plans for an erotic version of ChatGPT.

So the question is not whether innovation can drive growth. It’s how much growth innovation can drive. The falling population and heavy debt load mean productivity will need to increase GDP by at least 2.5%, maybe 3% depending on the path of interest rates.

In a choppy year for tech investors, one trade has stood out as a success: buy chip stocks, sell software shares. And the divide between winners and losers is getting bigger as 2026 moves along.

For much of the past few years, US Treasuries have failed to serve their traditional role as a sure-fire refuge from global market meltdowns.

Hyperliquid, the decentralized crypto exchange that has emerged as one of the most active trading venues in digital assets, is proposing to add prediction markets to its platform — a direct challenge to Kalshi and Polymarket as the fast-growing sector draws new competitors.

Hedge fund manager turned NBA owner Gabe Plotkin, who shut his firm after a bruising showdown with meme-stock traders, is planning to convert some of his own assets into an ETF using a tactic that’s helped a slew of wealthy investors defer tax.

A few weeks ago, I sat down at my laptop and built a trading platform. It connects to three financial exchanges. It ingests news from RSS feeds, web searches, Reddit and Twitter.

If venture capital investment is a measure of the economic future, California would seem to have locked things up. In the first quarter of this year — by far the biggest quarter for US VC investment ever — an unheard-of 85% of the money went to California companies, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. For all of 2025, California’s share was an also-unprecedented 60%.

Technology megacaps are pushing benchmark indexes to new records while the rest of the market is lagging behind. Traders can be forgiven for feeling like they’ve seen this movie before.

BlackRock Inc. is bringing its roughly $2.5 billion money market fund to cryptocurrency exchange operator OKX, with Standard Chartered Plc holding the underlying assets — the latest sign that Wall Street infrastructure and digital-asset markets are converging.

European stocks started the year much stronger than their US peers but the tantalizing prospect of the euro area clawing back some of its persistent gap in earnings growth, and the higher company valuations that come with it, looks to have slipped through its grasp again.

The chip industry seems to be the only game in town lately. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, known as the SOX, has risen 48% this year. Bourses in Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are riding the wave and hitting record highs, brushing away potential energy shocks from the military conflict over Iran.

Cook has spent 15 years focused on the King — the thousands of decisions about industrial design, manufacturing, and supply chains that make the iPhone an iPhone. Racing in AI would have meant counting pieces while leaving the King unguarded. Ballmer counted pieces, and it cost Microsoft $5.5 billion.

Many people seem surprised by the US stock market’s resilience during the Iran war. I’m not one of them, and I don’t see the war becoming a significant threat to the market, even if it drags on.

The world’s most important central banks will potentially hand investors fresh reasons to sell government bonds this week as policymakers find themselves forced to confront the risk of a war-driven inflation shock.

On Monday, the index returned to record highs, eclipsing the previous peak hit before the war started in Iran. Yet, when compared with the US market, emerging-market shares screen as cheaper than at the start of the war, reinforcing the case for investors to add exposure.

United Airlines Holdings Inc. Chief Executive Officer Scott Kirby confirmed he approached American Airlines Group Inc. and that talks have ended, laying out the virtues of a merger that he said could have strengthened corporate America and won approval from regulators.

US stock futures were little changed on Monday after a four-week rally, starting a busy week of corporate earnings and the US central bank’s policy meeting with a relative calm while investors monitor the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz amid stalled Iran peace talks.

A data center developer is seeking $4.54 billion in junk-debt financing for an artificial intelligence project tied to Nvidia Corp., testing investor appetite after a recent surge in offerings.

There’s no shortage these days of stories, posts and videos warning of the robot armies readying to vacuum up white-collar jobs in technology, finance, marketing, you name it. And there’s no doubt that artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how we live and work. Amid all this, though, a relative calm has descended on the labor market and should persist for the rest of this year, at least.

Budget airlines are going broke. Spirit Airlines may go under or get a government bailout, and JetBlue is just barely avoiding bankruptcy this year. It didn’t need to be this way. They tried to merge in 2024, but the merger was blocked because President Joe Biden’s administration was concerned that greater consolidation would lead to higher prices.

The bigger the vacuum becomes, the longer it will take to refill those inventories whenever whatever passes for normality finally arrives. Oil prices along the curve would need to rise accordingly to encourage excess production — or, conversely, achieve the same outcome by destroying demand.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX is no stranger to the stratosphere, and neither is its coming initial public offering.

As a more than $20 billion borrowing frenzy to build out data centers descended on the junk-bond market this year, some issuers offered up a rare sweetener: an early cash payback.

X-Energy Inc., a nuclear energy firm that counts Amazon.com Inc. as a backer, raised $1.02 billion in an upsized US initial public offering that priced above the marketed range.

Global bond markets are heading for their worst week in a month as investors grow increasingly uneasy about a stalemate between the US and Iran.

Intel Corp. shares are on track to hit their highest level ever after the chipmaker delivered a sales forecast that shattered Wall Street expectations.

After years weighing how to dive deeper into private credit, JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s $4.3 trillion asset manager is committing to a strategy that will plow tens of billions of dollars into loans sourced by the firm’s commercial bankers.

Jay Leno’s latest hosting gig involves a classic car, an airport construction site and municipal bonds.

Nearly two months into the conflict in Iran, global stock markets are staging a defiant rally. From the US to Taiwan and South Korea, a disconnect has emerged: while the geopolitical tensions remain high, equities are charging back toward all-time highs.

Intel Corp. has been one of the hottest stocks in the market over the past 12 months, soaring more than 240% to the highest price since the dot-com bubble. But the rally is facing a potential roadblock in the company’s first-quarter earnings report due after the close Thursday.

American Airlines Group Inc. lowered its full-year earnings target, saying it may end 2026 with a loss as the carrier absorbs $4 billion in additional fuel costs from the war in Iran.

Vanguard is boosting its holdings of Treasuries, taking advantage of higher yields following the Middle East conflict to lock in rates and hedge against the risks of a potential growth slowdown.

Stocks are trading near a record high, signaling Wall Street is learning to cope with lingering geopolitical risks. Main Street is struggling to catch up.

Investing pros say strong quarterly numbers that beat already lowered expectations aren’t likely to move the richly valued stock. Rather, Tesla needs one of two things to drag its shares out of their rut: Concrete signs of progress on its robotaxi plans or a shiny new object from Musk’s playbook that moves the goalposts for the company and resets the timer to show results.

Google has emerged as one of the most successful makers of in-house AI chips in an industry dominated by Nvidia Corp. TPUs have become a hot commodity in Silicon Valley in recent months, and the company is looking to build on that momentum with the latest versions.

In announcing on Monday that John Ternus would be succeeding Tim Cook as chief executive officer of Apple Inc. this year, the company’s board made it clear: We’re a hardware company and we’re going with the hardware guy.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is working toward getting approval from Chinese securities regulators to launch actively managed exchange-traded funds in the country for the first time.

The Pentagon’s largest-ever budget request earmarks $75 billion for drones and technologies to counter them, mainly for a massive increase for a little-known office working with US commandos to test and evaluate various systems, according to defense officials.

Would you buy OpenAI’s shares even though the transaction might expose you to a liquidity crunch? SoftBank Group Corp.’s founder Masayoshi Son did just that.

Billionaire money manager Bill Ackman is giving away a stake in his firm to investors who support his latest hedge-fund launch. This looks like a good deal. And so it should: If you’re selling a fund in the form of an initial public offering, you have to dangle the prospect of a quick buck.

Ternus will have a challenge when he officially takes the job in September. Even as he maintains Apple’s device empire — and its more than $400 billion in annual revenue — the executive will need to take chances, enter new product categories and find the company’s footing in artificial intelligence.

What makes recessions so harmful to workers is the freezing of movement. The gears of the labor market — gears that are constantly shuffling workers from job to job to unemployment to job again — slow to a crawl.

Developers including D.R. Horton Inc., Lennar Corp. and KB Home all missed expectations last quarter and estimates suggest both sales and earnings have fallen further as conflict in the Middle East unsettled buyers and raised costs.

Strategists at some of Wall Street’s biggest banks are upbeat on the outlook for US earnings after a positive start to the first-quarter reporting season.

Investors are set to pour more money into defense, energy and technology stocks as the Middle East war forces governments to prioritize security and become more self reliant.

The housing industry had good reasons for optimism heading into 2026. Transactions were picking up after three listless years as improved affordability and decent inventory levels brought buyers back into the market.

Sam Altman, the chief executive officer of OpenAI, said at a finance conference in October 2023 that he and his “CEO friends” were running a betting pool on when the first one-person billion-dollar company would be created thanks to artificial intelligence.

EQT AB, Europe’s biggest private equity firm, says the path to exiting investments in clean-energy developers and operators faces a growing number of hurdles.

Bitcoin’s recovery above $75,000 has a credibility problem: the traders with the most leverage don’t believe in it.

US stocks rallied Friday after Iran said it would open the Strait of Hormuz following the truce between Israel and Lebanon, promising to ease an oil shock that has shadowed the global economic outlook ever since President Donald Trump started the war seven weeks ago.

Intel Corp. shares leaped to their highest intraday level since the dot-com era on Friday as optimism that the chipmaker’s turnaround plan is working continues to grow.

During and immediately after the financial crisis of 2008, there was much talk and academic research about the rapid growth of the US financial sector over the preceding decades and whether that was good or bad.

For the first time, stablecoins have surpassed the Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments network in monthly transaction volume. According to blockchain analytics platform Artemis, stablecoins processed $7.2 trillion in February, topping the ACH’s $6.8 trillion.

As private credit managers mount a spirited defense of their industry to discourage investors from fleeing, they’ve found at least one persuasive argument for why much of the cash they lent to software firms at the start of the decade shouldn’t be at risk.

The Iran war has created a reshuffle in investing. High-flying tech companies are out while unloved old economy names are getting a second look.

