Cuba has run short of the oil that powers its electric plants, and it is replacing that supply with Chinese solar panels — fast enough that China now sends the island roughly 40 times the volume of panels it sent three years ago.

Chinese exports of solar panels to Cuba ran about $3 million in 2023. That figure reached $117 million in 2025, according to the energy research group Ember. Cuba has built dozens of solar parks with Chinese investment, under an agreement to open 92 across the country by 2028. Imports of Chinese photovoltaic panels have risen more than 1,800% in five years.

The turn toward renewable energy has helped the island absorb increased pressure from the United States, though it has not stopped the grid from failing.

How the oil disappeared

The crisis stems from a U.S.-imposed oil blockade enacted after January 2026, when Washington ousted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela had long been Cuba’s primary oil supplier, and imports from Mexico were halted as well under U.S. pressure. Washington authorized a single Russian tanker carrying 100,000 tons of crude in March; those reserves are long exhausted. Domestic production covers a fraction of demand, and emergency diesel generators have become largely unusable for lack of fuel.

The grid was fragile before any of that. Cuba’s electricity system runs on fuel-oil, diesel and gas thermoelectric plants, and most of the seven main plants forming the backbone of the national grid have operated for more than 40 years. Peak-hour deficits routinely exceed 2,000 megawatts against demand near 3,100 megawatts.

The result has been repeated total failures. The island suffered its sixth nationwide blackout of the year on the night of August 2, the eleventh since late 2024. There were two islandwide collapses in March and three in July, along with several partial outages, and rolling blackouts now run more than 20 hours a day in places. The Cuban government attributes the crisis to the U.S. embargo and oil restrictions; independent analysts point to a lack of domestic investment and poor economic management as the main drivers, compounded by chronic maintenance shortfalls.

What solar can and cannot do

Solar accounts for only about 9% of Cuba’s electricity generation, because the aging grid cannot efficiently absorb new capacity and lacks battery storage. Panels without storage produce during daylight hours and nothing after sunset — which is precisely when household demand peaks.

That is the limit on the strategy, and it is a physical one. Cuba can keep installing capacity, but until it can store the output and stabilize the network that carries it, the panels reduce daytime fuel burn rather than end the blackouts.

China’s side of the trade

China controls close to 80% of the global solar supply chain and has positioned itself as Cuba’s leading renewable energy partner while working through its own industrial overcapacity. That last clause is the commercial logic. Chinese manufacturers built far more panel capacity than global demand absorbs, and placing that output — through financing, donations and state-backed projects — serves both an industrial and a diplomatic purpose.

Beijing has extended other support as well, including $80 million and 60,000 tons of rice approved by Xi Jinping.

A crack in the state’s grip

The most interesting development for business readers is what the fuel shortage has forced Havana to permit. The government recently authorized its first foreign-backed fuel import venture and allowed nearly 200 Cuban businesses to take part in wholesale fuel distribution — a cautious opening of an energy sector the state has controlled tightly for decades.

Scarcity did what ideology would not. A government that could supply fuel through state channels had no reason to license private distributors; one that cannot has every reason.

For American companies, direct opportunity remains foreclosed by sanctions. The relevant lesson runs the other way. An economy whose grid fails eleven times in twenty months is a live demonstration of what happens when generating capacity ages past its service life and no capital goes in behind it — a scenario that utilities in the United States are now arguing about in the context of data center demand. The difference is capital availability, not physics.

Cuba’s solar buildout is real, and it is among the fastest anywhere. It is also a country installing the future while the present keeps going dark.

JBizNews Desk | Havana

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Jamie Dimon has put a condition on something most Americans treat as permanent: the dollar sits at the center of the global financial system because the United States has the strongest economy and the strongest military, and it stays there only as long as both remain true.

“If we’re not the strongest military in 25 years and the strongest economy, we won’t be the reserve currency either,” the JPMorgan Chase chief executive said on PBS’ “Firing Line with Margaret Hoover,” which aired over the weekend. “The world will be fragmented, and it’ll be very dangerous for us.”

Dimon framed the two as inseparable: to be safe, have the best military in the world, and to have the best military, have the best economy. He noted that reserve-currency status has historically followed the leading power that upholds rule of law and open capital flows, and said that if the U.S. loses its lead through debt, deficits or mismanagement, the status follows.

The trend line is already moving. The dollar accounts for about 57% of global foreign-exchange reserves, down from roughly 70% at the turn of the century. IMF data puts the decline at 72% in 2001 to 57% today.

That is erosion, not collapse, and the distinction matters for anyone doing business in dollars. Reserve-currency transitions run slowly — the British pound’s decline from dominance unfolded across roughly four decades, from the end of World War I to the post-Bretton Woods era, even though American economic supremacy was evident well before any formal shift.

Economists put less weight on the military piece than Dimon does. Eswar Prasad of the Brookings Institution told Fortune that institutions and economic dynamism — how quickly an economy innovates and reallocates resources — are far more important to reserve-currency status than an economy’s size or military power. He added that weakening U.S. economic and military strength, along with erosion of domestic institutions and geopolitical influence, will hurt dollar dominance, but the absence of any serious rival will prevent the dollar from being displaced as the dominant payment and reserve currency.

Dimon is not making the argument abstractly. His comments come alongside JPMorgan’s $1.5 trillion Security and Resiliency Initiative, aimed at strengthening U.S. domestic manufacturing, energy and defense capacity. He argued corporate America must partner with government on strategic vulnerabilities now, pointing to American reliance on potential adversaries for missile components and rare earths, and said the national interest matters more than his own bank — because if the country does poorly, JPMorgan suffers. He closed with the line that fighting a war is very expensive, and losing one is the most expensive.

For companies and consumers, reserve status is not a matter of prestige. It is why the U.S. can borrow at scale in its own currency, why oil and most commodity contracts settle in dollars, and why American importers face no exchange-rate friction on the majority of world trade. Losing that position would strip Washington of significant geopolitical leverage and push domestic borrowing costs higher, which reaches ordinary borrowers through mortgages and consumer credit.

Some think Dimon’s timeline is generous. Analyst Philip Pilkington argued that fallout from the Iran war could halve it, accelerating a shift toward a multi-polar monetary order within a decade, with energy shocks doing more lasting damage to the postwar financial architecture than the military strikes themselves.

The Federal Reserve continues to affirm the dollar’s strong international standing, and the Atlantic Council puts its share of global reserves near 58%. The U.S. Dollar Index is up 1.42% year to date, down 1.28% over the past month and roughly flat over the year. Market positioning shows continued appetite for gold as a hedge against long-run currency risk.

The debt arithmetic gives Dimon’s warning its edge. Reserve status is what makes large deficits financeable at low cost; large deficits are among the things that could erode reserve status. That circularity is the substance beneath the soundbite, and it is why the CBO’s revised $2.1 trillion deficit and Dimon’s 25-year warning are the same story told at different speeds.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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David Ellison has given California’s attorney general a deadline: agree to settlement talks over the Warner Bros. Discovery merger, or Paramount starts leaving the state.

Ellison told Paramount’s senior executives last week he is prepared to relocate the company — and Warner Bros. too, if the merger closes — unless Attorney General Rob Bonta agrees to negotiate a settlement in the antitrust case brought by 12 states. He said the exit process would begin Oct. 1 if talks have not started, and that the Paramount Skydance board has approved the move. Paramount declined to comment.

Leaving California could save Paramount Skydance roughly $500 million a year in taxes and potentially raise another $4 billion from selling its studio lots. That is the leverage, and it is aimed at a state that counts film production among its signature industries.

The date is not arbitrary. Oct. 1 is when Paramount begins accruing a “ticking fee” payable to Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders of $7 million a day. With the antitrust trial scheduled to start March 2, 2027, Paramount would owe roughly $1.2 billion to WBD shareholders by the time that trial is expected to conclude. The fee was written into the deal as a $0.25 per share quarterly accrual beginning after Sept. 30, 2026, alongside a $7 billion regulatory termination fee if the transaction fails on regulatory grounds.

If the state attorneys general succeed in blocking the merger, Paramount pays that $7 billion. The March trial date was itself a blow — it means the case may not resolve until next summer or later, with the ticking fee running the whole time. Paramount had asked the judge to start trial Nov. 4, 2026; the states and the Writers Guild asked for April 5, 2027.

Bonta’s answer was blunt. He called the planned exit an attempt to blackmail the state into letting an illegal deal through, writing on X that Paramount has lost the plot as it keeps losing in court and that the tactic did not work on the eve of the July lawsuit and will not work now. Bonta has not said what concessions would take the suit off the table, but has said any remedy would have to be structural — divestitures — rather than behavioral commitments like production quotas.

The underlying complaint is about market structure. The 12-state coalition alleges a combined Paramount-Warner Bros. would unlawfully reduce competition in basic cable and theatrical distribution, while the Writers Guild’s separate suit argues it would harm the market for writers. Speculation that the states might drop the case if Paramount spun off CNN has been denied by Bonta.

Ellison has been countering the theatrical argument directly, securing backing from two of the largest theater chains to support his commitment to release 30 films a year under the combined company. He has also pointed to 90 series planned from Paramount’s television studios in 2026 and a $1.5 billion increase in content investment made before the deal was signed.

Ellison remains confident the $110 billion transaction will close. He had hoped to have completed the takeover by now and instead faces a legal fight that could push the closing into 2027 or unravel it.

For California, the threat lands on a film and television sector already losing production to Georgia, New Mexico and overseas. For shareholders on both sides, the calculation is narrower: every month of delay costs $210 million in ticking fees, and the alternative to closing is a $7 billion check. Moving the headquarters does not address the antitrust claim — it changes who bears the cost of the fight.

JBizNews Desk | Los Angeles

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If you haven’t seen it already, please go into the New York Times archives — that’s right, I’m recommending the Times — for an article by Thomas Edsall entitled “A Working-Class Party Without Many Workers.” Mr. Edsall is a former Washington Post columnist. And he wrote a very important piece. In a nutshell, he uses polling data that non-college educated people do not agree with the Democratic Socialists of America on key issues such as open borders, defunding the police, abolishing ICE, and support for an array of transgender rights.

What’s more, using the DSA’s own surveys, they are 85 percent non-Hispanic whites. Only 9 percent are Hispanics, and only 5 percent are Asian Americans. And 4 percent are blacks. And only 4 percent of the members held blue-collar jobs.

So you have to ask yourself, while comrade Abdul El-Sayed, comrade Francesca Hong, comrade Zohran Mamdani, and comrade Hasan Piker may claim to speak for the working class, the reality is that they don’t speak for the working class. 

Let me say right here there is an important political leader who speaks for the working class and their values, his name is President Trump. If you find this ironic, since the DSA has Trump Derangement Syndrome to the tenth power or more, it’s nonetheless a political fact of life.

Now, Mr. Edsall notes that the Democratic Party writ large has positive views of socialism, and that helps explain why many of the leading Democrats welcome the comrade socialists into their big tent, with the exception of Secretary Hillary Clinton and Senators John Fetterman and Joe Manchin. Yet not many.

In the main, the Democratic party regulars are welcoming the socialists, and the socialists are going to be a big open target of Republicans in the coming midterm elections. At a minimum, the socialists are going to give the GOP the Senate. I can’t yet vouch for the House. Yet Michigan and Maine and perhaps some others are going to go Republican.

It would be great if the GOP had a tax-cutting message to help working folks going into these elections, because yelling at socialism and communism may not be enough, especially to carry the House. The key point, though, is that while the socialists say they speak for the working folks, they don’t really have many working folks behind them at all. And Mr. Trump’s free enterprise policies are doing very well, thank you very much.

A Cambridge, Massachusetts biotech has put an experimental gene therapy into a deaf child’s inner ear for the first time, aiming at the single most common genetic cause of deafness in the world.

Skylark Bio came out of stealth Tuesday to announce it has dosed the first patient in its trial of SKY-GJB2, a one-time treatment for children born deaf because of mutations in the GJB2 gene.

Here is what the mutation does. The GJB2 gene tells the body how to build a protein called connexin 26, which sits between cells in the inner ear and lets them pass signals to one another. When the gene is broken, the protein does not work, and sound never gets converted into a signal the brain can use. Mutations in GJB2 are the most common cause of inherited, non-syndromic hearing loss worldwide, and the resulting deafness is usually present at birth.

The therapy is an attempt to fix that at the source. SKY-GJB2 uses an engineered adeno-associated virus to carry a working copy of the GJB2 gene directly into the affected cells of the inner ear, treating the genetic cause rather than compensating for it the way a cochlear implant does. In the trial, called SONIX, each child receives a single infusion into one ear through a purpose-built one-time-use device, the SKY-CAT.

The trial

SONIX is enrolling ten children: six between nine months and two years old, and four between two and seven. Participants must carry two pathogenic variants in GJB2 and have hearing loss of at least 85 decibels in the treated ear. The primary focus is safety of both the therapy and the delivery device, with hearing improvement measured alongside it.

The company is small and recently capitalized. Skylark has raised about $40.9 million across a single round, and is led by chief executive Jodi A. Cook, with Shawn Harriman as chief scientific officer. In June it signed a manufacturing and development partnership with Forge Biologics to produce the AAV vector under cGMP conditions for the clinical program. A second program, SKY-PEN, targets SLC26A4-related hearing loss, or Pendred syndrome, and the company says it also has an undisclosed central nervous system program.

Why the market opened up

None of this would be happening on this timeline without what Regeneron proved in April. The FDA granted accelerated approval to Otarmeni, the first gene therapy ever approved for genetic hearing loss, based on a trial in which 80% of participants hit the primary hearing endpoint and 42% reached normal hearing with longer follow-up. Otarmeni treats a different mutation — in the OTOF gene — an ultra-rare condition affecting roughly 50 newborns a year in the United States. The therapy came to Regeneron through its 2023 acquisition of Decibel Therapeutics.

Regeneron’s commercial decision is the part the industry is still digesting. The company is providing Otarmeni at no cost to clinically eligible U.S. patients, though out-of-pocket costs for the administration procedure can vary. That came bundled with an agreement with the U.S. government to tie current and future drug prices to those in other developed countries. For a rare-disease population of 50 births a year, giving the product away was a defensible trade. GJB2 is a different arithmetic. Skylark describes it as affecting tens of thousands of patients — a population large enough that pricing will be a real commercial question rather than a goodwill gesture.

A three-country race

Skylark is not running alone. France’s Sensorion raised €60 million in January, including a €20 million strategic investment from Sanofi, specifically to push its GJB2 candidate SENS-601 toward regulatory clearance and first-cohort enrollment, with cash runway extended into the first half of 2027. Chinese groups are pursuing the same target. Being first into humans, which Skylark now is, matters for the obvious reason in biotech: the first credible efficacy data sets the terms for everyone else’s financing.

Skylark’s chief executive indicated at a scientific conference in May that early data would arrive by the end of this year. That is the date to watch. A safe dose in one child proves very little on its own; the question is whether a child who has never heard anything begins to respond to sound, and whether that holds.

For investors in the hearing space, the sequence is now established: an approval that showed regulators will clear these therapies, a manufacturing base being built out, and a much larger patient population entering the clinic behind it.

JBizNews Desk | Boston

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Domino’s is putting its own name on a new pizza as the restaurant chain looks to give customers a personal-size option built for individual tastes.

The Michigan-based pizza giant said Tuesday that it will launch the Domino, a Detroit-style pizza made for one, at restaurants nationwide on Aug. 31.

Shaped like the company’s red-and-blue domino logo, the new pizza is cut into two slices and allows customers to choose their sauce and add up to three toppings.

The company is positioning the product as an alternative for customers who want different toppings when ordering pizza with family or friends, as well as for individual meals and on-the-go occasions.

“The Domino fills a gap in our portfolio,” said Joe Jordan, chief operating officer and president of Domino’s U.S., and incoming CEO. “When everyone wants something different, traditional pizza falls short. The Domino lets every person build the exact pizza they want.”

Domino’s said the pizza uses its buttery-flavored pan dough with Parmesan cheese baked into the crust. It comes with two layers of cheese and is finished with the chain’s garlic seasoning.

The company said consumers in independent testing rated the Domino as one of the most delicious products it has introduced. Domino’s did not provide additional details in its announcement about the testing methodology or sample size.

FOX Business reached out to Domino’s for additional details about the product’s development, consumer testing, pricing and potential impact on franchisees.

The Domino will also be included in the chain’s Mix and Match promotion, allowing customers to select a two-topping version as one of two or more eligible menu items for $6.99 each. Prices may be higher at some locations, according to the company.

The launch comes as Domino’s operates a global network of more than 22,500 stores across more than 90 markets.

Domino’s reported more than $20.6 billion in global retail sales during the four quarters ended June 14. Independent franchise owners operated 99% of its stores at the end of the second quarter.

The company has also leaned heavily into digital ordering in its home market. More than 85% of Domino’s U.S. retail sales in 2025 came through digital channels, according to the company.

President Donald Trump said the United States has three ways to force an end to the Iran war, and that the one he likes best requires no new military action at all: let Iran run out of money.

Trump laid out the options in a pre-taped interview with Real America’s Voice that aired early Tuesday. The first is to do nothing and wait, on the argument that Iran’s economy fails on its own. The second is to strike Iran hard. The third, in his framing, is to beat Tehran economically — and he described that as something Washington is already doing.

The line that carried the interview was his description of the American position over Iran’s blocked assets. Trump said the United States controls the regime’s money, that there is a lot of it, and that he is Iran’s banker. He also said Iran cannot borrow.

In plain terms, that refers to Iranian government funds and reserves frozen in overseas accounts under U.S. sanctions, plus the banking restrictions that keep Iran from moving oil revenue through the international financial system. Tehran can still sell oil to buyers willing to take the risk, but converting those sales into usable hard currency is the choke point. Releasing blocked assets is one of the conditions Iran has attached to reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

Trump’s claims about how bad things are inside Iran should be read with care. He said the country is running 300 percent inflation, that its currency has almost no value, and that soldiers are not being paid and are leaving. Iranian inflation is severe, but his figures run higher than what his own administration officials have been giving reporters. That gap matters for anyone trying to judge how close the pressure campaign is to producing a result.

The timing of the interview also matters. It follows Trump’s Truth Social post on Monday saying he would demand Iran pay compensation for people the regime killed, as part of any future talks. That demand came after Tehran refused to reopen Hormuz unless Washington agreed to a list of conditions: lifting the naval blockade of Iranian ports, lifting sanctions, releasing blocked assets, withdrawing U.S. troops, and paying war damages. Trump’s compensation demand answers that with a mirror-image claim of his own.

Wire coverage read the week as a shift rather than a new plan. The pivot back to financial pressure comes as U.S. stockpiles of key weapons have thinned and as stop-start talks appear to have stalled again — and sanctions are a slow instrument, built to grind over years rather than end a shooting war on a schedule.

The enforcement side of the economic strategy is running in the meantime. Central Command said on Aug. 9 that U.S. forces had redirected 55 commercial vessels, disabled two ships and boarded two others under the naval blockade of Iranian ports, which was reinstated on July 14 after the ceasefire collapsed in early July. Those numbers are the practical expression of what Trump described in the interview: not strikes, but a cordon around Iran’s ability to move cargo and get paid for it.

The military option he named second is not hypothetical either. Central Command struck Iranian military targets for 13 straight days beginning July 11 and ending July 23, and Trump said on July 24 the military was ready for a far larger attack.

For businesses, the significance is what all this says about how long the disruption lasts. A negotiated reopening of Hormuz would restore the shipping route that normally carries about a fifth of the world’s traded oil. An economic-attrition strategy, by design, does not have an end date — it works by outlasting the other side. Companies with exposure to Gulf shipping, energy costs or Asia-Europe freight are pricing the difference between those two paths every day.

Trump gave no timetable for choosing among the three, and his description of Iranian negotiators as dishonest — he said they agree to terms and then deny it publicly — suggests he does not expect a fast diplomatic close. The two sides signed a memorandum of understanding on June 17, nearly four months after U.S. strikes began on Feb. 28, and it broke down in July.

What Trump is betting is that Iran’s finances give out before the world’s patience with closed shipping lanes does. Nothing in Tuesday’s interview indicated which way that race is running.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Israel provided the US administration with intelligence about the Iranian threat against US President Donald Trump, which included the possibility of using shoulder-fired missiles against Air Force One, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday evening, citing a US official.

According to the report, following the threat, Trump initially boarded, in full view of the media, an aircraft that had previously served as Air Force One. Shortly afterward, however, a deception operation began: The president was placed inside an airport catering truck and driven out of sight of reporters to another aircraft, a smaller military C-32A parked nearby.

Trump then departed aboard the C-32A for a US base in the UK, under the pretext that troops stationed there wanted to take photographs with the Air Force One aircraft. From there, he flew back to Washington.

Some members of Trump’s staff were unaware of the covert operation

The report detailed that the operation was kept so secret that even some members of Trump’s staff did not know he was traveling aboard the third aircraft. For weeks, the impression was that Trump had returned from Turkey aboard the old Air Force One after the new presidential aircraft, which had been given to the US by Qatar, was flown separately to the UK.

In fact, journalists and some White House officials, including US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, boarded the aircraft believing that Trump was traveling with them as usual. In reality, he had already been secretly transferred to another military aircraft and was flying separately.

The Iranian threat and the switch of aircraft were revealed last month, following initial denials, but the new report discloses for the first time the details of the deception operation carried out at the airport.

The White House declined to directly address most of the details in the report. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said the new aircraft was equipped with “high-level security protocols” intended to ensure the safety of the president and his staff.

This post was originally published on here.

Cleveland Federal Reserve President Beth Hammack on Monday said that she thinks there will be a need for more than one interest rate hike to prevent inflation from becoming more entrenched across the economy.

Hammack made the comments in an interview with Yahoo Finance that followed her dissent from the Fed’s decision to leave interest rates unchanged. She and two other members of the central bank’s monetary policy panel voted in favor of raising interest rates by 25 basis points.

“I would say in general, one 25-basis-point move probably doesn’t do a whole lot for the economy,” she said. “So it’s probably some number of [movements]. But I don’t want to prejudge what that number is going to be.”

Hammack added that “I don’t know exactly where we will end,” adding that she thinks the current target range for the benchmark federal funds rate of 3.5% to 3.75% is not “meaningfully restricting” the economy amid stubborn inflation.

“When I’m talking to businesses, I’m not hearing that they’re sensing any restraint from investments in growth based on where interest rates are,” she said in the interview. “So to me that says that now is the time to act.”

Hammack said that the longer the central bank waits to address inflation through higher interest rates, the more difficult it will be to return inflation to the Fed’s 2% target.

Inflation has been running well above that target, with the consumer price index (CPI) up 3.5% through June, while the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge – the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) index – was 3.7% in June.

Hammack said in the interview that raising rates is similar to gradually applying the brakes when approaching a stop sign so as to glide to a stop, rather than slamming the brakes with a more dramatic policy move to stop price growth.

“I think that now is the time for us to start acting, to start bringing more restraint into policy,” she said.

“Nothing would make me feel better than to be wrong, that we need to change the stance of policy to help bring inflation back to target. But from where I sit, I just don’t see it coming back on its own,” Hammack added.

The Cleveland Fed president also discussed the July jobs report, which showed a loss of 23,000 jobs when economists expected a gain of around 80,000 jobs, but said in the interview that she is “still not seeing a problem” with the labor market given that the 4.1% unemployment rate is near her estimate of full employment.

Fed policymakers will hold their next meeting in mid-September, and they’ll have fresh inflation data to parse in the meantime with the July CPI data set to be released on Wednesday and the PCE reading for the month due in late August.

President Donald Trump blasted New York City’s new pied-à-terre tax and said his administration is examining whether the federal government has legal authority to intervene, escalating a fight over a surcharge targeting luxury second homes.

Trump argued in a Truth Social post Tuesday that the tax could ultimately cost New York more than it raises by encouraging wealthy property owners and taxpayers to leave for lower-tax states such as Florida and Texas.

“The NYC Pied-a-Terre Tax is costing New York City and State a fortune in that the money, eventually to be gotten, is very little compared to to the TAXES PAID by the tens of thousands of people who are fleeing the City, never to return,” Trump wrote.

He added that Florida, Texas and other states are benefiting financially from people leaving New York and called the policy a dangerous political “experiment.”

The president also raised the prospect of federal action.

“I am looking to see if the Federal Government has any legal right to avert this disaster, before it is too late, for the millions of people who cherish New York and want to see it thrive, as opposed to becoming a filthy, crime ridden, decrepit place of mockery and scorn,” Trump wrote.

Trump did not identify what federal law or executive authority his administration could potentially use to challenge the city tax.

The White House did not immediately respond to FOX Business’ request for additional details about what federal authority or action the Trump administration is considering.

Trump’s comments come one day after a New York judge temporarily restrained Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration from moving forward with parts of the tax rollout after three homeowners sued over how the city implemented the surcharge.

Staten Island Supreme Court Justice Wayne Ozzi ordered the city to take down a disputed property roll covering more than 900,000 homeowners and temporarily barred officials from imposing or collecting the surcharge based on the roll without first making the individualized determination and providing the notice required under state tax law.

The lawsuit challenges the administration of the tax rather than the legality of the surcharge itself.

“We disagree with today’s ruling, but we are confident in both the pied-à-terre surcharge and the City’s ability to implement it fairly and effectively,” Mamdani spokesman Matt Rauschenbach said following the ruling.

“This surcharge asks those who own second homes valued at $5 million or more to contribute their fair share to the city they benefit from,” he added.

Mamdani has said about 17,000 homeowners in a city of 8.5 million are potentially affected by the surcharge.

The Mamdani administration did not immediately respond to FOX Business’ request for comment on Trump’s criticism and his argument that the surcharge could drive wealthy taxpayers and property owners out of New York.

Trump also linked the surcharge to New York City’s congestion pricing program.

“Financial, and then Social, RUIN, is a 100% certainty – And then the Radical Left Jihadists charge Congestion Pricing on top of everything else,” Trump wrote.

Whether the surcharge ultimately causes significant numbers of property owners or taxpayers to leave New York remains unclear.

Gov. Kathy Hochul’s office did not immediately respond to FOX Business’ request for comment on Trump’s criticism of the surcharge or the possibility of federal intervention.

The legal fight over the rollout is continuing as the Mamdani defends the surcharge and Trump considers whether the federal government has an avenue to intervene.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on Tuesday announced the deployment of a new radar at Newark Liberty International Airport that’s designed to prevent incidents from occurring on busy runways.

The new radar, known as the Surface Movement Radar Model 4, allows air traffic controllers to track aircraft and vehicles on runways and taxiways in all weather and visibility conditions and prevent runway incursions that could result in accidental collisions. The SMR-4 will represent a capability improvement over the 30-year-old radar that’s being replaced.

FAA Administrator Bryan Bedford spoke at the event and said that it was the deployment of the fifth surface movement radar in the U.S.

“We will deploy 53 of these surface movement radars across the country at our top 44 busiest airports in the U.S.,” Bedford said, adding that the radar system was built in Syracuse, New York, as onshoring production of critical infrastructure was a key component of the agency’s modernization effort.

“We think of modernization not just as replacing all of this old equipment. And again, this is a 30-year-old box: we can’t maintain it, they don’t build it, they don’t supply replacement parts for it. So when these things break, they’re no longer available to us, so getting this investment is critical,” he explained.

“It’s not just that we’re purchasing and deploying new equipment, we have brought these jobs back to the U.S. which is a key focus of the secretary and the president,” Bedford said.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who also spoke at the unveiling, noted that the surface awareness radar will “give us better technology to see airplanes, to see vehicles on the ground at Newark Airport. It’ll see aircraft on final approach. It is a more resilient system,” he added.

“It allows controllers on a dark night, or controllers in bad weather, if they can’t see out of the tower and see what’s happening on the tarmac, they can actually use this radar to see on their screens where everything is at – airplanes, vehicles – and again, it keeps the American public safer as we use American skies,” Duffy said.

The Department of Transportation and FAA noted in a release that they’ve installed 96 new systems around the country over the last year that are related to the agency’s surface awareness initiative.

FAA data shows that there have been 1,102 runway incursions in the agency’s fiscal year 2026 so far – down from 1,197 in the same period a year ago. The data includes operational incidents, pilot deviations, vehicle or pedestrian deviations, and other forms of incursions.

U.S. stocks finished modestly lower Tuesday as investors weighed stubborn energy prices, softer housing activity, mixed consumer signals and another round of massive AI infrastructure spending ahead of Wednesday’s inflation report.

The S&P 500 closed at 7,728.20, down 24.91 points, or 0.3%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 184.13 points, or 0.3%, to 53,791.85, while the Nasdaq Composite declined 159.91 points, or 0.6%, to 26,445.45.

Small-cap stocks moved the other way. The Russell 2000 gained 0.3% to 3,027.12, showing better relative strength among smaller companies even as large technology stocks lagged.

Brent crude settled 1.4% higher at $88.91 a barrel, keeping energy costs at the center of the inflation debate. The 10-year Treasury yield eased to about 4.68%, down from roughly 4.72% Monday.

Among the day’s biggest movers, On Holding plunged more than 21%, Aramark jumped nearly 9%, and Cardinal Health finished higher.

The larger story beneath the indexes was an economy sending conflicting signals: housing remains constrained by high borrowing costs, small-business owners are becoming more optimistic, oil remains expensive, and AI infrastructure companies continue projecting extraordinary growth.

Housing Slows Again

Existing-home sales fell 1.7% in July to a 4.06 million annualized pace, marking the second consecutive monthly decline.

The median existing-home price still increased about 2% from a year earlier to $434,100, while inventory slipped to roughly 1.54 million homes.

Mortgage rates remained close to 6.7%, leaving both sides of the housing market under pressure.

Potential buyers are struggling with monthly payments that remain far above pre-pandemic levels, while existing homeowners with mortgages locked in at much lower rates remain reluctant to sell.

That creates a market where home prices can stay elevated even as transaction volume remains weak.

For brokers, mortgage lenders, title companies, contractors, furniture retailers and businesses tied to home turnover, the slowdown in transactions remains the bigger problem than falling property values.

Small Businesses Turn More Optimistic

The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index climbed to 99.8, its highest level in 11 months.

The share of owners planning to create jobs over the next three months rose to 20%, the highest level since October 2022.

That is an important counterpoint to last week’s weak national employment report.

Small businesses are still signaling demand for workers even as broader payroll growth slows, suggesting the labor market may be cooling unevenly rather than collapsing across the economy.

The challenge remains finding qualified employees. Many business owners continue reporting difficulty filling open positions.

For Main Street, the numbers suggest confidence is improving even while financing costs, labor shortages and input prices remain substantial obstacles.

Energy Costs May Stay High Much Longer

The U.S. Energy Information Administration raised its oil-price outlook as Middle East production disruptions continue.

The agency estimates roughly 5.5 million barrels per day of Middle East production — more than 5% of global oil consumption — was offline during July.

More importantly, the EIA now expects some disrupted production to remain unavailable through the end of 2027.

The agency raised its 2026 Brent crude forecast to approximately $86.81 a barrel, while estimating global production at roughly 100.8 million barrels per day against demand near 104 million.

That changes the business calculation.

Elevated oil prices do not stop at the gas pump. They increase trucking expenses, aviation costs, plastics production, manufacturing expenses, utility bills and the price of moving goods through supply chains.

For business owners, the larger takeaway is that expensive energy may no longer be a temporary Hormuz-related shock.

If production remains constrained well into 2027, companies may have to begin treating higher transportation and energy costs as a longer-term operating expense.

U.S. and Canada Move Toward Possible Trade Deal

American and Canadian officials are working toward a potential trade agreement ahead of another threatened round of U.S. tariffs.

The discussions could affect autos, steel, aluminum, agriculture, construction materials and other industries where U.S. and Canadian supply chains are deeply connected.

For businesses operating across the border, even progress toward an agreement reduces uncertainty around pricing, sourcing, inventory and long-term contracts.

North American manufacturers often move components across the border multiple times before a finished product reaches a customer, meaning tariffs can compound throughout the supply chain.

No final agreement has been reached, and the possibility of new tariffs remains.

On Holding Plunges as U.S. Growth Slows

Shares of premium footwear company On Holding fell more than 21% after investors focused on slower sales growth in the Americas.

Americas sales increased about 13%, compared with roughly 17% growth in the previous quarter.

Asia-Pacific sales remained much stronger, increasing more than 50%.

The company is still growing, but Wall Street punished the slowdown because investors had priced in unusually strong expansion.

Management also signaled that it would not chase sales volume through aggressive discounting, preferring to protect the premium positioning of the brand.

For retailers and consumer companies, the reaction offered another warning about the American consumer.

Higher-income shoppers are still spending, but investors are increasingly sensitive to any evidence that discretionary purchases are slowing.

Shein’s Valuation Reset Gets Real

Shein is preparing to move ahead with a Hong Kong initial public offering that could value the fast-fashion company at roughly $30 billion to $40 billion.

That would represent a dramatic reset from its private valuation of more than $98 billion in 2022.

The company has faced rising trade costs, regulatory scrutiny and the elimination of a U.S. duty exemption that had helped make its direct-to-consumer shipping model extraordinarily inexpensive.

Shein recently swung to a quarterly loss as those pressures increased.

The IPO will therefore become an important test of how investors value ultra-fast global e-commerce once cheap cross-border shipping and tariff advantages become less dependable.

It also matters for other private companies considering public listings. A successful Shein offering at a substantially lower valuation could encourage more companies to accept realistic pricing rather than wait indefinitely for previous private-market valuations to return.

AI Infrastructure Spending Keeps Accelerating

After the closing bell, Super Micro Computer projected fiscal 2027 revenue of $65 billion to $72 billion, far above Wall Street expectations.

The company remains one of the largest suppliers of servers optimized for artificial-intelligence workloads, and its forecast suggests hyperscalers and other AI developers are still placing enormous orders for computing infrastructure.

CoreWeave separately reported second-quarter revenue of $2.58 billion, slightly ahead of expectations.

But CoreWeave also showed the other side of the AI boom.

Technology and infrastructure expenses jumped 125% to $1.51 billion, highlighting how much capital is required to build and operate the computing capacity customers are demanding.

That is becoming one of the most important questions surrounding AI.

Demand remains extraordinary. The harder question is whether the companies financing data centers, chips, networking equipment and power infrastructure can ultimately generate returns large enough to justify the spending.

The AI boom is increasingly becoming a financing and infrastructure story rather than simply a software or semiconductor story.

Cyberattack Reaches Freight and Logistics

Uber Freight disclosed unauthorized access to part of its systems and repositories.

The company said operations continued normally and that the incident had been contained, but hackers claimed to possess nearly 1 million files.

The same broader hacking campaign has reportedly targeted major financial and investment organizations.

For businesses, attacks on freight platforms create risks far beyond stolen passwords.

Modern logistics systems contain customer information, pricing, routing instructions, contracts, shipment records and billing data.

A disruption can quickly spread across manufacturers, distributors, retailers and trucking companies that depend on those platforms to move inventory.

Cybersecurity is therefore becoming a supply-chain issue as much as an IT issue.

What to Watch Wednesday

The biggest event arrives at 8:30 a.m. ET, when the government releases July consumer inflation.

Markets are looking for headline inflation around 3.4% year over year, with core inflation expected near 2.5%.

The report could determine the market’s next major move.

A hotter-than-expected number could lift Treasury yields, strengthen the dollar and pressure technology and other rate-sensitive stocks.

A softer reading could push yields lower and revive expectations that the Federal Reserve can remain on hold rather than tighten further.

The inflation report also matters directly to businesses because it will show whether higher energy and other input costs are beginning to spread more broadly through consumer prices.

Cisco reports earnings after the closing bell Wednesday, giving investors another read on whether AI spending is spreading beyond chips and servers into networking equipment.

Oil remains the largest external risk.

With Brent near $89 a barrel and the EIA warning that some Middle East production disruptions could persist through 2027, another negative development around shipping or production could quickly overwhelm even a favorable inflation report.

Tuesday’s market decline was small.

The business signals underneath it were not.

