Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
President Donald Trump is pitching a sweeping plan to channel roughly $100 billion of private oil money into Venezuela, casting it as a win for U.S. energy security and a lifeline for the country’s shattered industry. Inside the room with the executives who would have to write those checks, however, the mood is far more…
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok is at the center of a storm over sexually explicit image manipulation and a new paywall that critics say solves nothing. After viral “undressing” deepfakes triggered political outrage, X responded by locking Grok’s image tools behind a subscription, a move that has been condemned as both cosmetic and offensive…
The idea that Venezuela is quietly sitting on a secret Bitcoin fortune worth $60 billion has rocketed around crypto circles, promising a geopolitical plot twist and a potential windfall for whoever controls it. The story is irresistible: a sanctioned petrostate, a digital escape hatch, and a stash that would rival the largest corporate treasuries in…
The fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer in Minneapolis has collided with a fragile budget process, turning a single operation into a test of how far Congress is willing to go to remake the nation’s immigration enforcement machinery. As the next funding deadline approaches, lawmakers are openly weighing…
The United States has entered 2026 with a debt load that would have been unthinkable a decade ago and a bond market facing a powerful new competitor. With federal obligations now above $38 trillion and a surge of corporate borrowing tied to artificial intelligence and data centers, the race for investor cash is intensifying just…
The trade war that once felt like an abstraction on balance sheets has finally hit the bar top. A $9 billion bourbon powerhouse built in Kentucky is now cutting production, closing facilities, and shedding jobs as tariffs collide with a global demand slump and a domestic shift away from heavy drinking. What looked like a…
Hiring in the United States has shifted from a sprint to a shuffle, and the drag is no longer confined to a few struggling sectors. After a year in which job creation slowed to a crawl, the latest data show a labor market that is still adding positions, but at a pace that feels more…
The United States is again paying for the fallout of its own trade brinkmanship. After years of tariff crossfire with China, soybean prices have sagged, export volumes have struggled to recover, and the federal government is now rolling out a fresh $12 billion bailout to keep farm balance sheets from collapsing. The rescue package is…
Gold’s latest rally has emboldened some of the market’s most aggressive forecasters, with one strategist arguing that the metal could surge to levels that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago. The boldest call now on the table is that bullion could climb past $8,000 per ounce by 2028, a move that would radically reshape…
The United States has not seen a trade gap this small since the aftermath of the global financial crisis, and the shift is arriving for unusual reasons. A surge in gold shipments, a pullback in pharmaceutical imports, and softer demand for foreign goods have combined to push the monthly deficit in goods and services to…