When Paul Atkins took the helm of Wall Street’s top regulator, he came with a long to-do list: craft rules for the cryptocurrency industry, make initial public offerings “great again” and ease financial reporting for public companies.

A dramatic shift is underway in US equity markets. Stocks hit an all-time high Wednesday as Middle East peace hopes tamped down geopolitical anxiety, and derivatives traders who had pulled back from bullish bets are now racing to position for further gains in technology shares.

Hedge funds are increasingly downbeat on the dollar as the prospect of a two-week ceasefire extension between the US and Iran sap the currency’s war-driven strength.

Mythos, a new artificial intelligence model that Anthropic PBC has teased as too dangerous to release, looked at first like a problem for banks.

I came across a statistic the other day that goes against the intuition of practically everyone in the US who has a job: Americans are working less than they did in the 1950s and ’60s. How is this possible, when we all feel chained to our desks or our phones?

Bitcoin trended toward the high end of its more than two-month trading range as risk assets rallied on optimism that the US can strike a deal with Iran to end their conflict.

With the US-Iran war demonstrating not just how captive the world economy remains to fossil fuels, but also how easily energy can be weaponized, whether to drill at home is becoming an even more pressing question for some countries.

The S&P 500 Index is on track to close at its first record since January, as traders bid up stocks amid optimism over the ceasefire between the US and Iran and robust corporate fundamentals.

Wall Street has gotten repeatedly burned calling a bottom in software stocks, which have been hit hard by fears that artificial intelligence will make the companies obsolete. But this week’s bounce is bringing some bottom-fishing investors back to the group on hopes that the worst may finally be over.

Pacific Investment Management Co. bought all $400 million of bonds issued Monday by a Blue Owl Capital Inc. private credit fund, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Bank of America Corp. disclosed it has about $20 billion in private-credit exposure, as the bank and its Wall Street peers seek to calm concerns about the industry’s exposure to the asset class.

Morgan Stanley’s traders got a boost from President Donald Trump’s deregulation agenda. In the first three months of the year, Morgan Stanley plowed capital that was freed up after US regulators relaxed a key rule into its prime brokerage division and its macro trading desks, according to Chief Financial Officer Sharon Yeshaya.

Novo Nordisk A/S will integrate OpenAI’s artificial intelligence across the company to accelerate drug development.

Treasuries traded steadily after a reading of US wholesale prices last month rose less than anticipated, affirming wagers that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates at least once this year even as the broader inflationary outlook remains murky amid the war in Iran.

JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s traders posted their highest-ever quarterly revenue in the first three months of the year, with record stock-trading results boosting the total past the firm’s previous record by almost $2 billion.

BlackRock Inc. Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink sees increased demand for private credit from big institutional investors like insurers, even as retail clients grow skittish over the asset class and seek to redeem more of their shares.

Once upon a time, not so long ago, about a third of all American workers had a gold-plated pension: When they retired, someone paid them nearly their full salary for the rest of their lives. They didn’t have to worry about the market, or inflation, or running out of money.

Sportsbooks profit from customer losses, making them structurally predatory. Kalshi, by contrast, operates as a peer-to-peer exchange: customers bet against each other, Kalshi takes fees from both sides, and the house has no stake in the outcome. It's a financial market, not a casino.

With the Middle East in flames and a fifth of the world’s supplies of oil and gas in limbo thanks to the uncertain status of the Strait of Hormuz, it’s tempting to imagine that a clean-energy world might leave such conflicts behind.

Wall Street strategists expect the Federal Reserve to take a slow and careful approach to winding down a program meant to help ease pressure in funding markets.

Accelerating earnings are protecting the S&P 500 from deeper losses and masking a broader pullback in US equities, according to strategists at Morgan Stanley.

Intel Corp. has quickly become one of the hottest stocks in the S&P 500 Index thanks to a nine-day surge that has added more than $100 billion in market value.

Bond traders held onto wagers that the Federal Reserve will lower interest rates once this year after data confirmed that US inflation quickened in March as the Iran war led to higher gasoline prices.

Late last month, Blackstone Inc. announced the first inbound Gulf private equity deal since Iran started attacking Middle Eastern hubs, while Citigroup Inc.’s top boss fired off a 600-word memo underlining the bank’s enthusiasm for its business in the region.

US equity futures stalled after a seven-day rally as investors weighed whether a fragile truce between Washington and Tehran can hold, and oil headed for its biggest weekly loss in nine months.

By at least one metric in the $9.5 trillion foreign-exchange markets, demand for the dollar is ebbing amid the tenuous ceasefire between the US and Iran.

The idea that this would be enough for “new UMG” to almost double the current one’s valuation doesn’t add up at a time when artificial intelligence is creating doubts about the industry’s future. And it’s unlikely on its own to tempt dominant shareholders such as French tycoon Vincent Bollore. The proverbial fat lady has yet to sing.

After months of sluggish returns, Nvidia Corp.’s stock is rallying again and close to breaking out of its narrow trading range, which market technicians see as a bullish signal.

Ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz remained blocked Thursday, even as a handful of Chinese vessels lined up to escape, with a very fragile ceasefire between the US and Iran yet to improve traffic flows in the region.

Every twist in the Iran conflict — every ceasefire bet, every missile strike, every shift in tanker traffic — shows up almost instantly in a $65 million exchange-traded fund that most investors have never heard of.

In essence, the IPO is an acknowledgement that the ChatGPT-maker, which just raised $122 billion from investors at a valuation of $852 billion, needs what seems to be an endless amount of money to fund its race for artificial general intelligence.

Tesla Inc. and its Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk are a font of big numbers, real or imagined: A million robotaxis deployed, 20 million electric vehicles sold per year, “tens of billions” of Optimus robots stalking the Earth.

For centuries the so-called cannon shot rule determined who controlled the seas. The legal concept, codified by Dutch jurist Cornelius van Bynkershoek in 1702, was simple: The distance a cannonball reached from shore set the maritime boundary of a coastal state.

Global bonds surged Wednesday on news that the US and Iran had agreed to a ceasefire, pausing a war that roiled markets for weeks by delivering the worst oil shock in years.

US stocks rallied after President Donald Trump’s announcement of a two-week ceasefire in the Iran war spurred relief across markets.

European stocks soared the most in a year as investors rushed to buy stocks in the wake of the US and Iran agreeing to a two-week ceasefire in exchange for Tehran reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Fresh data on the US labor market and new research from the Federal Reserve suggest that the conventional wisdom around employment growth being sluggish is wrong.

Cybersecurity stocks have sold off this year alongside the rest of the software sector, but with artificial intelligence increasing the potential threats from bad actors, investors risk missing out on the burgeoning demand for their services.

Finance has been moving fast. From crypto to prediction betting to exchange-traded funds to private credit, new markets—and risks—are proliferating.

Wall Street’s biggest ETF issuers are circling Invesco Ltd.’s Nasdaq 100 franchise, threatening to end its near-exclusive hold on the index.

The defining statistic of the so-called K-shaped economy is a little hard to define.

Call it the season of IPO prep. Recent launches and announcements from OpenAI and arch rival Anthropic are aimed at laying the groundwork to go public in late 2026 or early 2027, and for OpenAI, which just closed a $122 billion funding round that values it at $852 billion.

Cities such as New York and Chicago are in deep financial trouble. Broadly speaking, they have two options: Make the difficult but appropriate choice to raise taxes and reduce the scale of government, or continue to live in a state of denial, increasing their pension obligations while also promising their residents more services.

BlackRock Inc. is setting its sights on a corner of the $13.7 trillion US exchange-traded fund industry long controlled by Invesco Ltd: tracking the Nasdaq 100 Index.

The next 12 months are expected to bring a bumper crop of mega initial public offerings to market. Billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI company SpaceX has reportedly filed for a potentially record-breaking offering.

US equities and crude oil prices edged higher as investors focus on signs of a potential diplomatic push toward a ceasefire in the Iran war.

Bond traders kicked off the week betting that the Federal Reserve will keep interest rates on hold for the coming year, with the Treasuries market holding steady ahead of President Donald Trump’s extended deadline for Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

SpaceX has filed confidentially for an initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter, bringing billionaire Elon Musk’s rocket, satellite and AI company closer to delivering the biggest-ever listing.

The stock market is looking past the sharp interest rate hikes priced by Europe’s bond market, risking losses for investors backing the wrong outcome.

Big names in crypto, payments and cloud infrastructure are racing to build the financial plumbing for a world in which AI agents — not humans — handle transactions on the internet.

Less than two months ago, projections showed the US government on track to borrow some $2 trillion this year with budget deficits exceeding 5% of gross domestic product indefinitely. Since then, this dire outlook has worsened — thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling on tariffs, the war with Iran, the prospect of slowing economic growth and rising interest rates.

Unilever Plc’s Fernando Fernandez haslucked out by selling the company’s food businesses, including Hellmann’s mayonnaise and Knorr stock cubes, to McCormick & Co. But Fernandez, who’s been chief executive officer for just over a year, shouldn’t squander his good fortune; he needs a clear vision for what comes next.

When Edward Jenner inoculated an eight-year-old boy with cowpox in 1796, the principle was radical: Expose a healthy body to a mild, manageable version of harm, and it builds the defenses to survive something far worse. The cowpox patient never got smallpox. Markets work in much the same way.

Now that Nelson Peltz has won a surprise bidding war for Janus Henderson Group Plc, the activist investor can start to revamp the $493 billion asset manager he has circled for years.

Eli Lilly & Co.’s Zepbound is helping to solve one of the most intractable health challenges of our time: Obesity. Now, the drugmaker hopes to crack another significant public health problem: Sleep disorders.

OpenAI has completed a deal to raise $122 billion from investors at an $852 billion valuation, marking the company’s largest funding round to date by far and bolstering its costly push for more chips, data centers and talent.