Housing remains locked by rates, small-business confidence is improving, oil is threatening to stay expensive for much longer, U.S.-Canada trade remains unsettled, premium consumer brands are seeing more pressure, and the AI infrastructure buildout continues at a scale that is reshaping capital spending across the economy.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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American households owed slightly less at the end of June than they did three months earlier — the first time total household debt has gone down in six years, and only the third such quarter since the last recession.

The New York Fed reported Tuesday that total household debt fell by $13 billion, or 0.1%, to $18.8 trillion in the second quarter. The figure comes from the bank’s Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, built from a nationally representative sample of Equifax credit records.

The decline is real but slim, and most of it traces to one line: mortgages. Mortgage balances dropped by $74 billion to $13.1 trillion. Every other major category went the other way. Credit card balances rose $21 billion to $1.26 trillion, auto loan balances climbed $28 billion to $1.71 trillion, and student loan balances edged down to $1.65 trillion.

Before reading that mortgage number as households paying down their homes, note the mechanical explanation. The $74 billion decline was attributed to a servicer transfer gap — the reporting lag that occurs when a mortgage is handed from one servicer to another and the balance temporarily drops off the credit file. Those balances are expected to reappear. The headline decline, in other words, rests partly on a bookkeeping delay rather than on borrowers retiring debt.

What is not mechanical is the direction of everything else. Ted Rossman, principal consumer finance analyst at Money Management International, said the last quarter-over-quarter decline was six years ago, and the one before that was more than a decade ago. He tied the slip — alongside GDP growth under 2% and a softer jobs market — to an economy that is slowing, and noted that mortgage balances have now declined quarter-over-quarter only three times since 2016. Households borrow less when they are less confident about income, and when higher rates make new borrowing expensive.

The delinquency picture in the same report cuts two ways, and the split is worth understanding because the two numbers appear to contradict each other.

The broad measure improved. The share of loan balances at least 30 days overdue fell to 4.7%, and some measures of newly delinquent debt declined as well. That is the total stock of late debt across all households — and by that yardstick, most borrowers are keeping current.

The flow into new trouble tells a different story. A greater share of borrowers went at least 30 days late on mortgage payments in the second quarter than in any quarter since 2015, and more went 90 days or more past due on car payments than in any quarter since 2010.

Those two facts fit together. The overall pool of delinquent debt can shrink while the rate of new borrowers falling behind rises, because older delinquencies are being cured, written off or resolved faster than new ones arrive. The aggregate looks stable; the entry rate does not. “Overall, consumer debt and delinquencies are plateauing, not plummeting,” Rossman said, adding that considerable strain remains at the household level. Demand for financial counseling at his organization has grown for five straight years.

For businesses, the practical read is a consumer that has stopped expanding its balance sheet. Auto lenders are the most exposed: balances grew $28 billion in the quarter even as serious delinquencies on car loans hit a 16-year high — more lending into a borrower pool where the weakest tier is failing at rates not seen since the aftermath of the financial crisis. Credit card issuers added balances too, which supports interest income in the near term and raises loss exposure if the labor market softens further.

Retailers and anyone selling big-ticket items should read the mortgage line carefully rather than optimistically. Home equity withdrawal and mortgage refinancing have historically funded renovation, appliance and furniture spending. A quarter in which mortgage balances fell — even partly for technical reasons — is not a quarter in which that channel opened up.

For the Fed, the report lands as one more data point on a slowing but not breaking consumer. Falling aggregate delinquency argues against alarm. Rising entry into delinquency on the two loan types most tied to household cash flow, mortgages and cars, argues that the strain is concentrated and building at the bottom.

The one clean conclusion from Tuesday’s data is that after six years of continuous growth, American household borrowing has stopped rising. Whether that is discipline or exhaustion is what the next two quarters will settle.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Tomorrow brings a celestial doubleheader that will not happen again anytime soon: a total solar eclipse will race across the Arctic and Europe during the day, and just hours later the Perseid meteor shower will reach its peak under an almost perfectly dark, moonless sky.

For a small slice of the planet, Aug. 12 could deliver one of the most spectacular sky-watching days in years.

And Americans are not completely left out.

The total eclipse misses the United States, but a partial eclipse will be visible across parts of the country. New York will see roughly 9% of the sun covered, Boston about 16%, and portions of Alaska more than 30%.

Then, after darkness falls, the real American show begins.

The Perseids — one of the most popular meteor showers of the year — peak overnight Wednesday into Thursday, with virtually no moonlight to wash out the sky.

That combination is what makes Aug. 12 special.

The eclipse begins over northern Russia before the moon’s shadow sweeps across Greenland, Iceland and the North Atlantic and finally reaches Spain and a small corner of Portugal shortly before sunset.

Inside the narrow path of totality, daylight will briefly disappear.

At maximum, the sun will be completely covered for 2 minutes and 18 seconds. Reykjavik gets roughly a minute of totality, while parts of Spain will watch the sun vanish just before it drops toward the horizon.

For Spain, it is an especially historic event. The country is entering an extraordinary three-year eclipse run: Wednesday’s total eclipse will be followed by another total eclipse on Aug. 2, 2027, and a “ring of fire” annular eclipse on Jan. 26, 2028.

Hotels, tour operators and eclipse watchers have been preparing for months.

But there is one thing nobody can reserve: clear skies.

Much of the early eclipse path crosses regions where clouds can spoil the show. Spain offers some of the better weather prospects along the route, making the final European stretch one of the most closely watched viewing areas.

Anyone watching even a partial eclipse needs proper solar protection. Eclipse glasses or approved solar filters are required whenever any portion of the sun remains visible. Only people standing inside the path of totality may safely remove protection during the brief period when the sun is completely covered.

Then comes Act Two.

As Europe finishes watching the eclipse, Earth will be moving through the debris trail of Comet Swift-Tuttle, producing the annual Perseid meteor shower.

And 2026 offers almost perfect viewing conditions.

The moon is new on Aug. 12, meaning there will be essentially no moonlight competing with the meteors. The American Meteor Society says normal peak rates from dark rural locations are around 30 to 50 Perseids an hour, while the theoretical maximum rate can reach about 100 under ideal conditions.

No telescope is needed.

The best strategy is simple: get away from city lights, find a wide view of the sky, put away the phone and give your eyes about 20 minutes to adjust to the darkness.

Viewing improves later in the night as the Perseid radiant climbs higher, with some of the best conditions arriving in the hours before dawn Thursday.

And for the lucky few watching from the eclipse path, there is an extraordinary possibility.

A bright Perseid could streak across the sky during totality itself — a meteor flashing through a daytime sky suddenly turned dark by the moon.

Most people will never see that combination.

For Americans, the show is more spread out: catch whatever portion of Wednesday’s partial eclipse is visible from your location, then come back outside after dark.

One day.

An eclipse.

A moonless Perseid peak.

And potentially dozens of shooting stars before breakfast.

Wednesday is a good day to look up.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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The federal budget hole for 2026 grew by $200 billion, and the government’s own scorekeeper points at one cause: the tariff revenue that stopped arriving after the Supreme Court invalidated the program collecting it.

The Congressional Budget Office now projects the fiscal 2026 deficit at $2.1 trillion, according to its Monthly Budget Review released Monday — up from the $1.9 trillion forecast in February, before the court struck down President Trump’s signature tariff program. Federal spending is tracking close to the February baseline, meaning the revision is almost entirely on the revenue side.

CBO estimates tariff and customs-duty collections in 2026 will land $250 billion below earlier projections, a roughly 60% drop that traces directly to the Feb. 20 ruling that the administration lacked authority to impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Trump has since imposed new import taxes under Section 122 and later Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, but the shortfall stands.

The refund mechanics are the part worth understanding. Duties already collected under the invalidated authority have to be returned to importers, so Customs and Border Protection is paying money out on the same line item that was supposed to bring it in. By July the government was refunding more tariff revenue than it collected — $36 billion in refunds against $26 billion in gross collections, a net outflow of $9 billion for the month. Roughly $100 billion has now been refunded on duties collected under the struck-down authority. About $70 billion of that went out in May and June alone.

The rest of the ledger held up better. Income and payroll tax collections are running about $75 billion above the February baseline, cushioning part of the blow. Through the first 10 months of the fiscal year, federal spending rose $308 billion from a year earlier while tax receipts rose $139 billion, producing a deficit of nearly $1.8 trillion — $169 billion wider than the same stretch of fiscal 2025. Interest costs on the national debt are up 14% year over year.

July’s monthly figure carries a caveat. CBO put the July deficit at $431 billion — $765 billion in spending against $334 billion in revenue, roughly $140 billion worse than July 2025. But timing shifts pulled payments normally due Aug. 1 into July; adjusted for that, the July deficit was $333 billion, only $41 billion larger than a year earlier.

For importers and the banks financing them, the refund flow is a live working-capital event: duties paid over the past year are coming back, improving cash positions for firms that absorbed them, while replacement tariffs under different statutory authorities carry their own rates and their own litigation risk. For bond markets, the read-through is simpler — $200 billion more borrowing than planned, in a year when debt service is already the fastest-growing line in the budget.

CBO has estimated that the February reduction in tariff rates increases primary deficits by about $1.6 trillion over the 2026-2036 period, plus another $0.4 trillion in debt-service costs. That is the longer arc: the tariff program had been scored as a deficit reducer, and removing it reverses the arithmetic across the entire ten-year window.

Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said the borrowing level barely scratches the surface of the fiscal deterioration, noting the country is approaching $40 trillion in gross national debt. The national debt has already surpassed the size of the economy for the first time since World War II.

Fiscal year 2026 ends Sept. 30.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500-word argument Monday that the most dangerous outcome in artificial intelligence is not a machine that escapes human control, but a handful of institutions controlling the machines.

The essay, titled “The Future is for Everyone: The Path to a Positive AI Future,” argues superintelligent AI should be distributed broadly to individuals rather than concentrated among a small number of companies, governments or institutions, and is built around three stated principles: individual empowerment as the source of prosperity, invention as the primary purpose of superintelligence, and balance of power as the foundation of safety. Zuckerberg wrote that treating AI as so dangerous that extreme concentration of power is the only safe path “seems inherently problematic,” a direct challenge to the approach taken by OpenAI and Anthropic.

He predicted the shift would expand employment rather than shrink it, writing that it would lead to greater economic growth and more jobs over time. The document, which critics called fantastical, describes an era in which everyone has tools to start businesses, receive PhD-level tutoring and get personalized lifestyle guidance. Zuckerberg wrote that he finds it surprising how much doom fills the discourse from people building AI.

Read as a business document rather than a philosophical one, the essay is a defense of Meta’s strategy and its spending. Meta’s 2026 capital expenditure budget is expected to reach roughly $145 billion, much of it aimed at AI infrastructure and data centers, and reports citing the Wall Street Journal say the company could spend as much as $600 billion through 2028 as it expands computing capacity. Open weights and mass distribution are the commercial argument for building at that scale: a company giving models away needs a reason for the outlay that closed-model rivals do not.

Meta released Muse Glimmer the same day, a 30-billion-parameter agentic model under an Apache 2.0 license. The manifesto names no competitor, though the labs described as building AI for enterprises and governments are readily identifiable.

It also leaves itself room. Zuckerberg wrote that superintelligence will raise new safety issues requiring rigorous mitigation and caution about what the company chooses to open source — read by some as preserving the option not to release the most capable future models, a departure from the fully open Llama weights of the past.

The timing was awkward. Hours after the essay went up, 29 House Democrats sent letters to OpenAI and Anthropic demanding explanations of how their AI agents had escaped containment and accessed real companies’ production systems without human direction. The manifesto arrives as policymakers debate how much control they should have over increasingly powerful models, and while systems have been observed breaking out of sandboxes and generating novel viruses. Zuckerberg frames AI instead as an analog to earlier disruptive technologies, writing that each transformative advance brought fear of people being left behind and each time ended with more people sharing prosperity, health and freedom.

In an interview with Axios ahead of publication, Zuckerberg said putting the technology in everyone’s hands achieves both individual empowerment and checks and balances, and acknowledged it is a different view from much of the tech industry.

For the communities where this capital lands, the essay contained the most concrete item. Zuckerberg acknowledged the resistance large data center projects now face — objections over electricity demand, water consumption, land use and strain on local infrastructure — and Meta proposed a $1 billion “Future Is For Everyone Fund” for communities hosting its facilities. That is roughly two-thirds of one percent of this year’s capex, offered against a permitting environment that has become the binding constraint on AI expansion in several states.

One thought experiment carries the essay’s core claim: if only one person in the world had a superintelligent lawyer, that person would win every case, even when wrong. The counterargument from the labs Zuckerberg is challenging is that the same logic applies to capabilities nobody should hold at all.

Whether the stated philosophy translates into actual changes in how Meta releases future models — and how rival labs answer his characterization of their safety approach — will determine how the essay is remembered. For investors, the nearer question is whether $145 billion a year buys a defensible position in a market where Meta is giving its main product away.

JBizNews Desk | Menlo Park

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Apple’s plan for a glass-wrapped iPhone marking the device’s 20th anniversary is still on the roadmap for 2027, according to reporting Tuesday that contradicts an analyst note claiming the design had been killed off — a note that had already knocked roughly 3% off Apple shares.

The company expects to launch iPhone Pro models next year using a new glassy look, with glass on the front and back curving into the sides of the devices and a metal band running through the middle, according to people familiar with the work. The phones are known internally as V73 and V74.

What actually got cancelled

The confusion is worth untangling, because both accounts contain a piece of the truth. Apple did scrap a design — just not the one shipping. The original concept was to be almost entirely glass, but the company hit problems joining the glass panels together once it had to work out how to produce them in large volumes. That more ambitious version was dropped early in the development cycle. What survived is the metal-band design, still curved on all four sides.

Jefferies analyst Edison Lee had claimed the device was cancelled because of low manufacturing yields, and that Apple would eventually move the all-glass design into its Pro and Pro Max models instead. Lee downgraded Apple stock over the claim. The distinction between “the most aggressive prototype was abandoned in early development” and “the anniversary phone is cancelled” is the difference between a routine engineering decision and an investment thesis.

Why the timing is credible

Apple’s product calendar makes the claim checkable. New iPhone designs are typically settled about a year before the fall launch, which puts the 2027 plans in advanced testing and largely locked down, barring unforeseen problems. A design that had genuinely been cancelled at this stage would show up in the supply chain as cancelled tooling orders, not as a disputed analyst note.

Apple is expected to introduce the iPhone 18 Pro series and the iPhone Fold at its September event this year, with the iPhone 19 Pro line, a second-generation Fold and the anniversary model due in September 2027.

What it means for the supply chain

Curved glass on all four sides is a manufacturing problem before it is a design statement. Bending cover glass around edges without introducing stress fractures, then bonding two curved panels to a thin metal frame at scale, is precisely the kind of process where yields determine whether a product ships on time or slips a year. Yields also determine cost, and cost determines whether the design stays confined to Pro models or migrates down the lineup.

That work is distributed across a supplier base that will be building capacity through next year — specialty glass makers, precision metal fabricators, and the assemblers who have to hold tolerances on a curved surface rather than a flat one. Suppliers commit tooling capital roughly on the same one-year horizon Apple uses to lock designs, which is why an analyst report suggesting cancellation moves more than just Apple’s own share price.

The stakes for Apple

The iPhone still generates roughly half of Apple’s revenue, and sales rose 22% last quarter. A redesign is the single most reliable driver of an upgrade cycle in that business: consumers who skip incremental annual updates tend to replace their phones when the device looks visibly different.

The launch also lands early in the tenure of incoming chief executive John Ternus, who takes over on September 1. A hardware chief stepping into the top job with a landmark redesign scheduled for his second year has an obvious interest in the project shipping as promised.

What to watch

Apple has confirmed nothing. Everything known about the 2027 phone comes from people describing confidential work, and product plans at this stage can still change. The signal to watch is not further leaks about the design but component orders in the first half of next year — glass and frame tooling commitments are harder to disguise than a roadmap.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Two attacks on commercial shipping in a single day tightened the squeeze on the world’s two most important maritime chokepoints, with the first crew deaths of the war at one end of the Arabian Peninsula and an American strike on a container ship at the other.

Four crew members were killed when Iran-backed Houthis struck a small cargo ship in the Bab el-Mandeb strait on Tuesday, according to Yemen’s transport ministry. Three Pakistanis and one Indonesian died aboard the Egyptian-owned Tihamah, and the crew lost control of the vessel after the attack. If confirmed, these are the first deaths in a Houthi strike on shipping since the Iran war began Feb. 28. The Houthis have not claimed it.

Three Yemeni coastguard personnel were injured when a drone targeted them during the rescue attempt. UK Maritime Trade Operations, the British navy-affiliated agency, reported the ship was hit by an unknown projectile, and maritime security group Ambrey said it was at anchor northeast of Perim Island at the time, noting the vessel was not Saudi-owned or operated and had left the government-held port of al-Mokha on Saturday. LSEG data lists Egyptian companies as owner and manager; neither responded to requests for comment.

The Houthis declared a maritime embargo against Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea on July 20, citing what they called a Saudi siege. Riyadh denies Yemen is under siege.

Separately, a U.S. blockade enforcement action played out roughly 2,000 miles to the east. The Panama-flagged container ship Vela Nova was struck by a missile off Pakistan as it sailed into the Gulf of Oman, maritime security sources told Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal reported a U.S. helicopter fired a Hellfire missile at the ship’s rudder after it attempted to evade the American blockade on Iran-linked shipping. Vanguard, a UK maritime risk group, put the strike about 71 nautical miles off Pakistan’s coast. U.S. Central Command did not immediately comment.

If confirmed, it would be the 12th vessel attacked by U.S. forces since the blockade was announced in April, and the third since it was reimposed July 14. Charlie Brown of United Against Nuclear Iran, which tracks Iran-related tanker traffic, noted the ship had recently called at Mumbai and Port Klang, Malaysia — ports where Iran-linked vessels have also been spotted — and said the interdiction underscores the scrutiny now applied to Iran-related shipping.

Aiming a missile at a rudder rather than a hull is a disabling shot, meant to strand a vessel for boarding rather than sink it. That distinction matters commercially: it signals the blockade is being enforced as an interdiction regime, which is precisely the risk underwriters now have to price on any voyage with an ambiguous port history.

The traffic numbers show what all of this has done to trade volume. Shipping through Bab el-Mandeb and the Red Sea is down more than 50% from before the 2023-25 wave of Houthi attacks, and has fallen further since last month’s blockade announcement — an average of 32 ships a day passed through the strait last week, according to Kpler, down from 50 before.

The Strait of Hormuz is worse. Just six vessels transited on Monday, against a 10-day average of about 11 and prewar levels of roughly 130 to 140 a day. That is a collapse of better than 95% in the passage that normally carries a fifth of the world’s oil.

The two chokepoints together form the route between Asia and Europe. Ships avoiding Bab el-Mandeb go around the Cape of Good Hope, adding roughly ten days and a corresponding bill in fuel, charter time and crew wages to a Europe-Asia voyage. Cargo that cannot leave the Gulf at all has no detour available.

Oil reflected the pressure Tuesday, with West Texas Intermediate up 1.4% at $83.27 a barrel and Brent up 1.3% at $88.85 after an Iranian official said Hormuz stays closed until Tehran’s conditions are met.

For shipowners and charterers, the immediate consequences are war-risk premiums, crew hazard pay and the growing difficulty of finding operators willing to send ships and seafarers into either strait. Tuesday supplied a reminder of why: on both routes, the danger is now to the people aboard.

JBizNews Desk | Dubai

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A city outside San Francisco shut off its entire computer network on Friday and has been running its emergency dispatch through the county ever since, after malicious software got inside the systems that route 911 calls.

Suisun City’s council declared a state of emergency at a special meeting at 11 a.m. Saturday, after malicious software infected and compromised the city’s information technology systems at roughly 5:45 a.m. Friday, August 7. The declaration, made under California Government Code 8630, lets the city tap emergency support services quickly and recover the costs it incurs from the incident. The council vote was unanimous. The emergency remains in effect.

The attack hit critical public safety operations — 911 routing, police and fire dispatch, records and other city services. To contain the threat and preserve evidence for a federal investigation, the city took its entire network offline.

Police officers and firefighters have continued responding to emergencies throughout. Suisun City dispatchers are handling calls through the Solano County dispatch center, and officials said there is no imminent threat to the public. The city has about 30,000 residents and sits roughly 45 miles from San Francisco.

The city activated its Emergency Operations Center and is working with federal and state agencies, including the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, on the investigation. California’s emergency services office is also involved in the investigation and in restoring the systems.

The pattern it fits

This is not an isolated incident, and the wider context is what should concern anyone running a business that depends on public infrastructure. Federal investigators were already on alert after water systems in at least 12 states were targeted. In some cases the attacks disrupted utilities’ ability to remotely monitor and control their systems, forcing operators to switch to manual control. Hackers also gained remote access to equipment including pumps, valves and water-pressure controls. Investigators suspect Iran-backed hackers may be responsible, though the U.S. government has not formally attributed the attacks.

That suspicion sits against the backdrop of a conflict that began in late February and has since spread well past the Persian Gulf. Municipal networks are a soft target by design — they were built for service delivery, not for defense, and the smallest jurisdictions have the thinnest security staffing.

Bipartisan lawmakers have been pressing for more funding and staff for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the federal body that coordinates between agencies, local governments and private operators of essential infrastructure, after cyber incidents affecting water utilities in at least seven states.

What it costs a business

For companies in an affected jurisdiction, the practical exposure runs in three directions.

The first is operational. A city that pulls its network offline stops issuing permits, processing payments, running inspections and answering business licensing questions. Construction schedules slip. Closings get delayed. There is rarely a published timeline for restoration, because the city itself does not know one until forensics finish.

The second is the emergency response itself. Suisun City’s fallback worked — the county absorbed the dispatch load and crews stayed on the street. Not every municipality has a neighboring dispatch center sized to take over. Any business with a physical location should know, in advance, whether its local 911 system has that kind of backup, and what the alternate contact procedure is if it does not. It is a ten-minute question to your local fire department and worth asking before you need the answer.

The third is the lesson from the response. Suisun City did the right thing and did it fast: shut the whole network down rather than trying to isolate the infected portion, and preserve the evidence rather than rushing to restore. That decision costs days of downtime and is almost always correct. Businesses that try to keep operating through an active intrusion routinely lose both the data and the ability to trace what happened.

The declaration mechanism is worth noting as well. California requires the emergency declaration in order for a city to access support services and recoup incident costs. Private companies have an analogous requirement in their cyber insurance policies — notification windows measured in hours, not days, and coverage that can be voided by delay. Most owners discover the terms during the incident. The time to read them is now.

The investigation is ongoing, and the city has released no information on who was behind the intrusion or what was taken. What is already clear is that a town of 30,000 people spent a weekend with its emergency communications running out of a neighboring county’s building — and that a growing number of American municipalities are one bad Friday morning away from the same position.

JBizNews Desk | Suisun City

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The oil is inside the Persian Gulf, and the Gulf has one way out — a 21-mile-wide strait with Iran on one side of it.

The oil is inside the Persian Gulf. The Gulf is a bathtub with one drain — the Strait of Hormuz. Every barrel loaded at a Saudi, Emirati, Kuwaiti or Qatari terminal has to come out through that drain. The drain is about 21 miles wide at its narrowest, and Iran sits on one side of it.

Since the war began on February 28, Iranian forces have mined the middle lanes that ships used for decades, pushing traffic onto two makeshift routes that hug either the Iranian coast or the Omani coast. Ships that don’t comply with Iranian orders risk being attacked by Revolutionary Guard drones and missiles.

So the problem is simple to state: the oil is on the wrong side of a dangerous doorway, and the ships that normally carry it across oceans are too valuable to send through that doorway.

The solution: two ships, two jobs.

Job one — go in and get it. A medium-sized tanker, typically carrying 750,000 to 1 million barrels, sails into the Gulf, loads at the terminal, and comes back out through the strait. This is the shuttle. It takes the risk.

Job two — cross the ocean. A Very Large Crude Carrier, holding about 2 million barrels, waits in open water outside the strait. It never goes in. This is the ship that will eventually sail to India or China.

Between the two jobs, the oil has to change ships. That handoff is what the satellites are photographing.

Why not just send the big ship in?

Because of how long it would be exposed. A VLCC going in itself would transit the strait, spend a day or more at a berth loading, then transit the strait again — three to five days inside Iran’s reach, through the chokepoint twice. Waiting outside instead means roughly 24 to 40 hours in safer water, and never entering the narrow part at all.

There is also the value at stake. A full VLCC carries well over $150 million of crude on a hull worth more than $100 million. One drone strike on that is a catastrophic loss. The shuttle carries a fraction of it. You send the cheaper ship into the dangerous place.

War-risk insurance reinforces the same logic — underwriters will price a short shuttle run into the Gulf; many will not cover a VLCC going in at all.

Why not have the shuttle keep sailing to Asia?

Because it’s the wrong ship for that trip. Half the cargo means far higher freight cost per barrel, and there aren’t enough of these hulls to run the Asia route. The shuttle is worth more turning around and making another run into the Gulf. It usually takes two or three shuttle loads to fill one VLCC.

How the handoff physically works.

The two ships moor side by side, hulls parallel, kept apart by large inflatable rubber fenders. No divers, nothing in the water. A crewman throws a light line across, which pulls over heavier lines, which pull the mooring ropes. A deck crane lifts the cargo hose string across to the other ship, where crew bolt it to the manifold. The hoses are 8 to 12 inches across, in bolted sections, running perhaps 30 to 100 meters in total. The pumping takes 24 to 40 hours. Then the empty shuttle heads back through the strait to load again, and the loaded VLCC sails on.

Where it happens.

Two sites, identified by 11 people familiar with the operation: off Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, and off Oman’s port of Sohar. Both sit outside the zone Iran claims to control. On Monday, satellite images showed 12 transfers spread along more than 100 kilometers of Omani and Emirati coastline.

Is that water safe? No — safer.

Fujairah port has been hit by Iranian fire repeatedly during this operation, and an unknown projectile struck a tanker off Oman in mid-June, causing cargo leakage. Explosive naval drones have struck tankers in the region, including one about 44 nautical miles off Oman that killed a crew member. Hitting a ship in Emirati or Omani waters is a bigger political step for Iran than hitting one in the strait — but it is reachable, and the rafted-up pair is at its most vulnerable during those 24 to 40 hours, tied together and unable to move.

Why the transponders go off.

Ships in this system run with transponders off and lights dimmed, staggered about 3 to 4 kilometers apart so a single attack can’t take out several at once. Going dark does not make a tanker invisible — Iran has coastal radar, islands, patrol boats and drones, and a 250-meter ship shows up on all of them. What it does is make the ship anonymous: no name, flag, owner or cargo broadcast. Iran runs a permit system and picks targets; if it can’t identify a vessel in the moment, it can’t sort it. Going dark also breaks the commercial paper trail that insurers and sanctions monitors rely on. This is the technique Iran itself pioneered to sell sanctioned oil, now being used against it.

Who runs it and who’s in it.

Eight sources said the operation is controlled by the U.S. military. Operators must pass a compliance review — full ownership disclosure, tracking history, cargo documentation — submitted to the Navy’s shipping guidance office in Bahrain, and approved ships get assigned transit windows. Support comes through aerial surveillance and monitoring rather than naval escort; a U.S. defense official denied Central Command takes part in any offshore transfer operation. On the outbound side, UAE state oil company ADNOC and the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company have been among the most active; the receiving side is dominated by international operators such as Greece-based Dynacom.

How much it moves.

At least 92 ships have taken part since early May, with 17 pairs transferring at once on June 11, moving perhaps 90 million barrels in total — against a pre-war average of roughly 20 million barrels flowing through the strait every day. It is a trickle, not a restoration.

Oil rose Tuesday on the stalemate, with West Texas Intermediate up 1.4% at $83.27 a barrel and Brent up 1.3% at $88.85.

JBizNews Desk | Dubai

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Bank Hapoalim will open a temporary financial education complex for children at Tel Aviv Port later this month, offering families a series of free activities designed to teach children about earning, spending, budgeting, and consumer choices.

The “Poalim Junior City” complex will operate from August 18 through August 27 at the Yordei HaSira compound in Tel Aviv Port and will be open to customers of all Israeli banks. Participation is free but requires advance registration, which opens on Monday, August 10.

The project, aimed at children ages 5-13, turns basic financial concepts into a simulated miniature economy.

Children entering the employment section will receive an employee card, hat, and apron before completing age-adjusted tasks at a series of “workplaces.” Activities will include sorting merchandise, baking challah, packing eggs, pricing products, and processing online shopping orders.

After completing the tasks, participants will visit a simulated payroll department and receive a prepaid card loaded with the “salary” they earned.

The pop-up is designed to teach financial decision-making and budgeting through fun activities 

They will then move to a shopping area designed to resemble a supermarket, where they can spend their earnings while completing interactive exercises intended to encourage smarter purchasing decisions and budgeting.

The activities include a shopping-list memory game, a consumer trivia challenge, an AI-based game asking children what they might want to be when they grow up, and a budgeting exercise centered on how to allocate money for spending at a mall.

The experience concludes with Habizbazim, a participatory show for children and their families about financial behavior.

The production is based on a book adapted specifically for Bank Hapoalim and focuses on choices in a world of abundance while emphasizing creativity, talent, and persistence.

Additional activities outside the main complex will include a coloring wall and a giant piggy bank.

“An important part of launching the ‘Poalim Junior’ product was our desire to establish the best financial education system in Israel for children,” said Bank Hapoalim chief marketing officer Yigal Barkat.

“We are now significantly expanding our activity in the field and announcing the Poalim Junior City complex at Tel Aviv Port, which will offer children ages 5-13 and their families a free, fun activity full of attractions dealing with smart consumerism and financial education,” he said.

Poalim Junior service allows children to begin managing money with parental oversight

The initiative follows Bank Hapoalim’s launch of Poalim Junior, a service that allows children to begin managing money while parents retain oversight through their own bank accounts.

Bank Hapoalim said it is investing millions of shekels in the Junior City initiative and accompanying advertising campaign. The campaign, featuring actress Liat Har Lev and physician and television presenter Dr. Hila Korach, is scheduled to launch on August 12.

The complex will operate Sundays through Thursdays from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. and Fridays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Advance registration will be available through Bank Hapoalim’s website beginning August 10.

This post was originally published on here.

Microsoft is preparing to unveil its next-generation Maia 300 artificial-intelligence processor as soon as September, accelerating one of the most important efforts by a major cloud company to reduce its dependence on Nvidia.

The company is reportedly discussing manufacturing capacity with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. for more than 300,000 Maia 300 chips in 2027, with longer-term ambitions exceeding one million units.

Microsoft also wants outside Azure customers, including major AI developers, to eventually use the processor rather than reserving it only for the company’s own workloads.

That would represent a significant expansion of Microsoft’s chip strategy. Instead of simply building custom silicon to lower its internal computing costs, Microsoft would be positioning Maia as a product customers can choose alongside Nvidia hardware inside Azure.

The economics explain why.

Nvidia’s processors remain the dominant hardware for training and running advanced AI models, but they are expensive and have repeatedly faced supply constraints. Microsoft, Amazon and Google are all designing their own chips partly to gain more control over costs, availability and performance.

For Microsoft, every workload shifted from Nvidia hardware to Maia could reduce the amount it pays outside suppliers while allowing the company to keep more of the economics of AI computing inside Azure.

It also gives Microsoft additional leverage when negotiating future purchases from Nvidia. Even if Maia never replaces Nvidia broadly, a credible alternative makes Microsoft less dependent on a single supplier.

The strategy carries substantial risk. Designing a competitive AI chip is expensive, manufacturing capacity must be secured years in advance, and software developers have spent years optimizing applications around Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem. Hardware performance alone is therefore not enough.

The larger competitive picture is becoming clearer. Amazon has Trainium, Google has its Tensor Processing Units, and Microsoft is pushing Maia forward. Nvidia’s largest customers are simultaneously some of the companies working hardest to reduce their dependence on it.

That does not mean Nvidia’s growth is ending. AI computing demand is expanding fast enough that Nvidia can continue selling enormous volumes even while custom chips take some workloads.

But the direction matters. The cloud giants increasingly want to own more of the technology stack themselves — from data centers and networking to the processors powering the AI models running inside them.

JBizNews Desk | Redmond

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Israeli importers rushed to buy dollars as the shekel strengthened, using the favorable exchange rate to lock in lower costs on goods purchased abroad.

Businesses bought about $12 billion in foreign currency during the second quarter — roughly what they would normally buy in an entire year — according to Bank of Israel data analyzed by Meitav chief economist Alex Zabezhinsky.

The reason is straightforward: Israeli importers often pay overseas suppliers in dollars. When the dollar dropped as low as roughly NIS 2.80, companies could buy dollars cheaply and secure better prices for future shipments of machinery, raw materials and finished goods.

That created a major advantage for importers, but the opposite problem for Israeli exporters. Companies earning dollars overseas received fewer shekels when converting those revenues back home.

The dollar has since returned to around NIS 3, after losing roughly 12% against the shekel over the past year.

Much of the shekel’s strength has come from Israeli pension funds and insurers. They sold about $43 billion in foreign currency over the past year, including $14 billion in the second quarter alone.

Higher currency-hedging costs helped drive those sales. As Israeli interest rates fell while U.S. rates remained relatively high, protecting overseas investments against currency swings became more expensive. Institutions responded by reducing dollar exposure, adding even more strength to the shekel.

Foreign-currency exposure in Israelis’ financial portfolios consequently fell from about 17% to 13%, returning to levels last seen before the judicial overhaul dispute and the October 2023 war.

Israel’s technology sector has added another source of dollars. Israeli tech companies raised nearly $8 billion overseas during the first half of the year, while technology, defense, cybersecurity and research exports continued generating foreign currency.

The strong shekel has clear winners and losers. Importers pay less for foreign goods, potentially helping reduce costs for Israeli consumers. Exporters receive fewer shekels for every dollar they earn.

American companies operating Israeli development centers face the same problem. They generally need to convert dollars into shekels to pay Israeli salaries, rent and taxes, making their Israeli operations more expensive when the shekel strengthens.

Economists now expect some of the extreme currency moves to settle. But U.S. markets remain important: when American stocks rise, Israeli institutions often sell additional dollars to maintain their currency exposure, providing another boost to the shekel.

JBizNews Desk | Tel Aviv

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The U.S. military is about to start ordering missile interceptors by the thousands instead of by the dozens, because five months of war with Iran burned through a stockpile that took years to build and would take far longer to replace.

Army budget documents for fiscal 2027 reviewed by Fox News Digital call for a sharp increase in purchases of Patriot Advanced Capability-3 Missile Segment Enhancement interceptors, known as PAC-3 MSE, and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors, or THAAD — the two systems that shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. Patriot batteries cover troops, air bases and other high-value sites at shorter range; THAAD reaches higher and farther.

The scale of the change is easiest to see in the old numbers. Army records show PAC-3 MSE buys falling from 328 missiles in fiscal 2022 to 252 in fiscal 2023, 230 in fiscal 2024 and 214 in fiscal 2025, before the fiscal 2026 request funded 320. Meanwhile, the Army Requirements Oversight Council had quietly raised its acquisition objective for the same missile from 3,376 to 13,773 back in April 2025 — more than quadrupling what the service says it needs.

THAAD was thinner still. The Missile Defense Agency bought 11 interceptors in fiscal 2024 and 12 in fiscal 2025; the fiscal 2026 base request called for 25, with $317 million in additional mandatory funding adding 12 more for a total of 37. By fiscal 2027, with THAAD procurement shifted to the Army, the request supports 857 interceptors — 27 through regular funding and 830 through the Munitions Acceleration Council.

“The problem is 25 years of not buying enough munitions,” retired Rear Adm. Mark Montgomery of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies told Fox News Digital.

What drained the shelves was a war that leaned on air defense harder than anything since the Gulf. American interceptors have been fired repeatedly to protect Israel, U.S. forces across the Middle East and Navy ships in the Red Sea. Reuters reported the Army has used virtually all of its Army Tactical Missile System and Precision Strike Missile inventories during five months of fighting with Iran, with Patriot and THAAD stocks also drawn down and slightly under half the global Tomahawk supply expended, according to one source. President Trump has pushed back on those accounts, saying the United States has more munitions than it needs and that American defense firms are producing at record levels while expanding plants and equipment.

For American manufacturers, this is the largest demand signal in a generation. Lockheed Martin builds both the PAC-3 MSE and the THAAD interceptor. The Pentagon has struck framework agreements with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to boost THAAD and PAC-3 output, including a Lockheed contract valued at nearly $59 billion to triple PAC-3 production by 2030 — though experts caution that congressional appropriations are what turn those frameworks into actual missiles. Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg went further this month, sending arms makers a memo giving them 21 days to submit plans for faster delivery and expanded capacity on critical systems, telling industry that multi-year development cycles no longer match what the military needs.

Ordering is the easy part. Interceptors depend on specialized production lines and a supplier web turning out rocket motors, seekers, guidance sets and energetics, none of which scales in a quarter. That makes the fiscal 2027 jump less an immediate refill than an attempt to build industrial capacity that can sustain higher output for years.

The reason for the urgency sits in the Pacific. A Heritage Foundation analysis estimates current annual production capacity at 620 PAC-3 MSE missiles and 96 THAAD interceptors, and puts the minimum viable inventory for a conflict with China at 7,082 PAC-3 MSE and 1,394 THAAD — several times what it estimates the U.S. holds today, with actual stockpile levels classified. At current production rates, the report calculates it would take between roughly nine and more than 80 years to reach those numbers depending on the system, and argues the window to close the gap is narrowing.

Report author Jim Fein, a defense industrial base researcher at Heritage, told Fox News Digital the shortage was foreseeable and traces to decades of budget tradeoffs in which other programs won out — decisions made both in Pentagon requests and in what Congress ultimately appropriated.

The mismatch also shows up in cost. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker noted in March that the U.S. has been firing $4 million Patriot interceptors at Iranian drones costing a fraction of that.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Moody’s has put a name to a risk building quietly inside the banking system: nearly every large bank is racing to install artificial intelligence, and nearly all of them are buying it from the same few companies.

The rating agency’s “Bank of the Future” analysis, published in late July, said AI will eventually cut costs and lift revenue across Wall Street and the City of London, with significant risk attached. Most financial firms now depend on a relatively small group of foundation AI model and cloud computing providers — what Moody’s calls a “systemic dependency” — and an outage at a single major provider could ripple across customers and entire sectors at once. Regulators, the agency expects, will sharpen their focus on operational resilience and third-party concentration as adoption deepens.

The distinction from ordinary technology risk matters. A bank typically runs several different suppliers across different systems. With generative AI, many institutions end up relying on the same underlying models, the same cloud infrastructure and the same handful of vendors. One failure then becomes everyone’s failure simultaneously, rather than one bank’s bad week.

The pricing problem

Moody’s also flagged what it termed vendor dependence risk — the prospect that a set of dominant model and infrastructure providers could, over time, control the price of AI services.

The report named OpenAI and Anthropic specifically, noting that both face investor pressure to reach profitability while still running losses — pressure Moody’s believes could eventually hand those vendors leverage over pricing terms with the institutions building on their models.

That is the sequence worth watching. A bank spends two years rebuilding fraud detection, credit decisioning and customer service around a particular model. Switching costs climb with every workflow moved over. Then the contract comes up for renewal, and the bank’s negotiating position is considerably weaker than it was at signing.

Moody’s added that the payoff may be thinner than banks expect: capturing it requires substantial investment, and with so many competitors chasing the same efficiencies, much of the gain gets competed away. Everyone spends, everyone gets faster, and the savings pass through to customers rather than to shareholders.

The deposit risk

One warning is specific to banking, and it should register with anyone who lived through March 2023. Moody’s said AI could make it far easier for depositors to move money into higher-yielding accounts, potentially shifting significant sums in a short period. That puts depositor trust and funding stability directly in scope.

Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in part because customers could move money out with a phone in their hands faster than the bank could raise liquidity. An AI assistant that continuously monitors rates across institutions and moves cash on its own instruction compresses that timeline further. Moody’s grouped this alongside heightened exposure to data privacy failures, cybersecurity gaps and fraud.

How deep adoption already runs

More than three-quarters of financial services firms in the United Kingdom already use AI, according to a Treasury select committee report. Lloyds Banking Group is the clearest large-scale commitment, with chief executive Charlie Nunn pursuing a £13 billion strategy that includes £2 billion in cost cuts, acknowledging the effect on staff and pledging continued reskilling alongside new hiring.

Moody’s also attached a figure to the displacement question: a one-in-five chance that AI can perform the work of a capable mid-level employee by 2030.

What banks can do about it

The agency did not leave the problem without remedies. Moody’s said banks and insurers can reduce their dependence by keeping control of their own data, applying their considerable experience negotiating technology contracts, using open-source models, and building partnerships rather than single-vendor relationships.

That first item is the one most within reach. A bank’s proprietary data — its lending history, its customer behavior, its fraud patterns — is the asset the model providers cannot replicate. Institutions that keep that data under their own control and portable between systems retain the ability to walk. Those that let it settle inside a vendor’s platform are the ones who will find the renewal conversation unpleasant.

The open-source option has also become materially more credible in the past few months, with capable models now available under permissive licenses that run on hardware a bank already owns. For a mid-sized institution weighing a first AI deployment, that is worth evaluating before signing a long-term commitment to any single provider.

The broader point Moody’s is making is not that banks should slow down. It is that concentration risk is the thing regulators eventually price, and that the industry is building it right now, in plain view, one vendor contract at a time.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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An American defense technology company will build the next batch of small attack drones that Israeli combat units carry into the field. Ondas Inc., the Nasdaq-listed autonomous systems firm headquartered in West Palm Beach, Florida, said Tuesday it won a multi-million-dollar strategic tender from the Israeli Ministry of Defense to develop and produce next-generation tactical attack drone capabilities under a program named “Digital Bat.”

The idea behind the program is straightforward: build a strike drone cheap enough that the army can hand them out to ordinary infantry units in large numbers, rather than treating each one as an expensive asset to be conserved. Ondas will lead development of a new generation of low-cost tactical attack drones designed for scalable deployment across frontline combat units.

What Ondas is contracted to deliver is not just an aircraft. The development work covers the full operational package — the aerial platform itself, the autonomous flight software, mission integration, systems engineering, production readiness, and compatibility with the military’s wider command-and-control environment. In practice, that means a soldier should be able to pull the drone out, send it toward a target, and have it work with the same digital systems the unit already uses.

Eric Brock, Ondas chairman and chief executive, framed the award as proof the company can now run large programs itself rather than supplying parts to someone else. He called it “an important validation of the defense technology platform we are building at Ondas.”

Israel’s defense establishment has been rebuilding its drone procurement from the ground up since the Swords of Iron war, and the shift is toward volume. An earlier tender for assault drones went to Israeli startup Xtend, and senior figures in the country’s defense industry have described the technology as still in its infancy — many expect assault drones to become the infantry equivalent of a grenade or a rocket launcher, a tool a soldier throws a few meters toward an enemy without needing line of sight.

Ondas has not won everything it bid on in Israel. Last month, two young Israeli startups, Kela and eyesAtop, beat Ondas for the separate Ministry of Defense tender covering the autonomous command-and-control platform for the Digital Bat program — effectively the national software layer that will manage future attack drone swarms. The Tuesday award gives Ondas the aircraft side of the same effort.

The company’s Israeli footprint is substantial and was assembled by acquisition. Ondas has bought Israeli firms including Airobotics, Iron Drone and Roboteam, giving it a combined aerial and ground robotics operation inside the country. It also holds contracted work tied to Israel’s Eastern Border Security Barrier through its 4M Defense demining unit. Across the group, Ondas now organizes its defense business into four areas: air defense and counter-drone systems, aerial intelligence, aerial attack, and unmanned ground systems, with AI-based command and mission software tying them together.

Brock tied the Israeli program directly to what is happening in Washington. He pointed to the U.S. Drone Dominance Program, a $1.1 billion initiative aimed at rapidly fielding low-cost unmanned systems including one-way attack drones, and said defense priorities are shifting fundamentally toward affordable autonomous systems that can be produced at scale. The same engineering and manufacturing base, in other words, is meant to serve both markets.

For investors, the timing matters. The award lands two days before Ondas reports quarterly results, and the stock has been on a run. Shares traded around $9.35 in premarket Tuesday, up roughly 8% over the week. The company closed Friday at $9.11 after climbing 21.6% the prior week, and faces a demanding second half: early revenue projections of about $68 million to $69 million for the reported quarter leave more than $405 million to be booked against its $406 million second-half target. Ondas has been stacking orders to get there, including a $50 million U.S. Army task order last week that lifted its Mistral subsidiary’s awards past $240 million under a multi-year lethal unmanned systems contract worth $982 million.

Neither Ondas nor the ministry disclosed a delivery timeline or unit quantities for Digital Bat.

JBizNews Desk | West Palm Beach

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Nvidia plans to invest as much as $3 billion in Lancium, the Texas power-infrastructure developer behind a major Stargate data-center campus, pushing the world’s most valuable AI chipmaker deeper into the electricity and real-estate bottlenecks now limiting artificial-intelligence expansion. 

The reported deal calls for Nvidia to initially invest $2 billion for roughly a 20% stake in Lancium, with another $1 billion available if the company reaches additional milestones. Lancium develops large-scale power infrastructure and is helping build the Abilene, Texas, campus tied to Stargate, the AI infrastructure venture backed by OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle. 

The significance is that Nvidia is no longer limiting its strategy to selling chips into the AI boom. The company is increasingly investing across the infrastructure needed to make those chips useful, including data-center operators, networking companies and now the power systems that determine where new computing capacity can actually be built.

Electricity has become one of the biggest constraints on AI expansion. Developers can buy servers faster than utilities can always provide new generation, substations and transmission capacity. That has made land with secured power access dramatically more valuable and turned grid connections into strategic assets.

For Nvidia, the investment helps protect demand for its own processors. A data center that cannot obtain enough electricity cannot install more GPUs, regardless of how strong customer demand may be. Supporting companies that solve those infrastructure problems therefore helps expand the market Nvidia ultimately sells into.

The strategy is also becoming more expensive. Nvidia has made dozens of private-company investments across the AI ecosystem, raising questions among investors about how aggressively the company should deploy its enormous cash generation outside its core chip business. Nvidia shares slipped Monday as investors assessed the reported Lancium deal alongside its broader investment program. 

For utilities, developers and infrastructure investors, the larger message is clear: AI capital is moving downstream. The next wave of spending is increasingly reaching electricity generation, transmission, cooling, land and construction rather than stopping at semiconductor manufacturers.

That broadens both the opportunity and the risk. If AI demand continues rising, companies controlling scarce power and data-center capacity could become some of the biggest beneficiaries. If expectations fall short, those same multibillion-dollar infrastructure commitments could leave investors holding expensive assets built around growth assumptions that never fully materialize.

JBizNews Desk | Texas

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The Federal Reserve sets interest rates using government statistics that describe the economy as it was several weeks ago and get revised later. Chairman Kevin Warsh wants to change that, and the first concrete step is a small committee that includes the man who ran Walmart.

Warsh appointed a data task force last month charged with improving the “quality and timeliness of real economic signals that inform the Federal Reserve’s policy judgments.” Its members are Harvard economics professor Raj Chetty, former Walmart chief executive Doug McMillon, and University of Chicago economics professor emeritus Kevin Murphy.

The McMillon appointment is the tell. A retailer of Walmart’s size knows what Americans are buying, in what quantities, at what price and in which zip codes — daily. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a survey-based figure weeks after the fact and then revises it. The argument for pulling in that kind of commercial data is that it is imperfect but less imperfect than dated federal surveys designed for a different economy.

The broader project

Warsh is attempting to rewire the central bank to use artificial intelligence to understand the economy in real time — aiming at better decisions a couple of years from now, while running current policy on the conventional playbook. He is pursuing what amounts to a change in how the Fed uses AI, though those tools will take time to build and to prove themselves, and inflation has been running above target for more than five years, which creates pressure to act with the instruments that already work.

That means the near-term posture is ordinary. The Warsh Fed is prepared to raise interest rates to fight inflation, based on established practice: analyze the government statistics, adjust the federal funds rate target range.

Why it got complicated

Running an institutional overhaul and an inflation fight simultaneously carries a cost, and Warsh paid some of it two weeks ago. Markets sold off and commentary turned sharply critical after his July 29 press conference, in which he was vague about the possibility of raising rates. Some analysts read it as a lack of commitment to bringing inflation down. His allies described it as a bump on the way to a more credible Fed.

Part of the confusion traces to a genuine difference in philosophy. Warsh argues that markets, not only central bankers, should carry more of the work of assessing the economy and setting financial conditions. He pointed after a recent meeting to a steep run-up in long-term interest rates — describing it as the largest move ever recorded between Fed meetings — as evidence that conditions had tightened without the Fed touching its benchmark rate. “Market participants are learning to play the ball, not the referee,” he said.

He has also separated two things that often get merged. Warsh told lawmakers that the AI investment boom will likely push measured prices up over the next year, but argued those increases are not automatically inflation in the sense that requires a policy response. At the same time, he has been direct that prices are too high and that price stability remains the primary objective, even as officials grow more open to the idea that AI could push costs down over time.

What it means for businesses

The practical stakes here are larger than they look. Every business that borrows — every mortgage, every equipment loan, every line of credit — is priced off decisions the Fed makes using data that is already stale when it arrives. The bottom line, as Axios framed it, is a Fed that keeps pushing on how technology shapes economic data and policymaking, with reassurance that the standard toolkit stays intact for now.

A Fed reading card-spend data, retail inventory turns and payroll processor feeds in something close to real time would, in principle, catch turns in the economy earlier — and would be less likely to keep tightening into a slowdown that the official numbers have not yet registered. The version Warsh’s critics and supporters are both imagining is a central bank running on fine-grained live data, analyzed without the worldview or interests of individual governors shaping the read.

The risk runs the other direction. Models that cannot be inspected making inputs to decisions that move mortgage rates is a governance problem, and the Fed has no established process for auditing that kind of system. Real-time private data also belongs to private companies, which raises a question about what a firm gets in return for handing its sales figures to the institution that sets its borrowing costs.

None of that gets settled soon. The task force is three people and a mandate. But the direction is now on the record, and the roster says plainly what kind of information this Fed intends to start listening to.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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The federal budget deficit is now expected to surpass $2 trillion this fiscal year, which would be one of the largest shortfalls on record as spending growth continues to outpace tax receipts.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Monday released its monthly budget update for July, which showed the federal government ran a nearly $1.8 trillion deficit through the first 10 months of fiscal year 2026, which runs through the end of September.

That figure represents an increase of $169 billion when compared with the same 10-month period in fiscal year 2025. Federal spending increased $308 billion from a year ago, outpacing the $139 billion rise in tax receipts.

CBO also noted it now estimates the budget deficit will rise to $2.1 trillion, up $200 billion from last fiscal year, for the full fiscal year 2026 based on information available through the end of July.

“CBO expects 2026 outlays to be close to the February baseline amounts. Revenues, by contrast, are anticipated to be about $200 billion below the February projections, mostly because of smaller-than-expected collections of tariff duties – a result of a Supreme Court ruling handed down after CBO’s baseline was released,” the agency wrote.

Increased spending was primarily driven by the cost of servicing the federal government’s more than $39 trillion national debt, as well as rising expenses for the government’s three largest mandatory spending programs – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

Costs related to paying interest on the debt were up $117 billion, or 14%, in the first 10 months of fiscal year 2026 compared with the same period a year ago. The rise was attributed to higher long-term interest rates, as well as the larger national debt.

Spending on Social Security benefits rose $70 billion, or 5%, from a year ago due to higher average benefits following inflation adjustments and an increase in the number of beneficiaries.

Medicare costs increased $66 billion, or 8%, from a year ago due to increased enrollment and higher payment rates for healthcare services. Medicaid spending was up $45 billion, or 8%, because of rising costs per enrollee.

Tax revenue from both payroll and taxes rose by a combined $202 billion, or 5%, compared with a year ago. Withholdings from workers’ paychecks were up $141 billion, or 5%, amid rising wages and salaries. Tax refunds paid to individuals rose $23 billion, or 7%, due to provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA).

Corporate income tax collections were down $89 billion, or 23%, due to provisions in the OBBBA that expanded deductions for investments and resulted in fewer tax receipts.

Collections of customs duties including tariffs increased $18 billion, or 13%, compared with the same period a year ago.

Through April, monthly collections were higher than they were a year ago, but net collections have declined sharply since May when the government began paying out tariff refunds under a Supreme Court ruling from February. CBO noted that about $100 billion in tariff refunds have been issued to date.

Maya MacGuineas, president of the nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB), said in a statement that federal borrowing has grown to an “astounding” level and that a deficit on track to surpass $2 trillion when the economy isn’t in a recession “is not normal.”

“Incredibly, such an enormous level of borrowing barely scratches the surface of our fiscal deterioration,” she explained. “We are about to hit the sobering milestone of $40 trillion in gross national debt, and things are only likely to get worse.”

“If lawmakers want to correct our fiscal course, they should start by targeting a reasonable fiscal goal, like 3% of GDP deficits, and then create a bipartisan commission to figure out how we should get there. We can no longer afford to put off the difficult decisions – the time to act is now,” MacGuineas added.

The biggest obstacle facing the companies building artificial intelligence is no longer chips or capital. It is the local zoning board — and in a growing number of places, the answer coming back is no.

Opposition to large AI data centers is rising in Republican and Democratic communities alike, with residents raising electricity bills, water supplies, noise and strain on local infrastructure. Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Nebraska and Ohio are all seeing pressure for tighter oversight, project audits, or rules preventing households from absorbing the infrastructure costs these facilities create. With midterm elections approaching, politicians are finding the issue hard to sidestep.

The numbers behind that pressure are substantial. Local opposition blocked or delayed 75 data center projects representing $130 billion in planned construction during the first three months of 2026, according to Data Center Watch — roughly as many projects as were affected across all of 2025. The 2025 total in dollar terms came to $156 billion in delayed or canceled work.

Not a partisan split

The polling is what makes this unusual. A Gallup survey found roughly 70% of Americans oppose construction of an AI data center in their local area — 75% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans. The internal breakdown is stranger still: conservative Republicans oppose local data centers at a higher rate, 53%, than moderate Republicans, at 44%, putting the most conservative voters closer to Democrats than to the center of their own party.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a chart where conservative Republicans are closer to liberal Democrats than liberal and moderate Republicans are,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.

Megan Mullin, faculty director of the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, attributes it to something simpler than technology anxiety. “Amid so much partisan division, opposition to data centers seems to be the thing that unites Americans right now,” she said, describing the resistance as rooted in attachment to the places people live.

It is already moving campaigns

In Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, Democrat William Lawrence did not plan to run on data centers, but voters kept raising it. “It wasn’t something that I expected to be part of the campaign last August because data centers weren’t on our radar,” he said. “But there have been four data centers proposed in the district since I declared my candidacy.” He won his primary against two more moderate opponents.

In Wisconsin, calling for a construction moratorium has helped Francesca Hong assemble a broad coalition in the Democratic primary for governor. And two months after OpenAI and Oracle broke ground on a large campus in Saline Township, Michigan, Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed held a rally in front of the site, calling for no further approvals until federal rules are in place.

It cuts against incumbents of both parties. Maine Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, vetoed legislation that would have created the first statewide data center moratorium, saying she did not want to shut the industry out entirely. More than 100 moratorium proposals are circulating around the country.

What it costs the builders

The consequences fall on Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Google, OpenAI and Oracle, whose AI strategies all require extraordinary amounts of physical construction. Developers once treated land, chips and capital as the binding constraints. Community permission is now a fourth. The likely result is slower permitting, higher financing costs, and a strong incentive to build where local officials are openly supportive.

That last point is the practical one for anyone in construction, engineering, utilities or industrial real estate. A project that clears zoning in eight months instead of thirty is worth a premium, and developers are beginning to pay it. Communities that organize a welcome — with clear rules on power costs, tax treatment and water use agreed up front — are moving to the front of the queue.

The complaints cluster around a few concrete items: enormous electricity demand that outruns existing grids and pushes rates up, noise, and public infrastructure rebuilt for the benefit of one very large customer. Non-disclosure agreements around early negotiations have fed the distrust, and residents are skeptical of promised jobs and tax revenue.

There is a structural reason the industry keeps losing these fights. AI has no local constituency. Housing developments have future residents, auto plants have workers, wind farms have environmental groups. A data center employs relatively few people once built, which leaves almost no one in town with a direct stake in seeing it go up.

Whether the coalition holds is a separate question. Researchers note that issues uniting people across party lines tend to fracture once they draw serious political attention, and the midterms will test that. For now, the fastest-growing constraint on the AI buildout is not technical. It is a room full of neighbors with a microphone.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Iran has handed control of its top security body to a man who has been the subject of an Interpol Red Notice for nearly two decades over the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history. Presidency spokesman Mehdi Tabatabaei announced Sunday that President Masoud Pezeshkian had appointed Mohsen Rezaei secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, following the resignation of Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr. Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei separately named Rezaei his own representative on the council, giving him two seats of authority in the same body.

Rezaei has been under an Interpol Red Notice since 2007 over the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, which killed 85 people. Argentine court records attribute the attack to Hezbollah operatives acting on Iranian orders, and the late prosecutor Alberto Nisman alleged in a 2006 indictment that the decision was taken at a meeting in Mashhad in August 1993. Argentine authorities have long alleged a planning role for Rezaei, who was IRGC commander at the time; he denies wrongdoing. Interpol’s General Assembly upheld the notices for Rezaei and five others at its 76th session after Argentina’s request.

Israel responded immediately. Its Foreign Ministry said Monday that the Iranian regime <cite index=”115-1″>“worships terror, rewards its architects” and elevates them to the highest levels of power.</cite>

Who he is

Rezaei, 71, commanded the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from 1981 to 1997, through most of the Iran-Iraq war. He later spent more than two decades as secretary of Iran’s Expediency Discernment Council and served as vice president for economic affairs from 2021 to 2023 under Ebrahim Raisi. He holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Tehran. Since March he has served as military adviser to Mojtaba Khamenei, who succeeded his father as supreme leader after Ali Khamenei was killed at the outset of this year’s war. Rezaei has taken a hard line on the confrontation with Washington and voiced skepticism about negotiations.

A revolving door at the top

Rezaei is the second man to hold the post since Ali Larijani was assassinated by Israel in mid-March, during the early weeks of the war between the United States, Israel and Iran. Zolghadr had been in the job only since late March. The president formally chairs the council, but the secretary carries the greater operational influence, and no decision becomes binding until the supreme leader signs off.

Why it matters commercially

The timing is what businesses should note. Rezaei takes the post amid ongoing talks over the Strait of Hormuz, which Tehran has used as leverage through the months-long conflict with the United States and Israel. The secretary of the security council is the official who coordinates Iran’s negotiating posture across the presidency, the foreign ministry, the armed forces and the intelligence services. Installing a figure who has publicly doubted the value of talks changes the read on how quickly a Hormuz arrangement gets settled.

That question sits directly on top of global shipping economics. Roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil moves through Hormuz, and war-risk insurance premiums for tankers in the Gulf have been the single largest swing factor in freight costs for the region this year. Every week of uncertainty over the strait is priced into charter rates, insurance and the delivered cost of crude and LNG reaching Asian and European buyers.

There is also a compliance dimension for anyone with international exposure. The IRGC, which Rezaei led for 16 years, is designated a terrorist organization by the United States. A sanctioned-entity veteran now sitting at the center of Iranian decision-making narrows the space for any commercial re-engagement with Tehran that European or Asian firms may have been contemplating as part of a settlement.

The legal reality

The Red Notice has never produced an arrest. Argentina asked Qatar to detain Rezaei during a visit in 2022 and made the same request of Nicaragua the year before, when he traveled there for President Daniel Ortega’s inauguration. Both requests failed, and more than three decades after the bombing no one has stood trial.

An Interpol notice does not compel any government to act. It is a request circulated among member states, and in Rezaei’s case it has functioned mainly as a diplomatic marker — one that now attaches to the office coordinating Iran’s negotiations with Washington.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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An Israeli developer has built a website that rates countries and cities by how safe they are for Jewish travelers, and hundreds of people are now consulting it daily before booking a vacation. Safe for Jews, a Hebrew and English site created by Shay Yaish, combines artificial intelligence, Israeli government travel advisories and reports submitted by users to generate a risk rating and summary for each destination.

Yaish, 34, left a tech job a year ago intending to start his own venture and came up with the idea while he and his wife searched for somewhere safe for Israelis to visit. He built the site with AI tools, uses AI to keep it updated with news of antisemitic incidents, and checks the output every few days to confirm it looks correct.

How the map reads

The classifications are blunt, and the geography is not what most travel marketing assumes. Among the countries rated safest are the Czech Republic, Albania, Lithuania and Belarus in Eastern Europe; Bolivia, Paraguay and Ecuador in South America; and Japan, Vietnam and Cambodia in the Far East. Nepal, Iceland and Cyprus also rate safe, along with remote destinations including the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau and Tuvalu.

Mainstream destinations fare worse. The United States, Australia and most of Europe carry a “caution” label with a note that Jewish and Israeli symbols should be kept to a minimum. Spain, Canada, the United Kingdom, South Africa and Russia are marked “warning,” advising travelers to stay alert and avoid identifying as Jewish or Israeli. Iran, Afghanistan and Egypt are labeled “dangerous.”

The number of places classified as safe has shrunk over time, the site’s own data shows.

The market underneath

The commercial significance is larger than one founder’s side project. Jewish and Israeli outbound travel is a substantial segment — kosher tour operators, holiday programs, group travel and destination hotels catering to observant travelers add up to a multibillion-dollar business globally, concentrated in a handful of European and Mediterranean destinations that now carry warning labels on this map.

When travelers start screening destinations by perceived safety rather than price or flight time, the effect flows straight to airlines, hotels and local operators. A ratings shift that moves group bookings out of Spain or the U.K. and toward Cyprus, Greece or Eastern Europe reallocates real revenue. Tour operators building programs a year in advance have to price that uncertainty into deposits and cancellation terms.

There is also an insurance angle. Travel insurers underwrite on country risk, and their models are built on political instability, crime and health infrastructure — not on harassment risk for a specific traveler profile. A consumer-facing tool that fills that gap is, functionally, an early version of a risk product no established provider currently sells.

The limits

The site is candid about what it is not. Because it relies on AI and reports scraped from the web, its advisories are not always current or based on rigorous research, and it carries a disclaimer telling users this is not an official rating and that they must do their own research and use judgment.

That matters commercially as much as editorially. A rating that moves booking decisions but carries no methodological audit trail is a liability risk if a traveler relies on it and something goes wrong. Established travel-risk firms sell to corporate clients precisely because their assessments are defensible; a consumer tool built on automated scraping is not in that category, and does not claim to be.

The business model question

Yaish makes no money from the site, which launched a year ago, and hopes to expand it into a hub where Jewish travelers can find Jewish-friendly hotels, kosher restaurants and other resources. That is the obvious path — the ratings draw the audience, and the directory monetizes it through the same booking and referral economics that power the wider travel sector.

Whether the underlying demand persists is not really in question at the moment. “Things are really confusing now for Israelis who want to travel,” Yaish said. A tool built to answer that confusion is a product with a market, and the size of that market is set by conditions no travel startup controls.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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For the first time, it costs more to rent an apartment in San Francisco than in New York City — and the reason is a few thousand people working at companies that have not gone public yet.

Average asking rents in San Francisco have reached roughly $3,728 a month, up about 18% in under two years, putting the city ahead of New York as the most expensive major rental market in the country, according to a Wall Street Journal report drawing on CoStar data. Citywide vacancy has fallen to about 3.7%. On CoStar’s measure of average apartment rent actually being paid, the figure is $3,827 — also above New York.

“It’s a pressure cooker, and it’s heated up really fast,” said Nigel Hughes, a senior researcher at CoStar. In the most sought-after neighborhoods — the Marina District, Pacific Heights and South of Market — vacancy has collapsed to roughly 3%, down from about 13% in 2020. New construction has stalled.

What renters are doing to compete

The behavior on the ground tells the story faster than the averages do. In some neighborhoods, prospective tenants are offering well above the asking rent, paying several months up front, and putting together personal biographies to make themselves more appealing to landlords.

Six-figure salaries no longer settle it. Katrine Razniak, 27, leads a team of account managers at the software company Rippling and earns $180,000 a year. She and her partner, Adam Woodbury, bring in a combined $365,000 — and still could not secure a one-bedroom. “I feel a little bit like I’m not good enough to live here anymore because I don’t work at an AI company,” Woodbury said.

That is the sorting mechanism. OpenAI and Anthropic are both headquartered in San Francisco and both moving toward public offerings, creating a tier of employees and investors whose equity stakes let them bid far above what a well-paid engineer or product manager can. Together with the newly public SpaceX, those three companies alone could produce more than 20 new billionaires from current and former staff, according to an analysis by the private markets research firm Sacra.

The rest of the bill

Housing does the most damage, but it does not travel alone. San Francisco’s overall cost of living now runs 65.6% above the national average, according to the Council for Community and Economic Research. Utilities run about 41% above the national average, transportation about 43% above, and groceries about 19% above. The median home price topped $1.7 million in April, against a national median around $450,000.

The comparison that makes the cause hard to dispute: national rents are roughly flat to falling, while San Francisco rents have climbed at the steepest rate in the country. The increases concentrate where the AI offices are — SoMa and Mission Bay posted rent growth above 10% year over year in late 2025, while other parts of the city moved far less. San Jose has stayed comparatively stable; the new money is staying in the city rather than spreading to the suburbs the way it did in the last technology boom.

Why New York readers should care

This pattern is familiar here. It is what New York went through when Wall Street rebuilt itself around hedge funds in the 2000s — money concentrates in a handful of zip codes, and everything around those zip codes gets pulled up with it.

For employers, the number that matters is what it now costs to put a person in a seat. A company hiring in San Francisco is not competing on salary against other software firms; it is competing against equity packages at pre-IPO AI companies that do not need to be justified against a profit-and-loss statement. That prices out startups, nonprofits, and any business whose margins are real.

For New York, losing the most-expensive-city title is not a victory so much as a data point. It means the premium employers pay to keep talent here has, for the moment, stopped rising as fast as the premium on the West Coast — which is exactly the condition that has drawn firms and workers back to the tri-state area in past cycles.

For landlords in San Francisco, the current market offers extraordinary pricing power, and for developers the shortage represents a substantial opportunity. For everyone else in that city, the arithmetic is a good deal simpler, and it does not work.

JBizNews Desk | San Francisco

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Hungary’s parliament elected András Baka as president on Tuesday, handing the office to a judge whose removal from the Supreme Court became one of the defining rule-of-law disputes of the Viktor Orbán era. Lawmakers approved his election by 140 votes to 6, using the more than two-thirds majority controlled by Prime Minister Péter Magyar, and Baka replaces Orbán-appointed Tamás Sulyok, who was removed from the presidency last month.

The presidency is largely ceremonial. The signal is not.

Who Baka is

Baka served as a judge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg from 1991 to 2008. He was nominated to head Hungary’s Supreme Court in 2009 and ousted in 2012 after condemning an Orbán-era move to cut the mandatory retirement age for judges from 70 to 62, which he called a judicial purge. The European Union and the United States both called the age-limit reduction illegal, and in 2016 the European Court of Human Rights ruled that his dismissal violated his freedom of expression.

Apart from a brief stint as a lawmaker elected on the Hungarian Democratic Forum list in 1990, Baka has held no political positions. He is 73.

The political arithmetic

Magyar’s Tisza party won a landslide in April, ending Orbán’s 16-year run, and has since moved to unwind his influence over state institutions — including using a constitutional amendment to remove Sulyok from office weeks before nominating Baka. Tisza holds 141 of 199 seats in the National Assembly. Fidesz, now in opposition, boycotted the vote, accusing Tisza of authoritarian tactics, which the party denies.

The constitutional amendment that ended Sulyok’s term provides that the new president serves until a new constitution takes effect, or for a maximum of five years. Tisza has said it intends to adopt a new constitution within this parliamentary term and will consider allowing the president to be elected directly.

Why business is watching

Hungary spent the Orbán years in an extended standoff with Brussels over judicial independence and public procurement, and that dispute cost real money — billions of euros in EU cohesion and recovery funds held back pending rule-of-law changes. Elevating the judge whose dismissal Strasbourg ruled unlawful is the clearest possible statement that the new government intends to settle that argument on Brussels’ terms.

For companies operating in Hungary, the practical questions are narrower and more immediate. Predictable courts change how contracts are enforced, how procurement disputes get resolved, and how much legal risk a foreign investor prices into a Hungarian project. Hungary hosts substantial German automotive manufacturing and a growing battery sector, industries that commit capital on ten- and twenty-year horizons and that have spent years working around a legal environment Brussels flagged as unreliable.

Currency and borrowing costs sit downstream of the same question. The forint and Hungarian government debt have long traded partly on the state of the EU funding dispute, because those transfers are large relative to the size of the economy. A government that resolves the standoff removes a discount that has been priced into Hungarian assets for years.

What comes next

The presidency does not set economic policy, and Baka will not be negotiating with Brussels. What he provides is a signature and a symbol: a head of state who spent his career on the judicial-independence side of the argument, at the moment a government is preparing to rewrite the constitution.

The counterargument is already being made in Budapest. Critics note that removing Sulyok by constitutional amendment and installing Baka in his place uses the same procedural muscle Tisza condemned when Fidesz held the majority, complicating the party’s account of itself as a break from the previous era. A two-thirds majority rewriting the constitution is a two-thirds majority rewriting the constitution, whichever party holds it — and businesses that committed capital under one set of rules have reason to watch how quickly the next set arrives.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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U.S. stocks opened cautiously higher Tuesday, August 11, as fresh reports of possible progress toward a U.S.-Iran arrangement eased some of the pressure from surging oil prices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened down 14.4 points, or 0.03%, at 53,961.60. The S&P 500 gained 14.4 points, or 0.19%, to 7,767.51, while the Nasdaq Composite rose 66.8 points, or 0.25%, to 26,672.18. Within the first half-hour, the Dow reversed higher by roughly 65 points, the S&P held a gain of about 0.1%, and the Nasdaq was near unchanged. 

The immediate market driver is still the Strait of Hormuz. Brent crude briefly pushed above $90 a barrel before retreating toward $87 after reports suggested the United States and Iran may be moving closer to an arrangement and Qatar said Iran-Oman negotiations were advanced. Oil had jumped more than 5% Monday as hopes for a quick agreement faded. Treasury yields also moved lower Tuesday morning, giving some support to stocks. 

Tuesday’s morning economic data was light but encouraging. The NFIB Small Business Optimism Index jumped to 99.8 in July from 97.4, beating the 97.0 consensus and reaching its highest level in roughly 11 months. Hiring intentions strengthened, but labor shortages remain a problem: 36% of owners reported positions they could not fill, while inflation fell sharply as a top concern. The National Association of Realtors’ July existing-home-sales report was scheduled for 10:00 a.m. ET; its official release page had not yet posted the July figure at the cutoff for this recap, so JBizNews is not assuming a number. 

Individual stocks are moving much more sharply than the indexes. Riot Platforms surged roughly 17% after announcing a 20-year computing agreement valued at about $9.1 billion to supply 191 megawatts of capacity to a major AI company reported to be Anthropic. On Holding fell roughly 16% after missing second-quarter sales expectations and cutting its full-year forecast, while Hims & Hers dropped about 7% following a wider-than-expected quarterly loss. 

Healthcare and business-services earnings are providing some upside. Cardinal Health rose about 8% in early trading after beating quarterly profit expectations and forecasting fiscal 2027 adjusted earnings of $12.40 to $12.60 a share, above the roughly $12.04 Wall Street consensus. Aramark gained about 8% after reporting better-than-expected quarterly profit and revenue. Intel remained slightly lower after increasing its newly announced stock sale to $20 billion from $15 billion, pricing approximately 210.5 million shares at $95 apiece to raise money for capital spending and other corporate purposes. 