Hedge fund activist Boaz Weinstein is on the cusp of his most significant campaign victory yet — overhauling an investment trust whose claim to fame is an early bet on Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company. But the beleaguered target is doing a good job of trashing the prize pot.

The Iran war is challenging Japan’s safe-haven assets, once again forcing domestic investors to seek better returns abroad.

Warren Buffett cautioned that he’s seeing signs of fragility emerging in the banking system as it has become more connected to non-bank players.

On paper, Super Micro Computer Inc. is the type of company that Wall Street can’t get enough of, with soaring sales, an enviable list of partners like Nvidia Corp. and its placement at the center of the artificial intelligence boom.

Tech megacaps entered a correction, oil prices broke out, big-money funds retreated and small-lot investors showed waning conviction in buying the dip. While the war in Iran that triggered all that didn’t end a three-year bull run in US equities, it is shaking it to its core.

BlackRock Inc. plans to launch a fund next month focused on large Southeast Asian stocks, according to people familiar with the matter, a move supporting Singapore’s drive to boost liquidity in the local market.

A Japanese oil tanker slips through the Strait of Hormuz in the dead of night, radio silenced to conceal its position. Iran secures a market for its crude in defiance of Western sanctions. The balance of the world’s energy trade switches from incumbent hegemons toward emerging powers.

Does artificial intelligence herald soaring prosperity or mass unemployment, political breakdown and Orwellian subjection? Nobody, not even AI, can honestly say. Forced to guess, I’d predict some of both.

When someone says a retiree is “living off Social Security,” it’s not usually $100,000 a year.

Financial markets have been relatively unaffected by the costly and senseless war the US and Israel are waging against Iran. But what’s really surprising is the ongoing boom in investment banking.

A progressive rallying cry to tax the rich is being welcomed by traditionally Republican states, including Florida and Georgia, looking for a new pitch to draw migrants — especially wealthy migrants — from the coasts.

The wreckage in large technology stocks that sent the Nasdaq 100 Index into a correction is flashing signs that have marked turning points for the group in the past.

Some of Wall Street’s biggest bond-fund managers say financial markets are underestimating the risk that the US war in Iran will cause a sharp slowdown in an already sputtering economy.

Sovereign bonds rose around the world as concern the Middle East conflict will derail global economic growth revived demand for beaten-down government debt.

Meta Platforms Inc. was looking like the best Big Tech stock in the market when the year began. But investors’ fears of legal risks and heavy spending on artificial intelligence are bubbling to the surface, culminating in last week’s 11% rout.

Private credit managers are feeling sheepish. Some of their investors can’t get their money out as quickly as they’d like — and some may be quite angry about that.

Franklin Templeton is partnering with Ondo Finance to offer tokenized versions of its ETFs that trade around the clock through crypto wallets, bypassing the brokerage accounts and limited trading hours that have defined fund investing for decades.

Eve oversees dozens of brainiac office hands; monitors countless earning calls; keeps tabs on CEOs; parses corporate filings; conducts due diligence; brainstorms stock picks.

The war in Iran may be showing few signs of easing, but Wall Street strategists are encouraging investors to start buying stocks again.

The dollar is on track for its best month since July as the conflict in the Middle East scrambles Wall Street’s playbook for the world’s dominant reserve currency.

US stocks opened lower on Thursday, as hopes for a quick ceasefire deal between the US and Iran faded, and the escalating conflict pushed oil prices higher.

Canadian energy producer and Bitcoin miner New West Data is exploring a US initial public offering to help meet the growing need for powerful computing systems.

Crypto is moving deeper into the US financial system — this time through the mortgage market.

Gold's reputation as the ultimate store of value has been tarnished by its 15% decline since the Iran conflict began. It's failed to act as a haven or a geopolitical hedge.

Private credit funds lent a lot of money to software companies at the beginning of the decade when they were being snapped up in a rush of expensive buyout deals. Now many of these tech businesses are braced for disruption by artificial intelligence, and some might end up defaulting on that debt.

The Iran war has laid bare a paradox: Gulf money is helping underwrite America’s effort to win the artificial intelligence race, and now the US has started a conflict that could destabilize those investments.

US mortgage rates climbed for a third straight week, pushing home-financing costs to the highest since October and dealing a blow to both purchasing and refinancing activity.

A rush by bond traders to unwind US futures positions amid the selloff triggered by war in Iran is running its course, setting the stage for new wagers that will determine whether the rout reverses or deepens.

Even as war in the Middle East roiled markets this month, some investors are finding solace in Corporate America’s growth machine, which not only remains intact — but is showing signs of thriving.

The US economy looks amazingly resilient on the surface. Notwithstanding the two-month Covid-19 recession of 2020, the US hasn’t experienced a downturn since the end of the financial crisis in the middle of 2009.

One of the most compelling theories about the future of artificial intelligence comes, oddly enough, from a 161-year-old paper about the coal industry. In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that improvements to the coal-fired steam engine had not reduced Britain’s coal consumption.

China’s $1.57 trillion sovereign wealth fund - long one of the biggest backers of private equity firms in the world - is considering new allocations to US money managers just months after reducing its exposure to the world’s biggest economy.

In the stock market’s volatile and uncertain start to the year, one trade has held strong: go long memory and storage.

Gold steadied after a dramatic selloff that has pushed the metal down more than 15% since the start of the Middle East conflict.

BlackRock Inc.’s Rick Rieder, the firm’s top bond-market executive who was passed over by President Donald Trump to be chair of the Federal Reserve, is pursuing investor cash for his first hedge fund in years.

There are at least two conflicting narratives about Gen Z and young millennials. One is that they are extremely risk averse — afraid even to go out of the house, much less on a date.

Recent market performance for US consumer-discretionary stocks has been so ugly that it may be a great time to buy.

Dimensional Fund Advisors is becoming the first asset manager to launch an exchange-traded fund share class of a mutual fund since Vanguard Group’s patent on the model expired nearly three years ago.

Banks making loans to specialist fund managers instead of directly to companies is meant to act like a firebreak protecting traditional lenders against the risks of businesses going bust. But losses from financing private credit firms and other nonbank lenders are coming back to bite them — and it’s making their investors antsy.

Modern markets have gotten used to central bank support whenever the global economy wobbles. But as the world confronts a fresh energy shock unfolding against brittle labor markets, investors need to prepare themselves for the possibility that central bankers won’t have their backs — quite the opposite.

he shock to global oil supply this month has already been declared the greatest ever by the International Energy Agency, so it’s natural to draw parallels with the great shocks of the 1970s. But numerous other factors determine how serious the impact of any given hit to supply will be on the global economy.

When Walt Disney Co. announced in November 2022 that Bob Iger would return as chief executive officer, the market took it as an auspicious sign. The stock jumped more than 6% on the news, its biggest increase in nearly two years.

Confidence among global stock-market investors, who largely kept their cool in the face of an escalating conflict in the Middle East, is starting to wear thin.

The simultaneous patent expiry of Ozempic’s active ingredient in China and India on Friday is a watershed moment. Until now, the revolutionary weight-loss drugs have been available largely to people with means.

March Madness is losing much of what made it mad. Signs of the shift were clear last year. Cinderella teams, the low-seeded upstarts that are supposed to deliver upsets and attention, didn’t surprise anyone.

US futures extended a drop on Friday as earlier hopes for a quick resolution to the war in the Middle East faded. Meanwhile, traders braced for a historic amount of March options expiry.

Public markets give a running commentary on the biggest players in private markets. Over the last year, this has gone from good to bad to worse. The sector’s long-term growth prospects may be more-or-less intact, but the next few years probably won’t feel that way.

Amid uncertain times in the job market one thing stands out — Americans in their 50s are working like never before.

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is moving ahead with plans for a major data center in Michigan that features a 20-year electricity contract requiring it to cover the full expense of adding a haul of new clean power.

Gold sank for a seventh session as the escalating war in the Middle East drove oil prices higher and reduced prospects for a US interest-rate cut in the near term. Silver slumped more than 10%.

Japan’s equity investors will closely watch a meeting between President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in Washington on Thursday for possible agreements on economic and military cooperation.

JPMorgan Asset Management is issuing its first Taiwan-focused wealth management product in more than a decade, joining global rivals rushing into one of Asia’s hottest exchange-traded funds markets.

Now that investors are aware of withdrawal limits, they’ll have a greater incentive to always ask for the maximum, requiring further asset sales that will depress returns — which, in turn, will encourage more withdrawals.

Federal Reserve officials left interest rates unchanged and continued to expect one rate cut this year as they acknowledged increased uncertainty due to war in the Middle East.

The European Union has unveiled a red-tape-cutting plan dubbed “EU Inc.” to boost the emergence of companies that could compete on the world stage with US and Chinese rivals.

There’s been no love lost between builders and buyers in the entry-level housing market over the past five years. Good news for one was invariably bad news for the other. But we finally seem to be hitting a sweet spot where both sides can be cautiously optimistic.

It’s been a volatile stretch for US equities as Wall Street tries to wrap its arms around the war in Iran. But with the fighting now in its third week, investors are becoming more sanguine about the stock market as signs emerge that the worst may be over.

US stock futures extend a two-day rally as investors remain cautiously optimistic amid rising energy prices and before the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate decision.

It took a war in Iran to reveal the full extent of billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s sway over the White House — and his centrality to mending the frayed US-India bilateral relationship.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is leading a push by Wall Street banks to offload risky loans for acquisitions. The latest is a $2 billion debt sale to finance the purchase of asset manager Janus Henderson Group Plc by Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management and General Catalyst.

Every financial crisis has a moment — usually identified only in retrospect — when an obscure product intended to mitigate risk spreads through what author Rick Bookstaber called “tightly coupled” interconnections to cause widespread damage.