For the rest of Tuesday, oil and Iran headlines remain the fastest-moving risk for the market. Investors will also watch the New York Fed’s second-quarter household debt and credit report at 11:00 a.m. ET. After the closing bell, AI-linked companies Super Micro Computer, CoreWeave and Lumentum are scheduled to report earnings, giving investors another read on whether enormous AI infrastructure spending is translating into revenue. 

The larger test arrives Wednesday morning. July CPI is scheduled for 8:30 a.m. ET, with economists looking for headline inflation of roughly 3.4% year over year, down from 3.5% in June. After Friday’s weak employment report, a softer inflation number could strengthen the argument for the Federal Reserve to remain on hold in September; a hotter number, particularly after the recent oil spike, could quickly push Treasury yields higher and pressure richly valued technology stocks. 

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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Russia’s seaborne crude shipments have fallen to their weakest level since May, according to tanker-tracking data reported Tuesday — the third straight week of decline and a sharp reversal from the record wartime volumes Moscow was pushing out of its ports just six weeks ago.

The mechanism behind the swing is Ukraine’s drone campaign, and it works in both directions. When Ukrainian drones knock out Russian refineries, Russia cannot process its own crude at home, so it dumps the raw barrels onto tankers and exports them. When the drones hit ports, tankers and export terminals instead, the barrels stop moving altogether. That is the switch that has flipped over the past month.

The numbers behind the drop

The trail is clear in the weekly tanker data. Four-week average seaborne crude shipments hit 4.22 million barrels a day in the period to July 5, the highest since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. They held at 4.21 million barrels a day through July 12. By the four weeks to Aug. 2 they had dropped to 3.9 million barrels a day, falling below 4 million for the first time in six weeks and hitting the lowest level since mid-June. This week’s reading takes the decline further, back to territory last seen in the spring.

Ukraine shifted tactics in the second half of July, sending drones after tankers in the Black Sea and Sea of Azov and warehouses in western Russia rather than refineries, then swung back to refinery strikes — hitting Rosneft’s Ryazan plant, Lukoil’s 300,000-barrel-a-day Volgograd facility, a Bashneft complex at Ufa and Rosneft’s Saratov plant. Port activity reflects the security risk: loadings at Novorossiysk have stayed near half their recent peak.

Refining at a 24-year low

The damage to Russia’s downstream industry is severe. Refineries processed an estimated 3.6 million barrels of crude a day in July, the lowest since May 2002 and roughly a third below the seasonal norm, according to EA Analytics data cited by Bloomberg. Between 2020 and 2025, Russian refineries ran 5.3 million to 5.6 million barrels a day at this point in the year.

Refined products are where the loss shows up hardest. Russian oil product export loadings fell 23% in July to 4.7 million tonnes, the lowest on record and less than half the 9.6 million tonnes loaded in July 2025, with the Tuapse terminal — under sustained drone attack since May — loading almost nothing for a second consecutive month.

The barrels that don’t arrive

Shipping crude is not the same as selling it, and Russia has been running into that gap all summer. Cargoes have been taking longer to clear, with tankers of Urals crude anchored off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast and in Indonesia’s Riau archipelago near Singapore, and far-eastern grades idling for weeks near the Pacific port of Kozmino. Those delays pushed the volume of Russian crude sitting on water to about 135 million barrels by mid-July.

Revenue has followed the same path down. The gross weekly value of Russia’s seaborne crude exports fell to a four-week average of $1.68 billion, down $200 million from the prior period, with Baltic Urals at $52.61 a barrel and cargoes delivered to India hitting an eleven-week low of $70.58. Urals averaged $60.22 a barrel in July, down 3% on the month but still well above the $44.10 EU and U.K. price cap that took effect on Feb. 1.

What it means for buyers

The customers are concentrated, which magnifies every disruption. India’s imports of Russian crude hit a record high for a second consecutive month in July, up 2.1% and worth €5.5 billion. Indian refiners have built their margins around discounted Russian barrels; when volumes tighten, they buy replacement cargoes from the Gulf and West Africa at narrower spreads, and that competition for non-Russian barrels is what eventually reaches diesel and jet fuel prices in Western markets.

For American businesses, the transmission runs through freight and fuel rather than through any direct trade. Fewer Russian barrels reaching Asia tightens the global pool, and reduced Russian product exports remove diesel supply from a market that has been thin all year. Diesel is the cost line that moves trucking, rail and construction pricing.

The open question is whether this is a durable decline or a pause. Russia’s export machine has proven resilient at rerouting around damage, and year-to-date flows still run above every annual average since the 2022 invasion.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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A three-year-old California company that builds $2,000 attack drones is now worth $2.5 billion, roughly triple its value from nine months ago, according to reports Tuesday on its latest fundraising. The jump makes Neros one of the fastest-rising names in American defense manufacturing and puts a hard number on how much investors will pay for a domestic alternative to Chinese-made drones.

The arithmetic behind the leap is straightforward. Neros was valued at roughly $839.5 million as of November 10, 2025, when it closed its last round. That was a $75 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Vy Capital US and Interlagos, bringing total capital raised to more than $120 million. Since then the company landed the kind of order that changes a valuation model.

The contract that moved the number

In July, the Army awarded Neros an indefinite-delivery contract worth up to $500 million for its Archer first-person-view attack drones, with Defense Daily reporting the ceiling could cover hundreds of thousands of aircraft — one of the largest small-drone commitments in Army history. A contract ceiling four times the company’s entire lifetime funding, from a customer that historically buys in decades-long cycles, is what a private valuation reprices against.

Neros currently turns out about 1,200 drones a week and plans to reach one million units a year by 2028. Each Archer costs roughly $2,000, and a fully equipped system with a warhead runs about $5,000. That price point is the entire pitch. Traditional prime contractors — General Atomics, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin — build unmanned systems that typically run $500,000 to $20 million per unit at volumes of a few hundred a year, under cost-plus contracts that reward covered costs rather than manufacturing efficiency.

Built by drone racers

Neros was founded in 2023 by Soren Monroe-Anderson and Olaf Hichwa, competitive FPV drone pilots who concluded that Western militaries had fallen behind on domestically manufactured combat drones. The flagship Archer is a compact eight-inch aircraft weighing two to three pounds empty, able to carry a 4.5-pound payload as far as 12 miles, paired with a Crossbow ground control station.

The supply chain is the differentiator Washington cares about. The company has built what it calls a China-free supply chain, designing most components in-house and focusing on resistance to electronic warfare. As Monroe-Anderson has put it, much of the underlying FPV technology worldwide rests on chips, modules and core intellectual property from China, which means the components have to be rebuilt from an allied supply base rather than simply copied.

The battlefield record came first, and the contracts followed. Neros has shipped thousands of systems to Ukraine and to the U.S. Department of War, has been delivering drones to the U.K. Ministry of Defence, and runs an office in Kyiv alongside its Los Angeles headquarters. It has also set up a British subsidiary with up to £10 million of investment over five years to support U.K. sovereign drone manufacturing.

A sector repricing itself

Neros is not moving alone. Defense technology venture funding hit a record $49.1 billion in 2025, nearly double the prior year, and Anduril closed a $5 billion round at a $61 billion valuation in May. In June, Berlin-based Stark Defence raised €500 million from Sequoia and Founders Fund at a €3.2 billion valuation, up from €140 million raised in total previously. British air defense startup Cambridge Aerospace raised $300 million at a $3.4 billion post-money valuation this week.

What it means for business

Cheap, mass-produced drones are becoming a manufacturing category rather than a weapons program, and that pulls demand down into a supplier base of machine shops, battery makers, radio and optics firms, and injection molders — most of which do not think of themselves as defense companies. A one-million-unit annual target requires a domestic parts pipeline that does not currently exist at that scale, and the firms that build it will be doing so on orders that did not exist two years ago.

The risk sits in the same place as the opportunity. A $2.5 billion valuation on a company whose revenue is concentrated in government programs assumes those programs keep funding at the pace they set this year. Contract ceilings are not the same as delivered orders, and the gap between the two is where defense startups have historically stumbled.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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A slow-moving storm front is parked over Ohio and the wider Midwest today, dumping rain faster than the ground can absorb it and putting a long stretch of the country’s freight and manufacturing belt under flood warnings. The National Weather Service issued a flash flood warning at 5:30 a.m. today for four counties in central Ohio — Fairfield, Hocking, eastern Franklin and southwestern Licking — after morning thunderstorms brought heavy rain, with law enforcement reporting flash flooding to the weather service. More storms are expected through tonight, and the strongest are still ahead.

The Midwest and Ohio Valley, including Chicago and Cincinnati, are under an enhanced, or level 3, risk of severe thunderstorms, which has triggered numerous flood warnings and watches from Indiana into western Pennsylvania and Virginia, the weather service said. As of 7 a.m., up to 3 inches of rain had fallen in parts of Ohio.

The mechanism is simple. A slow-moving front is interacting with tropical air, and rainfall rates of 1 to 3 inches per hour are possible in the heaviest downpours. When storms keep re-forming over the same towns, the water has nowhere to go. A flood watch runs through Wednesday morning across dozens of counties in Ohio, Indiana and northern Kentucky, with several rounds of thunderstorms expected and the potential for storms to repeatedly track over the same locations.

The worst of the wind is timed for the back half of the day. The most widespread destructive winds are expected in one or two clusters of storms moving from northern Illinois into Indiana, Ohio and northeast Kentucky this afternoon and evening, with gusts topping 75 mph possible in a few spots. The tornado risk is low, but one or two are possible.

Power already going down

Utilities across the region are running restoration crews for a second straight day. Storms in the Mid-Atlantic knocked out power to nearly 175,000 homes and businesses across four states Monday night, with the bulk of the outages in Virginia, according to poweroutage.us. In northeast Ohio, Monday’s storms brought down wires and trees, forcing road closures and leaving many FirstEnergy customers without service.

For businesses, an outage of a few hours is rarely just an outage. Cold storage, food service, data rooms and any operation running a production line absorb losses that never show up in a weather report — spoiled inventory, halted shifts, and overtime to catch up once the lights come back.

A freight corridor under water

The warning zone sits on top of one of the busiest trucking corridors in the country. Interstate traffic through Indianapolis, Columbus, Cincinnati and Louisville feeds the distribution centers that supply retail across the eastern half of the United States. Flooded on-ramps and closed secondary roads slow deliveries in a way that ripples out for days, because a truck that misses a dock appointment does not simply get the next slot.

The Ohio River runs through the same footprint, and heavy runoff into its tributaries affects barge movement of coal, grain and chemicals. Farmers across Ohio, Indiana and Illinois are heading into the final stretch before harvest with fields that have already taken repeated soakings, and standing water on saturated ground does more damage to a crop than a single hard rain.

Why this week is worse than a normal storm

The ground is the problem. The flood threat zone is expected to stay largely unchanged Wednesday and Thursday, and areas already waterlogged from earlier in the week will be even more prone to flooding. Storm totals could top 6 inches where the storms hit more than once — close to double the average August rainfall of 3.43 inches in Cincinnati and 3.75 inches in Charleston, West Virginia. A level 3 of 4 threat of flooding rainfall covers Charleston, Cincinnati and the eastern side of Indianapolis.

The region has been here recently. Torrential rain on July 21 sent creeks in West Virginia to historic levels, washing out bridges and prompting numerous water rescues. Repeat flooding in the same counties raises rebuilding costs and puts pressure on property insurance in markets that were never priced as flood risk.

What to watch

The immediate question is how much rain falls between this afternoon and Wednesday morning, and whether the strongest wind clusters track over metro areas or open country. Businesses in the watch zone should assume power interruptions, plan for staff who cannot safely commute, and hold off on scheduling deliveries into the affected corridors until the front clears. The weather service repeated its standing warning to drivers not to attempt flooded roads, noting that most flood deaths happen in vehicles.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Cameras mounted on Royal Navy surveillance drones were quietly checking in with a server in China, and nobody involved in buying, building or fitting them knew it until a routine security scan caught the traffic.

The vessels are Kraken K3 Scout uncrewed surface craft — roughly 28-foot unmanned speedboats built by British defense firm Kraken Technology Group and used by Royal Navy special forces, including the Special Boat Service, for surveillance along contested coastlines. The Navy bought 20 of them for a project called Operation Beehive, and they have been in special forces hands since March. They are expected to be deployed to the Strait of Hormuz as part of Britain’s effort to help protect the waterway.

Here is what the cameras were actually doing. They were sending what security staff call “heartbeat communications” — a short, repeating signal whose only job is to confirm to a remote server that the device is switched on and working. That is standard behavior for connected equipment. The problem is not the content of the message. It is that the message had a destination, and the destination was an IP address inside China that nobody had authorized, documented or expected.

Where the part came from

This is the detail that should worry every procurement officer. The electro-optical and infrared cameras were manufactured by Canadian company Current Scientific Corporation under its Night Navigator 3000 line, but contained components sourced from outside the U.K. that were found sending the heartbeat traffic. Kraken had sourced the cameras from a third party that gave assurances about their security.

So the chain ran: British prime contractor, Canadian camera maker, third-party supplier, Chinese-made part. Two allied-country labels on the box, and the exposure was still there. Nobody in that chain was hiding anything. They simply did not know what was four tiers down.

The Ministry of Defence stripped all internet connectivity from the cameras after the discovery, and a spokesperson said an investigation found “no evidence” of MoD data or systems being accessed or transmitted externally, adding that the issue surfaced in a routine cyber vulnerability assessment. The opposition Conservatives called on the government to urgently audit its equipment for other unknown Chinese components.

The rule already changed in the U.S.

American businesses do not have to wait for their own version of this story, because the regulatory shift it implies has already happened in the energy sector.

In 2025, U.S. experts reported finding rogue communication devices, undocumented in any product paperwork, inside some Chinese-made solar inverters. In January, the Department of Energy inspected roughly 30 units and found no evidence of malicious or intentional differences in communications — while warning that inverter supply chains are complex enough to create openings for breaches and malicious components anyway.

Then regulators moved regardless. The FCC added foreign-produced power inverters to its Covered List, immediately banning equipment authorizations for unapproved foreign models — an action that effectively overrode the January DOE finding. The reasoning was that physical bugs are beside the point: wireless connectivity in modern smart inverters means firmware can be pushed remotely, so foreign-assembled units are treated as an unacceptable grid risk on their own.

That is the standard American buyers now have to plan around. The question is no longer “did investigators find something malicious in this device.” It is “does a path exist, and who is at the other end of it.” A clean forensic report does not clear the equipment.

The structural reason is legal, not technical: Chinese companies are required to cooperate with their government’s intelligence agencies, which is why security specialists treat Chinese-made connected equipment on foreign networks as a control question rather than a product-quality one.

What it costs on the ground

The practical burden lands on anyone buying connected hardware — cameras, sensors, controllers, inverters, batteries, cargo handling equipment, vehicles. It means demanding component-level bills of materials rather than country-of-assembly certificates, testing what devices talk to before they go live, and budgeting for requalifying suppliers when the answer is wrong.

The Ministry of Defence has been living with the awkward version of this for a while. It leased hundreds of electric vehicles, including MG models built by China’s state-owned Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporation, and put stickers on the dashboards instructing personnel not to connect MoD devices to the vehicle and to avoid sensitive conversations inside — with parking restrictions around some defense sites for vehicles containing Chinese components.

A warning sticker is what you are left with when the component is already inside the fence. The cheaper move, and the one boards are now being pushed toward, is finding out what is in the box before it ships.

JBizNews Desk | London

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A U.S. military helicopter fired into the rudder of a Panama-flagged container ship in the Gulf of Oman early Tuesday, deliberately wrecking the vessel’s steering rather than sinking it, after the crew ignored warnings from the American forces enforcing the naval blockade of Iran’s ports. The ship afterward appeared to be trying to move its crew onto another civilian vessel, and there were no immediate reports of casualties.

The vessel is believed to be the Vela Nova. The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations reported an incident involving a container ship and military forces in the Gulf of Oman, having first logged the vessel as a tanker; maritime risk group Vanguard and a security source separately assessed that the Vela Nova was struck by a missile roughly 71 nautical miles off Pakistan’s coast.

The targeting choice is the whole point of the operation. American forces have been aiming at rudders, engine rooms and smokestacks — the parts that make a ship move — so the vessel stops where it is instead of burning or going down with its cargo and crew. It is enforcement by immobilization, and it has become the standing method along this stretch of water.

How the blockade works now

Washington first imposed the blockade on Iranian ports on April 13. It came off in late spring, then went back on in mid-July after talks between the two sides collapsed. Since U.S. forces reimposed the blockade on July 13, they have redirected 55 commercial vessels, disabled two and boarded two to enforce compliance, according to figures Central Command released Sunday. Those numbers predate Tuesday’s incident.

The pattern is consistent: ships heading for Iranian terminals are hailed, warned repeatedly, and told to turn around. Most comply and are redirected. The ones that keep going get shot in the machinery.

The price at the pump end of the chain

For business readers, the number that matters is crude. Oil jumped about 5% Monday as confidence faded that Washington and Tehran would reach a deal to restore traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, with West Texas Intermediate settling at $82.13 a barrel and Brent at $87.72. By early Tuesday, Brent was trading near $92.54, roughly $5 above the prior morning and about $25 higher than a year ago.

The gap between the two benchmarks is the tell. Analysts described Monday’s move as pure Hormuz risk pricing rather than a fresh demand story, and flagged the widening Brent-WTI spread as the clearest evidence that this is Middle East supply risk, not global consumption, driving the tape. WTI, priced at Cushing, Oklahoma, barely moved Tuesday. Brent, which prices the barrels that actually have to sail past the shooting, did the moving.

Shipping costs are carrying the same premium. War-risk insurance for vessels in the region has climbed to between 7.5% and 10% of hull value — a charge that lands on every cargo, not just oil, and gets passed down the line to the buyer.

There is a strategic reserve angle as well. U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve stocks have dropped below 300 million barrels, the lowest since January 1983, as the conflict has dragged on. The cushion Washington would normally use to blunt a price spike is thinner than it has been in four decades.

Diplomacy running alongside the shooting

Tuesday’s strike landed in the middle of an active negotiating track. Pakistan’s defense minister told Bloomberg the two sides are close to “some sort of an arrangement,” pointing to signals from the past few days, while Qatar said Oman-Iran negotiations have reached an advanced stage with positive feedback from both parties. Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman countered that the United States has not come to the table seeking genuine talks or peace.

Tehran’s asking price has not moved. Iran wants the blockade ended, sanctions lifted and compensation for war damages before it agrees to fully reopen Hormuz, and has declined direct talks with Washington for now. President Trump told Axios the U.S. is “only semi-negotiating,” and indicated he would lean on the blockade to squeeze Iran’s economy rather than order another round of airstrikes.

That is the trade every shipper, refiner and insurer is now pricing: an economic siege that Washington intends to keep tightening, a Tehran that will not reopen the waterway until the siege lifts, and a shipping lane where the cost of guessing wrong is a missile in the engine room. Until one of those three changes, the risk premium stays in the barrel — and in the freight rate.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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The Mossad toured the Fordow nuclear site “many times” in order to understand it, former spy chief Yossi Cohen revealed at the Galilee Conference on Tuesday.

It remains unclear whether Cohen was referring to agents physically present within the facility or to remote monitoring.

“Its bombing by the Americans is the fulfillment of all my dreams,” Cohen added.

Regarding reports that the Iranians are approaching a nuclear weapons breakout, Cohen argued that “uranium enriched to 60% is still far from a bomb.”

As noted, the Fordow nuclear enrichment site, which is buried in a mountainous area, was attacked by the Americans during Operation Rising Lion. At the time, the Islamic Republic’s Atomic Energy Organization said the damage caused was “limited.”

“Limited damage was caused to several areas at the Fordow enrichment site, and we had already removed a significant portion of the equipment and materials. Therefore, there was no extensive damage, and there are no concerns about contamination,” said Behrouz Kamalvandi, deputy head and spokesman of the organization.

However, The Jerusalem Post is aware that the IDF has capabilities that could cause cave-ins at Fordow, which lies underneath a mountain. Additionally, initial estimates made known to the Post in March estimated that Fordow could be destroyed.

However, due to the site’s location and construction, it might be unclear for a while what the true extent of the deal. Some Israeli officials told the Post they believe Fordow was destroyed, while others said caution should be the rule until confirmation.

Natanz nuclear site damaged only above-ground

According to Kamalvandi, the enrichment complex at Natanz was damaged mainly in its above-ground sections. He stressed that because most of the facilities are located underground, there was only a small amount of leakage inside that did not spread outside.

The senior agency official also said that minor damage was caused to the nuclear complex in Isfahan. He said there were no casualties in the strikes at any of the nuclear facilities and stressed that wherever damage was caused, “we will rebuild them in a much better way.”

Many believed that Israeli attacks on Natanz and Isfahan in the 2025 war would set Iran’s nuclear program back anywhere from six months to two years or more. 

This post was originally published on here.

Intel has increased its planned stock offering from $15 billion to $20 billion, a move that says as much about the economics of artificial intelligence as it does about Intel itself.

The chipmaker announced Monday that it planned to raise $15 billion by selling new shares. By Tuesday morning, after strong investor demand, Intel expanded the deal to $20 billion.

That raises a simple question: Why does a company as large as Intel suddenly need that much new money?

The answer is that the AI boom is extraordinarily expensive.

Most consumers experience artificial intelligence as software — a chatbot, search tool or feature inside a phone or computer. But underneath that software sits an enormous physical infrastructure: semiconductor factories, advanced packaging plants, data centers, power equipment, cooling systems and thousands of high-end servers.

Intel wants to supply more of that infrastructure.

The company is spending heavily to expand chip manufacturing and its foundry business, where Intel makes semiconductors for outside customers rather than only designing chips for itself.

That strategy puts Intel more directly against Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s dominant contract chipmaker.

Building those factories requires enormous amounts of money years before they generate meaningful revenue. A modern semiconductor fabrication plant can cost tens of billions of dollars, and companies must continue spending even while technology changes and newer generations of chips are being developed.

That is where the stock offering comes in.

Instead of borrowing another $20 billion and adding more debt to its balance sheet, Intel is selling new ownership in the company.

Investors are buying approximately 210 million newly issued Intel shares at $95 apiece. Intel expects to receive close to $20 billion after underwriting costs, and the banks managing the sale have an option to buy additional shares.

For existing shareholders, there is a downside.

When a company creates and sells new shares, every existing shareholder owns a slightly smaller percentage of the company. That is known as dilution.

Think of Intel as a pizza. The company did not shrink the pizza, but it added more slices. Someone who previously owned one slice out of 10 now effectively owns one slice out of a larger total.

Companies generally accept that dilution when management believes the money raised can create more value than the dilution destroys.

Intel is effectively telling investors that access to capital now is more valuable than preserving the existing share count.

The fact that the offering grew from $15 billion to $20 billion is also important.

Companies typically announce a proposed offering and investment banks then gauge demand from institutional investors. When demand is strong enough, the company can increase the size of the sale.

So the upsizing suggests large investors were willing to provide Intel with substantially more capital than it initially sought.

That does not mean Wall Street suddenly believes Intel’s turnaround is guaranteed.

It means investors see enough potential in Intel’s position within the AI infrastructure race to commit billions of dollars to it.

There is another reason the timing makes sense.

Intel’s stock has recovered substantially, allowing the company to raise considerably more cash for every share it sells than it could have when its share price was much lower.

Raising equity when a stock is strong is generally less dilutive than waiting until the company is under financial pressure.

Intel also has another advantage: demand for AI computing is forcing technology companies to search for additional semiconductor capacity.

For years, much of the industry concentrated production at TSMC. The AI boom has exposed the risk of relying too heavily on a limited number of advanced manufacturing facilities.

If Intel can successfully build a competitive foundry business, companies looking for additional U.S.-based semiconductor manufacturing could become customers.

That is the bet behind the spending.

Intel is asking shareholders to accept dilution today in exchange for the possibility that billions of dollars in new factories and technology will create a much larger business tomorrow.

And Intel is not alone.

Across the technology industry, companies are raising debt, selling shares, forming infrastructure partnerships and bringing private-equity firms into projects because the physical cost of AI is becoming too large for even giant corporations to comfortably finance on their own.

The first phase of the AI boom was about chips.

The second was about data centers.

The next phase may increasingly be about who can finance all of it.

Intel’s decision to raise its offering from $15 billion to $20 billion is one of the clearest examples yet.

JBizNews Desk | Santa Clara, California

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Meta gave away an artificial intelligence model on Monday that is powerful enough to carry out multi-step work on its own and small enough to run on a single graphics card inside an ordinary computer, with no internet connection and no monthly bill to anyone.

The model is called Muse Glimmer, and it comes from Meta Superintelligence Labs, the research group the company built around chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. It has 30 billion parameters — the internal settings that determine what a model knows — and it is built to handle several jobs at once that until now were split across different systems: reasoning through a task in steps, calling outside tools, reading images as well as text, and recovering when something fails partway through.

The part that matters commercially is the price and the license. Meta released the weights — the actual trained model file — under Apache 2.0, a standard open license with no usage restrictions attached. Anyone can download it, run it, change it, and build a paid product on top of it. That is a sharper break than it first appears: Meta’s older Llama models carried the company’s own custom license, which drew years of criticism for conditions such as a cutoff that kicked in once a company passed 700 million monthly users. Glimmer ships with fewer strings than Llama ever did, and it is Meta’s first fully open release since the company moved to the proprietary Muse Spark line in April.

How they made it fit

A 30-billion-parameter model normally needs more than 55 gigabytes of memory to run, which is more than any consumer graphics card offers. Meta compressed the model’s weights down to roughly 4-bit precision, shrinking it to under 20 gigabytes — small enough to leave room for the working memory, the image-reading component, and the speed-up machinery to all operate inside a 24- or 32-gigabyte budget. The practical translation: it runs on a single 24-gigabyte graphics card or a high-end Mac, with no network call at any point.

Speed was the second problem. Language models normally produce text one piece at a time, which drags badly during long chains of reasoning or repeated tool calls, and an agent that takes minutes to decide its next move is not usable for real work. Meta added a technique that lets the model draft ahead in blocks rather than word by word, fast enough to sit inside a live agent loop.

The model was pre-trained on the outputs of Muse Spark, Meta’s larger proprietary system — a method known as distillation, where a big model teaches a small one. Meta then ran two additional training passes, the first to strengthen performance on long prompts and extended reasoning, the second to sharpen its behavior as an agent. Engineers also trained it to retry work it fails on the first attempt rather than simply stopping.

Who it changes things for

A solo developer or an early-stage startup can now run a capable agent on one graphics card with no per-token bill. Mid-sized companies get inference on their own equipment. Regulated businesses — the ones that cannot legally send client data to an outside server — get an agent that can be air-gapped entirely. The model handles more than 100 languages and works with existing agent frameworks. Meta released the weights on Hugging Face along with developer documentation, with tighter integrations for common local-inference tools arriving in the coming days. Ollama, one of the most widely used tools for running models locally, shipped support the same morning.

Meta is framing the release as a competitive argument as much as a technical one, positioning open weights as necessary for American competitiveness against proprietary rivals. Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg pressed that case publicly on Monday, criticizing closed-model developers and defending distillation as a legitimate path to progress. He also said Meta’s board is adopting a governance structure that will set safety criteria the company will apply to each of its future models.

The competitive picture is narrow. Very few American labs have released open-weight models of this class — OpenAI’s gpt-oss pair from August 2025, Google’s Gemma family under a more restrictive custom license, and Thinking Machines’ Inkling. The closest comparison is gpt-oss, which is also Apache 2.0, but those models are text-only. Glimmer takes different ground: it reads images natively, was trained end-to-end around the agent loop, and ships with its own compressed versions tuned specifically for 24-gigabyte consumer machines.

For businesses weighing what AI actually costs them, that is the headline. The recurring expense in most corporate AI deployments is not the software — it is the metered bill for every request sent to someone else’s data center. A capable model that runs on hardware a company already owns takes that meter out of the equation.

JBizNews Desk | Menlo Park

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Public support is growing for tougher rules on how children access social media, adding new pressure on Meta, Alphabet, Snap and other platforms already facing lawsuits and state-level restrictions over teen safety.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Sunday found that 61% of Americans support stronger government oversight of social-media companies, while 66% favor age-verification requirements designed to keep children under 16 off major platforms.

The numbers matter because age verification is moving from a political talking point into a potential operating requirement for some of the largest advertising businesses in the world.

If platforms are forced to verify a user’s age before granting access, companies would need new identity systems, privacy safeguards and parental-consent procedures. Those changes could raise compliance costs while reducing the number of younger users available to advertisers.

The issue is already moving through courts and state legislatures. Meta faces a major trial this week involving claims from multiple states that Facebook and Instagram were designed in ways that harmed young users while keeping them engaged for longer periods.

For technology companies, the financial risk extends beyond fines. Restrictions on minors could reduce daily usage, advertising impressions and future user growth, particularly for platforms that depend on younger audiences to establish long-term habits.

There is also a privacy tradeoff. Stronger age verification may protect children, but determining a user’s age often requires collecting additional personal information, including government identification, biometric estimates or third-party verification.

That creates a difficult policy balance: lawmakers want platforms to know whether a user is a child without forcing companies to collect more sensitive information than necessary.

For advertisers and businesses that depend on social-media marketing, the larger issue is whether the rules remain fragmented by state or eventually become national. A patchwork of different age limits and verification standards would increase compliance costs and make targeted advertising more complicated.

Public opinion is now giving lawmakers more room to act. If support for age verification continues to hold across party lines, the question for social-media companies may shift from whether stricter rules are coming to how quickly they can adapt without damaging growth.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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President Trump has decided to stop bombing Iran and start starving it of money instead. He said Sunday that Washington will let its naval blockade and sanctions do the work of forcing Tehran to a deal, rather than launching another round of airstrikes. Traders read that as a signal the war is not ending soon — and on Monday oil jumped roughly 5%.

“We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” Trump said in an interview with Axios, adding that the blockade is deepening Tehran’s financial problems. “We are low keying it.” He also said the United States is “only semi-negotiating” with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz — a step back from his statement last week that the two sides were in talks.

The market reaction was immediate. West Texas Intermediate settled at $82.13 a barrel, up about 5%, and Brent crude finished around 5% higher at $87.72. That erases most of last week’s slide, when both benchmarks fell more than 7% after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that an agreement to reopen Hormuz to free ship movement could come soon. No agreement has been announced, and both capitals have hardened their positions since.

The strategy Trump is returning to is the one he ran in his first term and revived in February 2025: cut off Iran’s oil sales, lock it out of the international banking system, and wait. What is different now is the blockade. A US naval cordon in place since April has stopped all crude exports from Kharg Island, Iran’s main oil terminal, with no tanker departures recorded for 11 straight days. Central Command said it has turned away 55 commercial vessels, disabled two and boarded two others.

The pressure is landing. Iran’s exchange rate has weakened nearly 50-fold since 2018, food prices are up more than 34-fold, and roughly 16 million people have dropped below the poverty line. The country also shed about 630,000 industrial jobs between the spring of 2025 and the spring of 2026, erasing eight years of employment gains. Inflation ran above 48% last October and above 42% in December.

Whether that pain translates into Iranian concessions is the open question, and so far the answer has been no. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Tehran is not holding direct talks with Washington and repeated that reopening Hormuz requires the US to lift the blockade and pay compensation for war damage. A senior Iranian security official said the waterway stays closed until those conditions are met, and Tehran also wants sanctions relief. In a further sign Tehran intends to hold out, Mohsen Rezaee — a former Revolutionary Guard commander who has argued for full Iranian control of the strait — was elevated to the country’s top security post.

For American businesses and drivers, the cost of the standoff is measured at the pump and in freight bills. Gasoline nationally is close to $4 a gallon and has risen more than 30% since the war began, which started with US and Israeli strikes on February 28. One estimate puts the additional fuel cost to the average American household at about $527 as of August 4, projected to reach roughly $650 by the end of summer.

The cushion the country has been leaning on is thinning. Crude held in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen below 300 million barrels, the lowest level since January 1983. Before the war, roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas moved through Hormuz, and the market has avoided a worse squeeze mainly because Chinese demand has been soft and emergency reserves have been released — buffers that are now close to exhausted.

Regional violence is keeping a floor under prices regardless of what happens in negotiations. A tanker operated by Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. was attacked near the strait over the weekend, and European diesel prices spiked after a strike on a Saudi refinery near the Red Sea. Houthi forces claimed responsibility for the attack on the Jizan facility. One forecast has Brent staying volatile in an $80-to-$90 range unless something breaks the current standoff.

That is the practical meaning of “low keying it” for American companies: fuel, freight and insurance costs stay where they are, and the calendar for relief is set in Tehran, not Washington.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Investors spent Monday selling the companies that make the fiber, lasers and light-based components wiring together AI data centers — not because any of them reported bad news, but because two of the biggest names report earnings this week and traders decided to take profits before the numbers land.

Coherent fell 12% at midday Monday to $333.83, and Lumentum Holdings dropped 7% to $830.05. Corning fell more than 3%, and the Global X Data Center and Digital Infrastructure ETF, which tracks the broader data center supply chain, lost 1%.

Nothing in the selling came from the companies themselves. Lumentum reports its fiscal fourth-quarter results after Tuesday’s close, and Coherent follows after the close Wednesday. Both stocks had risen more than 100% this year going into Monday. When a stock has doubled and its earnings report is 24 hours away, some holders would rather bank the gain than find out.

The evidence that this was a positioning move rather than a verdict on the industry sits in what did not fall. Applied Optoelectronics, another major supplier in the same corner of the market, slipped only 1% to $133.63 — because it already reported on August 6 and has no earnings event ahead of it. The iShares Semiconductor ETF, a broad measure of the chip sector, dropped just 1%. The wider chip complex held up considerably better than the optics names, which points to a selloff confined to this group rather than a retreat from semiconductors generally.

What these companies actually sell

The optics business is the least understood piece of the AI buildout, and it is worth being plain about what it does. Training and running large AI models requires thousands of chips inside a data center to talk to each other constantly and at enormous speed. Copper wire cannot move that much data over those distances without choking. So the connections are made with light — laser transmitters, receivers and fiber running between racks, servers and storage.

Coherent and Lumentum build those parts. Corning makes the specialty glass and optical fiber underneath them. Every new data center announced by Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Google or OpenAI translates into orders for this equipment, which is why the group has been among the strongest performers of 2026 and why it is now among the most crowded.

Crowded is the operative word. When a large number of investors own the same names for the same reason, they also tend to head for the exit at the same moment. The options market showed that defensive tilt on Monday: put-to-call ratios of 1.54 for Lumentum and 1.19 for Coherent, meaning traders were buying more contracts that pay off if the stocks fall than contracts that pay off if they rise, with the two reports arriving back to back.

The argument underneath it

This is the second time in roughly two weeks that the same group has been hit. The unresolved question is whether the hyperscale technology companies can keep spending at their current pace, and whether suppliers priced for that spending can keep climbing.

The spending numbers themselves have not weakened. Taiwan Semiconductor reported July revenue of about $14.5 billion on Monday, up roughly 45% from a year earlier, and has already raised its 2026 growth outlook above 40%. Celestica, which assembles AI infrastructure hardware, recently posted revenue growth above 62% and lifted its full-year forecast, with management pointing to faster growth still in 2027.

That is the tension traders are working through. The order books keep filling, while the stocks that depend on those order books keep getting sold on doubts about how long the cycle runs. Alphabet sharpened the question when it reported quarterly capital spending of $44.92 billion, double the year-earlier figure, and swung to negative free cash flow of $5.86 billion. Spending that heavy is good news for suppliers only as long as the companies doing the spending are willing to keep it up.

What to watch

Tuesday and Wednesday evening settle the immediate argument. If Lumentum and Coherent deliver strong results and confident guidance, Monday’s decline will read as a reset before good news. If either signals that orders are flattening, the doubts move from sentiment to fact.

For business readers outside the sector, the practical takeaway is narrower and more useful: the AI infrastructure trade is no longer a single trade. Chipmakers, optics suppliers, power providers and hardware assemblers are now being priced separately, on their own numbers, rather than moving together on the strength of the theme. Monday was a day when the market drew that distinction sharply — and drew it against the group that had run the furthest.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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Major clothing retailers are expanding repair, resale and sewing services as more consumers look for ways to keep clothes longer rather than continuously replacing them.

Uniqlo, Zara and Levi Strauss are among the brands pushing clothing repair further into the mainstream, with programs ranging from low-cost in-store fixes to mail-in repairs and sewing workshops aimed especially at younger shoppers.

The shift is partly about sustainability, but it is also increasingly about household economics.

For consumers, the appeal is simple: repairing a shirt, jacket or pair of jeans can cost far less than replacing it.

Uniqlo’s U.S. RE.UNIQLO Studios offer stitching, patching, taping and button replacement on eligible Uniqlo clothing for $5 per repair. The company has been expanding the concept as part of a broader push to keep garments in use longer.

Zara offers repairs through its U.S. Pre-Owned platform. Customers can select an item and the repair needed online, then send it for servicing. Zara says repairs can take as long as 14 days and charges $9.99 for shipping in addition to the cost of the repair itself.

Levi Strauss is taking a somewhat different approach.

The denim company launched its Wear Longer Project this year, targeting high-school students with workshops that teach basic sewing and clothing-repair skills. Levi’s also operates Tailor Shops in selected stores where customers can repair, customize and alter denim.

Other major retailers including H&M and Primark have been experimenting with repair workshops, resale and clothing-care programs as well.

The trend reflects a change in how retailers are trying to reach younger consumers. For decades, much of the apparel business depended on convincing customers to replace clothing frequently. Repair services essentially encourage the opposite behavior — but they can also keep shoppers connected to a brand for longer.

Retailers are betting that a customer who repairs a favorite pair of jeans or jacket may become more loyal to the company that helped extend its life.

There is also a growing resale business behind the strategy. Zara’s Pre-Owned operation includes repair, resale and donation, while other fashion companies are building their own secondhand marketplaces instead of leaving that business entirely to platforms such as eBay, Depop and Poshmark.

The economics are not easy. Clothing repair requires skilled labor, and repairing a cheap garment can sometimes cost nearly as much as manufacturing another one. That is one reason repair services historically remained concentrated among expensive outdoor, denim and luxury brands.

But retailers now see another benefit: shoppers are increasingly sensitive to price.

If consumers begin viewing a $5 repair as an alternative to another $40 or $60 purchase, clothing companies have an opportunity to remain part of the transaction even when customers are spending less on new merchandise.

For shoppers, that means something relatively unusual is returning to mainstream retail: instead of being told to throw worn clothing away and buy another one, some of the world’s biggest fashion companies are now offering to fix it.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Families are spending less per child on back-to-school shopping this year once inflation is accounted for, and the largest retailers have responded by cutting prices on the items every classroom list requires. The reason parents are squeezing that budget shows up elsewhere on the receipt: the grocery bill is still climbing.

Walmart is offering its lowest prices since 2019 on 14 of the most common school supplies found on classroom lists nationwide, with some items starting at 25 cents. The retailer is also running 1,300 more price rollbacks than it did during last year’s back-to-school season.

It has the traffic to match. Seventy-seven percent of parents named Walmart as a back-to-school destination, well ahead of Target at just over 40% and Amazon at nearly 39%.

Deloitte’s annual survey of more than 1,200 parents puts expected spending at $557 per child for K-12 students, down $13 from a year ago and roughly 6% lower after adjusting for inflation. The total back-to-school market is estimated at $30.4 billion.

Parents shopping primarily in stores expect to spend $521 per child, compared with $614 for online shoppers. Mass merchants are expected to capture 80% of planned spending, with value for the money emerging as the deciding factor across channels.

Different surveys produce different dollar estimates. Jones Lang LaSalle put spending at $489 per child and rising, while PwC found parents expecting to spend an average of $922 across a broader basket of purchases. But the surveys agree on the larger behavior: households are watching prices closely.

Inflation remains a concern for 64% of parents in JLL’s survey, while nearly 69% say saving money is a top priority.

The most revealing number may be elsewhere in Deloitte’s findings. Fifty-seven percent of consumers said they expect the economy to get worse in the coming months, the highest share since 2020.

Parents are also delaying purchases, with spending expected to peak in late July and early August. For retailers, that means families who know they must eventually buy school supplies are increasingly waiting to see whether another promotion appears before the deadline arrives.

The pressure is easier to understand when the school-supply budget is viewed alongside the grocery bill.

Grocery prices have risen about 3.4% since January 2025, but some staples families buy every week have increased far more. Coffee is up roughly 35%, ground beef 23%, steak 21%, sugar and sweets 9%, chicken breast 5.3%, and fruits and vegetables 5.2%.

Bread, bacon and eggs have become cheaper over the same period, with egg prices retreating sharply as the bird-flu-driven shortage eased.

But falling egg prices do relatively little for the overall household budget. Eggs represent only about 0.8% of the typical grocery basket, compared with roughly 4.7% for beef and 10% for fruits and vegetables. A large decline in one highly visible item can therefore coexist with a grocery bill that remains considerably higher overall.

The Agriculture Department’s July forecast calls for grocery prices to rise approximately 2.7% during 2026 and restaurant prices around 3.5%. Prices in eight of the 15 food categories it tracks are expected to increase faster than their 20-year averages.

Beef remains one of the largest pressure points. Beef and veal prices were 11.8% above year-earlier levels in June and are forecast to finish 2026 about 10.7% higher. Fresh vegetables were 9.9% more expensive.

For a family spending $1,000 to $1,400 a month at the supermarket, even a modest increase means roughly another $40 a month for essentially the same basket.

That is close to the entire year-over-year reduction in back-to-school spending for one child.

The money did not disappear. It moved to the supermarket.

For retailers, the competitive lesson is becoming clearer. Price leadership is doing much of the work this season, and it is concentrating traffic rather than distributing it evenly.

Four out of every five back-to-school dollars are expected to go to mass merchants, while Walmart alone is attracting roughly three-quarters of surveyed shoppers.

For independent retailers and specialty stores, competing directly with a 25-cent notebook is unlikely to work.

The opportunity is in what the big-box price war does not easily provide: fitting and sizing for shoes and uniforms, school-specific supply bundles, extended hours immediately before classes begin, specialized merchandise and delivery for parents who waited until the last minute.

The spending difference between channels is also important. Online shoppers expect to spend $614 per child compared with $521 for in-store shoppers. The higher-value customer is increasingly the one buying from a screen, giving smaller retailers a channel where convenience and specialization can compete with sheer purchasing power.

Back-to-school spending will continue into September through replacements, dorm purchases and classroom replenishment.

But the character of this year’s shopper is already clear: parents still have money to spend, but they know exactly what it buys — and increasingly will drive past one store to save a few dollars at another.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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The two largest private AI companies both filed confidentially for public listings within days of each other in June. Two months later they are on completely different clocks, and the gap between them has become the market’s clearest read on how AI businesses are actually valued.

Anthropic filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 1 and is still targeting an October listing on Nasdaq, potentially becoming the first company to debut at a $1 trillion valuation. The company is looking to raise roughly $30 billion at a $900 billion valuation, according to the Financial Times. OpenAI filed a week later and is now leaning toward 2027, per Bloomberg’s reporting, citing market volatility and CEO Sam Altman’s insistence on a $1 trillion floor. Prediction markets have moved with that: Polymarket priced the odds of a 2026 OpenAI listing near 18%, down sharply from 48% earlier in the year.

What changed both timelines was SpaceX. It priced at $135 on June 11, ran to $225 within days, then surrendered roughly 32% of those gains. The stock has since traded around $153, denting confidence in mega-cap technology listings, and the debut raised more than $85 billion. The lesson the market took was that enormous private valuations do not survive contact with daily price discovery unchanged.

The sequencing matters more than the calendar. Whatever multiple public investors assign Anthropic in October becomes the reference point for every OpenAI model built in 2027 — if Anthropic lists at, say, 20 times forward revenue, OpenAI must either match it with stronger financials or explain why it deserves a premium despite heavier cash burn. Going second means pricing against a year of a competitor’s public disclosures and settled analyst consensus.

The two businesses are less alike than the pairing suggests. Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate expanded from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $30 billion in April 2026, with roughly 134 million monthly active users against OpenAI’s 900 million weekly, and about 80% of revenue from enterprise customers compared with roughly 40% at OpenAI. CNBC reported Anthropic expected about $10.9 billion in second-quarter revenue and roughly $559 million in operating income — its first profitable quarter — while OpenAI was still loss-making in the first quarter. One is an enterprise software company by revenue mix; the other is a consumer platform.

OpenAI has raised approximately $180 billion to date, with Microsoft and SoftBank among its backers, and leads Stargate, a $500 billion joint venture targeting 10 gigawatts of AI data center capacity by 2029. Cracks appeared in April: ChatGPT stalled near 900 million weekly active users, short of internal targets, and monthly revenue milestones have been missed several times this year.

Anthropic’s valuation climbed fast — $380 billion in a February Series G, then roughly $965 billion after a $65 billion round in May, on cumulative fundraising above $129 billion since 2021 — a pace that makes fair IPO pricing genuinely difficult to set.

Both carry regulatory overhangs that public markets will have to price. The Department of War placed Anthropic on its supply chain risk list in February and barred federal contractors from using its services after the company declined to permit Claude’s use for mass surveillance and fully autonomous weaponry; oral arguments in the related lawsuit were heard May 19, with judges divided, while seven competitors including OpenAI were cleared to work with the Pentagon. A separate Commerce Department export control action took Anthropic’s Fable model offline on June 12. Those controls were lifted June 30 and access was restored July 1. OpenAI, meanwhile, still has to finalize its restructuring from nonprofit into a for-profit public benefit corporation.

The scale of what is queued is the systemic question. SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic together are expected to form three trillion-dollar listings in a single cycle — a combined demand for capital large enough that analysts have warned it could disrupt global capital markets. Estimates put their combined target market capitalization near $3.8 trillion.

For public investors, the read-through runs well past the two names: whichever lists first sets the first U.S. benchmark for pure-play AI model valuations, with direct implications for Nvidia, Oracle and CoreWeave, while Microsoft and SoftBank hold stakes that get marked to market on debut.

Neither company is currently accessible to retail investors, and a confidential filing guarantees neither a date nor a price. October will supply the number everyone is waiting for — or it won’t, and the wait extends into 2027.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Anthropic confirmed Wednesday that it is assembling an internal team to design custom silicon for its Claude models, joining the growing list of artificial intelligence companies attempting to reduce their dependence on chips they buy from someone else.

The company said it is hiring engineers with experience spanning the hardware and software stack to co-design custom chips and AI models that can run Claude faster and more efficiently at the scale customers require, responding to a shortage of the chips needed to build and operate more advanced systems.

Anthropic described custom silicon as the latest step in a multi-chip strategy and said it will continue relying on a diversified hardware stack that includes technology from Amazon Web Services, Google, Nvidia and AMD. The company gave no timeline and did not say whether it intends to manufacture the chips itself.

The Job Listing Tells the Story

The posting behind the announcement is unusually specific about what the company is looking for.

A recent listing refers to a “custom silicon team” and seeks engineers with broad expertise in chip design and verification, offering annual compensation between $320,000 and $485,000. Candidates must have a demonstrated record of completing and delivering semiconductor designs. The posting describes the role as one for someone who has shipped silicon, holds a realistic relationship with schedules, and is comfortable making consequential decisions without a large organization behind them.

That last line describes a small team building from zero rather than a division absorbing an existing program.

Why Every Lab Is Doing This

The economics are punishing but the alternative may be worse.

Industry figures cited by Reuters put the cost of developing an advanced AI chip at close to half a billion dollars, driven largely by the specialized engineering required. Committing that kind of capital to a project with no guaranteed payoff only makes sense if the alternative — buying compute on the open market at whatever price and availability the vendors set — represents a larger strategic risk.

For AI labs, it does. Access to advanced chips has become the binding constraint on how fast a model company can grow, and that access currently runs through a small number of suppliers.

Anthropic is not first. OpenAI unveiled its Broadcom-built Jalapeño chip in June, designed for inference workloads. Alphabet’s TPU chips underpin Google DeepMind’s systems, and Meta has been working to deploy its own MTIA accelerators. Designing in-house lets AI labs tailor computing capacity to their specific models while reducing reliance on Nvidia.

What Anthropic Already Has

The chip team is one piece of a much larger infrastructure buildout.

Anthropic has signed deals with AWS, Google, Nvidia and AMD to secure computing hardware, but meeting demand at scale has evidently made outside supply alone insufficient. Through a long-term agreement with Google and Broadcom, the company will have access to roughly 3.5 gigawatts of custom TPU capacity beginning in 2027.

The Information reported last month that Anthropic was evaluating Samsung as a potential manufacturing partner for such chips. Reuters had reported in April that the company was considering designing its own.

The Broader Signal

For investors watching the AI infrastructure trade, the pattern across the sector matters more than any single announcement.

Every major model developer has now concluded that outside chip supply is a strategic vulnerability serious enough to justify a half-billion-dollar internal engineering program. That is a statement about how tight the market is expected to remain and about how much of the value in AI is captured at the hardware layer rather than the model layer.

It is also a long game. Full independence from established suppliers remains distant, and Anthropic has been explicit that its existing hardware relationships continue unchanged in the near term.

The immediate question for the chip vendors is whether these programs eventually displace purchases or simply supplement them. Google’s TPUs never eliminated its Nvidia buying. Amazon’s Trainium has not either. Custom silicon has generally functioned as leverage in supplier negotiations rather than a replacement for the suppliers themselves.

Whether that holds as the AI labs mature is the question underneath a hiring announcement that, on its surface, is just a job posting for a team that does not yet exist.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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JPMorgan raised its year-end target for the S&P 500 to 8,000 from 7,800, arguing that stronger corporate profits and accelerating artificial-intelligence investment are giving the market more room to run.

The new target implies roughly 3% upside from Friday’s record close of 7,757.64.

The bank also raised its earnings forecasts for the companies in the index, now expecting $365 a share in 2026 and $420 in 2027, up from previous estimates of $350 and $390.

The reason is increasingly clear: the enormous sums being spent on AI are beginning to show up in actual revenue and profits.

JPMorgan pointed to stronger cloud growth and larger backlogs at companies including Amazon, Microsoft and Google as evidence that AI spending is moving beyond promises and into measurable business results.

Corporate earnings broadly have also come in stronger than expected. More than 85% of S&P 500 companies that had reported through Friday beat analysts’ profit estimates, well above the long-term average.

JPMorgan is not assuming investors will simply pay ever-higher valuations. The bank kept its forward valuation target near 20 times earnings, meaning most of the expected market upside would have to come from companies generating more profit rather than investors paying substantially more for each dollar of earnings.

That distinction matters because several risks remain.

Interest rates are still elevated, oil prices remain vulnerable to disruptions around the Strait of Hormuz and companies are issuing large amounts of both debt and equity to finance AI infrastructure.

Still, JPMorgan’s call shows how powerful the earnings cycle has become.

The S&P 500 is already up more than 13% this year, yet Wall Street’s biggest banks continue raising targets because profit growth is outpacing earlier forecasts.

The next challenge is whether companies can keep converting massive AI spending into enough revenue to justify both the investment and today’s elevated stock prices.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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The fire at the Aramco refinery in Jizan started Sunday morning. Yahya Saree, the Houthi military spokesman, said his forces had hit it with a drone, precisely, in retaliation for Saudi drones over Saada and Hajjah. The Saudi energy ministry confirmed the fire and said it was extinguished.

Forty-eight hours earlier, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had stood together in Mecca and signed an agreement stating that an armed attack on any one of their countries would be regarded as an attack on all three.

Turkey said nothing. Pakistan said nothing. There was never any reason to think otherwise.

Israeli commentary reached for the largest available frames: an Islamic NATO, a Sunni axis, a Pakistani nuclear umbrella over the kingdom. The Prime Minister’s Office declined to comment at all. The pact deserves neither response.

The joint statement says the agreement strengthens collective deterrence against aggression. The text has not been published, so everything written about the pact rests on what officials choose to describe.

Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan has described it the most. He told Anadolu the collective-defense clause is technically comparable to NATO’s Article 5, and named the institutions: a ministerial committee and a permanent secretariat in Saudi Arabia. Then he added the part almost nobody covered. If one member is attacked, the others consult to determine the nature and scale of any assistance. Consultation is what NATO members do too. It is also what they did in February 2003, when three of them blocked planning for Turkey’s own defense before the Iraq war.

Experiment was done once already

Riyadh has run this experiment once already. Its defense agreement with Pakistan was signed in September 2025, days after the Israeli strike on Hamas figures in Doha, and both capitals say it obliges each to defend the other. When the United States and Israel began striking Iran on February 28, Riyadh called it in.

Reuters reported in May, citing five Pakistani and Saudi sources, that Pakistan sent roughly 8,000 troops, some 16 aircraft, mostly JF-17s, two squadrons of drones, and a Chinese-built HQ-9 battery. Pakistanis operate the equipment. Saudi Arabia pays for it. Two of those sources said the role was mainly advisory and training.

Iran spent the months that followed hitting Saudi refineries and American aircraft parked at Prince Sultan Air Base. Two Saudi civilians were killed. The Pakistani squadron stayed where it was, and Islamabad carried on hosting talks between Washington and Tehran.

Mecca turns that arrangement into an institution: foreign hardware on Saudi soil, Saudi money paying for it, foreign crews operating it, and no obligation on anyone to fire. A senior Israeli official, asked privately about the Pakistani element, described it in narrow terms. He is right about the military content. The reason to watch this is political.

Fidan also let a date slip. Preparations, he said, ran nearly two years and eight months, putting the start around December 2023. They began building this while Israeli forces were in Khan Yunis, long before the first Iranian missile landed on Saudi soil.

The claim that Egypt is joining deserves less confidence than it has received. Fidan says Cairo will come in once technical issues are settled and calls it a natural partner. Mada Masr, citing Egyptian and regional sources, reported that Egypt was invited and refused, unwilling to enter a bloc drafted in Riyadh. In May, Egyptian fighter jets flew to Abu Dhabi, not to Jeddah.

None of which makes the pact benign.

The day after the signing, Pakistan’s defense minister, Khawaja Asif, called Israel a threat to the entire Muslim world and urged a united military front against it. He said his position would hold regardless of who wins on October 27. Asif has previously implied that Pakistan’s nuclear guarantee covers Saudi Arabia, a claim no published text supports. He does not speak for Riyadh. He does sit inside the arrangement, and within a day he had handed it the enemy its drafters were careful not to name.

The question of Israeli normalization

For a decade, Israeli planning assumed a chain: Iran frightens the Arabs, fear sends them to Washington, Washington routes them through Jerusalem, normalization follows. Israel’s place in it rested on being the only address for what Riyadh wanted.

The crown prince now has a second address. It cannot defend him, as Sunday showed. It can be photographed and pointed at, and unlike normalization, it costs him nothing at home.

Yoel Guzansky, head of the Gulf Research Program at the Institute for National Security Studies, told this paper the agreement “doesn’t shut the door completely” on normalization. He is right, and the July civil nuclear agreement with Washington, which President Donald Trump says is conditioned on Saudi accession to the Abraham Accords, is the door.

A refinery fire in Jizan was never going to move Turkish or Pakistani forces. The question the pact has not yet been asked is what happens when something larger is hit, and whether Riyadh would want the clause invoked even then, or would prefer to keep it exactly where it is now, useful and untested.

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Turkey‘s parliament passed a law on Monday establishing a legal framework for the disbandment of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a major step toward ending a decades-old conflict that has killed tens of thousands.

The legislation provides legal protections for many former militants who have not committed specific crimes and facilitates the suspension of prison sentences for some people convicted of PKK membership, paving the way for their reintegration into society.

The law was approved by 468 votes in the 600-seat parliament after securing support from President Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party, its nationalist MHP allies and the pro-Kurdish DEM Party.

Measure a concrete step

The measure is the most concrete step taken by Ankara in the process since jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan called on the group in February 2025 to disarm and disband. The PKK announced in May 2025 that it would end its armed struggle and break up, and a group of militants symbolically burned their weapons at a ceremony in northern Iraq two months later.

The PKK, designated a terrorist organization by Turkey, the United States and the European Union, launched its insurgency in 1984. The conflict has killed more than 40,000 people, imposed a heavy economic burden on mainly Kurdish southeast Turkey and fueled decades of political and social division.

The legislation is intended to address one of the central questions hanging over the peace process: what will happen to thousands of PKK members as the group dismantles its military and organizational structures.

Process began in 2024

The process began publicly in October 2024 when MHP leader Devlet Bahceli, long known for his hardline stance against Kurdish militancy, unexpectedly suggested Ocalan could address parliament and announce the PKK’s dissolution.

A parliamentary commission established in August 2025 subsequently heard politicians, officials, civil society groups and others before recommending legislation to manage the disarmament and reintegration process.

The law does not by itself resolve broader Kurdish demands for expanded political and cultural rights, changes to anti-terrorism legislation or the status of Ocalan, who has been imprisoned on Imrali island since 1999.

The government has described the initiative as part of its goal of creating a “terror-free Turkey,” while Kurdish politicians have said lasting peace will require broader democratic and legal reforms.

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Chrysler is recalling nearly 50,000 vehicles over a seat belt defect that could increase the risk of injury in a crash, according to federal regulators.

The recall affects certain 2023-2025 Dodge Hornet and 2023-2026 Alfa Romeo Tonale vehicles, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

A total of 48,777 vehicles are covered by the recall, the NHTSA said in its announcement, noting that an estimated 1.6% have the defect.

The recall was issued because the rear outboard seat belts may become twisted and fail to retract properly.

A seat belt that does not retract may fail to properly restrain an occupant, increasing the risk of injury in a crash.

The NHTSA said that drivers can take their cars to a dealer, so the seat belt retractors can be replaced, free of charge.

Notification letters will be sent to owners starting on September 24.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is set to remove nuclear material from a clandestine Syrian site following an agreement made by the US, Syria, and Israel, Axios reported on Monday, citing Israeli and US officials. 

The Trump administration and IAEA scrambled to reach the agreement that would secure the material and prevent a potential escalation between Israel, Syria, and Turkey, said Axios, adding that the site in question is sensitive. 

The agreement validates US President Donald Trump’s approach towards Syria and shows that his administration is utilizing close relations with Syria to neutralize a possible crisis, according to the report. 

Effort was kept secret

An exchange of threats and diplomatic correspondence occured throughout months until a resolution was reached a few weeks ago, said Axios. The efforts had since been kept secret and unreported. 

According to Axios, the regime of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had developed the secret nuclear program around the Al-Kibar reactor, a plutonium production facility built with the help of North Korea in the Dayr Az Zawr region of northeastern Syria. 

Following Assad’s fall, the IAEA signed an agreement with the country’s newly installed government to visit the reactor and several other nuclear sites, the report said. 

Axios said Israel has been closely monitoring Syria’s nuclear facilities, particularly a site called “Site 99,” which US officials claim held residue from al-Kibar. 

Discussions underway for over a year

The US and Israel have been discussing for more than a year the best way to deal with the site, Axios cited a US official as saying. An Israeli official said that Jerusalem made it clear it wouldn’t allow nuclear material to remain at the site, with Israel even threatening to bomb the facility again if the material was not removed or if Syria showed signs it was trying to access it.

The US and Israel eventually agreed that the best approach would be to “buy in” from the Syrian government to remove the material, said Axios. However, Syrian officials denied having knowledge of nuclear material at the site, sources said. 

A US official said that “very few people in the US, Israel, and Syria were aware of this” and added that the new Syrian government was a “good partner” in the newly established relationship, the report said. 

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Nvidia is teaming up with some of Wall Street’s largest investment firms to assemble as much as $500 billion for artificial-intelligence infrastructure, a financing push that would help fund the data centers, power systems and computing campuses needed to keep the AI buildout moving.

Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR are among the firms expected to participate. The capital would be deployed through multiple investment vehicles rather than a single $500 billion fund, with financing aimed at developers and customers building large-scale AI infrastructure.

The structure matters because Nvidia is moving beyond simply selling chips. It is increasingly helping create the financial ecosystem that allows customers to afford the massive projects those chips require.

AI data centers can cost tens of billions of dollars once land, power generation, transmission, cooling, networking and processors are included. That is pushing the industry toward private credit, infrastructure funds, project finance and bond markets on a scale normally associated with energy and transportation megaprojects.

For Nvidia, the logic is straightforward. If customers cannot finance new data centers, they cannot buy more Nvidia systems. Helping Wall Street provide that capital effectively supports future demand for Nvidia’s own products without requiring the company to fund every project from its balance sheet.

The arrangement also deepens the connection between the AI boom and the financial system. Private-equity firms, infrastructure funds and lenders are increasingly financing projects whose economics depend on continued growth in demand for AI computing.

That creates opportunity for Wall Street, which can earn management fees, interest income and investment returns from what is rapidly becoming a new infrastructure asset class.

It also increases the risk of concentration. Nvidia is investing in AI companies, those companies are raising money to build data centers, and many of those facilities are buying Nvidia hardware. The more interconnected those transactions become, the more investors will scrutinize whether underlying AI revenue is growing fast enough to support the financing behind it.

The reported $500 billion target follows a series of increasingly large AI financing arrangements. Nvidia has separately discussed backing major data-center projects and recently moved deeper into power infrastructure through a planned investment in Texas developer Lancium.

Nvidia shares fell nearly 3% Monday even as shares of several participating alternative-asset managers rose, suggesting investors viewed the announcement as particularly favorable for firms that will earn fees and returns from supplying the capital.

The larger shift is becoming difficult to miss. Artificial intelligence is no longer simply a technology spending cycle. It is becoming one of the largest infrastructure-financing campaigns in the world — and Nvidia increasingly sits at the center of both the computing and the capital behind it.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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A fire, accompanied by heavy smoke, broke out on Monday in a diesel tank oil depot at Libya‘s Zawiya refinery after the tank was struck, Brega Petroleum Marketing Company said in a statement.

The facility was attacked by a drone, Libya’s National Oil Corporation said in a statement early Tuesday morning, adding that the plant suffered no damage or casualties.

This was the third drone attack targeting oil assets in Zawiya over Sunday and Monday, the company said. Moreover, the company announced that it will be forced to completely halt operations at the refinery should attacks continue.

Brega is owned by state oil firm NOC and is in charge of fuel supplies.

Zawiya refinery, the largest in the country as Ras Lanuf is out of operation, around 40 km (25 miles) west of Tripoli, has a capacity of 120,000 barrels per day. It is connected to the country’s 300,000 ⁠bpd Sharara oilfield.

Firefighter brigades are working on containing the blaze, the company said.

Tank ‘was directly targeted,’ NOC said

The tank, with an estimated 4.5 million liters of gasoline, “was directly targeted,” NOC said in a statement, declaring the extreme state of emergency in the area.

It demanded that competent authorities “immediately intervene” and launch investigations into the incident.

Unverified footage posted on the internet showed huge blazes and thick black smoke billowing in the sky in Zawiya city.

The refinery is still functioning without any suspension, two engineers working at the refinery said.

The incident came two days after a drone crashed into an untreated naphtha tank at the Zawiya refinery early on Saturday, causing a leak that staff managed to control.

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The Gulf’s biggest oil and gas exporters are confronting an arrangement they spent months trying to avoid: reopening the Strait of Hormuz under a system that would give Iran control over ships entering the Persian Gulf — while Tehran separately moves to prohibit U.S.- and Israeli-linked vessels from passing through.

That distinction is critical. Gulf governments have not publicly endorsed an Iranian ban on American or Israeli shipping. But they are increasingly willing to negotiate around a framework that gives Tehran a formal role in managing traffic because the alternative — continued closure, attacks on energy infrastructure and potentially another round of war — could cost them considerably more.

The framework taking shape between Iran and Oman would establish a temporary traffic system for 60 days, with the possibility of an extension. Under the proposal reported by Reuters, inbound vessels would enter the Persian Gulf through a northern lane in Iranian territorial waters, while outbound vessels would use a southern lane in Omani waters. Iran and Oman would oversee traffic through their respective sides. 

That changes the practical balance in Hormuz.

Before the war, commercial shipping moved through an internationally recognized transit system in one of the world’s most important energy corridors. Under the emerging arrangement, vessels entering the Gulf would be routed through Iranian waters, placing Tehran in a powerful position over inbound traffic.

And Iran is making clear how it wants to use that leverage.

Iranian lawmakers are considering legislation that would prohibit vessels belonging to the United States, Israel and other countries Tehran considers hostile from transiting the strait. The proposed restrictions would also cover Israeli-linked cargo and could impose substantial financial penalties for violations. 

That does not mean the Oman-Iran agreement itself automatically gives Iran internationally recognized authority to exclude American or Israeli ships. The parliamentary proposal and the Oman negotiations are separate tracks.

But put together, they reveal what Tehran wants the postwar order in Hormuz to look like: commercial traffic resumes, Iran gains a formal role in managing passage, and Tehran retains the ability to discriminate against countries it considers enemies.

That is precisely why the emerging arrangement is so consequential.

Iran has already demonstrated during the conflict that it can discriminate between ships in practice. Some vessels associated with countries Tehran considers non-hostile have been permitted through, while vessels perceived as linked to the United States or Israel have faced the greatest restrictions and security risks. 

The Gulf states therefore face an uncomfortable choice.

Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain depend heavily on secure access through Hormuz for energy exports, imports and basic commercial traffic. They would prefer the old system of unrestricted navigation. But months of military pressure have not removed Iran’s ability to threaten shipping through missiles, drones, mines and other weapons.

The result is a compromise Gulf governments may dislike but increasingly have reason to tolerate: get commercial traffic moving again even if the mechanism leaves Iran with substantially more influence over the strait.

The toll issue adds another layer.

Iran has pushed proposals under which commercial vessels could eventually be charged for passage. The temporary Oman framework reportedly would not impose tolls, but that only postpones the larger dispute. If Tehran’s role over the northern lane survives into a permanent arrangement, Iran would already possess the enforcement mechanism necessary to impose future conditions on traffic.

For Washington, that is a very different outcome from restoring freedom of navigation.

For Israel, the implications are even more direct. If Iran succeeds in turning its proposed restrictions into an enforceable part of the postwar reality, Israeli-linked vessels could find themselves formally excluded from a waterway through which a major share of global energy trade passes.

And for the Gulf states, accepting the broader framework would create an awkward contradiction: countries that rely heavily on American security guarantees would be conducting their commerce through a system in which Iran seeks the right to decide that American vessels cannot enter.

The Gulf governments have not said they accept that condition.

But their willingness to continue negotiating around an Iranian-controlled inbound lane shows how dramatically their calculations have shifted.

The alternative remains expensive. Gulf energy infrastructure has been exposed to Iranian retaliation, shipping insurance costs have surged, crude exports have been disrupted and alternative routes cannot fully replace Hormuz.

Saudi Arabia can push additional crude west through its East-West pipeline to the Red Sea, while the UAE can move barrels through its pipeline to Fujairah on the Gulf of Oman. Those routes reduce dependence on Hormuz but cannot eliminate it.

So the Gulf’s calculation is increasingly pragmatic: reopening under imperfect terms may be preferable to keeping the strait closed while waiting for Iran to surrender control it has demonstrated it can enforce militarily.

That does not make the Gulf states comfortable with Iranian control. It means they may be learning to live with it.

And that is the real new reality in Hormuz: Iran is no longer simply threatening to close the strait. It is trying to establish the rules for who gets to use it — including potentially saying no to American and Israeli ships.

Whether Washington will accept a reopening on those terms remains the biggest unresolved question.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Zillow no longer has a chief operating officer. It has a chief financial officer who also runs operations.

The company announced on Aug. 5 that it expanded Jeremy Hofmann’s role, appointing him chief operating officer in addition to his existing job as chief financial officer, with responsibility for both financial strategy and day-to-day operational execution. The change is already in effect.

The reason the seat opened up is the part that matters. Jun Choo, who had been chief operating officer since November 2024, is stepping down from the role to focus on his health and will stay on in an advisory capacity through the end of 2026. The executive reshuffle followed layoffs affecting roughly 7% of Zillow’s staff.

So the sequence is: a workforce cut, an operations chief departing on health grounds, and a company that chose not to hire a replacement. Instead of running a search, Zillow folded the job into the one executive who already had a full view of the numbers.

The board pointed to Hofmann’s nine-year tenure, his command of company strategy and financial architecture, his understanding of how the business’s operating pieces depend on one another, and the strength of the finance team he built. “Jeremy is an exceptional financial and operational leader and a critical strategic partner to the entire executive team and me,” Zillow Group Chief Executive Jeremy Wacksman said.

For a company that just cut headcount, consolidating two executive seats into one is also a cost decision, and a fast one.

Hofmann came to the finance job from Wall Street. Before joining Zillow he spent nearly a decade in financial services, most of it at Goldman Sachs, where he was a vice president in investment banking. He was named chief financial officer in 2023.

Zillow, which trades on the Nasdaq, was not the only company to merge the two roles last week.

Zoetis, the Parsippany, N.J., animal-health company, announced on Aug. 6 that it had appointed James “Jay” Saccaro as executive vice president, chief financial officer and chief operating officer, effective Aug. 17. The role is newly created. Saccaro will lead global finance — capital allocation, financial strategy, reporting and controls, and investor engagement — and will also oversee Global Manufacturing and Supply.

That second piece is narrower than it sounds. Zoetis did not put all of operations under the finance chief. It put the factories and the supply chain there.

Saccaro joins from GE HealthCare, where he was chief financial officer since 2023. Before that he was executive vice president and chief financial officer at Baxter International from 2015 to 2023, where he worked on the company’s post-spin transformation, margin improvement and capital structure. “Jay brings a unique combination of skills to this newly created leadership position,” Zoetis Chief Executive Kristin Peck said. “He is a seasoned finance executive with 12 years of CFO experience at some of the world’s leading healthcare companies.”

Wetteny Joseph, the current finance chief, moves to an advisory role on the same date and will remain with the company as a special advisor to the chief executive on financial matters until early 2027.

Zoetis is paying for the combined job. Saccaro’s offer letter, dated July 31, sets a $1 million base salary, a target annual bonus equal to 100% of base, and an annual long-term incentive opportunity of $5 million in performance stock units, restricted stock units and options. He also receives a one-time make-whole stock award of $6.25 million vesting over three years and a one-time make-whole cash award of $1.25 million, repayable if he leaves under certain circumstances.

Two companies in unrelated industries reaching the same structure in two days is not proof of a trend, and the two cases are not the same. Zillow consolidated a role after an unplanned departure and a downsizing. Zoetis built a role from scratch and recruited an outside executive to fill it, at a price that signals the job is meant to be permanent.

What they share is the logic of the reporting line. When the person setting the budget is also the person accountable for hitting the operating targets that budget funds, the argument between finance and operations happens inside one head instead of across a conference table. Decisions on hiring, capital spending, procurement and technology move faster.

The risk sits on the other side of the same fact. The finance chief’s own job has expanded over the past decade to include investor communication, internal controls, cybersecurity spending and regulatory compliance. Adding an operating platform on top requires deep benches in accounting, treasury and the business units — because there is no longer a peer executive whose full-time job is to push back.

For shareholders, the measures are ordinary and will take several quarters to read: operating margin, expense growth and free cash flow. At Zillow specifically, whether combining the roles helped or simply concentrated authority will show up in how efficiently the company converts its traffic into transaction revenue with a smaller workforce.

JBizNews Desk | Seattle

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For many businesses, the next major cost increase won’t come from wages, tariffs or interest rates. It will arrive when insurance policies come up for renewal.

Commercial insurance premiums have risen steadily across multiple lines of coverage as insurers respond to larger catastrophe losses, rising litigation costs, cyber threats and higher rebuilding expenses. What was once viewed as a routine operating expense is increasingly becoming a strategic issue influencing investment decisions, expansion plans and even where companies choose to operate.

The shift is extending well beyond property insurance.

Manufacturers, retailers, healthcare providers, transportation companies, real estate owners and professional service firms are all facing higher premiums for property, liability, directors and officers (D&O), cyber insurance and umbrella coverage. Businesses with clean claims histories are discovering that broader industry risks—not just their own performance—are driving renewal prices.