Morgan Stanley is sticking with a forecast that sees the Federal Reserve resuming interest rates cuts in June and delivering another reduction in September, even as soaring oil prices prompt traders to curb bets for how much policymakers will lower borrowing costs this year.

US stock futures rose Tuesday as investors buy the dip, signaling confidence in the markets even as Iran war tensions escalate.

The Federal Reserve is about to give America’s biggest lenders an extra $200 billion of capital to play with. Later this week, US regulators will launch fresh proposals to update and, in some ways, loosen US capital rules that will fuel stock buybacks, lending and trading.

The scariest portmanteau in macroeconomics is making a comeback in market discourse: stagflation.

For years it was a punch line. Now the Laffer Curve — which purports to show that tax cuts can increase revenue — is making a kind of comeback.

Nvidia Corp. executives will likely need to deliver a surprise at the chipmaker’s annual AI conference that begins Monday to spark a rally in the moribund stock.

The mood in the stock market by the end of last week was the type of stuff that contrarian investors dream about.

Spending on data center projects in the US has exploded, surpassing offices for the first time at the end of last year. It’s a trend Matt Kunz saw early on when Meta Platforms Inc. built a computing hub outside Columbus, Ohio.

One of my most longstanding and controversial opinions is that the move from defined-benefit pensions to defined-contribution pensions was a success. It’s an especially unpopular view amid stories of retirees who fall through the cracks and a grim market that is pruning many retirement accounts, if not retirement dreams.

Back in 2008, executives at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. were zealots for valuing their assets at exactly the prices where they could be sold. Critics said this fervor for fair value inflamed the financial crisis, while supporters argued it helped investors and lenders at least know where they stood.

Volatility in US Treasuries jumped to a nine-month high as the Iran war fanned inflation concerns and upended traders’ expectations on the Federal Reserve’s policy path.

Americans will legally wager $3.3 billion on the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournaments this year, the American Gaming Association said.

European stocks rose Friday as oil prices slipped below $100 a barrel, following news reports of an Indian tanker’s passage from the Strait of Hormuz, a key shipping artery that’s been effectively shut amid the Iran war.

A key measure of US inflation was tame at the start of the year. But another metric is shaping up to paint a very different picture.

Apollo Global Management Inc. is ramping up efforts to give investors more regular insight into the value of its opaque private credit holdings, just as a spate of redemption requests from such funds rattles the wider market.

His time horizon is infinite. His capital is permanent. And the rewards, he argues, should be enormous.

For more than a decade, emerging markets have been a heartbreak for those who place their faith in developing countries. Since 2010, the benchmark MSCI Emerging Markets Index has not outperformed its US counterpart for two consecutive years.

Selling pressure for leveraged buyout loans has been high all year, amid fears that artificial intelligence will damage or even bankrupt the software companies that account for a fair chunk of the market.

Amazon.com Inc. has blown the primary market for new debt wide open just days after market volatility, sparked by soaring-then-plummeting oil prices, all but halted issuance. Its mega offering is priced cheaply, for a reason: Too much of a good thing is still too much.

Hedge fund positioning across US equities has created a setup for stocks to rip higher after their recent wobble, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc.’s trading desk.

After months of heavy selling on fears of artificial-intelligence disruption, software stocks appear to have found a bottom — at least for now.

The US and Israel’s war on Iran is forcing world governments to intervene to shore up energy supplies, with ongoing missile fire from both sides disrupting flows through a key waterway.

President Donald Trump said the US will get its first new oil refinery in 50 years with the help of investment from India’s Reliance Industries Ltd.

For months, Wall Street’s panoply of risk-hedging strategies did little but lose money. Now, as uncertainty sparked by the war with Iran hits the market’s most popular trades, investors that loaded up on portfolio protection are being rewarded.

President Donald Trump said the US and Israel are making significant progress in the war on Iran and could end the conflict “very soon,” cooling a surge in oil prices.

Those are a lot of disappointments in a relatively short time. That also left some investors wondering if Treasuries are still the bear-market hedge they are touted to be — which prompted me to ask if they ever were. After digging into the data, I discovered a surprising answer: no.

The European Central Bank can be forgiven for feeling nauseous as a massive global deleveraging of risk since the Iran war started has hit the euro area’s currency and interest-rate markets particularly hard.

Big Tech’s consolidation of power seemed a foregone conclusion even as Sam Altman’s OpenAI sparked an artificial intelligence boom with ChatGPT.

Stocks and currencies have seen steep losses, with the MSCI equity index posting its biggest weekly drop in six years, and bond yields have jumped.

Gold fell, pressured by a stronger US dollar and concern about the prospect of higher interest rates, as the war in the Middle East extended into a second week and oil rallied.

US stocks dropped on Monday, continuing on from the biggest weekly drop since October, as the prospect of a prolonged war in Iran sent energy prices soaring and stoked fears over inflation.

Netflix Inc.’s stock price is staging a dramatic reversal triggered by management’s decision to walk away from its proposed acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. late last month.

Iran’s strategy in its war with the US and Israel is by now clear: Impose an intolerable economic cost on President Donald Trump, forcing him to abandon his “war of choice” as American gasoline prices surge. Is there any way the Islamic Republic’s blueprint for survival can fail?

Traditional safe havens — Treasuries, the yen, the Swiss franc, and gold — have offered investors no refuge as the Middle East conflict roiled markets this week.

With “energy dominance” comes great turbulence. President Donald Trump’s open-ended war against Iran reflects a US seemingly unconstrained by energy needs and ready to wield its own fossil fuels as instruments of power.

Nearly 50 million Americans go to court each year without a lawyer. Low-income Americans are especially vulnerable, with most saying they “do not get any or enough legal help” for their major civil legal problems.

Bond investors, who have been focused on inflation since the Iran war began, say a surprise in the monthly US jobs report has the potential to upend their expectations for Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts.

Looking at the energy market with a wide-angle lens, I don’t see anything remotely approaching the pain of 2021-22, when the energy crisis label was appropriate for Europe. There’s nothing matching the contours of the 1990-91 shock, let alone the 1973-74 and 1979 crises.

US stocks have flipped the script for international investors since war erupted in the Mideast, handily outpacing the rest of the world after trailing their global peers badly last month.

Credit investors are unwinding long positions worth tens of billions of dollars and jumping into hedging trades.

A great financial economist once tried to convince me that retail investors should not be allowed to buy individual stocks. I strenuously disagreed: Wasn’t this America, the country that encourages risk-taking? Why shut regular investors out of the chance to get rich?

A world where we can cook up AI videos in seconds from the apps on our phones might seem remote from the physical realities of warfare in the seaways of the Persian Gulf. In fact, they’re closely intertwined.

Treasuries fell for a fourth day — lifting yields to the highest levels in several weeks — as rising oil prices ignited inflation expectations and dented the outlook for Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts.

The Trump administration has struck a deal that would see Venezuela’s state mining company sell as much as 1,000 kilograms of gold to commodities trader Trafigura, according to people familiar with the matter.

The war in Iran is forcing investors to reevaluate one of their most profitable stock strategies, leading some to conclude that the “Sell America, Buy Asia” trade has reached an inflection point.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission asked leveraged-ETF issuers not to move forward with a new wave of planned funds, using a rare group call Monday to renew its push against increasingly aggressive fund structures.

Intercontinental Exchange Inc. is acquiring a stake in OKX in a deal that values the cryptocurrency exchange operator at $25 billion.

It turns out, the biggest financial victim of President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Iran is not the S&P 500, but equity markets across North Asia.

Stocks attempted a rebound Wednesday morning as traders seized on a report that Iranian officials had indirectly reached out to the US about potentially ending the conflict in the Middle East. New data pointing to steadiness in the US labor market also helped fuel gains.

The last time an armed conflict upended the global energy economy, crude spiked past $100 and shares in oil and gas producers rallied for months. A similar trajectory might be unfolding as war rages in the Middle East.

Decades of “regulatory creep” and onerous disclosure requirements have discouraged companies from going public, say leaders of the Securities and Exchange Commission. To revitalize American markets, they plan to pare back those demands, especially for smaller firms. “We need a reset,” Chairman Paul Atkins recently declared.

Most investors, from grandma to the mightiest sovereign wealth funds, own bonds to help steady their portfolio and provide a ready reserve for spending. So, it’s notable when prominent voices start questioning their safety.

The public loves to hate short sellers, the investors who profit from declining securities’ values. Their bad reputation is mostly undeserved. In reality, many provide a valuable service, taking the other side of frauds and bubbles, and generally helping drive prices toward a semblance of fair value.

President Donald Trump said the US will provide insurance guarantees and naval escorts to ensure safe passage for oil tankers and other vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, aiming to head off a potential energy crisis caused by the war with Iran.

Oil surged for a second day as the US and Israel stepped up their war against Iran, with the sprawling conflict’s impact on energy assets in the Persian Gulf continuing to grow.

Gold sank after a four-day rally, as traders weighed the escalating war in the Middle East against the prospect of a stronger dollar and elevated inflation.

US Treasuries slumped for a second day as surging oil prices prompted traders to slash bets on more than one Federal Reserve interest-rate cut this year.

Greg Abel has passed his first test since taking over from Warren Buffett as Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s new chief executive officer. In his introductory shareholder letter, he emphasizes that Berkshire’s culture runs far deeper than a single man. Yet, almost in the same breath, he tells us not to worry — after all, Buffett is still lurking around the office.

Private credit firms are facing a major test, with mom-and-pop investors pulling their cash in fear of corporate defaults spiking and artificial intelligence destroying many of the software businesses that these funds have lent to.

Qatar shut down liquefied natural gas production at the world’s largest export facility after it was targeted in an Iranian drone attack, sending European gas prices surging more than 50% and rattling global energy markets.

When JPMorgan Chase & Co. took the lead last year in financing the $55 billion takeover of Electronic Arts Inc., a record-setting leveraged buyout, Wall Street saw it as a sign that a lucrative period of bankrolling super-sized private equity deals might come roaring back.