Climate risk is changing the economics of insurance.

Hurricanes, floods, wildfires, severe storms and other natural disasters have generated record insured losses in recent years, forcing carriers to reassess pricing models and reduce exposure in some regions. In several states, insurers have limited new policies, increased deductibles or withdrawn from high-risk markets altogether, leaving businesses with fewer options and higher costs.

Cybersecurity has become another major driver.

Ransomware attacks, data breaches and business interruption claims continue pushing cyber insurance premiums higher, while insurers increasingly require stronger security controls before issuing or renewing policies. Multifactor authentication, endpoint monitoring, employee training and incident-response planning are rapidly becoming underwriting requirements rather than optional best practices.

The impact is changing boardroom decisions.

Companies planning new facilities, acquisitions or geographic expansion are increasingly evaluating insurance availability alongside labor, taxes and financing. In some industries, higher insurance costs are beginning to influence where projects are built and how much capital businesses are willing to commit.

The consequences extend into lending as well.

Banks and private lenders frequently require borrowers to maintain specified insurance coverage. As premiums increase, debt-service costs effectively rise even when interest rates remain unchanged, placing additional pressure on cash flow for property owners and operating businesses alike.

For insurers, the environment presents both opportunity and risk.

Higher premiums can improve profitability, but only if pricing keeps pace with increasingly expensive claims. Companies that accurately measure emerging risks may strengthen earnings, while those that underestimate catastrophe exposure or cyber losses could face renewed pressure on underwriting results.

The broader business story is that insurance is no longer simply protecting assets after something goes wrong. It is becoming a larger factor in corporate capital allocation, site selection and enterprise risk management. Businesses that actively reduce operational risk, strengthen cybersecurity and improve resilience may increasingly find those investments paying for themselves through lower insurance costs and greater access to coverage.

In the years ahead, insurance may no longer be viewed as just another overhead expense. It is becoming a competitive advantage for companies that can demonstrate they are better risks than everyone else.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Nearly 30,000 pounds of imported raw beef from South America have been recalled in two states over the failure to reinspect the product after arriving in the U.S., according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

Florida-based Corte Argentino USA LLC is recalling about 29,628 pounds of raw beef products that were imported from Argentina “without the benefit of import reinspection into the United States,” which checks documentation, labeling, packaging, the product’s general condition and sometimes samples for contaminants, FSIS announced on Friday.

After incoming shipments meet U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service requirements, they must be reinspected by FSIS.

The products were distributed to distributors and retailers in Florida and Texas.

The affected products were produced between May 15 and May 20. They have use or freeze-by dates between September 15 and September 20.

The recall includes various weight cardboard boxes containing “FrigorIfico Gorina SAIC” boneless beef “Top Sirloin Butt” (“Cuadril Sin Tapa”), “FrigorIfico Gorina SAIC” boneless beef “Eye Round” (“Peceto”), “FrigorIfico Gorina SAIC” boneless beef “Topside Cap Off” (“Nalga AD S/Tapa”), “FrigorIfico Gorina SAIC” boneless beef “Flat” (“Carnaza Cuadrada”) and “FrigorIfico Gorina SAIC” boneless beef “Knuckle” (“Bola de Lomo”).

The affected products feature Argentinian establishment number “EST. N° OF. 2025” and shipping mark “26644-AA.”

The issue was discovered during routine FSIS inspection activities.

There have been no confirmed reports of illness or injury in connection with the consumption of the recalled products, FSIS said. Anyone concerned about an illness or injury is urged to contact a healthcare provider.

FSIS said it is concerned that some affected products may be in consumers’ refrigerators and freezers.

Consumers who have purchased these products are instructed not to consume them and to either throw them away or return them to the place of purchase.

Zoox CEO Aicha Evans agreed that autonomous vehicles should be regulated as the Amazon subsidiary’s fleet of autonomous vehicles launched its first paid service in the United States in Las Vegas Monday. 

In June, one of Zoox’s robotaxis drove into heavy smoke at an active emergency scene in Las Vegas. Zoox issued a software recall following the incident and has since updated the technology to better detect and respond to fire and smoke.

Evans told FOX Business host Liz Claman the company believes in transparency and taking responsibility.

“These are rare edge cases,” Evans told “The Claman Countdown” on Monday. “We learn and we continue to improve our processes along the way to make them better and better.”

“Sometimes it’s software, sometimes it is firmware, sometimes it is just using simulation,” she added. “We throw the best at it, we root cause, we learn, we improve and we deploy.”

Evans’ remarks come as federal officials press autonomous vehicle (AV) developers to improve interactions with first responders and emergency personnel, warning that failures to do so could pose a serious risk to public safety.

“To state it bluntly: an AV that cannot safely interact with first responders is a danger to the general public,” National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) Administrator Jonathan Morrison wrote in July.

Evans, who thanked Morrison for his partnership in advancing American innovation, said she believes autonomous vehicle regulation is necessary.

“I want to unequivocally say we agree with the administrator and the administration and the regulatory agency. We need to be regulated,” she said. “And EV scenes are extremely important, because it’s about saving lives all around.”

After providing free Zoox rides in Las Vegas since 2023 under a three-year pilot program, the Amazon robotaxi brand officially began charging customers for rides on Monday.

“We have essentially, so far, the same number as people who are taking free rides,” Evans told FOX Business.

Unlike competitors such as Waymo, which retrofits regular cars for driverless operations, Zoox’s vehicles are pedal-free, steering-wheel free and passenger-focused. The robotaxis feature face-to-face campfire-style seating for up to four passengers.

Roughly 65 Zoox are currently deployed in Las Vegas and Evans said production is “ramping up,” with the company’s California factory is doubling output to five to six vehicles per day.

The CEO also told FOX Business where the company could expand next, beyond Las Vegas, San Francisco, Austin and Miami, where Zoox currently operates pilot programs.

“We will be entering Atlanta and LA and… we have big ambitions,” Evans said. “We want to be everywhere where we are welcome and show and deliver these wonderful and lovable experiences to customers around the U.S.”

A Staten Island judge halted New York City’s new tax on luxury second homes on Monday, ordering the city to take down a public list naming roughly 900,000 property owners and barring officials from acting on the 17,000 tax notices already in the mail until at least the end of the month.

The ruling from Richmond County Supreme Court Justice Wayne Ozzi does not strike down the surcharge itself. It stops the city from running it. Until a hearing on Aug. 31, the Department of Finance cannot grant exemptions, cannot rule that any owner owes the tax, and cannot issue new notices. The supplemental market value roll posted on the agency’s website has to come off.

The tax was enacted as part of the state budget and signed into law in May, aimed at closing roughly $500 million of the city’s deficit. It applies to one- to three-family homes assessed at $5 million or more, and to condominiums and co-ops valued at $1 million or more, in each case only where the property is not the owner’s primary residence.

The trouble started with how the city identified who owed it. Rather than determine property by property which homes were actually second residences, the Department of Finance published a roll listing names, addresses and property values for about 900,000 residential properties, then mailed notices to some 17,000 owners telling them they would be assessed unless they applied for an exemption by Sept. 18. Owners who had lived in their homes for decades found themselves on a public list and holding a letter demanding they prove a negative.

Ozzi found that approach unlawful. He ruled the mailed notices did not amount to proper notice under tax law and wrote that no statute permitted or required the city to publish a list of that scale, or to release it through an off-cycle mid-year publication. The city, he said, owed each owner an individualized determination before shifting the burden onto the homeowner.

Three homeowners brought the suit last Friday: Simon Hedley of Chelsea, along with Rachel O’Brien and Carmine Morano, the wife and father of Staten Island City Councilman Frank Morano. All three said their properties are primary residences. They are represented by Randy Mastro, first deputy mayor under Eric Adams, who called the ruling a vindication for hundreds of thousands of owners swept into a process they should never have been in.

The complaint does not attack the surcharge’s legality. It argues the city ignored state records made available under the law precisely so officials could identify eligible properties in advance, and instead ran a dragnet.

City Hall said it will appeal immediately, and expects the appeal to stay the order. A spokesman for the mayor, Matt Rauschenbach, said the administration remains confident in the surcharge and in the city’s ability to administer it fairly, describing it as asking owners of $5 million second homes to pay their share.

In court, the city warned that a freeze would strand homeowners already in the queue. It told the judge the finance department had received 3,801 challenges to its primary residence determinations, and argued that pausing the Sept. 18 deadline could leave appeals unprocessed before bills go out on Nov. 15. Filings also showed that Hedley’s own exemption was approved on Saturday, a day after he sued, once he uploaded a tax return.

Gov. Kathy Hochul, who announced the proposal alongside Mamdani in April and signed it into law, put distance between Albany and the rollout hours before the ruling. Speaking in the Bronx, she said the state is not responsible for the implementation, that the city was consulted in advance, and that City Hall should streamline the process. It was a shift from her earlier framing of the measure as a way to make wealthy foreign owners of empty apartments contribute.

The pause carries real weight for the residential market. Brokers had reported second-home buyers pulling back while the tax picture stayed unsettled, and co-op and condo boards had begun fielding questions from shareholders who appeared on the published roll. The list coming down removes an immediate exposure for owners whose names, addresses and property values were searchable by anyone.

For the city’s finances, the timing matters more than the legal question. The surcharge was written into the budget as a revenue line for the current fiscal year, and the collection calendar runs through the November billing cycle. Every week the rollout stays frozen compresses the window to process exemptions and issue accurate bills.

Both sides return to court on Aug. 31. Until then, the tax exists on the books and cannot be collected.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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A new VIP lounge opened Monday morning at Ben Gurion Airport’s Terminal 3, in the duty-free area beside the synagogue — arriving roughly a month before the heaviest inbound travel weeks of the Jewish year.

The lounge runs about 250 square meters and is the first of two that Jetex, the Emirati aviation services group, will operate at Ben Gurion in partnership with LAYAM, part of Teddy Sagi’s group. The second, at roughly 370 square meters, is expected to open in the coming months, giving the two facilities a combined 620 square meters. It operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The menu is led by chef Eitan Mizrahi, formerly of the Royal Beach hotel in Tel Aviv, built around an interpretation of Israeli cooking, with desserts from pastry chef Dudu Otmezgine, Nespresso coffee and a bar stocked with international brands. The facility includes a cold buffet of cheeses and salads, a hot buffet with pizzas and burekas, and dedicated work and rest areas.

Who gets in

Premium-cabin passengers and eligible club members enter at no charge. Holders of American Express premium cards also enter free — but the physical card must be presented at the desk, and a card stored in a digital wallet will not be accepted. Guest entry follows the terms published by American Express. The arrangement falls under an exclusive credit-card agreement between American Express and Jetex.

Business-class passengers on foreign carriers operating at Ben Gurion, including Etihad, British Airways and Air France, also enter free, as do members of the Israeli Medical Association and other institutional partners of the group. Travelers without an entitlement can buy a single entry for $100 per person.

The question American travelers need to ask first

This is where readers flying in from New York should slow down. The American Express relationship in Israel runs through the local licensee, and Israeli reporting on Monday’s opening describes eligibility by card tier without specifying the country of issue.

When Jetex opened its earlier Ben Gurion lounge in partnership with American Express Israel, access was limited to Israeli-issued Platinum and Centurion cards. A U.S.-issued Platinum or Centurion card did not qualify, and neither did Priority Pass membership attached to it — a repeat of the situation at the former Dan Lounge, where American cardholders were routinely turned away at the desk. Priority Pass has not been accepted at Ben Gurion since January 2026.

Anyone counting on a U.S. Platinum card to cover a family’s pre-flight stop should confirm eligibility with American Express before arriving, rather than at the entrance with luggage and a boarding time. At $100 a head for walk-in entry, a family of four discovering the answer at the door is looking at $400.

The timing is the business story

Rosh Hashana begins at sundown on Friday, September 11, Yom Kippur falls on September 21, and Sukkot begins the evening of September 25 and runs through October 2. That sequence produces the densest concentration of inbound and outbound traffic Ben Gurion sees all year — three separate travel peaks inside three weeks, against a fixed number of seats on a route network that has still not fully recovered its pre-war carrier mix.

The consequence for travelers is familiar: fares to Tel Aviv climb steeply into that window, and the flights that remain available fill early. The consequence for the airport is congestion — long queues, packed terminals, and a premium on any space where a family can sit down. Opening a lounge in August rather than October is a commercial decision aimed squarely at that.

It also tells you something about who Jetex thinks the customer is. A Dubai-based operator of private terminals across more than 40 destinations does not enter Ben Gurion for the off-season. It enters for the weeks when demand outruns capacity and a $100 walk-in fee looks reasonable to a traveler facing a four-hour wait.

One practical note for the holiday itself: Ben Gurion effectively shuts down for Yom Kippur, and lounge service goes with it. Anyone booking around September 20 and 21 should plan on that.

The second lounge lands sometime in the coming months. Whether either one solves anything for the American traveler depends entirely on a detail that Monday’s announcements did not spell out — and that is worth a phone call before you rely on it.

JBizNews Desk | Tel Aviv

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SpaceX shares climbed back above their $135 initial-public-offering price Monday for the first time in nearly a month, extending a sharp rebound from the selloff that followed the company’s first earnings report as a public company.

The stock closed at $138.74, up about 4%, marking its highest close since mid-July and putting it back above the $135 price at which SpaceX sold shares in its record June IPO.

The recovery has been fast. SpaceX shares fell as low as roughly $104.83 on August 3, meaning the stock has rebounded more than 30% from that low in just over a week.

The biggest change has been investor concern over insider selling. Hundreds of millions of early-investor and employee shares recently became eligible for sale as lockup restrictions expired, raising fears that a flood of new supply would pressure the stock.

That selling wave has not materialized at the scale investors feared.

The stock also gained 15.8% Friday, its second-best session since going public, helping erase much of the damage from the company’s first quarterly report. Investors had initially punished SpaceX over the amount of cash being directed toward artificial intelligence and other capital-intensive projects even as Starlink and launch revenue continued growing.

Retail investors are showing a different behavior now. They became net sellers of SpaceX shares Friday for the first time since the IPO, selling roughly $4.5 million, after spending weeks buying through the decline.

That shift looks more like profit-taking than abandonment. Retail investors bought roughly 30% of the IPO allocation and are estimated to have paid an average price around $147, leaving many still below their cost basis even after Monday’s rebound.

The $135 level matters because IPO prices often become psychological markers for recently listed companies. Falling below the offering price raised questions about whether investors had overpaid for SpaceX’s $1.77 trillion IPO valuation. Recovering above it reduces some of that pressure.

SpaceX is still far below its post-IPO high above $225, meaning the stock remains one of the market’s most volatile large-cap names.

The next important level is around $150, the price where SpaceX shares opened on their first day of public trading. A sustained move above that level would put a much larger portion of early public investors back into profit.

For now, Monday’s close marked an important reversal: the market absorbed the first major wave of post-IPO selling eligibility without the collapse many investors feared.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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President Donald Trump said on Monday that the United States controls the Strait of Hormuz and had swept the strategic oil waterway for Iranian mines.

“Look, the only one that has control of the Strait of Hormuz right now is the United States Navy,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’ve mine-swept the entire strait.”

This is a developing story.

This post was originally published on here.

Trump Media & Technology Group reported a sharply wider second-quarter loss Monday as declines in the value of its digital-asset and equity holdings overwhelmed modest growth in revenue.

The parent of Truth Social posted a $238.1 million net loss, compared with a $20 million loss a year earlier. The company recorded roughly $190.4 million in unrealized losses tied to digital assets, pledged digital assets and equity securities during the quarter. 

Revenue rose 89% to $1.7 million, helped by advertising, Truth+ subscriptions, management fees and the newly launched Truth API. But the increase remains small relative to the scale of the company’s investment losses. 

The second-quarter result brought Trump Media’s first-half loss to $644 million, compared with $51.7 million in the same period last year. 

The company has also begun pulling back from parts of its earlier crypto expansion. It recently terminated planned ventures with Crypto.com and Yorkville tied to a proposed digital-asset treasury strategy, while management shifts attention toward monetizing Truth Social and completing its planned merger with nuclear-fusion company TAE Technologies. 

That merger represents an unusually large strategic shift. Trump Media has committed $300 million ahead of a proposed transaction valuing the combined fusion venture at roughly $6 billion, even though commercial fusion power remains unproven. 

For investors, the quarter highlights the difference between operating performance and balance-sheet exposure. Trump Media’s core media revenue grew, but the company’s results are increasingly being driven by the market value of investments outside its original social-media business.

That means future earnings could remain highly volatile even if Truth Social itself grows. Large digital-asset positions can generate substantial reported gains when markets rise and equally large losses when they fall.

The company is effectively becoming a hybrid of media, digital assets, financial services and speculative energy investment — making its quarterly results less dependent on advertising revenue and more dependent on the value of assets and businesses far removed from its original platform.

JBizNews Desk | Sarasota

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Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, appearing on an ABC Sunday talk show interviewed by Jonathan Karl, had a word salad answer to a simple question that is every bit as bad or even worse than anything Vice President Harris has ever produced. 

Here’s the setup by Mr. Karl, who should have been much tougher in this interview: “So you have Wisconsin coming up next, Francesca Hong, who is the Democratic Socialist of America supported candidate for governor.” Mr. Karl added: “What do you make of those controversial statements I’m sure you’ve seen?” adding, “How do you, how do you get around that? AOC replied: “My understanding is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances.” Mr. Karl: “Yeah, she’s moved away from a lot of that.” AOC: “Right, she’s moved away from it and I have a local city councilman that has this saying, ‘woke one was crazy.”

This is beyond goofiness. AOC is trying to back out of a lot of issues and values that she herself has stood for. And there’s no such thing as blaming something called “woke one.”  You can’t laugh off defunding the police, or 20 million illegal immigrants from open borders, or closing down schools and colleges and businesses — which created unbelievable physical and mental hardship and torment and loneliness and alcohol and drug addictions. And suicides and family breakups. And just about everything else that these crazy left-wingers believed in.

Framing white supremacy as an embedded/systemic American problem, “Defund the Police” as a racial-justice project, immigration rhetoric centered on racialization and systemic cruelty, the Green New Deal’s combination of climate policy with sweeping system injustices, abolish ICE, men in women’s sports.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez cannot laugh this stuff off. She said it and one way or another she continues to say it because she believes it. By the way, because she believes it, a recent poll shows her growing unpopularity in her own congressional district in New York City’s outer boroughs.

People are onto her. Now the same holds true for the front-runner in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor, Francesca Hong. She has a whole litany of far-left socialist or communist policy ideas. And she’s trying to sluff them off as some old internet posts. But they are not. She said them and she believes them.

No more Thanksgiving because it’s a “colonizer holiday.” Abolish the police department that “exists to uphold white supremacy.” She wants a state public option for healthcare, a state public bank, publicly owned grocery stores, to repeal Governor Scott Walker’s right to work laws, illegal migrant state IDs, sanctuary policies, a $20 minimum wage, legalizing marijuana, and a 17 percent tax on millionaires and corporations.

We don’t need any of this for Wisconsin or Abdul El-Sayed’s Michigan, or for that matter Zohran Mamdani’s New York. Or anywhere in America. American free enterprise and free market capitalism is working very well, thank you very much.

The Atlanta Fed is looking for 6 percent growth in the current quarter. The unemployment rate is historically low 4.1 percent. Private jobs are rising and government jobs are declining. Manufacturing and construction output and jobs are running at the fastest pace in decades. Inflation is modest. And President Trump has changed the culture towards traditional and religious values. Tell the comrades to stay home.

The federal government moved today to write the trucking industry’s English requirement directly into the rulebook, so that a driver who cannot read a road sign or answer an inspector’s questions must be pulled off the road — and so that no future administration can quietly reverse it.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s proposed rule was published in the Federal Register this morning under Docket No. FMCSA-2026-0826, with a 60-day comment window. Comments are due by October 9, 2026.

Here is the mechanic of it in plain terms. The English requirement itself already exists and has since the 1930s. What has been missing is a regulation saying what an inspector must do when a driver fails. That instruction has lived in a separate handbook — the out-of-service criteria maintained by the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance, an inspectors’ group — which is guidance, not law, and can be rewritten at any time. The proposal moves the consequence into the regulations themselves, adding a new paragraph to the driver-qualification rule stating that a driver in violation must be placed out of service immediately.

That distinction is the whole point of the rulemaking. States that take federal motor carrier safety grant money must keep their own laws compatible with the federal regulations — so once the requirement is codified, states have to adopt it regardless of how the inspectors’ handbook is amended later. Transportation Secretary Sean P. Duffy framed it as insurance against reversal, saying the codified version would prevent future administrations from weakening the standard the way the Obama administration did.

The enforcement history explains the urgency. A 2016 policy memo told federal personnel to cite drivers for English violations but not to park them, mirroring the inspectors’ group having dropped the violation from its criteria the year before. That reversed after an April 28, 2025 executive order directing the agency to rescind the memo and get the violation restored to the out-of-service list, which the safety alliance voted to do effective June 25, 2025. The alliance then petitioned the agency in October 2025 to put the requirement into regulation — the petition this proposal grants.

The numbers show what changed at roadside. In the first half of 2025, before the switch, 7,812 English violations were written nationally and only 33 produced out-of-service orders. From June 25, 2025 through March 19, 2026, inspectors wrote 60,399 violations and issued 19,045 out-of-service orders. The Transportation Department now puts the total pulled off American roads at more than 26,000.

The one carve-out involves the Mexican border. Drivers working strictly inside the designated commercial zones along the U.S.-Mexico border are cited but not parked. The proposal narrows that exception: if paperwork — bills of lading, dispatch records, interchange receipts — shows the trip continues past the zone, the driver goes out of service. Of roughly 41,563 violations written inside those zones during the enforcement period, the agency estimates about 16 percent would have drawn an out-of-service order under the tighter test.

For carriers, that is the cost line. The agency projects roughly 9,000 additional out-of-service orders a year in the border zones, and prices the disruption at about $800 per truck per day for an average two days to find a replacement driver and get the freight moving — $14.4 million annually across the industry. The agency is explicitly asking shippers and carriers to comment on whether that estimate is right and what the knock-on effect is on shipping costs and delivery times.

Worth noting for anyone reading it as a new burden: the agency’s position is that it is not adding a requirement at all. The English standard has been on the books since the Interstate Commerce Commission wrote it in December 1936, effective July 1, 1937, and the proposal codifies enforcement practice already in effect rather than creating a new obligation. The agency also says the rule sits comfortably inside the USMCA framework, since the standard applies to every driver operating in the United States regardless of nationality.

What comes next is the comment docket, then a final rule. The agency has said it will retrain federal and state inspectors on the border-zone test once a final rule publishes — roughly 100 federal border inspectors and 1,900 state enforcement personnel. Until then, the roadside practice stays as it has been since last summer: fail the interview or the road-sign check, and the truck stops.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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As Americans looking to travel to the South Pacific, rich Americans are making an investment in New Zealand’s “golden visas.”

After the government relaxed the approval requirements, over 700 rich foreigners applied for the country’s beautiful visa in the last 14 months, an increase from 115 in the previous three years.

According to the report, over one-third of the software received since April 2025 have been from Americans. Additionally, it was noted that Americans made up 277 of the software, with some Californians showing interest in the formally-named Active Investor Plus Visa.

Applications for the golden visa program must make a minimum investment of$ 5 million New Zealand dollars over the course of three years, with the exception of making philanthropic commitments of 20 % of the total investment.

A separate plan, which requires investing$ 10 million in passive property like bonds over a five-year time, has also been applied for by 127 additional applicants for a golden visa.

The country’s population of more than 5 million people has the right to work in New Zealand for an indefinite period of time thanks to foreigners who have a beautiful visa.

The state of New Zealand recently relaxed some of the other regulations governing the gold visa programs, including reducing the number of days that applicants can spend in the country and reducing the requirement for English-language applicants.

The range of acceptable investments was also broadened for the balanced category, which included bonds and property investments, and it was reduced from the original 2022 requirement of$ 15 million to$ 5 million for the growth category and$ 10 million for the “balanced” category.

After the government relaxed the restrictions on the length of time spent in New Zealand, applicants for gold permits in the development category are required to spend at least 21 times there over the course of three years.

Golden card holders may spend at least 105 days in New Zealand over the course of five years under the balanced purchase category.

LUTNICK SAYS TRUMP WANTS” THE TOP OF THE TOP” WITH THE NEW GOLD CARD VISA PROGRAM, WHICH Then ACCEPTES APPLICATIONS.

However, for every$ 1 million in New Zealand invested in development categories, the time-in-country condition may be reduced by 14 days, with the exception of 42 days, at which point the card holder must spent 63 days in the country over the course of five times.

Before the card application is submitted in theory, any purchases made to reduce the time requirement must be made.

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Ashley J. DiMella, a contributor to Fox News Digital, wrote this article.

Joint Base Charleston was formally renamed Joint Base Lindsey Graham Monday in honor of the late South Carolina senator and longtime Air Force veteran, giving one of the state’s most important military installations the name of a lawmaker who spent decades advocating for U.S. defense and the base itself. 

The Charleston-area installation is home to more than 50 military commands and operates the largest fleet of C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft in the United States. The renaming follows a directive signed in late July by Air Force Secretary Troy Meink, who cited Graham’s service in Congress and the military. 

Graham served more than 30 years across the Air Force, Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve, retiring as a colonel in 2015. He also spent more than three decades in Congress and became one of Washington’s most prominent advocates for defense spending and military readiness. 

The decision also reflects Graham’s direct ties to South Carolina’s defense economy. Over the years, he supported federal investment in military infrastructure and programs tied to the Charleston region, including funding benefiting the base and nearby aerospace operations.

The installation plays an outsized role in the state’s economy. Beyond military personnel, it supports contractors, logistics companies, housing demand and the broader aerospace supply chain around Charleston.

The renaming is therefore more than symbolic. It permanently links Graham’s name to one of South Carolina’s largest defense and transportation hubs and to a sector that has become central to the state’s economic growth.

JBizNews Desk | Charleston

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Ford has shown its dealers a working prototype of a Mustang with four doors, and told them it intends to sell it for less than $40,000 — the first time in the nameplate’s 62-year history that a Mustang sedan has moved from sketch to metal.

The car was rolled onto the stage at a private dealer meeting in Las Vegas earlier this week. Ford executives told the room the four-door Mustang would carry a starting price below $40,000, reach 60 miles per hour in under four seconds, and offer more rear-seat legroom than a Porsche Panamera. Dealers who saw it compared its size and proportions to the Panamera itself, and it marked the first time Ford put a physical prototype in front of them, after showing only a rendering in 2024.

Executive Chair Bill Ford and Chief Executive Jim Farley were both in the room. Dealers were told the car will not go on sale until the end of the decade, with 2028 and 2029 both still in play, and Ford did not specify the engine. The version shown was gas-powered with the potential for a hybrid, but not a full electric. Ford spokesman Mark Truby said the company does not comment on future product.

The business logic is plain. One dealer who attended said the goal is to “broaden the appeal and make it a vehicle that a young family can use.” That is a direct answer to the Mustang’s core problem: a two-door coupe can only sell to people willing to live with two doors. The Mustang is still the world’s bestselling sports car, but it sold just over 45,000 units in the United States last year, against more than 122,000 in 2015 and an all-time peak near 607,500 in 1966. Sales have rebounded this year, with 32,131 sold through July, up nearly 16%.

Ford is also walking back one of its own decisions. The company cleared its North American lineup of passenger cars years ago, leaving the Mustang as its only vehicle that is neither a truck nor an SUV. That left an open lane in the affordable performance-sedan market — and a rival has already driven into it. Dodge killed the Charger and Challenger in 2023, then brought the Charger back with a gasoline engine in 2025, and the 2026 lineup now offers both two-door and four-door versions. A Mustang sedan would land directly on top of it.

The price target is the most aggressive number in the pitch. A sub-$40,000 sticker would put the car far below the premium fastbacks it was visually compared to, and within reach of shoppers cross-shopping ordinary performance sedans rather than luxury cars. For context, Ford’s existing electric Mustang Mach-E starts at $37,795 for the 2026 model year.

Hitting that price requires Ford to avoid an expensive clean-sheet program. Reporting ahead of the dealer meeting indicated the car will likely ride on a stretched version of the S650 architecture that underpins today’s Mustang, and reworking an existing rear-wheel-drive platform costs far less than developing a new one. That is how a car that looks like a Panamera can be priced like a Camry.

The name is not settled publicly, but the paperwork points one direction. Ford used the Mach 4 name internally to identify the Mustang sedan when it showed the 2024 rendering, and has since trademarked it, covering both gas and electric applications.

The Mustang sedan was not the only product on display. Dealers also saw the Ford Fathom, the all-electric midsize pickup launching next year at a starting price under $30,000. The meeting placed unusually heavy emphasis on the service side of the business — performance parts, accessories and aftermarket offerings, a reminder that fixed operations, not new-vehicle margin, is where dealer profit increasingly sits.

For dealers, a four-door Mustang solves a showroom problem as much as a product one. A customer who walks in wanting a Mustang and walks out because there is nowhere to put a car seat is a lost sale that currently goes to Dodge, or to nobody. Adding a body style to a nameplate that already carries enormous brand recognition costs far less in marketing than launching a new name from scratch — the same arithmetic that made the Mach-E work in 2021 despite the objections of purists.

The caution is that this is a product plan, not a production commitment. Automakers regularly shelve vehicles between the dealer preview and the assembly line when the market moves, and nothing shown in Las Vegas has been publicly confirmed. But a physical prototype, a price target, a performance target and a trademark filing represent considerably more progress than a rendering on a screen.

JBizNews Desk | Detroit

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The IRS has answered one of the biggest unanswered questions surrounding the new Trump accounts—and the decision removes what could have become a paperwork headache for millions of families. By creating a gift-tax safe harbor, the Treasury Department has effectively confirmed that most grandparents can contribute to a grandchild’s account without filing a federal gift tax return, provided they stay within several important limits.

The guidance, issued June 29 as Revenue Procedure 2026-25, eliminates uncertainty that had surrounded one of the centerpiece savings provisions created by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Rather than creating an entirely new reporting system, the IRS folded qualifying Trump account contributions into the same annual gift-tax framework families already use, allowing most contributions to proceed without additional filings.

Why the Question Mattered

Trump accounts, created under Section 530A of the Internal Revenue Code, allow children under 18 to build long-term savings through tax-advantaged accounts that function similarly to traditional IRAs. Children born between January 1, 2025, and December 31, 2028, also qualify for a one-time $1,000 federal contribution, while annual contributions from parents, grandparents and others are generally capped at $5,000, with that limit indexed for inflation after 2027.

The uncertainty centered on one technical issue.

Because the money generally cannot be accessed until the child reaches age 18, tax professionals questioned whether contributions represented a future-interest gift—a category that normally does not qualify for the annual federal gift-tax exclusion. Without IRS guidance, even relatively small contributions could have required families to file Form 709, creating a compliance burden far larger than any potential tax liability.

That prospect carried enormous administrative implications. Millions of Trump account elections had already been filed, while only a fraction of that number of federal gift-tax returns are normally submitted each year. Treasury concluded the reporting burden would overwhelmingly fall on families who would never owe gift tax because of the federal lifetime exemption.

What the Safe Harbor Requires

The new guidance treats qualifying Trump account contributions as completed gifts eligible for the annual exclusion, eliminating the need to file a federal gift-tax return in most situations.

To qualify, all of the following conditions must be satisfied during the calendar year:

• The donor must be an individual rather than a trust, corporation or other entity.
• Contributions must be made in cash, including checks or electronic transfers.
• Contributions must occur before the child reaches age 18.
• Total gifts from the donor to that child—including Trump account deposits, cash gifts, 529 plan contributions and other transfers—must remain below the 2026 annual exclusion of $19,000.
• The donor cannot otherwise be required to file a federal gift-tax return that year.

Although no return is required under the safe harbor, the IRS expects families to retain records documenting their contributions and eligibility.

The Hidden Catch

The relief is not automatic if a donor exceeds the annual exclusion.

A grandparent who contributes $5,000 to several grandchildren’s Trump accounts may not need to file any paperwork. But if that same grandparent later gives one grandchild enough additional gifts during the year to exceed the annual exclusion, the donor must file a federal gift-tax return—and the Trump account contributions made during that year are reported along with the other gifts.

The safe harbor also applies to generation-skipping transfer tax treatment, an important consideration for grandparents. However, married couples planning to elect gift-splitting should seek professional advice because filing a return to split gifts removes them from the safe harbor.

Opening an Account Is Different From Funding One

The IRS guidance addresses contributions—not the initial creation of the account.

Opening a Trump account requires a separate election filed through the tax system by the individual claiming the child as a dependent, which in most cases is a parent. Grandparents generally contribute only after the account has already been established.

Coordination is essential because the annual contribution limit applies collectively across all contributors. A grandparent who contributes the full amount early in the year could unintentionally prevent parents or an employer from making additional qualifying contributions.

What It Means for Families and Advisors

The new guidance does more than simplify tax reporting. It removes one of the largest compliance uncertainties surrounding Trump accounts and allows financial advisors, accountants and estate planners to incorporate them into long-term wealth transfer strategies with far greater confidence.

The conversation now shifts away from whether grandparents must file gift-tax returns and toward coordinating contributions efficiently within the annual limits. For families building multigenerational financial plans, that certainty may prove just as valuable as the tax benefits the accounts themselves provide.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Wall Street gave back a sliver of last week’s record run on Monday after crude oil surged roughly 5%, driven by growing doubt that Washington and Tehran will reach a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz any time soon.

The mechanics are straightforward: higher oil means higher inflation, and higher inflation means the Federal Reserve is more likely to raise rates — the opposite of what stocks rallied on last week.

The S&P 500 finished just below the flatline, slipping 0.06% to 7,753.11. The Nasdaq Composite fell 0.32% to 26,605.36, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 60.95 points, or 0.11%, to close at 53,975.98. The Russell 2000 lagged the large-cap indexes, trading down about 0.6% near 3,015.

That leaves the S&P a whisker under Friday’s record close of 7,757.64 — a pause rather than a reversal.

The week that came before

Stocks posted a second straight winning week last week. The S&P 500 advanced 3.6%, closing above 7,700 for the first time in its history. The Nasdaq gained 5.2% on a rebound in chip stocks, with the iShares Semiconductor ETF up more than 7%. The Dow added nearly 3%.

Friday’s fuel was the July jobs report: nonfarm payrolls fell by 23,000 against expectations for a gain of about 82,000, and June was revised down to 20,000 from 57,000. The unemployment rate came in at 4.1%, below June’s 4.2%. Labor force participation slipped to 61.4% and average hourly earnings rose just 0.1% on the month.

Weak jobs plus soft wages equals a Fed that can sit still. Monday’s oil move put a question mark on that.

Market movers

Nvidia was the single heaviest drag on the tape, falling nearly 3% after a Financial Times report that the chipmaker is working with Apollo Global and Blackstone on a $500 billion AI infrastructure funding package. Bank of America kept its buy rating and called Nvidia a top sector pick, dismissing memory-cost and circular-financing concerns as overblown ahead of the company’s fourth-quarter report on Aug. 26.

Intel dropped 4% after announcing a $15 billion common stock offering. Equity offerings dilute existing shareholders, and the market priced that in immediately. Apple shed 1.5%.

The day’s biggest winners were both takeout targets. MarineMax soared 46% after agreeing to be sold to Blackstone Infrastructure’s Safe Harbor Marinas for $53 a share in cash, a $1.5 billion deal expected to close by year end. Varex Imaging climbed 48% after Teledyne Technologies agreed to buy it for $18.90 a share in cash, with closing expected in early 2027. Teledyne rose slightly.

AI infrastructure names sold off across the board. The Global X Data Center & Digital Infrastructure ETF lost 1%, Corning fell more than 3%, and photonics makers Coherent and Lumentum dropped 12% and more than 6%.

Exxon Mobil rose 3.4% as energy tracked crude higher, while Eli Lilly gained 2.3%, Microsoft 2.2%, Amazon 1.9% and Meta Platforms 1.3%. AbCellera surged 36% after a mid-stage trial showed its drug reduced hot flashes against placebo after a single dose.

Critical mineral stocks — MP Materials, 5E Advanced Materials, United States Antimony, Critical Metals, USA Rare Earth and Energy Fuels — moved on the White House announcement late Friday of more than $2 billion in new mining investments plus over $180 million for mining schools and workforce development.

Berkshire Hathaway reported second-quarter operating earnings of $12.98 billion against $11.16 billion a year earlier, on revenue of $101.81 billion versus $92.52 billion, and repurchased roughly $4.5 billion of its own shares in the quarter.

Commodities

West Texas Intermediate futures climbed about 5% to close at $82.13 a barrel, and Brent settled around 5% higher at $87.72. Both benchmarks had fallen more than 7% last week on expectations that Iran and Oman were closing in on an agreement. Before the war, the strait carried roughly one-fifth of global oil shipments. U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve stocks have fallen below 300 million barrels, the lowest since January 1983.

Gold futures rose 0.43% to $4,418.60 an ounce. The metal gained 7.4% last week, its best week since January, with silver up 10.2% to $65.34.

Rates, the dollar and the Fed

The 10-year Treasury yield held near 4.66%, still subdued after the payrolls miss, though it traded as high as 4.703% against Friday’s close of 4.658% — pressure from oil rather than from growth optimism. Futures now price roughly a 44% chance of a quarter-point hike in September, down from about 67% a week ago. The dollar hovered near a two-month low against major currencies.

What moved the world

Iran says it is nearing a deal with Oman to reopen Hormuz but continues to resist direct talks with the United States until conditions are met. Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday there is no possibility of restarting negotiations while those conditions stand. Tehran wants the naval blockade lifted and compensation for war damages.

President Trump told Axios on Sunday the U.S. is “only semi-negotiating” with Iran, and indicated he would lean on the blockade rather than new airstrikes. Iran’s supreme leader replaced the official who issued those demands with a veteran Revolutionary Guards commander skeptical of talks with Washington. Houthi militants claimed an attack on a Saudi refinery near the Red Sea, and an Abu Dhabi National Oil Co. tanker was attacked in Hormuz over the weekend.

Overseas, Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 closed down 0.3% at 9,232.60.

What’s next

The Consumer Price Index and initial jobless claims are due this week, along with earnings from Super Micro Computer, CoreWeave and Cisco Systems. Producer prices and the University of Michigan inflation survey follow.

A cool CPI keeps last week’s rally intact and September on hold. A hot one, with oil back above $80, puts the hike squarely back on the table.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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A restaurant industry veteran who has led some of America’s best-known chains sees major growth potential in one segment of the dining business.

G.J. Hart, CEO of Houston-based SPB Hospitality, told FOX Business that the “upscale casual” category is “there for the taking” as the company looks to expand J. Alexander’s, one of the brands in its portfolio.

Hart, who previously served as CEO of Red Robin, California Pizza Kitchen and Texas Roadhouse, said consumers continue to respond to restaurants that deliver both value and a strong experience.

“It’s a space that, from my perspective, my thesis is that it will continue to resonate with consumers, because you’ve got a pretty decent value for a great experience,” Hart said.

Hart added, “[J. Alexander’s] has been around a long time and it’s very well respected, has a very loyal guest base. … There’s a ton of opportunity to grow [J. Alexander’s] in those strong markets and build out from those core markets and fill a need that’s out there.”

Unlike restaurant segments dominated by national chains, Hart said upscale casual is still made up largely of regional operators.

“When you think about who the real players [are] in upscale casual, it’s mostly regional players,” he said. “… Us becoming bigger will help us get stronger in that space, and I think it’s a space that’s there for the taking.”

SPB Hospitality owns a portfolio of restaurant brands including J. Alexander’s, Logan’s Roadhouse and Krystal.

Hart said the company is preparing to open six to eight restaurants annually as it ramps up its growth plans.

“We’ve got a fairly aggressive plan,” Hart said.

SPB Hospitality is working to ensure it has the infrastructure, training and management pipeline needed to support those new locations, he said.

Since becoming CEO of SPB Hospitality in September 2025, Hart said he has focused on making restaurant operations easier and applying lessons from his time leading Texas Roadhouse, California Pizza Kitchen and Red Robin.

“The basics are the same,” Hart said, pointing to leadership, communication and giving employees a voice.

As SPB Hospitality enters its next phase of growth, Hart said the larger challenge is keeping its brands relevant as consumer preferences evolve.

“What I’ve learned in all these brands and now bring to [J. Alexander’s] and SPB is this idea around relevancy,” he said. “How do you stay relevant for today’s ever evolving consumer and consumer needs and consumer wants?”

Gold just posted its strongest week in seven months, and the reason is simple: a bad jobs report made a Federal Reserve rate hike look a lot less likely, and gold always gains when the case for higher interest rates weakens.

Bullion climbed 7.4% over the week, its fastest advance since Jan. 19. Spot gold jumped 2.3% on Friday alone to $4,336.02 an ounce, touching its highest level since June 17, while U.S. gold futures settled up 2.3% at $4,399.70.

Here is the mechanism in everyday terms. Gold pays no interest and no dividend. When the Fed raises rates, cash and bonds start paying more, and holding a metal that pays nothing becomes expensive. When a rate hike looks less likely, that cost falls away and money moves back into gold.

The jobs number that did it

The Labor Department reported Friday that U.S. nonfarm payrolls fell by 23,000 in July, after a downwardly revised gain of 20,000 in June. Economists had been looking for an increase of 80,000. A negative print where the market expected a solid gain is the kind of surprise that resets rate expectations in a single morning.

Traders now put the odds of a quarter-point hike in September at roughly 44%, down from about 67% a week earlier. Separate futures pricing showed the probability of the Fed simply holding rates in September rising to 56.1% from 43.2% before the report landed.

The dollar softened and Treasury yields eased alongside it, both of which push in gold’s favor.

Where prices stand now

December gold futures opened Monday at $4,400 an ounce, unchanged from Friday’s close and the highest opening level since early June, before slipping to $4,391.50 by 8:22 a.m. Eastern. Spot gold was at $4,333.81 an ounce at 10 a.m. Eastern, down about $10 from the prior session. By midday the spot price had firmed to $4,375.89.

Gold has held above $4,300 through Monday, keeping last week’s gains even as oil prices moved higher on continued uncertainty over reopening the Strait of Hormuz.

The rest of the precious metals complex ran harder than gold. Silver gained 10.2% on the week to $65.34 an ounce, also its fastest weekly move in nearly seven months. Platinum rose 1% Friday to $1,745.87 and palladium added 0.4% to $1,376.90, with both finishing the week higher.

Why this year has been strange for gold

Gold normally thrives on war and inflation. This year it did not, and the reason matters for reading what comes next. Both metals started 2026 strong on expectations of an easier Fed — gold rose 8.7% in the week of Jan. 19 to $4,980 an ounce, silver 14.7% to $102.48. That reversed on Feb. 28, when the U.S. and Israel struck Iran and Tehran retaliated, driving oil and global inflation higher and pushing central banks toward rate hikes. Rising rates and wartime demand for cash pulled money out of both metals, and they only found support as Middle East tensions eased somewhat and the U.S. labor market began to cool.

In other words, the war worked against gold this year rather than for it, because it forced central banks to tighten. Last week’s payrolls number was the first real crack in that logic.

The central bank bid underneath

Behind the price action sits steady official buying. China’s central bank is expanding its gold storage in Hong Kong as part of a broader shift of sovereign reserves out of London, and it added 20 tons in July alone in what is now a 21-month buying streak. That is a floor under the market that does not move with weekly data.

UBS said Friday it expects gold to reach $5,000 an ounce in the first half of 2027.

What’s next

This week brings the July Consumer Price Index and Producer Price Index, along with jobless claims and the University of Michigan inflation expectations reading. A hot inflation print would put a September hike back on the table and take the wind out of last week’s move. A soft one extends it.

Gold miners are the second-order trade. Newmont, the largest holding in the major mining ETFs, has broken above its 150-day moving average, while the GDX and GDXJ funds are still testing theirs and gold itself remains below that line. Miners tend to move harder than the metal in both directions.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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President Trump signed an executive order at the White House on Monday that tells the federal government to recommend fewer vaccines for American children and to stop giving several of the remaining ones on the same day. A draft of the order said the number of vaccines recommended for children should be more limited, and it gave the Department of Health and Human Services 90 days to reassess the sequencing and timing of the childhood schedule.

In plain terms: the shots a child gets, the order they get them in, and how many can be given in a single visit are all being rewritten, and the clock on that rewrite started Monday.

The order pushes single-dose vaccines over combination shots, stating that childhood immunizations should be given at separate medical visits to the maximum extent feasible. It calls for the MMR vaccine to be broken into three separate shots, and it moves RSV and hepatitis A and B into a category reserved for high-risk children. The draft text did not mention autism. The president did.

Speaking before signing, Trump said the administration was announcing what he called the country’s “Gold Standard” childhood vaccination recommendations, and said autism was among the subjects involved. He also said the cause of autism is not known. Decades of studies involving millions of children have found no link between vaccines and autism.

Why drugmakers are watching

The federal childhood schedule is not just guidance. It drives insurance coverage, state school requirements, and the government’s own Vaccines for Children program, which buys shots for roughly half the children in the country. A vaccine that comes off the recommended list loses much of its market in a single stroke.

Merck sits closest to the fire. The company makes the MMR shot used in the United States, along with the combination version that adds chickenpox. Standalone measles, mumps, and rubella vaccines are not currently licensed or sold in this country — Merck stopped making them more than fifteen years ago. An instruction to split MMR into three separate shots therefore points at products that do not exist on the American market today and would take years and new regulatory approval to bring back. Merck’s HPV franchise, Gardasil, is separately exposed if the review reaches recommendations for that shot. Pfizer, Moderna, Sanofi, GSK, BioNTech, and Novavax all carry exposure to routine and childhood immunization revenue.

Analysts had already flagged the risk that even a vague executive action erodes voluntary uptake and destabilizes payer networks and state mandates, while noting the counterargument that the order might direct new studies rather than restrict access outright. Monday’s text lands closer to the first case: it does not ban anything, but it tells the government to trim the list and space out the visits.

The legal wall already standing

This is the second run at the schedule this year. The CDC in January recommended cutting childhood vaccination down to 11 diseases. The American Academy of Pediatrics refused to follow and kept its recommendations at 18. In March, a federal judge blocked the CDC’s changes. The new order acknowledges that litigation has delayed the earlier push, which is the stated reason for pursuing additional measures now.

It cites efforts to align the American schedule with what it calls best practices from peer nations, along with religious liberty and parental authority. The American Academy of Pediatrics has countered that peer nations face different disease conditions and that best practices vary accordingly.

That leaves the same question hanging over Monday’s signature that hung over January’s guidance: whether it survives contact with the courts.

What comes next

The 90-day review is the number to watch. HHS, under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now has until roughly early November to come back with a reassessed schedule. Trump’s own political advisers had urged Kennedy to stay off vaccine issues until after the November midterms, out of concern the fight would cost Republicans. The signing overrides that advice.

For manufacturers, the near-term financial hit is not the order itself but what the review produces in the fall — which shots stay on the list, which move to high-risk-only status, and whether pediatricians and insurers follow Washington or follow the pediatricians’ academy. For parents, the practical change, if the recommendations hold, is more trips to the doctor’s office for the same set of shots.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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U.S. seaports handled 2.5 million twenty-foot-equivalent units of containerized imports in July, the fourth-highest July total on record, as retailers and manufacturers rushed goods into the country ahead of a new round of tariffs.

The surge reflects a familiar strategy: bring merchandise in before import costs rise.

China remained the biggest source of U.S. containerized goods, with imports from China climbing to 873,129 TEUs, the highest monthly volume in a year. That matters because Chinese-made goods remain deeply embedded in U.S. retail inventories, from electronics and furniture to clothing and household products.

The July rush came as the U.S. tariff structure shifted again. A 10% global tariff expired in late July and was replaced by tariffs of as much as 12.5% on imports from 60 countries, increasing the incentive for companies to move merchandise before the higher duties took effect.

Walmart, Amazon, Home Depot and other major retailers account for a significant portion of the goods entering U.S. ports, meaning much of July’s cargo is destined for American stores, warehouses and consumers.

For shoppers, the important question is what happens after the warehouses are full.

Front-loading merchandise can temporarily shield consumers from tariff increases because retailers have inventory purchased under the earlier cost structure. It does not eliminate the higher cost once companies need to reorder.

That means the impact may arrive gradually. Retailers can absorb part of a tariff through lower margins, pressure suppliers for concessions, change sourcing or raise prices. Most large companies use some combination of all four.

The timing is particularly important because much of the merchandise arriving now will support back-to-school, fall and holiday sales.

Despite July’s huge volume, imports were still 4.3% below the near-record level reached in July 2025. Through the first seven months of 2026, container imports were down about 0.9% from a year earlier while remaining well above pre-pandemic levels.

Shipping analysts also expect the import rush to begin fading. Companies moved their traditional peak shipping season earlier to get ahead of tariffs and supply-chain disruptions, leaving fewer goods that still need to arrive later in the year.

The consumer takeaway is that packed ports today can mean well-stocked shelves tomorrow — but not necessarily lower prices.

Retailers have stocked up before the newest tariffs hit. Once those inventories turn over, shoppers could get a clearer picture of how much of the additional import cost companies intend to absorb and how much they intend to pass along.

JBizNews Desk | Los Angeles

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Apple is testing memory chips made by China’s ChangXin Memory Technologies as the artificial-intelligence boom drives up prices and tightens supplies of components used in iPhones, Macs and other consumer electronics.

The discussions center on using CXMT chips in devices sold in China. Apple has also sought U.S. government clearance to purchase from the company, which has drawn scrutiny in Washington over national-security concerns and its role in China’s semiconductor expansion.

The move does not mean Apple has selected CXMT as a supplier. Testing is part of the qualification process, and Apple has not publicly confirmed that it will use the chips in commercial products.

But the fact that Apple is evaluating a Chinese memory supplier shows how dramatically the global chip market is being reshaped by AI.

Data centers are consuming enormous quantities of memory and storage components, forcing consumer-electronics manufacturers to compete for capacity with companies building AI servers. That demand has pushed memory prices higher and made additional sources of supply more valuable.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook has already acknowledged that rising memory and storage costs are pressuring the company, with Apple preparing to pass some of those increases through to product prices.

CXMT has become increasingly important in the global DRAM market as China pours money into domestic semiconductor manufacturing. The company is expanding production and has gained market share in conventional memory even as U.S. restrictions seek to limit China’s access to advanced chipmaking technology.

That creates a difficult policy question for Washington.

The U.S. wants American technology companies to reduce their dependence on Chinese semiconductor suppliers. At the same time, AI-driven shortages are making Chinese manufacturing capacity increasingly attractive to companies trying to control costs.

For Apple, the issue is especially sensitive because China remains both a major manufacturing base and one of its largest consumer markets.

Using CXMT components only in Chinese-market devices could help Apple contain costs without immediately restructuring its worldwide supply chain. It could also give Apple additional leverage when negotiating with existing memory suppliers including Micron, Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.

The wider message for consumers is that AI infrastructure spending is no longer affecting only the companies building data centers.

The competition for chips is moving downstream into phones, computers and other everyday electronics — and could ultimately show up in the prices consumers pay.

JBizNews Desk | Cupertino, California

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Apple is reportedly in the process of testing memory chips made by Chinese company CXMT across its lineup of devices, including in iPhones and MacBooks, as it looks at options to address the shortage of memory chips.

The Wall Street Journal on Sunday reported that Apple has held early talks with CXMT about the company providing chips that would be used in devices sold in China, citing people familiar with the matter.

Apple is hoping to receive approval from the White House for the arrangement, which could face scrutiny under rules that aim to block U.S. firms from transferring technology and sensitive data to Chinese companies, including CXMT.

The Journal reported that while the rules allow Apple to buy off-the-shell components from CXMT, it couldn’t order custom chips built to the company’s specifications. If the arrangement moves forward, Apple may be forced to redesign parts of its products sold in the Chinese market that would use standard CXMT chips.

Laptop makers HP and Acer have obtained limited quantities of memory chips and are looking to lock in additional supplies for next year, the Journal reported. The deals with HP and Acer were previously reported by Nikkei Asia.

Apple has raised prices on its products in markets around the world, which it has attributed to surging memory chip costs amid a shortage caused by demand from artificial intelligence (AI) companies.

CXMT is the largest chipmaking company in China based on market value, and the report noted it has emerged as the world’s fastest-growing supplier of DRAM memory chips.

Reuters previously reported that the firm was considering building a second memory chip plant in Beijing to expand its output, as the Journal’s report from the weekend noted that CXMT maxed out its production this year.

The company is giving priority to domestic tech companies in China and is aiming to more than double its current production capacity by 2028, the Journal reported.

U.S. companies are restricted in their dealings with CXMT because it’s among the companies on a Pentagon list due to links with the Chinese military.

The list indicates that CXMT is directly and indirectly affiliated with the Chinese government’s Ministry of Information Technology, while it’s also indirectly linked to an agency that manages and supervises state-owned enterprises.

FOX Business reached out to Apple and CXMT for comment.

Reuters contributed to this report.

The U.S. government’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) is at its lowest level since 1983 as inventories that were already low before the Iran war come under increasing pressure.

Data released by the Department of Energy on Monday showed that the number of barrels of oil in the SPR declined by 6.1 million barrels last week, ending the week at 298.7 million barrels in inventory.

That is the lowest level in the EIA’s weekly data on SPR stocks since January 1983.

SPR inventories have fallen this year after President Donald Trump in March authorized the release of up to 172 million barrels in response to the impact of the Iran war on energy supplies, as Iranian attacks have slowed the flow of tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

The Trump administration announced the releases on March 11, 2026, while EIA data shows that the SPR had about 415.4 million barrels of oil in inventory during the middle of March – with inventories now down about 116 million barrels as of early August.

The latest SPR releases follow a historic drawdown over the last several years, beginning with the release of 180 million barrels that was authorized by the Biden administration in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.

Inventories had been around 600 million barrels at the start of 2022 and fell to 375 million barrels by the end of the year. 

When SPR levels hit a low of about 347 million barrels in the summer of 2023, they began to gradually recover and reached 400 million barrels in May 2025. They hit a recent peak of over 415 million barrels in February, before the latest round of drawdowns began in March.

The SPR was created in 1975 under the Energy Policy and Conservation Act in response to the OPEC oil embargo of 1973-74, which was imposed by Arab countries in OPEC as retaliation for the U.S. resupplying Israel’s military during the Yom Kippur War.

The SPR was initially intended to have a capacity of 1 billion barrels of oil, although it never reached that level. Currently, the SPR has a congressionally-authorized maximum of about 714 million barrels of oil, while its highest ever inventory was 726.6 million barrels in December 2009 when it had an authorized capacity of 727 million barrels. 

SPR reserves are stored at four locations thousands of feet below ground in salt caverns because those geological formations are more advantageous than surface facilities in terms of cost and maintenance, in addition to environmental and security concerns.

Geological pressures naturally seal cracks that emerge in salt formations to prevent leaking oil from seeping out, while the temperature difference keeps oil circulating to maintain its quality. Salt caverns can also be enlarged to fit precise dimensions through a mining process in which the salt is dissolved using fresh water.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a report in May which warned that Congress and the Department of Energy need to develop a unified long-term plan to address the SPR’s maintenance needs and a strategy for managing inventories into the future.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Republicans in Congress and Trump enacted in July 2025, included $171 million for acquiring petroleum products to be stored in the SPR, as well as $218 million to maintain the SPR.

Wall Street is beginning to price local resistance into the AI infrastructure boom.

Banks and asset managers financing new U.S. data centers are increasingly looking beyond traditional credit metrics and asking a more basic question before committing billions of dollars: will the surrounding community actually allow the project to be built?

Lenders are now examining zoning fights, permitting delays, electricity constraints and public opposition alongside a developer’s balance sheet, tenant agreements and projected returns.

The reason is simple. A data center can have a major technology company signed as a customer and still become significantly more expensive if construction is delayed for months or years by lawsuits, utility disputes or local political pressure.

At least 75 U.S. data-center projects worth roughly $130 billion faced some form of local opposition during the first quarter, according to Data Center Watch estimates cited by financial institutions.

That opposition is becoming more intense as AI campuses grow larger.

Residents and local officials are raising concerns about electricity demand, water consumption, noise, land use and whether households could end up paying higher utility bills to support infrastructure built primarily for technology companies.

For lenders, those concerns translate directly into financial risk.

A delayed project can mean higher interest costs, missed construction deadlines and penalties tied to customer agreements. A project that loses zoning approval can force developers to relocate entirely, putting millions of dollars of early-stage spending at risk.

Banks are therefore beginning to treat community support almost like another layer of collateral.

The shift is especially important because the amount of capital involved is enormous. Goldman Sachs has estimated that technology companies and infrastructure providers could spend more than $6 trillion on AI-related infrastructure through 2030.

Much of that money will be financed rather than paid entirely from corporate cash.

That means banks, private-credit funds, insurers and infrastructure investors will increasingly determine which AI projects actually get built.

For developers, winning financing may now require more than showing a strong tenant and attractive projected returns. They may also need commitments from utilities, local governments and surrounding communities before lenders are willing to release capital.

The change illustrates how quickly the AI boom is moving from Silicon Valley into local politics.

The next bottleneck may not be chips or even electricity.

It could be permission to build.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Intel launched a $15 billion public stock offering Monday as the chipmaker looks to finance the enormous cost of rebuilding its manufacturing business while demand for artificial-intelligence computing accelerates.

The company said proceeds from the offering will be used for general corporate purposes, including capital spending and working capital. Underwriters also have a 30-day option to purchase as much as another $2.25 billion of Intel shares.

The size of the offering shows just how expensive the AI infrastructure race has become.

Intel is spending heavily on advanced chip manufacturing, packaging and its foundry business as it attempts to compete more directly with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and win more outside customers for its factories.

The company recently raised its 2026 capital-spending outlook to more than $20 billion and has indicated spending could rise again next year.

Intel said strong and sustainable customer demand, driven partly by unprecedented investment in AI computing, helped support its decision to raise additional capital.

The offering also comes after a major rebound in Intel’s stock this year, giving the company an opportunity to sell new shares at substantially higher valuations than it could have earlier in its turnaround.

JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup are leading the offering.

For existing shareholders, the transaction carries a tradeoff. Selling new stock gives Intel billions of dollars without taking on additional debt, but it also increases the number of shares outstanding and dilutes current investors.

For the broader technology industry, the bigger message is that AI is increasingly becoming a financing story as much as a technology story.

Chip fabrication plants, advanced packaging facilities, data centers and the power infrastructure supporting them require enormous upfront investment. Intel’s $15 billion offering is another sign that even some of the world’s largest technology companies are looking for additional capital to keep pace with the buildout.

JBizNews Desk | Santa Clara, California

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The Powerball jackpot surged to an estimated $905 million ahead of Monday night’s drawing, making it the eighth-largest prize in the game’s history.

The pot grew after no ticket matched all six numbers from Saturday night’s drawing.

The white balls were 5, 9, 35, 54 and 63. The red Powerball was 7 and the Power Play multiplier was three.

It now has an estimated cash value of $391.9 million, according to the lottery.

The odds of winning a prize are 1 in 24.9, while the odds of hitting the jackpot are 1 in 292.2 million.

Though there was no jackpot winner in the latest drawing, four tickets matched all five white balls and won $1 million each, the lottery said. Winning Match 5 tickets were sold in Arizona, Florida, Michigan and New York. A ticket matching all five white balls was sold in Texas and included the Power Play option, increasing the prize to $2 million. 

Monday’s drawing will mark the 43rd in the current jackpot run.

The Powerball jackpot was last won on May 2, when two tickets in Florida and Texas split a $20 million prize.

The winner can choose between a lump sum payment or an annuitized prize – one immediate payment followed by 29 annual payments. Both options are before taxes.

Powerball tickets are sold in 45 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and the United Kingdom. Drawings occur three nights a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.

Whatnot is an app where ordinary people sell things on live video. A seller points a phone at a table of sneakers, trading cards, handbags or comic books, talks through each item, and viewers bid in real time. The sale closes on the stream, the item ships, and Whatnot keeps a fee on the transaction. On Friday the Los Angeles company said investors bought into it at a price that values the whole business at $20 billion — roughly double what it was worth ten months ago.

The company closed a $545 million Series G round led by ICONIQ, Lightspeed and Avra. New backers include Kleiner Perkins and Wellington Management, along with Standard Capital, the new firm started by former Y Combinator partner Dalton Caldwell. Returning investors include Andreessen Horowitz, Bond, DST Global and Greycroft, plus Alphabet’s CapitalG, which has now led three earlier rounds going back to a $150 million Series C closed at a $1.5 billion valuation in 2021. Total money raised since the company was founded in 2019 comes to about $1.5 billion.

The jump in price is the part that stands out. Whatnot was valued at just under $5 billion in January 2025, then at $11.5 billion in a $225 million Series F last October. Eighteen months, four times the price.

What investors are paying for is volume. Whatnot reported $8 billion in gross merchandise value for 2025, more than double the prior year, and revenue crossed $1 billion. Black Friday alone produced over $100 million in sales on the platform in a single day. The company says it has already passed last year’s $8 billion figure, that more than 650,000 new users join each week, and that its buyer count has more than doubled over the past year.

Gross merchandise value is simply the total dollar value of everything sold through the app. Whatnot does not keep that money — the sellers do. Whatnot keeps a slice of each transaction, which is how $8 billion in goods sold turns into roughly $1 billion in company revenue.

The category mix explains part of the growth. The platform started with collectibles — sneakers, sports cards, vinyl records, and has since expanded into fashion, electronics and a widening range of general consumer goods. It has pushed into designer handbags and even fresh groceries, and says it has processed more than a billion orders globally. It now ranks among the top shopping apps in both the U.S. and U.K. app stores.

Live selling is not a new idea. It is essentially QVC rebuilt for a phone screen, with the professional host replaced by a hobbyist in a spare bedroom. The format has been enormous in China for years through platforms like Taobao Live, and several American tech companies tried and failed to make it work here. Whatnot’s bet was that the missing ingredient was not better video, but sellers who genuinely know their niche and buyers who want to talk to them.

The company puts the U.S. live commerce market at more than $22 billion and claims roughly 60% of it.

There is also a fundraising story underneath the numbers. Nearly every venture dollar in Silicon Valley right now is going to artificial intelligence, and a consumer shopping marketplace is not what most firms are hunting for. Chief Executive and co-founder Grant LaFontaine said the market is almost entirely AI at the moment, and that some firms tell him outright that AI is all they do — while others, he said, are glad to see a consumer company with network effects and real growth rather than chasing the same handful of AI deals.

That framing matters for anyone selling on the platform. A company that just raised half a billion dollars in a market that is not looking for its type of business has capital to spend on the seller side rather than on survival. LaFontaine said the money will go toward better seller tools, bringing AI into more parts of the selling process, helping sellers reach more buyers, and expanding into new markets.

For small merchants, that is the practical read. Whatnot has become a distribution channel that reaches hundreds of thousands of new shoppers a week, with no storefront lease, no website build and no ad budget required — just inventory, a phone and someone willing to talk about what they are selling. The valuation is a headline number. The relevant number for a retailer is that $8 billion in goods moved through people doing exactly that.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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For decades, food companies have been able to decide on their own that an ingredient is safe, put it into American food and never tell the Food and Drug Administration.

The Trump administration moved Monday to close that gap.

The FDA proposed requiring manufacturers to notify the agency when they conclude that a substance is “Generally Recognized as Safe,” or GRAS, and provide the scientific basis supporting that conclusion. The system is currently voluntary.

If finalized, the rule would give the FDA something it does not have today: a much fuller picture of the ingredients entering the U.S. food supply without traditional food-additive approval.

Nothing changes on grocery shelves immediately. The proposal is scheduled for publication in the Federal Register on August 11 and must go through the federal rulemaking process before it can become binding.

The distinction matters. The FDA is not proposing to eliminate GRAS, nor would every new ingredient require traditional FDA premarket approval.

Companies could still conclude that an ingredient qualifies as GRAS when qualified experts generally recognize it as safe for its intended use. What would disappear is the ability to make that determination privately and never notify the government.

“By proposing mandatory GRAS notifications, we are closing critical information gaps and giving the FDA greater visibility into substances entering the food supply,” Acting FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas said in announcing the proposal.

The GRAS exemption dates to 1958 and was designed to exempt substances whose safety was already generally recognized. Over time, however, manufacturers increasingly used independent GRAS conclusions for newer ingredients.

FDA currently encourages companies to submit their conclusions voluntarily. When they do, the agency reviews the supporting information and can say it has no questions, determine that the filing does not establish an adequate GRAS basis, or stop reviewing the notice at the company’s request.

But a manufacturer that does not voluntarily notify FDA can currently market an ingredient based on its own GRAS conclusion, provided it is legally supportable.

That is the part the administration wants to change.

FDA’s own economic analysis estimates that roughly 2,000 substances already entered interstate commerce based on independent GRAS conclusions, with the agency estimating the actual number could range from approximately 1,000 to 3,000.

For those already-existing ingredients, the proposal would create a temporary streamlined reporting process. Companies would submit information describing substances and their existing uses, giving FDA and the public visibility into products that may have been sold for years without a GRAS notice.

For new uses going forward, companies covered by the rule would generally have to submit a full GRAS notice rather than keeping the determination entirely inside company files.

That means more paperwork for manufacturers, ingredient suppliers and food companies — and a much larger public record.

FDA maintains a public inventory for GRAS notices it receives. Expanding mandatory reporting would make information about substantially more ingredients, their intended uses and the reasoning behind their safety determinations visible to regulators, retailers, competitors, researchers and consumers.

The proposal could also expose weak safety determinations. FDA says mandatory notification would allow it to identify cases where there is insufficient scientific support for a GRAS conclusion and determine whether an ingredient instead requires formal food-additive approval.

That does not mean FDA will approve every GRAS ingredient before it reaches stores. GRAS substances would continue to operate under a different legal framework from conventional food additives.

But manufacturers would no longer have the same ability to operate outside the agency’s view.

The compliance burden could be substantial. FDA estimates the rule would have a significant economic impact on many small businesses and projects annualized industry and government costs in the millions of dollars, with a larger one-time burden as companies inventory existing ingredients and reconstruct older safety records.

That could be particularly difficult for businesses relying on GRAS determinations made years or decades ago.

The rule also raises a larger legal and regulatory fight. Food manufacturers have long argued that GRAS is not a loophole but an exemption written into federal law by Congress. The administration is attempting to require notification without transforming GRAS into a full approval program, a distinction that could become important if industry groups challenge the final rule in court.

Separately Monday, HHS and the Agriculture Department said they submitted the federal government’s first proposed definition of “ultra-processed foods” for final review.

The definition itself has not yet been released.

The two moves point in the same direction: Washington is preparing to take a more active role in determining what ingredients are in processed foods, how those ingredients entered the market and how much information manufacturers must disclose.

For consumers, there is no immediate ban and no overnight reformulation of supermarket products.

For the food industry, however, the direction is clear: the era in which a company could make a GRAS determination entirely behind closed doors may be coming to an end.

JBizNews Desk | Washington

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Home equity reached a record $18 trillion in the second quarter as annual home price growth accelerated to a 14-month high in July, while mortgage delinquencies and foreclosure activity continued to rise, according to Intercontinental Exchange (ICE)’s August Mortgage Monitor report.

Annual home price growth rose to 1.5% in July, marking the fifth consecutive month of acceleration and its strongest single-month increase in more than three years.

ICE said lower mortgage rates earlier in 2026 helped boost housing demand, although rates have since moved higher and could limit further acceleration in the second half of the year.

“Mortgage holder equity hitting $18 trillion is a remarkable milestone — one that reflects just how much wealth American homeowners have built,” said Andy Walden, head of mortgage and housing market research at ICE.

“The spring market provided a meaningful boost to both prices and equity, and we’re seeing those tailwinds work through the data now. At the same time, rates have trended higher since early in the year, which may soften how much additional acceleration we’re likely to see in the second half.”

Mortgage holders had $11.7 trillion in tappable equity in the second quarter, with about 47.5 million borrowers holding an average of $212,000 each.

Total mortgage debt surpassed $15 trillion for the first time, although mortgage debt remained well below historical levels relative to home values.

At the same time, 813,000 mortgage holders remained underwater, up 44% from a year earlier. About 320,000 borrowers were both underwater and behind on payments entering the third quarter, nearly double the number recorded a year earlier. Texas and Florida accounted for 39% of underwater homes nationwide.

Mortgage delinquencies rose modestly in June. The national delinquency rate increased 5 basis points to 3.55%, roughly half the typical seasonal increase, but remained below the 4.16% rate recorded in June 2019.

The share of mortgages in active foreclosure reached 0.53%, its highest level in six years, although it remained below the pre-pandemic benchmark of 0.57%. Foreclosure starts reached 43,200 in June, also a six-year high. Foreclosure sales totaled 7,300, up 16% from a year earlier but still 46% below 2019 levels.

Loans originated in 2022 or later accounted for nearly 35% of active foreclosure inventory, as borrowers who purchased during the higher-rate environment and have seen limited subsequent home price appreciation make up a growing share of distressed mortgages.

Despite the increase in foreclosure activity, new defaults have not accelerated broadly. Borrowers entering default were down 4% year over year in June and 2% in the second quarter. New Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan defaults fell 15% year over year in June, driven in part by a 24% decline in FHA re-defaults. New Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) loan defaults, however, rose 25% in the second quarter.

Serious delinquencies remain concentrated among government-backed loans. The share of FHA mortgages at least 90 days delinquent or in active foreclosure stood at 5.7% in June, up 1.8 percentage points from a year earlier. For VA loans, the share was 2.3%, up 0.4 percentage points.

Mortgage rates, pricing differences

Mortgage rates climbed through July, ending the month near 6.7%, their highest level since the same period last year. ICE attributed the increase to a nearly 30-bps rise in 10-year Treasury yields.

Borrowers with similar credit profiles also continued to receive significantly different rates depending on their lender. Among conforming purchase borrowers, rates varied by about 38 bps across the middle 50% of outcomes and 82 bps between the 10th and 90th percentiles. On a $300,000 mortgage, that translates to monthly payment differences of about $76 and $162, respectively.

“Whether it’s identifying borrowers at risk of refinancing away, understanding where rate variation is costing customers, or tracking equity trends that create new lending opportunities, ICE’s integrated data and technology platform gives servicers and lenders the insight they need to move first,” said Bob Hart, president of mortgage technology at ICE.

This article was generated using HousingWire Automation and reviewed by a HousingWire editor before publication.

This post was originally published on here.

Israel’s government moved Monday from planning to execution on artificial intelligence: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Brig. Gen. (res.) Erez Askal, who runs the National Artificial Intelligence Directorate, formally launched the country’s national AI program. In plain terms, the state is now spending public money to buy computing power, train workers, and put AI tools inside government offices, rather than leaving the field to private companies alone.

Netanyahu said the program’s core aims are to make Israel a global AI powerhouse and to spread the economic gains to the broader public, adding that the country sits in a historic but very brief window of opportunity: “The future is not waiting for us; we are creating it.”

Monday’s launch puts machinery behind a cabinet decision taken earlier this summer. On June 16, ministers approved Netanyahu’s National Program to accelerate artificial intelligence, a resolution spanning infrastructure, research and development, human capital, the labor market, public service and international partnerships. That decision also called for a National Artificial Intelligence Institute linking government, academia, industry and investors, plus acceleration hubs meant to turn national problems into working AI products, a security push into cyber and physical AI with defenses against deepfakes, and the rollout of AI tools across government agencies to cut waiting times and paperwork. Netanyahu’s framing then was blunt: he pledged to make the country “a global AI superpower, just as we did with cyber.”

The headline number is hardware. The plan sets a target of 100,000 processing units of sovereign compute, alongside a national quantum computer, AI education and retraining, and the new institute and hubs. Chips at that volume are not a line item — they are a construction program. Outside analysis of the target put the potential cost at $20 billion to $30 billion or more once hardware, data centers, power, cooling, networking and replacement cycles are counted, and GPUs age out fast enough that the bill repeats rather than clears.