Amazon.com Inc. may be a leader in the artificial intelligence race, but investors are increasingly unwilling to pay up for the cost of maintaining that position.

Emerging-market currencies and stocks slumped as US and Israeli strikes on Iran are triggering a jump in energy prices and bring a rally in riskier assets to a screeching halt.

BlackRock Inc.’s Global Infrastructure Partners LP and EQT AB agreed to buy AES Corp. for about $10.7 billion in cash as the market heats up for power plant developers that can provide electricity for energy-hungry AI data centers.

The rise of prediction markets offers statisticians and social scientists the kind of help that astronomers get from a new space telescope or particle physicists from a bigger supercollider. We finally get to test theories and resolve questions that people, held back by poor data, have been wrangling over for decades.

US stocks opened lower as risk-off sentiment swept through markets and fintech Block Inc.’s massive layoffs fanned angst that artificial-intelligence is poised to upend broad sections of the economy.

The Trump administration on Wednesday closed a $26.5 billion loan package for Southern Co. power projects in Georgia and Alabama amid rising concern about electricity price affordability and electricity-thirsty data centers.

OpenAI has raised $110 billion in a deal that values the startup at $730 billion, representing the ChatGPT maker’s largest funding round to date and bolstering its costly push to secure more computing power and talent for AI development.

It took a price of $111 billion, backed by $46 billion from tech billionaire Larry Ellison, plus the promise to pay $7 billion in compensation if the deal failed.

Nvidia Corp. has one of the strongest growth stories in the market after posting blowout earnings on Wednesday. So why is it trading at a level that looks like a value stock?

US bonds are wrapping up their best monthly performance in a year against a backdrop of rising global risks, with resurgent demand serving as proof that investors still see Treasuries as the premier haven in turbulent times.

BlackRock Inc.’s Global Infrastructure Partners LP and EQT AB are in advanced talks to acquire power company AES Corp., according to people familiar with the matter.

Nvidia Corp.’s latest sales forecast drew a lukewarm response from investors, signaling that concerns over a potential bubble continue to weigh on the dominant maker of artificial intelligence processors.

The frontier AI companies are building exactly the kind of cost structure Christensen warned about at a scale he could never have imagined. No companies in the history of capitalism have ever paid their employees like this.

Global asset managers who collectively oversee more than $20 trillion of assets have grown more bullish across emerging-market equities, currencies, domestic bonds and credit, potentially offering fresh momentum to the sector’s record-busting rally.

The S&P 500 has been stuck in a range for the better part of four months, and investors are paying up to protect against the possibility that the next big move is down. To a growing number of strategists, that pessimism is cause to expect the opposite.

A bidding war for Janus Henderson Group Plc broke out Thursday as Victory Capital Holdings Inc. offered to buy the money manager for $57.04 a share, in a move that topped a previous offer from Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management.

Thanks to Nvidia Corp.’s practice of reporting earnings outside of the typical cycle for technology companies, the question of whether the almost $5 trillion company will record strong demand in 2026 had already been safely answered well before its latest announcement on Wednesday.

As investors digest the potential impact of artificial intelligence and debate whether this new technology will help or destroy existing businesses, a sharp divergence is occurring in global equities.

US mortgage rates slipped last week to the lowest level since 2022, generating more refinancing activity.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of America strategists are urging clients to buy Venezuelan global bonds with large piles of unpaid interest, betting they could outperform ahead of a potential debt restructuring.

The threat to software-backed businesses from artificial intelligence should prompt investors to shift focus from technology to companies that toil in the physical world, like miners, power producers and industrial firms, according to Ulrike Hoffmann-Burchardi, global head of equities and chief investment officer for the Americas at UBS Wealth Management.

Nvidia Corp.’s earnings report on Wednesday afternoon comes at a critical time for the US stock market with investors increasingly nervous about the outlook for artificial intelligence.

Stripped to its essentials, finance is a race against time. What lies ahead of us is unknown, and the vast industry of banking and finance has developed to manage the risks that come with making commitments now that depend on an uncertain future.

Corporate bonds are exposed to abrupt downside as liquidity providers are increasingly replaced by liquidity takers.

Day after day, Wall Street investors fret that artificial intelligence could disrupt white-collar industries by turning expert human judgment into code.

The captains of artificial intelligence are an impatient lot. There’s good reason for the existence of the Silicon Valley cliché “move fast and break things.” They are certainly moving fast on the buildout of AI infrastructure, rolling out eye-popping spending budgets to buy computer chips and construct data centers to house them.

An unintended consequence of the brutal bear market in Bitcoin has been to focus the blockchain industry’s attention where it is most needed: real-world assets.

It’s been a wild few months for software and other “middleman” stocks. First, there was “SaaSpocalypse,” in which investors dumped enterprise software purveyors that help companies manage accounts and internal workflows.

The placid surface of an equity market that’s treaded water for months is masking dramatic swings underneath, as stock moves whipsaw traders and threaten more turbulence ahead.

Pay for top bosses at the biggest US banks has reached new records in the past couple of years, surpassing even what chief executive officers got in the pre-crisis peak of 2007. Someday these vast rewards might run dry. After all, in the age of artificial intelligence, what is a CEO even for?

With his move to impose new global tariffs, US President Donald Trump isn’t just trying to repair a trade policy dismantled by a Supreme Court rebuke. He’s also declaring the world’s largest economy is facing a profound balance-of-payments crisis.

A tweak here, a twiddle there, and now possibly a 3% sweetener on the price. It’s all progress. But the billionaire Ellison family has yet to make an offer for Warner Bros Discovery Inc. that clearly beats the studio’s December deal with Netflix Inc.

Since the dawn of retail, merchants’ primary job has been to tempt human shoppers to part with their cash. Now they have a new customer to woo: the bots.

The US Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s sweeping global tariffs, undercutting his signature economic policy and delivering his biggest legal defeat since he returned to the White House.

For years, loading up on the biggest US technology stocks delivered a steady stream of riches — and avoiding them was a surefire ticket to the unemployment rolls. In 2026, the opposite has been true.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has boosted its investment-grade bond sale forecasts for the US and Europe after a strong start to the year for issuance and on expectations of a stronger economic outlook.

Maybe we really are headed into a future in which technological change reduces the demand for skilled labor rather than increasing it. But the job market hasn’t been turned upside down just yet.

California, like a careless heir who squanders a fortune, keeps menacing its top taxpayers. Unless lawmakers start showing some restraint, the state’s many economic strengths are likely to further erode.

A new class of digital money is reshaping how Americans move and store dollars — and Wall Street is racing to get a piece of it.

US equities rose Wednesday as a batch of reports confirming the strength of the American economy and a number of developments at the Big Tech giants reignited Wall Street’s excitement for the group.

Last week’s release of the Congressional Budget Office’s long-term budget projections prompted the merest murmur of concern. That’s America’s fiscal problem in a nutshell: It greets detailed and impeccably nonpartisan projections of looming financial catastrophe with a shrug. Tell us something we didn’t know. We’re busy right now.

It is hard to say if there is much economic benefit or cost to increased bank profits. On the one hand, it may allow banks to issue more credit to lower-income borrowers with worse credit.

If orbital space is the 21st century’s high seas, China looks to be preparing an armada. Government plans submitted late last year to the United Nations’ International Telecommunications Union, or ITU, promise a fleet of 203,000 satellites to be deployed by the mid-2030s.

Years after Cathie Wood became the face of pandemic-era investing euphoria, her flagship fund is marking a difficult milestone.

An early departure by Christine Lagarde could narrow the field of candidates vying to succeed her as European Central Bank president.

Artificial intelligence fears have ripped through stock and bond markets, but investors in loans and private credit are still playing catch-up.

If inquisitive investors wanted to measure the demand for AI with some actual numbers, one place they might look on the balance sheet is the line reading “remaining performance obligations,” known more simply as the backlog.

Artificial intelligence is a genuinely useful technology, but its impact will be uneven, gradual and impossible to predict. That’s the boring truth, however unlikely it is to go viral.

We’ve seen upper-income consumers power consumption growth over the past year even as middle-income and working-class households become more restrained. The message from the office market is starting to sound similar.

Investors are avoiding beaten-down software stocks, warning that the brutal selloff triggered by fears of displacement by artificial intelligence is likely only just beginning.

Emerging-market assets were little changed on Tuesday as traders weighed the recent optimism toward the asset class against a firmer US dollar and thinner trading volumes due to holidays in major markets.

Treasuries rose on Tuesday as investors bet on the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates at least twice this year and jitters over global technology shares boosted demand for safer assets.

Adani Group plans to invest $100 billion by 2035 to develop green-powered, AI-ready data centers as billionaire Gautam Adani seeks to capitalize on India’s bid to emerge as a hub for artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

Thrive Capital, the venture capital firm founded by Josh Kushner, has raised more than $10 billion — its largest fund ever, giving the firm an expanded war chest to invest in areas ranging from artificial intelligence applications and infrastructure to space, robotics and life sciences.

Big Tech keeps raising its spending plans for artificial intelligence infrastructure, yet shares of Nvidia Corp., one of the biggest beneficiaries of that flood of cash, have been largely stagnant for months.

And so it goes in the world of private credit. Time and again, companies widely regarded as software firms are frequently labeled otherwise by lenders, a practice that raises fresh questions over the full extent of their exposure as the threat from artificial intelligence upends markets and rattles investors.

As Bitcoin struggles to climb out of its current funk, several indicators suggest any breach of the $60,000 level would unleash a fresh bout of extreme turbulence.

If you want to build a technology giant, a car company is a tough place from which to start. In terms of competing in AI and potentially even chips, Tesla is up against the massive budgets of several other Magnificent 7 members, who can, nonetheless, cover their spending with operating cash flow.

All but unnoticed last month, a bipartisan group of legislators introduced a resolution calling for Congress to keep budget deficits at no more than 3% of gross domestic product. Though not enough by itself to solve America’s fiscal problems, the proposal is a rare step in the right direction. It deserves strong support.

Artificial intelligence has made a lot of noise in the stock market lately, with bots from Alphabet Inc. and startups Anthropic and Altruist disrupting businesses from software to financial services.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t only threaten to put herds of software businesses out to pasture. Anthropic PBC’s schooling of its Claude models in financial modelling has also sent a cold shiver down the spines of bankers and analysts.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Morgan Stanley are among leading investment banks hesitating to provide a critical source of financing for US renewables projects.

The ex-Credit Suisse bankers behind Global Infrastructure Partners are best-known for building one of the world’s largest investment firms. Now they’re also forging something else: family offices.

It’s hard not to marvel at how America’s capital markets have rallied to finance the artificial intelligence boom. If all goes as expected, “hyperscalers” such as Meta Platforms Inc. will invest more than $3 trillion through 2030 in data and power infrastructure.

India will need favorable terms to enter into long-term liquefied natural gas purchase deals with the US as the market is highly price sensitive, according to the chief executive officer of the country’s top LNG importer.

Silver’s conductivity makes it essential to photovoltaic modules, where thin printed contacts boost electrical output. About 196 million ounces was used by solar manufacturers last year. That’s equivalent to every gram used in jewelry, and represents about 17% of the global market.

Sell first, ask questions later. That was the stock market’s response to last week’s new artificial-intelligence tools that challenge the software, legal data and media industries. But bargain hunters seeking victims of indiscriminate selling may need patience waiting for a recovery.

Bitcoin has just drawn fresh support from some of its largest holders, though the return of demand remains narrow enough to raise doubts about whether it marks a recovery or mere damage control.

Market pros increasingly think the punishment of software stocks over the past few weeks went too far, creating new bargains in shares that were beaten down in an indiscriminate selloff.

Clashes between global powers will fuel further market swings over the coming year, according to a JPMorgan Chase & Co. survey, with developments in artificial intelligence also top of traders’ minds.

As Wall Street awaits a potentially consequential US employment report, some investors are counting on bad news for the economy turning into good news for stocks.

In what is shaping up to be another blockbuster year, Asia’s markets are outpacing peers in the US and Europe, drawing global investors as extreme swings rattle assets from tech stocks to metals.

US equity markets are moving more money than ever before, blowing past $1 trillion in shares traded each day as heavy volume becomes the new norm.

Alphabet Inc. has this week embarked on the next leg of its debt program to meet the voracious funding needs of its artificial intelligence program. Nothing quite signifies global domination like issuing bonds with ease across all of the world’s major bond markets and at a range of maturities, including the ultra-long arena that’s typically reserved for the most favored of borrowers.

For months, investors have been growing increasingly anxious about how artificial intelligence will potentially transform the economy. Last week, those concerns suddenly spilled over into the stock market.

US stocks were muted on Tuesday as investors examined the first of several key economic data releases this week in an attempt to find clues on the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate path.

The tech sector’s once relentless push higher in the US stock market has turned into a topsy-turvy ride, forcing investors to seek calmer waters where stodgy, old-economy companies ply their trades.

Alphabet Inc. is looking to raise about $15 billion from a US high-grade dollar bond sale, according to people with knowledge of the matter, adding to a borrowing spree by companies at the forefront of the artificial intelligence investment boom.

Hedge funds are betting on more pound weakness as UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s future hangs in the balance.

US initial public offerings are poised to rebound this year, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. strategists said, citing tailwinds including a solid economic backdrop, rising boardroom confidence and supportive monetary policy.

Markets are efficient after all. This does not mean that prices are always “correct,” just that they generally reflect the available information. When investors learn that software firms’ products may be displaced by AI, their prices fall, as they did last week.

For the last year, any discussion of the obesity-drug market has come with an asterisk: Everything will change once pill versions of the popular GLP-1 drugs arrive. Those potentially cheaper alternative to injectables could mean a larger slice of the millions of Americans with obesity will try out the medicine.

The S&P 500 Index is in the midst of a tug-of-war. Companies are beating earnings per share estimates by significant margins and are set to deliver impressive 12% growth this reporting season.

The semiconductor industry will reach $1 trillion in revenue this year for the first time ever, fueled by artificial intelligence and the spread of computer chips to virtually every part of the economy.

Emerging market assets are heading for their worst week in more than two months, after increasingly volatile markets from commodities to technology stocks roiled investor sentiment.

Four of the biggest US technology companies together have forecast capital expenditures that will reach about $650 billion in 2026 — a mind-boggling tide of cash earmarked for new data centers and all the gear housed within them.

On an evening in late September, a few dozen wealth managers gathered at a $63 million French château-style mansion owned by Paris Hilton and venture capitalist Carter Reum in the exclusive Los Angeles enclave of Beverly Park.

The problem of housing affordability is much bigger than insufficient supply; it’s a mismatch with demand. And that demand is driven by income inequality that has seen soaring income growth at the top and tepid growth (or even stagnation) in the middle.

Anthropic is releasing a new version of its most powerful AI model that’s designed to carry out financial research, days after the company’s push into legal services upended the stocks of legacy software makers.

US stocks continued to slide on Thursday as technology shares fell and private jobs data revived worries of an economic slowdown.

The unrelenting selloff in software shares has left tech investors antsy enough that they’re starting to pony up for protection against yet another steep slide.

All eyes will be Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud business when the technology giant reports earnings on Thursday, after shares of Microsoft Corp. plunged last week due in part to slowing growth at its key cloud-computing platform.

Vanguard Group Chief Executive Officer Salim Ramji is putting his imprint on the world’s second-largest asset manager by siphoning talent from Wall Street firms to fill key roles.

As the company moves to integrate its Gemini chatbot into more products like Gmail and the Chrome browser, it is rapidly gaining popularity and eating away at ChatGPT’s market lead.

Oil smuggling has been so enormously profitable that no matter how many obstacles Washington and Brussels put up, the barrels kept flowing. With a daily turnover of $1 billion, the black market has been just too attractive.

The US Treasury refrained from any major shift in its debt-issuance strategy, meeting dealers’ expectations in the face of speculation that officials might take steps to bring down longer-term borrowing costs.

Novo Nordisk A/S’s chief executive officer asked investors to stick with him after a dire sales forecast caused a share price rout, saying a surge in prescriptions for cheaper obesity drugs will eventually revive growth.

In an industry numb to eye-watering AI bets, it takes a lot to make a chief executive hesitate. So Nvidia’s Jensen Huang blinking at one such commitment to OpenAI is worthy of notice.

SpaceX has a big head start on the technology of reusable rockets, which drastically lowered launch costs and helped spawn a commercial space industry that is gaining momentum year by year.

Brookfield Asset Management named Connor Teskey chief executive officer, marking the final step in Bruce Flatt’s long-held plans to replace himself at the helm of the $1 trillion asset manager.

President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Narendra Modi took a major step to reset fractured ties with a surprise deal on Monday to slash tariffs, bringing much-needed relief to India’s economy.

Artificial intelligence tops the investment priority list for family offices globally, a survey from JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s private bank shows, though allocations lag and remain concentrated in public equities.

A common proclamation made by tech leaders is that while artificial intelligence will destroy jobs, it will also create many new ones. But what kinds of new careers will AI spark? And, more importantly, will they last?

President Donald Trump formally announced plans to launch a $12 billion critical minerals stockpile, in his latest effort to aid manufacturers while minimizing reliance on Chinese rare earths.

Warren Buffett has a great line on how hard it is to pick winners when major industrial change is afoot. “What you really should have done in 1905 or so, when you saw what was going to happen with the auto, is you should have gone short horses,” the Oracle of Omaha once said.

Crypto’s latest downturn looks different on the surface. There are no spectacular scandals, no bankrupt exchange, no regulatory crackdown. Yet for the industry’s biggest trading platforms, the damage is starting to look uncomfortably familiar.

US stocks advanced on Monday after stronger-than-expected manufacturing data outweighed lingering questions about the interest-rate outlook following President Donald Trump’s decision to pick Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve chair.

Money managers at BlackRock Inc., Bridgewater Associates and Pacific Investment Management Co. are shoring up their portfolios against a fresh bout of inflation.

Reality has a way of catching up with theory eventually, and now it has for Japan, whose long-term bond yields are rising as the yen is depreciating. The Japanese experience, it turns out, is not an excuse to run up lots of debt. It is a cautionary tale.

There are calls in Europe to “sell America” and invest that money at home in response to political tensions over Greenland.

Buying a house is expensive enough these days. But the costs of owning one have been rising, too — not least because of soaring insurance premiums. As policymakers of both parties have made housing affordability a top priority in recent years, they’ve done far too little to address this crisis in the making.

The iconic American manufacturer of commercial aircraft is investing to increase production rates of the 737 Max and the 787. The finish line for certification of two Max variations is in sight this year, and the game-changing 777X is expected to clear regulatory hurdles next year.

Apple Inc. had a very, very merry Christmas. “Unprecedented” demand for the latest iPhone pushed revenue for its top device up 23% year-on-year to a staggering $85.27 billion in the holiday quarter.

While much of the United States is ending January with bitterly cold weather, signs of a thaw are emerging in Florida’s housing market after years of stagnation. This is by no means an “all clear” signal.

If you play it safe and the fund doesn’t generate sufficient returns, it will require more contributions, often from taxpayers. But if you take too much risk, it could also go wrong and leave the fund without enough money. The task requires balancing risk and reward.

Gold surged to a record above $5,500 an ounce, extending a breakneck rally fueled by a weaker dollar and investor flight from sovereign bonds and currencies to a ninth day.

Jerome Powell has two more opportunities to adjust interest rates before his term as Federal Reserve chair ends — and he may not need them.