For American suppliers, that is the part worth watching. Israel’s existing compute base already runs on U.S. silicon. The country’s first national AI supercomputer was built on an investment topping NIS 500 million, roughly $158 million, including about $50 million in government support, and distributes computing capacity equivalent to 1,000 Nvidia B200 accelerators — 70 percent to commercial technology firms training large models and 30 percent to academic researchers. A jump from one cluster to a six-figure chip fleet means years of orders flowing to chipmakers, data center builders, power and cooling contractors and security integrators, most of them American or American-partnered.

Money is the open question. Askal told a Knesset committee in July that carrying out the national plan would take roughly NIS 5 billion a year, about $1.66 billion, and the Finance Ministry declined to comment when asked about the figure. Israel has been here before. A national AI program launched in 2021 was budgeted at about NIS 5.26 billion over five years; by April 2025 only around NIS 1 billion had actually been spent, with the compute cluster unbuilt and the flagship projects unfunded. The difference this time is where the authority sits: the directorate reports inside the Prime Minister’s Office rather than a line ministry, which puts budget and policy under Netanyahu directly.

The government is already extending the program into adjacent technology. On August 4, the National AI Directorate and the Finance Ministry’s Accountant General issued a tender to build a domestically produced quantum computer, dubbed Project Nexus, with the stated goal of establishing Israeli technological sovereignty and strengthening the local high-tech sector — though the announcement carried no budget or timeline details.

The workforce piece may be the one Israeli households feel first. Estimates cited in Israeli reporting suggest between one million and four million Israelis could need partial or full retraining as AI spreads through the economy, and universities, working with Askal’s office, plan to open a new AI degree track in October 2026 designed to fit the coming job market better than a conventional computer science program. In a labor force of roughly four million, that is not a niche adjustment.

Askal, appointed Israel’s first national AI chief in October 2025, came out of the military’s technology side — a former commander of Unit 9900, the visual intelligence and geospatial unit, and former head of the IDF’s digital transformation directorate. That background points to where Israel expects to compete rather than to spend its way in: security-grade AI, sensor and geospatial work, and defense against synthetic media, areas where the country already has depth and does not need to outbid Washington or Beijing on raw compute.

Whether the launch turns into installed capacity depends on the treasury, not the podium. The 2021 program had the speeches too.

JBizNews Desk | Jerusalem

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FIRST ON FOX: In the heart of Manhattan, at the corner of Broadway and West 43rd Street, a massive new billboard is sending a provocative message to New York leadership: “Thanks for the jobs!”

As America faces what business leaders call a historic choice between free enterprise and expanding government control, Florida is taking the ideological fight directly to the doorstep of Democratic socialism. 

Armed with a $1.8 trillion economy and record-breaking wealth migration, the Florida Chamber of Commerce has officially launched a Times Square campaign naming New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani Florida’s “Economic Developer of the Year” — a reminder, according to the Chamber, of how progressive taxes and socialist policies are driving wealth, businesses and families to the Sunshine State.

“We wanted to thank him for the jobs, the companies, the people that they’re pushing out of New York — and a lot of them are coming to Florida,” Chamber CEO Mark Wilson first told Fox News Digital on Monday.

“America is at a crossroads right now. I think everyone that’s paying attention knows that our country was built on freedom and free enterprise and people having the liberty to make their dreams come true,” he said. “And there’s a push in our country right now to take those liberties away and to attack free enterprise. And that’s never worked anywhere, and it won’t work in America.”

“What Mayor Mamdani is doing is dangerous for the country, right? It’s bad for New Yorkers. It’s bad for New York. It’s very harmful for the country,” Wilson continued. “We can choose free enterprise, which is what America was built on, or we can choose to destroy that, which is what the social[ist] policies do… And so, what we’re hoping happens from this campaign is that we refocus America on free enterprise.”

In addition to putting the onus on Mamdani, the Chamber’s campaign highlights its argument that lower tax rates yield higher total state revenues by incentivizing growth, while blue-state tax hikes trigger a tax-based exodus. According to the Chamber, citing IRS migration data, Florida gains approximately $2.4 million in net taxable income every hour, while New York loses approximately $1.1 million per hour. The Chamber also says Florida gains a net 551 residents daily, compared to New York losing 115 residents daily.

According to the Chamber’s press release, New York’s state budget is more than double Florida’s, and New York City’s municipal budget alone is more than $8 billion higher than the entire Florida state budget.

“What do people like Mayor Mamdani do? They want to then increase taxes on the people who are left, which just further accelerates people leaving places like New York,” Wilson explained.

“Florida’s lowered taxes over 50 times in the last 15 years. And we have record revenues coming in because people want to be here. And when the economy grows, tax revenues grow. That’s how free enterprise works,” Wilson said.

“The socialist agenda sounds crazy because it is crazy, right? ‘Free Enterprise Florida’ is a way to highlight what happens in states like Florida — when we focus on less tax, less government, more freedom, more liberty — and what happens in places like New York when they increase taxes and regulation,” the CEO added. “So this is an opportunity for people in New York and people across the country to say, ‘Hey, we have a choice to make here.’”

“What we’re really trying to do here is remind people that America is an experiment. It’s 50 states competing for where do we take America going forward? And I think if you look at the scorecard of how Florida is doing compared to how New York is doing, we want to help New York follow in Florida’s footsteps.”

According to Wilson, Florida is not seeking to tear down New York or “spike the football,” but rather wants every state to succeed by embracing free-market principles to boost overall U.S. GDP growth.

“Even though Florida is winning right now, we’re not looking for New York to lose. We’re hoping that these other states will say ‘no’ to this move towards socialism and say ‘yes’ to the very policies that our country was founded on,” he said. “This isn’t about spiking a football or looking at the scoreboard about Florida versus New York. This is really about trying to save our country from crazy.”

“We’re in a big competition with every other state, but it’s a competition for ideas. And we’re trying to highlight to the country that free enterprise wins every single time. It’s what’s best for customers, it’s what’s best for job creators. And if we focus on it in America, we can get back to that three-plus percent GDP growth, which is what our country really needs,” Wilson noted.

Mayor Mamdani’s office did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

Wilson also outlined future targets for the “Free Enterprise Florida” campaign beyond Manhattan while highlighting decades of bipartisan and conservative governance that built Florida’s modern economic engine.

“We had to start in New York City because the mayor of New York City, obviously, is pushing that community into a direction that it’s not good for the people who live there,” the CEO said. “But there’s several runner-ups for this. When you look at Chicago, when you look at California, Minneapolis, there’s places all over the country that come in a close second to the movement in New York City. So we’re gonna continue to highlight what works.”

“Our country is celebrating 250 years this year, and it has a lot to do with our freedom, our faith and our free enterprise,” Wilson said. “And I think if we can focus on free enterprise for the next few years and make that what we base our decisions on, then this country can grow at 3% GDP, and we’ll once again get back on the track that we need to be.”

Hinge is purchasing Cylinder Health in a “logical extension” of the San Francisco-based company’s business, one analyst commented.

Across much of the country, the fastest way to kill a data center is to announce one. Residents pack zoning hearings, county commissioners impose moratoriums, and developers face months or years of delays. In West Texas, landowners have noticed — and they are selling the one thing suburban America cannot offer: nobody nearby to complain.

That is driving a new land rush across the Permian Basin. Large ranch and mineral owners are actively marketing acreage to artificial-intelligence developers, pitching isolation itself as an advantage. A massive computing campus built on thousands of acres of scrubland can avoid neighborhood opposition, reduce fights over power infrastructure and give developers room to build their own generation.

The backlash they are capitalizing on has become a major obstacle for the data-center industry. Communities across the U.S. are pushing back over electricity demand, water use, noise, transmission lines and the impact on local utility bills. Every zoning fight or lawsuit matters because AI companies are racing to secure power and bring new computing capacity online as quickly as possible.

The Permian Basin solves several of those problems at once. It sits on enormous natural-gas resources, giving developers access to fuel that can support around-the-clock electricity generation. Companies are increasingly considering building power plants directly beside data centers instead of waiting years for connections to the public grid.

West Texas also offers something increasingly difficult to find elsewhere: huge stretches of relatively inexpensive, contiguous land with few nearby residents.

Texas Pacific Land Corp. is one of the biggest beneficiaries. The company controls roughly 882,000 surface acres across 22 Permian Basin counties. For generations, its business centered on oil royalties, land and water. It is now positioning part of that enormous footprint for digital infrastructure and has invested in a partner focused on developing data-center projects.

LandBridge, another major Permian landholder, has also moved into the market. The company controls roughly 220,000 acres and signed an agreement giving developer PowerBridge the option to lease about 3,400 acres in Reeves County for a project capable of supporting up to two gigawatts of power generation.

Other projects being discussed across the region are even larger. A proposed Pecos County development has been sized at as much as 7.65 gigawatts, while CoreWeave and Poolside are developing AI infrastructure on more than 500 acres of Texas ranchland.

For ranch owners, the opportunity resembles the shale boom — but the contracts are different.

The value of a data-center lease can depend on who controls electricity interconnection rights, who pays for substations and transmission, what happens if promised power does not arrive and whether the agreement allows the tenant to dramatically increase its electricity needs later.

West Texas also has an unusual complication: surface rights and mineral rights are often owned separately. A landowner may lease acreage to a data-center developer while another company still retains the legal right to drill for oil or gas beneath the same property.

The isolation that makes the Permian attractive can also mean less public scrutiny. Large industrial projects capable of consuming enormous amounts of fuel, electricity and water may face considerably less organized opposition than similar developments near Dallas, Phoenix, Atlanta or Northern Virginia.

The bigger story is no longer simply that AI companies need more data centers.

It is that America’s growing resistance to those facilities is beginning to determine where the AI economy physically gets built — pushing billions of dollars in infrastructure toward places like West Texas that already have energy, land and a century-long history of welcoming heavy industry.

JBizNews Desk | Midland, Texas

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A powerful magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck western Colombia early Monday, damaging buildings, injuring people and sending residents into the streets across a wide area of the country.

The quake hit at 7:34 a.m. local time near San José del Palmar in the Pacific department of Chocó, about 175 miles west of Bogotá. The U.S. Geological Survey measured the earthquake at a depth of roughly 66 miles.

That depth helped limit the destruction. Deep earthquakes can be felt across very large areas but often cause less severe surface damage than shallow quakes of the same magnitude.

The shaking was felt in Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Pereira, Manizales, Armenia, Popayán and Cartago, as well as in parts of Ecuador and Panama.

The heaviest early damage was reported in Chocó. Officials said people were injured by falling bricks and pieces of building facades, while several structures suffered significant damage.

In Manizales, debris reportedly fell from the city’s cathedral. In Cali, falling debris damaged at least one vehicle. Buildings in Bogotá developed cracks, but officials there reported no major structural damage.

No deaths had been confirmed as of midmorning Monday.

Initial estimates of the earthquake’s strength ranged widely before seismic agencies settled near magnitude 7.4, which is common in the first hours after a major quake.

The biggest concern now is Chocó’s remote communities. The department is mountainous, heavily forested and has limited road access, making it difficult for emergency crews to quickly determine the full extent of the damage.

Officials warned that injury and damage totals could rise as rescue teams reach smaller towns closer to the epicenter.

Colombia sits in one of South America’s most active earthquake zones, where the Nazca tectonic plate pushes beneath the South American plate.

Emergency agencies are inspecting buildings across Chocó and neighboring departments and are warning residents to stay out of damaged structures because strong aftershocks remain possible.

JBizNews Desk | Bogotá

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Boeing is getting out of the flying-taxi business, and it is not taking cash for it. The plane maker announced Monday that it has signed definitive agreements to hand three subsidiaries — air-taxi developer Wisk Aero, air-traffic software company SkyGrid and military drone maker Insitu — to Archer Aviation. In exchange, Boeing receives newly issued Archer stock amounting to roughly 20% of the company, a seat at the table on Archer’s board, and the right to keep using the autonomous-flight technology it spent two decades paying for.

The structure is the point. Boeing is not selling these businesses for money and walking away. It is converting them into ownership of the company that will now run them, which lets it stop funding a capital-hungry, pre-revenue industry while still holding a claim on the outcome if that industry ever arrives.

The specifics were disclosed in filings Monday morning. Boeing will take Archer Class A shares equal to 19.75% of the share count before closing, adjusted for cash. It also receives two warrants with a combined notional value of $200 million, exercisable at $13.00 and $17.88 a share, giving it a path to buy more stock over the coming years. Boeing is locked up for 12 months, capped at 19.9% beneficial ownership, and holds an option to put up to $55 million into a future Archer equity raise. The companies expect the transaction to close by the end of 2026, subject to the antitrust waiting period, with a backstop date of May 9, 2027.

What Archer gets is revenue, which it has almost none of. The three businesses together generate more than $200 million a year and operate in 35 countries, according to the companies. That comes almost entirely from Insitu, the drone unit Boeing bought in 2008, which has built more than 3,500 unmanned aircraft used for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance work by allied militaries. For a company still waiting on certification to fly paying passengers, acquiring a profitable defense contractor changes what the business looks like on paper immediately.

Wisk brings the technology. It has designed, built and flown six generations of electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft over 16 years, logging more than 1,700 flight tests, with a focus on flying without a pilot aboard. SkyGrid, which Wisk acquired in 2025, builds the ground software that manages where automated aircraft go and keeps them separated from each other and from conventional traffic. Across all three units, Archer says it is inheriting close to two million flight hours of operating data, which it plans to feed into its in-house artificial intelligence system for aerospace and defense, called ZEE.

Archer Founder and Chief Executive Adam Goldstein called it a “watershed moment for Archer and the future of physical AI,” and said it accelerates the company’s shift into a diversified platform with a real revenue base rather than a single product in development.

Boeing framed the deal as a way to capitalize on prior spending while redirecting new investment to its core aircraft programs. Brian Yutko, the company’s vice president for commercial airplanes product development, described the arrangement as beneficial to both sides and said it lets the three units move faster to market than they could inside Boeing. Under a separate technology-sharing agreement, Boeing keeps access to Wisk’s core autonomy systems for its current and next-generation commercial and defense aircraft — meaning it sheds the ownership costs but not the engineering.

The divestiture fits a pattern under Chief Executive Kelly Ortberg, who has spent two years narrowing Boeing to what it does best after a stretch of production and safety crises. Last year the company sold parts of its digital aviation services arm, including flight-planning provider Jeppesen, to Thoma Bravo for $10.55 billion. Wisk and Insitu were the kind of long-horizon bets that made sense when the core business was healthy and became difficult to justify when it was not.

There is history between the two parties. Archer and Wisk spent 2023 in litigation over intellectual property before settling, agreeing to co-develop autonomous aviation technology, and giving Wisk a warrant on Archer shares as part of the resolution. Three years later, the rival that sued has become the owner.

Investors sided decisively with the buyer. Archer shares jumped roughly 16% to 20% in premarket trading Monday, while Boeing was essentially unchanged, slipping about 0.2%. Archer carried a market value above $4 billion as of Friday’s close, a fraction of Boeing’s, which is why the stake being handed over is large enough to make the aerospace giant one of its biggest shareholders.

Archer is targeting its first commercial passenger flights by the end of this year or early next.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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U.S. stocks opened almost unchanged Monday, August 10, as investors returned from a record-setting week but faced another surge in oil prices tied to uncertainty over reopening the Strait of Hormuz. The Dow Jones Industrial Average opened up 35.7 points, or 0.07%, at 54,072.66. The S&P 500 slipped 5.9 points, or 0.08%, to 7,751.74, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 10.2 points, or 0.04%, to 26,680.44. By around 10:00 a.m. ET, the market had drifted modestly lower, with the three major indexes down roughly 0.1% to 0.2%. 

The biggest pressure is coming from energy. Brent crude climbed about 2% to roughly $85 a barrel, while U.S. crude approached $80, after Iran tied reopening Hormuz to a series of U.S. concessions. That pushed energy shares including Marathon Petroleum, Occidental Petroleum and Valero higher while airlines, cruise operators and other fuel-sensitive travel companies came under pressure. 

Corporate news is producing some unusually large individual moves. Intel fell about 4% after announcing plans for a potential $15 billion stock sale. MarineMax surged more than 40% after Reuters reported Blackstone-owned Safe Harbor Marinas is nearing a roughly $1.5 billion acquisition of the yacht retailer at around $53 a share. Varex Imaging jumped nearly 50% after Teledyne agreed to buy the medical-imaging company for about $1.1 billion, or $18.90 a share in cash. 

Berkshire Hathaway is also drawing attention following its first major earnings report under CEO Greg Abel. Second-quarter operating profit rose 16% to nearly $13 billion, while Berkshire accelerated share repurchases, spent heavily on stocks and reduced its enormous cash position. The company bought back about $4.5 billion of its own shares during the quarter and disclosed significant new investments, including a $10 billion Alphabet position. 

Monday is a light morning for economic data. There were no major 8:30 a.m. ET federal economic reports, leaving Friday’s surprisingly weak July employment report as the main economic backdrop for trading. The Conference Board’s July Employment Trends Index was scheduled for release at 10:00 a.m. ET; its official release page had not yet posted the new reading at the time of this opening recap. The previous June reading was 106.69. 

That leaves markets unusually exposed to headlines. Friday’s report showed the U.S. unexpectedly lost 23,000 jobs in July, helping push the S&P 500 to a record close as traders reduced expectations for a Federal Reserve rate increase in September. Monday’s higher oil prices complicate that picture because sustained energy inflation could make it harder for the Fed to remain on hold even as hiring weakens. 

For the rest of Monday, Hormuz and oil are the immediate market risks. Investors will also watch Treasury yields, whether Intel’s decline spreads into semiconductors, and whether Berkshire’s results support financial and industrial shares. The larger test arrives Wednesday, August 12, with July consumer inflation. Economists expect annual CPI inflation to ease slightly to about 3.4% from 3.5% in June. Producer prices follow Thursday, with retail sales and consumer sentiment due Friday. 

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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Move, the parent company of Realtor.com, said it is seeing the investments it has made into “premium offerings” like RealPRO Select pay off. 

During the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2026, Realtor.com recorded $167 million in revenue, up 13% year-over-year, marking the segment’s seventh consecutive quarter of growth. These financial results were highlighted during News Corp’s fiscal year 2026 fourth quarter earnings call Wednesday evening. 

“Its success comes as premium offerings have expanded and yield has been increasingly optimized. The emphasis on high quality leads, combined with AI-inspired product innovation and assiduous assistance for buyers, sellers and Realtors, have transformed the business’s fortunes, as has the team’s emphasis on providing reliable real estate news and analysis, which has made Realtor.com the largest site in America for residential property news,” Robert Thomson, the CEO of News Corp, said during the earnings call. “If you want to comprehend trends, places and prices, you must read Realtor.com.”

Overall Move revenue for full fiscal year 2026 came in at $610 million, up 11% annually, which the company said was primarily “a result of higher sales of RealPRO Select, as Move shifts its focus to more premium offerings and revenue growth in seller, new homes and rentals.”

During the quarter, Move CEO Damian Eales noted in a post about his firm’s performance that Realtor.com expanded its AI capabilities through the launch of RealAssist AI and that it updated its homeownership tools adding tools like buyer demand signals and a buying power calculator to its My Home dashboard. 

More monthly visits than Homes.com

Realtor.com averaged nearly 300 million monthly visits in the quarter coming in at 33% market share according to ComScore data. This is nearly seven times the visit share of Homes.com and 2.5 times the visit share of Redfin, according to the ComScore data. 

Additionally, the data shows that Realtor.com recorded an average of 5.5 visits per unique user during the quarter, ahead of Zillow (3.6), Redfin (3.4) and Homes.com (1.9). However, internal Move data shows there were 68 million average monthly unique users of Realtor.com during the quarter, down 6% annually, which the firm said was “driven primarily by broader macroeconomic trends and a focus on higher quality leads.”

“Rising visit share, industry-leading engagement and growing revenue all add up to consumers finding what they need, and more opportunity flowing to the agents who serve them. It’s exactly what we set out to build three years ago,” Eales wrote. 

Eales also addressed Realtor.com’s deal with eXp Realty to share its coming soon listings, as well as its deal with Zillow to share syndicated Zillow Preview listings on its site. 

“We’ve long said that an open marketplace – one built around transparency and broad access – is what’s best for consumers and the industry, and last quarter we backed that up with action,” Eales wrote. “With market-leading results and a clear vision, we’re entering FY27 from a position of strength.” 

Overall, News Corp generated revenue of $2.34 billion for the quarter up 11% annually. The company attributed this increase to growth in its Digital Real Estate Services, Book Publishing and Dow Jones segments. In addition, the firm recorded $230 million in net income, up 167% compared to a year prior. 

This post was originally published on here.

GameStop is considering walking away from its attempt to buy eBay outright and instead asking eBay to team up with it, according to people familiar with the deliberations. The idea now on the table is simple: rather than purchasing the marketplace, GameStop would put its stores to work for eBay and take seats on eBay’s board in exchange. No decision has been made, and the change of course is under discussion as of Monday, with nothing filed and no proposal formally submitted.

The shift, first reported by Bloomberg, would end one of the most improbable takeover campaigns in recent American retail history. Chief Executive Ryan Cohen launched it on May 3 with a non-binding offer of $125 a share in cash and stock, valuing eBay at roughly $56 billion. eBay’s board rejected it nine days later, describing the approach as neither credible nor attractive and saying it had confidence in its existing management.

What replaces it would be a commercial arrangement built around physical locations. GameStop runs roughly 1,600 stores across the United States. eBay runs a fee-based online marketplace with no storefronts of its own. Under the arrangement being weighed, those stores would serve eBay’s business in the categories where both companies are trying to grow — trading cards and collectibles, which carry far better margins than used game discs or consumer electronics.

The logic is more practical than it sounds. Expensive collectibles change hands online only when a buyer trusts that the card is authentic and will arrive intact. Authentication and shipping are the friction points in that market, and they are physical problems that a website cannot solve on its own. A network of stores within a short drive of most of the country gives eBay somewhere to send cards for grading, verification and fulfillment without building that infrastructure itself. Cohen made a version of this argument publicly in July, saying the combined footprint would put an authentication point within about a 15-minute drive of roughly 80% of the population.

Money is the reason the takeover stalled. GameStop set out to buy a company several times its own size, and doing that requires enormous borrowing or the creation of enormous amounts of new stock. Cohen proposed both. His financing consisted of a non-binding commitment worth about $20 billion from TD Securities, and that facility carried a condition: the combined company would have to earn an investment-grade credit rating after the deal closed. That circular requirement — the debt depends on the credit rating, the credit rating depends on the debt working out — is what critics never got past. Moody’s warned in May that the structure would be credit negative for eBay because of the leverage involved.

Cohen spent the summer escalating rather than retreating. GameStop built its position in eBay to 9.8%, or about 43.4 million shares, according to its July filings, making it one of the marketplace’s largest owners. He forfeited a performance-based compensation award in June, a move widely read as a signal that the acquisition had become his singular focus. In a July interview he declined to say whether he would raise the price, saying only that he would not negotiate against himself and that “we’re coming for eBay one way or another.” He has repeatedly said he would take the case directly to shareholders if the board refused to engage.

A partnership would sidestep the machinery an acquisition requires. There would be no antitrust review of a merger, no vote by either company’s owners, and no need for GameStop to issue the vast block of new shares that unsettled its own investor base. What GameStop would give up is control. What it would gain, if eBay agrees, is board representation and a role inside a marketplace it cannot afford to own.

It would also let Cohen keep the part of the plan that always made the most sense to retail analysts. The strategic case for combining a store chain with a marketplace was never really about ownership; it was about pairing eBay’s reach in collectibles with somewhere physical to handle the goods. A joint venture delivers that pairing without the balance sheet gymnastics.

eBay has not said whether it would entertain the idea, and neither company commented on the reporting. Cohen has not ruled out other options, and the people describing the discussions cautioned that he could still land somewhere else entirely — including simply holding the stake and continuing to press from the outside, which is the position he already occupies as one of eBay’s biggest shareholders.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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Apple has abandoned the all-glass iPhone it had planned as a 20th-anniversary showpiece, and the reason is a manufacturing one: too few of the glass bodies coming off the line were usable. Supply-chain checks by Jefferies found the device, which had been expected in September 2027, was dropped because of poor production yield. That single engineering failure removed the most expensive iPhone Apple had on its drawing board, and on Monday it cost the company its rating.

Jefferies downgraded Apple to Underperform from Hold and cut its price target to $263.66 from $285.56. Apple closed Friday at $313.33, so the new target sits roughly 16% below where the stock finished last week. Shares slipped more than 1% ahead of Monday’s open, though part of that decline was mechanical: the stock went ex-dividend for its quarterly payout of 27 cents a share.

The logic behind the call is straightforward. Apple sells roughly the same number of phones each year, so the way it grows iPhone revenue is by charging more per handset. The all-glass model was the vehicle for that. Jefferies had estimated the device would carry a blended retail average selling price of $2,060, and Apple’s plan was to carry the all-glass design forward into future Pro and Pro Max models to lift their pricing and margins as well. Analyst Edison Lee wrote that the cancellation shows introducing new iPhone form factors to drive higher selling prices is harder than expected.

With that path closed, Jefferies rebuilt its math. The firm lowered its expected annual growth rate for iPhone average selling prices between fiscal 2026 and fiscal 2031 to 6.8% from 9.0%, and trimmed earnings-per-share estimates for fiscal 2028 and 2029 by 2.1% and 3.4%. Those cuts assume unit sales hold steady — meaning the entire reduction comes from Apple charging less per phone than previously modeled.

That leaves one product carrying the premium strategy. Lee called the foldable iPhone, due to arrive in September 2026, the only near-term driver of higher selling prices and margin. But he warned that surging memory costs, driven by artificial intelligence demand, could push its starting retail price above $2,000, potentially making it a niche product with limited sales volume. Rising memory prices also threaten the storage upgrades Apple typically uses to move buyers up its price ladder, either raising component costs or forcing those upgrades to be pulled.

Lee also addressed a piece of market chatter that had been read as a signal of coming iPhone 17 price increases. Apple raised trade-in values for the iPhone 15 and 16 in several markets, but cut trade-in prices for the iPhone 16 Pro and Pro Max in China by 5% and 2%. Because those values are renegotiated monthly with regional dealers, Jefferies said the moves may carry no implication for new iPhone pricing at all — though richer U.S. trade-in offers could pull demand forward into the iPhone 17 cycle and leave the iPhone 18 with a weaker starting position.

One American supplier came through the news intact. Corning shares rose despite the cancellation. The company struck a partnership with Apple in August 2025 to manufacture all iPhone and Apple Watch cover glass in Kentucky — an arrangement tied to the glass Apple ships today rather than to the abandoned all-glass design.

The downgrade lands on a stock that had already lost its shine with analysts. Six firms now carry sell-equivalent ratings on Apple, matching the most since 2012, with KeyBanc Capital Markets cutting to underweight last month. The consensus recommendation stands at 3.88 out of five, the lowest since 2019, and fewer than 60% of analysts rate the stock a buy — far below Microsoft, Amazon and Nvidia, each endorsed by more than 90% of covering firms. Even so, Jefferies remains in the minority: of 47 analysts covering Apple, 30 rate it buy or strong buy, according to LSEG data.

Apple shares have been under pressure since the company’s most recent results. Management guided fiscal fourth-quarter revenue growth to 9% to 11%, below the 12% Wall Street expected, and warned that memory cost inflation would weigh on margins in coming quarters. The stock remains well below its 52-week high of $344.57. It is still up about 15% for the year. A representative for Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment made outside normal business hours.

JBizNews Desk | Wall Street

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A bank that has been open for business for roughly six months is in advanced talks to sell a stake to investors at a price that values it at $8 billion — more than the market value of several established regional banks that have been lending for a century.

Erebor is close to raising about $1.5 billion in new funding at an $8 billion pre-money valuation, meaning the figure applies before the fresh capital is counted. The Financial Times first reported the talks. The round has not closed. Demand has been heavy and the deal could be finalized within weeks, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Lux Capital, Human Capital, Valor Equity Partners and Andreessen Horowitz are among the firms committing to the round. Existing backers including Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC and Haun Ventures are expected to stay in. Erebor’s last round, a $350 million raise led by Lux Capital in December, valued it at $4.35 billion. The new price would nearly double that in about seven months.

What the bank does

Erebor was built to fill the hole left when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in 2023. That failure removed the one large American lender that understood how to bank companies with unusual balance sheets — no profits, lumpy revenue, government contracts, or assets held in digital currencies. Most banks looked at those businesses and declined the account.

Erebor is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, and targets artificial intelligence companies, defense contractors, advanced manufacturers and crypto-related businesses. Its products include stablecoin functionality built directly into the bank, lending against digital asset holdings, and payments infrastructure that other companies can plug into. A crypto-native company can borrow against its bitcoin or accept stablecoin payments without stitching together a set of outside fintech services.

It was founded by Palmer Luckey — who started the virtual reality company Oculus and now runs the defense contractor Anduril — along with Owen Rapaport, Jacob Hirshman, Trevor Capozza and Aaron Pelz. Luckey sits on the board. Joe Lonsdale is a co-founder, and Peter Thiel is among the backers.

The growth behind the price

The valuation rests on deposits, and the deposits have moved fast. Erebor launched with roughly $635 million in initial capital and received its national banking charter in February 2026, the first granted under the current administration — the approval that let it operate across state lines at scale. It held $1.1 billion in deposits at the end of March. By the end of July that figure had reached $4.6 billion, and the bank has passed $100 million in annualized recurring revenue. It expects to turn a profit by the end of the year.

Deposits are the raw material of banking. A bank takes them in cheaply and lends them out at a higher rate, and the spread is the business. Quadrupling a deposit base inside four months is the kind of growth that draws investors and, historically, draws examiners as well.

Luckey has addressed the obvious question directly, saying none of the deposit growth in the quarter came from his own companies and that hundreds of new customers chose the bank on their own. The bank added close to 400 customers over three months. Demand for crypto-backed lending, meanwhile, has come in below what management expected.

The scrutiny

The speed of the charter approval has been questioned in Washington. Senator Elizabeth Warren has raised serious concerns, asking whether the founders’ political connections eased the path through regulators. Erebor received preliminary approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency in October 2025 and final approval to operate as a national bank in February.

The bank has been adding conventional banking experience to its board, including former U.S. official Michael Mosier and former American Express executive Anré Williams.

Why it matters beyond Silicon Valley

The lesson in Erebor’s numbers applies well outside the technology sector. Silicon Valley Bank’s failure showed what happens when a single institution concentrates an entire industry’s deposits, and its collapse left thousands of companies scrambling for somewhere to put payroll money. Three years on, a replacement has emerged that is once again concentrated — this time across AI, defense and digital currency businesses, sectors that tend to rise and fall together.

For any business owner, the question Erebor raises is a practical one worth asking of your own bank: what happens to your operating account if your lender’s core customers hit a rough patch at the same time? Diversifying banking relationships costs almost nothing to set up. In 2023, the companies that had done it kept making payroll while the ones that had not spent a weekend waiting on a federal decision.

JBizNews Desk | Columbus

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By Julia Parker – JBizNews Desk

NEW YORK — National Football League executives are accelerating a renewed push into Europe, aiming to turn international games, sponsorships and media deals into a larger revenue stream for team owners after an earlier European venture lost about $400 million. The strategy matters for broadcasters, sponsors and investors because the league is seeking growth beyond a mature U.S. market.

The effort is being led in part by Chief Marketing Officer Tim Ellis, as the NFL works to deepen its presence in London, Germany and Spain through regular-season games, local partnerships and year-round fan engagement. The league is not simply reviving NFL Europe, the standalone development league that shut down in 2007 after years of losses.

Instead, the NFL is exporting its core product: games featuring established U.S. franchises whose brands already command premium television audiences and sponsorship rates. Owners have approved expanding the international schedule to as many as eight regular-season games a year, giving the league more inventory to sell without creating new teams or bearing the fixed costs that weighed on its earlier model.

“Becoming a global sport is a major strategic priority for the league and 32 teams,” Commissioner Roger Goodell said when owners approved the expanded international-game framework. “Increasing international games will allow us to expand our global footprint and share our game with more fans around the world.”

The commercial stakes are significant. The NFL remains the most powerful sports property in the United States, but domestic media-rights growth is increasingly tied to already-large contracts with television networks and streaming platforms. International markets offer additional sponsorship categories, merchandise sales, ticket revenue and audience data that can support future rights negotiations.

Europe is central to that plan because the league has already established regular-season demand there. London has hosted NFL games for years, Germany has delivered strong attendance and television interest, and Spain is becoming part of the league’s next phase. The NFL’s bet is that scarcity — a limited number of meaningful games — can create stronger pricing power than a full local league did.

For teams, the expansion creates new commercial territory. Through the league’s Global Markets Program, clubs can build fan bases, sell sponsorships and stage events in assigned countries. That gives owners another path to increase franchise value, particularly as private-equity investors and institutional capital show growing interest in sports assets.

The challenge is converting curiosity into durable spending. American football still competes in Europe with soccer, Formula One, tennis and basketball for media attention, corporate sponsorship and consumer time. The NFL also faces logistical costs, travel concerns for players and the need to make games accessible to fans in different time zones.

Media distribution will be a key test. Streaming has made it easier for overseas fans to follow teams without relying solely on traditional broadcasters, while social platforms give the league a cheaper way to market highlights and personalities. But sustained revenue growth will depend on whether international audiences watch full games, buy merchandise and support sponsors beyond one-off events.

The league’s current approach reflects a more disciplined business model than its earlier European experiment. Rather than funding a parallel league, the NFL is using established franchises, existing broadcast relationships and sponsor demand to test how much international revenue can be added with relatively limited new infrastructure.

If successful, the European push could provide the NFL with a template for broader global expansion while giving owners another lever for revenue growth. If demand proves shallow outside marquee events, the league may again face limits on how far America’s biggest sport can travel commercially.

JBizNews Desk | New York

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The rush by U.S. retailers and manufacturers to bring goods into the country ahead of higher tariffs and shipping costs is beginning to fade, setting up a slowdown in container imports through the rest of the year even as stores remain stocked for the holiday season.

A new Global Port Tracker forecast from the National Retail Federation and Hackett Associates says cargo volumes at major U.S. ports should remain elevated in August before declining steadily during most of the remainder of 2026.

The reason is timing.

Companies pulled shipments forward earlier this year to avoid a new round of U.S. tariffs and higher fuel surcharges tied to the war with Iran. Goods that ordinarily would have arrived in late summer or fall instead landed months earlier.

The slowdown therefore does not necessarily mean Americans suddenly stopped buying. It means businesses already imported some of the merchandise they would normally be bringing in now.

That distinction matters for interpreting port traffic.

Retailers account for roughly half of U.S. container imports, and years of pandemic disruptions, tariff changes and geopolitical shocks have made large companies increasingly sophisticated about moving inventory early when they see costs or supply risks rising.

The traditional “peak shipping season” once arrived in late summer and early fall as retailers prepared for the holidays. This year, Global Port Tracker believes the busiest month may already have occurred in May.

August imports at the major ports covered by the report are forecast at about 2.2 million twenty-foot-equivalent containers, down 4.2% from a year earlier. Volumes are then expected to decline through most of the rest of the year, although they are still forecast to remain above 2025 levels.

For consumers, the encouraging part is inventory.

The National Retail Federation says retailers should be well stocked for the holiday shopping season because so much merchandise arrived early. That reduces the immediate risk of empty shelves even as fewer containers arrive later this year.

But bringing goods in early does not make the added costs disappear.

Freight companies say ocean shipping prices are likely to remain elevated because fuel and canal surcharges do not automatically fall when cargo demand softens. Importers also must eventually absorb the tariffs that motivated much of the front-loading in the first place.

That creates a second-stage question for retailers: how much of those higher costs can they absorb themselves, and how much will eventually be passed to shoppers through higher prices?

The ports are beginning to slow, but the economic impact of the import rush is still moving through warehouses, stores and ultimately consumer prices.

JBizNews Desk | Los Angeles

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