Apple Inc.’s stock is taking a hit as investors try to assess how much rapidly rising memory prices are eating into its bottom line. Investors will get a peek when the iPhone maker reports its earnings after the close Thursday.

Elon Musk, ever attuned to the political zeitgeist, has updated Tesla Inc.’s mission to “amazing abundance.” It is the kind of hyperbole beloved of investors in the company he runs.

Who could forget those heady days when Microsoft Corp. Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella looked like the smartest man in tech? When ChatGPT emerged in late 2022, his decision to back OpenAI put Nadella’s company at the forefront of the AI boom.

Federal Reserve officials left interest rates unchanged and pointed to improvements in the US economy as they signaled a more cautious approach to potential future adjustments.

Amazon.com Inc. is cutting 16,000 corporate jobs in an effort to remove layers of bureaucracy and “increase ownership,” becoming the latest company to target managers for layoffs in recent years.

Investors wondering about payoffs from the pile of cash being spent on artificial intelligence should get some clues when Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc. post earnings after the close Wednesday.

Over the past year, Tether has quietly become one of the biggest players in the global gold market — the embodiment of a meeting of the crypto and gold worlds whose shared distrust of government debt is a major factor behind the surge in prices to never-before-seen highs above $5,200 an ounce.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is amping up pressure on Governor Kathy Hochul to hike taxes for the richest residents and corporations, asking the state to send billions more in aid to New York City as he faces mounting budget holes.

One frustrating characteristic of the AI boom seems to be that everyone must pay for it, regardless of any interest in using it. For some, it will be through rising utility bills as data centers strain the grid.

The Federal Reserve is widely expected to halt its interest-rate-cutting cycle this week, as a steadier jobs market restores a degree of consensus at the central bank after months of growing division.

Put me down as an AI optimist. Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform the economy and make Americans richer, healthier and more productive. I’d bet money on it — in fact I have, through the shares I own in an index fund, which means I am long the US economy.

Venezuela’s bonds lingered for years in financial purgatory. Investors held them as a lottery-ticket-like bet on the improvement of a dysfunctional country. Most steered clear.

Anthropic PBC is finally having its own ChatGPT moment. A powerful new version of its Claude chatbot can now take actions on a computer, and the broad repercussions of that advance are impossible to predict.

Standard Nuclear Inc., a uranium startup, raised $140 million to boost production of fuel for advanced reactors in an effort to expand the US energy supply chain amid surging interest in fission power.

Blackstone Inc. is planning to hire more people across Asia to tap growing opportunities in private markets, said Ed Huang, the firm’s head of Asia Pacific private wealth.

Investors selling the dollar to buy emerging-market currencies are off to a lucrative start to 2026, with strategists at top banks expecting such strategies to build further on last year’s 18% rally.

An increasingly unstable global geopolitical order has turbocharged stocks of military contractors in recent months. Now, with some of the biggest names in the industry set to report earnings this week, investors are eager for evidence that the rally is rooted in reality.

Mining stocks in Asia and Europe climbed with metals prices as investors rotated into hard assets, driven by a weakening dollar and growing unease over currencies, geopolitics and global fiscal risks.

The best growth opportunities are overwhelmingly found among highly scalable technology and communications companies. Many of them get started with the help of venture-capital funding and are already behemoths when they go public.

By asking New York traders to confirm the price of the Japanese yen against the dollar on Friday, US authorities handed investors yet another reason to sell the greenback.

The Trump administration said it’s canceling almost $30 billion of financing from the Energy Department’s green bank after reviewing transactions approved under former President Joe Biden.

Chinese officials have told the country’s largest tech firms including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. they can prepare orders for Nvidia Corp.’s H200 AI chips, suggesting Beijing is close to formally approving imports of components essential to powering artificial intelligence.

The biggest US banks cut their combined headcount last year by the most in almost a decade as executives sought to keep a lid on costs through what’s typically the biggest expense line item.

Memory and storage stocks are the market’s hottest trade, but investors aren’t sweating the companies’ suddenly elevated valuations as the buildout of artificial intelligence transforms their cyclical nature.

Tokenized shares are conventional assets — stocks, bonds or private loans — whose ownership records are maintained using blockchain software, often with the goal of faster, more automated settlement behind the scenes.

US stocks extended gains on President Donald Trump’s retreat from tariff threats while traders’ appetite for artificial intelligence bets returned.

A quiet but telling shift is unfolding in the crypto derivatives market, as one of the most reliable money-making trades shows signs of breaking down.

Trend-following funds are starting 2026 with fresh momentum, outperforming stocks and bonds after a year of false starts.

Investors are pouring cash into emerging-market funds at a record pace as momentum builds for a rotation out of US assets.

There is a natural human tendency to assume that your generation has it harder than everyone else. Even by those standards, however, baby boomers (and some older millennials) are on the receiving end of an extraordinary amount of resentment.

The $5 trillion hedge fund industry posted its best returns since the Global Financial Crisis last year, a welcoming reprieve for an asset class that has been overshadowed by the rise of private alternatives. Before declaring the worst is over however, boutique funds have one more myth to bust.

Netflix Inc. shares tumbled in early trading Wednesday after giving a disappointing forecast for earnings in the months ahead as it spends more on programming and works to close its $82.7 billion deal with Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.

US mortgage applications for home purchases climbed last week to the highest since January 2023, suggesting a further easing in financing costs is contributing to a thaw in the housing market.

US equities reversed early losses during Donald Trump’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos when the US president said he didn’t want to use excessive force to acquire Greenland

PJM is the name given to the largest regional US electricity grid, stretching from Chicago to the Chesapeake. It is also synonymous with the AI-power surge, being home to Virginia’s ‘datacenter alley’ and seeing recent big increases in bills tied to concerns that the electricity needs of artificial intelligence will swamp supply.

Bitcoin and other digital tokens, once touted as the uncontrolled and decentralized future of money, have proved to be lucrative tools for fraudsters, terrorists and rogue regimes.

Wells Fargo & Co. is moving the headquarters for its wealth-management business to West Palm Beach, becoming the first big bank to run that operation from the heart of the wealth boom in South Florida.

Netflix Inc. reached an amended, all-cash agreement to buy Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.’s studio and streaming business as it battles Paramount Skydance Corp. to acquire one of Hollywood’s most iconic entertainment companies.

As earnings season picks up steam, expectations remain high. Analysts forecast fourth-quarter S&P 500 earnings growth of about 8%, according to Bloomberg Intelligence, with investors focused on themes including artificial intelligence spending, oil-market volatility and tariff risks.

OpenAI is ruling out the more obvious downsides for users of its free and $8-a-month ChatGPT Go tiers who will start seeing ads. Advertisers won’t influence the chatbot’s answers but rather post banners with images at the bottom of the screen.

I have a confession, shameful as it may be for someone who has spent decades studying retirement policy and advising individuals and institutions on how to save for and think about retirement: When I bought my apartment a few years ago, I raided my retirement account for the down payment.

The 10-year Treasury note’s yield is headed for a fifth straight week of minimal change, rivaling its longest stretch of inertia in the past two decades.

President Donald Trump and the governors of several US Northeastern states agreed to push for an emergency wholesale electricity auction that would compel technology companies to effectively fund new power plants.

JPMorgan Asset Management has a new superlative: The firm now hails as the world’s largest issuer of actively managed exchange-traded funds.

Global credit markets are running at their hottest in two decades, prompting some of the world’s biggest money managers including Aberdeen Investments and Pimco to warn against complacency.

Big banks’ share traders are raking it in right now. Sure, stock market indexes have been flying high, but it’s been far from certain in recent years that traditional Wall Street firms would reap the benefits with electronic market makers storming the zone.

Morgan Stanley’s debt bankers increased revenue 93% in the fourth quarter, by far the biggest jump on Wall Street and capping a record year for that business.

Billionaire Stephen Ross aims to position Florida’s Palm Beach County as the next Silicon Valley, calling the region a more business-friendly environment for tech investors and executives than California.

The billionaire Ellison family said this week that it will try to overhaul the board of Warner Bros Discovery Inc. unless the Hollywood studio engages with their $108 billion takeover bid. But winning support in a corporate fight won’t be easy as long as their offer contains holes.

Silver pulled back from a record high as investors took profits after a blistering rally and as the US refrained from imposing import tariffs on critical minerals.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. blew through expectations for equities-trading revenue, posting an all-time Wall Street record of $4.31 billion in the final three months of last year.

US previously owned home sales climbed in December to the fastest pace since 2023, a welcome sign for a housing market that has lacked momentum for several years.

Wall Street loves few things more than a good acronym to describe a trading thesis. Think FANG, FOMO/YOLO and TACO.

Bank of America Corp.’s equity traders posted their best fourth quarter ever as the company reaped the benefits of volatile markets and net interest income topped analysts’ estimates.

Metals extended their dramatic start to the year — with gold, silver, copper and tin all hitting record highs — as investors piled into the commodities as a red-hot alternative to more traditional assets.

Skild AI Inc., a fast-rising startup that makes software to help robots learn to complete tasks, has secured about $1.4 billion in a new funding round that values the company at more than $14 billion, more than triple what it was worth just seven months ago.

Oil briefly rose above $65 a barrel for the first time since November after the US escalated pressure on Iran, while tankers were attacked near a vital terminal for Kazakh crude on Russia’s Black Sea coast.

The outlook for the global energy transition is likely to be more volatile than investors may have expected, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Artificial intelligence infrastructure has been a solid stock market bet over the past year, with many of 2025’s best performers in the S&P 500 Index falling into the category. But the trade is getting volatile as some of the perceived winners start taking hits.

US Treasuries slipped Tuesday as traders looked to December’s inflation data for clues on how quickly the Federal Reserve may resume lowering borrowing costs this year.

Investors’ newfound affinity for companies that benefit most from an accelerating economy is in for a tough test as the latest earnings season kicks off.

Nvidia Corp. plans to invest $1 billion over five years in a new laboratory with Eli Lilly & Co., aiming to speed up the use of artificial intelligence in the pharmaceutical industry.

According to just about every significant economic indicator, including the December jobs numbers released Friday, the US economy is doing fine. Not great, mind you: Job growth stalled in 2025. But unemployment is low, gross domestic product growth is solid, and inflation is seemingly trending downward.

Going public used to be a sign that a company had made it. In the last decade or so, however, IPOs started to become a little … cringe.

Meta Platforms Inc. has appointed a former top adviser to US President Donald Trump to a newly created senior management role focused on partnering with governments and investors on AI.

The US economy seems to be in the throes of one of its biggest bursts of productivity in decades, weighing on business labor costs and hastening the disinflation process.

The hottest corner of the stock market in 2025 remains scorching in the new year, but the relentless momentum has some Wall Street pros wondering if a reversal is coming.

It’s been eight years since Venezuela stopped paying its debt. But traders are making a wager that the ouster of Nicolas Maduro will deliver windfalls to holders of the country’s $59 billion of bonds.

The key in both approaches will be to cleverly avoid the ire of regulators by trying not to trigger outbound investment rules when they buy Chinese firms, and by using hiring-and-licensing deals — known in the industry as acquihires — to avoid antitrust scrutiny when they grab competitors in the US and Europe.

Retail traders have extended a buying spree into the new year, following a record-setting performance in 2025, an analysis from JPMorgan Securities’ Arun Jain shows.

Stablecoin transactions reached unprecedented heights last year, buoyed by favorable policy in the US under pro-crypto President Donald Trump.

If you can’t get what you want, get what you need. It’s taken the best part of two years, but JPMorgan Chase & Co. has finally helped Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Apple Inc. do just that with the tech giant’s credit card.

A stunning rally in Venezuelan assets after US forces removed president Nicolas Maduro from power has showcased how unprepared the local market is to absorb the new wave of attention.

US equities edged higher on Friday, as December’s payrolls report did little to change the outlook for leaving interest rates on hold. Traders remain on alert for a possible Supreme Court ruling on whether President Donald Trump’s tariffs are legal.

Bets on artificial intelligence companies have dominated US equity markets for three years, powering a 78% gain. A growing number of investors are now wagering that run, led by the Magnificent Seven, is about to end.

President Donald Trump is set to outline his vision for rebuilding Venezuela’s battered oil sector Friday in a meeting with representatives from 17 energy companies, including crude producers, refiners and commodity traders.

Alphabet Inc. has overtaken Apple Inc. to become the second-most valuable company by market capitalization, a reflection of how the Google parent has emerged as one of the most significant winners of artificial intelligence.

The health-care corner of the US equity market has traditionally been viewed as defensive, thanks to steady growth and healthy dividend yields among the industry’s stalwarts. That narrative is changing.

Money managers like Blackstone Inc. and Pretium who binged on single-family rentals in the wake of the financial crisis took blow after blow as housing prices shot up. But the cohort has since cooled its buying, and the attacks slowed.

Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran said he is looking for 150 basis points of interest-rate cuts this year to boost the labor market.

US labor productivity accelerated in the third quarter to the strongest pace in two years, adding to evidence that efficiency gains are suppressing inflationary pressures from wages.

SpaceX’s dominance of rocket launches and satellite broadband internet service was reaffirmed last month with news of an insider share sale that would value the company at $800 billion. There was even speculation that Elon Musk’s space venture might sell shares to the public this year with a target valuation of almost double that amount.

The rich are increasingly looking for properties that can accommodate extended families, according to the 2026 Luxury Outlook report by Sotheby’s International Realty. Millennials and Gen Xers are driving the shift as they search for homes that work for both young children and aging parents.

Alaska Air Group Inc. is ordering 110 Boeing Co. aircraft, laying the groundwork for a global network with the largest investment in new planes in the airline’s history.

The speculation that has pushed its notional market capitalization beyond $20 billion — and that of all pure cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, to more than $2 trillion — is a social phenomenon that could end as suddenly as it arose.

Tesla enters 2026 grappling with its loss of the global EV sales title to BYD and a persistent production surplus that has strained profit margins. Despite growth in its energy storage division, the company faces significant underutilization of its manufacturing capacity as premium vehicle sales lag behind previous years.

Bitcoin options are showing that traders are setting their sights on a return to the $100,000 price level amid optimism that investors will turn back to digital assets following the crypto market’s crash in the fourth quarter.

Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Officer Jensen Huang said that the company’s highly anticipated Rubin data center processors are in production and customers will soon be able to try out the technology.

Morgan Stanley filed for Bitcoin and Solana exchange-traded funds, marking its first foray into the popular corner of the funds world two years after the explosion of crypto-focused ETFs in the US brought them into the mainstream.

Taxes are a necessary fact of life. Although no one likes paying them, and they divert resources and cause waste, governments need revenue to provide essential (and some not-so-essential) services.

To resist the dollar’s assault and preserve monetary sovereignty, China has asked banks to start paying interest on e-CNY holdings in customer wallets from Jan. 1. Amid this superpower rivalry, nations must strive to preserve their unit of account — dollar, euro, yen, or yuan — from becoming a casualty of technological dominance.

President Donald Trump has promised to address housing-market dysfunction and a lack of affordability in 2026. While we don’t know what the White House has planned, previous talk has included a (much criticized) suggestion for 50-year mortgages and exhortations to builders to do their duty and build more housing.

Cathie Wood’s ARK Blockchain & Fintech Innovation ETF delivered a standout 29% return in 2025, defying an industry downturn by stretching the definition of “financial technology.”

Hedge funds are racing to Caracas to scout assets following the high-stakes removal of Nicolás Maduro by the Trump administration. Investors view the potential reintegration of the oil-rich nation into the Western financial system as a historic opportunity for restructuring debt and infrastructure.

US oil stocks jumped in premarket trading on Monday after President Donald Trump pledged to revive the Venezuelan energy sector following the capture of Nicolás Maduro over the weekend.

In 2026, AI hectacorns might go public. That process, historians would tell you, was a harbinger for the dot-com bust as hopeless balance sheets were ignored in favor of overhyped promises that eventually collapsed.

US initial public offerings delivered underwhelming results in 2025 as equity-market volatility and increasing scrutiny around themes such as crypto and artificial intelligence hit some of the year’s most high-profile listings.

From an AI-fueled stock rally to China shaking off US tariff threats and earning a record trade surplus, 2025 was full of economic marvels. Don’t expect debates over innovation and economic disruptions to disappear in 2026.

Major hedge funds achieved historic returns in 2025 as tariff-driven market volatility created ideal conditions for macro and multi-strategy trading.

Michael Saylor has long noted that Bitcoin’s volatility “is a feature, not a bug” when pitching his cryptocurrency accumulator Strategy Inc.

Emerging-market stocks posted a strong start to 2026, following a $7.2 trillion annual rally, as Asia’s expanding role in artificial intelligence lifted Chinese technology shares to their biggest gains since September and pushed benchmarks in South Korea and Taiwan to record highs.

The S&P 500 Index climbed at the open on Friday as investors bought tech stocks ahead of next week’s massive CES conference and cheered signs President Donald Trump was easing up on tariff policies.

Gold and silver rose as 2026 trading kicked off, building on their best annual performances since 1979.

US Treasuries rose on the first trading day of 2026, getting off to a positive start after notching their best annual return in five years.

Investors were rationally exuberant in 2025. US consumers remained remarkably resilient, keeping the world's largest economy out of recession. The tariff blizzard waxed and waned, eventually settling at levies still compatible with maintaining global growth, albeit at an anemic level.

Trillions of dollars hang in the balance of two questions that dominated this year and loom perilously large over the next. “Will the artificial intelligence bubble burst?” and “Will China beat the US?”

Step aside, artificial intelligence. Another transformative technology with the potential to reshape industries and reorder geopolitical power is finally moving out of the lab: quantum.

Like previous generations, most young people are going to end up owning homes. The housing market is in transition, and despite the current lack of affordability, there’s compelling evidence that we’re grinding back toward more normal levels.

At the big banks and the boutique investment shops, an optimistic consensus has taken hold: the US stock market will rally in 2026 for a fourth straight year, marking the longest winning streak in nearly two decades.

Bitcoin briefly topped the $90,000 mark on Monday before tumbling, leaving traders waiting on a potential breakout after the token missed a Santa rally that sent stocks to record highs.

SoftBank Group Corp. agreed to acquire private equity firm DigitalBridge Group Inc. in a deal valuing the data center investor at $4 billion including debt.

When the year began, a billionaire with close ties to the White House was a lock for the most newsworthy tech titan of 2025. But 12 chaotic months later, Larry Ellison, not Elon Musk, can justifiably lay claim to the title.

Bitcoin’s 30% slide from its all-time high is creating conditions financial advisers say are likely driving more tax-loss harvesting in digital assets than in previous years.

Nvidia Corp. agreed to a licensing deal with artificial intelligence startup Groq, furthering its investments in companies connected to the AI boom and gaining the right to add a new type of technology to its products.

Gold, silver and platinum jumped to all-time highs to extend a historic end-of-year rally for precious metals, with support from escalating geopolitical tensions and US dollar weakness.

What will 2026 be like? There are reasons to be optimistic, as many were a year ago. Here are five of them.

Intel Corp. shares fell in premarket trading Wednesday after a report said that Nvidia Corp. halted a test to use Intel’s production process to make advanced chips.

Copper extended a powerful December rally that’s carried prices for the industrial metal to unprecedented highs above $12,000 a ton on fears over a tighter global market in 2026.

Planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions kept rising in 2025 and country pledges to cut them are nowhere near where they need to be to avoid catastrophic climate change, but there were silver linings too.