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NJ Transit is planning to charge more than $100 for round-trip rail tickets from Penn Station in Midtown Manhattan to MetLife Stadium, according to The Athletic, which cited sources familiar with the agency’s planning. The normal fare for that journey is $12.90 — a roughly 700% increase. Under the current model, the fare would be a flat rate, with no discounts for children, seniors, or passengers with disabilities, who typically pay reduced fares.

The pricing pressure extends beyond the New York metro area. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has announced round-trip rail fares from Boston’s South Station to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough will jump to $80, more than quadrupling the standard $17.50 fare. Bus service to the stadium will run $95.

The transit surcharges are the latest entry in a mounting ledger of World Cup costs. A joint FIFA–WTO economic analysis released earlier this year projected the event would gather 6.5 million fans and generate $30.5 billion in U.S. economic activity from $11.1 billion in direct expenditures. But that optimistic forecast is colliding with gasoline averaging more than $4 per gallon and soaring airfare amid elevated jet-fuel costs.

American international Timothy Weah has actually criticized the ticket prices, telling French outlet Le Dauphiné in January that the ticket prices were simply “too expensive … I am just a bit disappointed by the ticket prices. Lots of real fans will miss matches.” The player-level discontent is mirrored at the federation level. France, Spain, and England have reportedly voiced concerns directly to FIFA president Gianni Infantino, while fan organizations have escalated beyond complaints to formal legal action and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani made ticket affordability part of his platform as he was running for election.

“You’re seeing a number of headwinds coming to what many thought was going to be a crowning and incredibly successful event,” Mark Conrad, a professor of law and ethics at Fordham University’s business school and director of its sports business concentration, told Fortune in a recent interview.

Soaring transit fares and ticket costs

Ticket prices are no relief. The tournament features dynamic pricing for the first time, and the numbers are stark. While FIFA offered $60 tickets for a limited time following backlash over pricing, group-stage seats have exceeded $4,000 and top prices for the final have surpassed $10,000.

The World Cup NYNJ Host Committee told Fortune that match-day transit were not finalized as of press time. NJ Transit offered the same response, while adding: “As the Governor has clearly stated, the cost for the eight matches will not be borne by our regular commuters.”

The Athletic‘s report came just a day after New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill said she was determined to keep prices low. “When I came into office about two months ago, I immediately got to work on the World Cup,” she said. “One of the key things I wanted to make sure of was that we were not going to be paying for moving people who were viewing the World Cup on the backs of New Jersey taxpayers and New Jersey commuters.”

MetLife Stadium will host eight World Cup matches, culminating in the final on July 19. With limited parking at the venue — JustPark (FIFA’s official parking partner) is listing a handful of spots at $225 each — trains and rideshares are effectively the only options for most fans traveling from New York City.

In March, the Federal Transit Administration announced $100 million in transit-improvement grants for the 11 U.S. host cities — funds that may go toward additional buses, disability-transport assistance, and express shuttles.

But the math is unforgiving. NJ Transit alone estimates its World Cup operating costs at $48 million, nearly half the entire federal grant pool. With no clear answer on who ultimately covers the shortfall, fans may find themselves paying it one train ticket at a time.

A faculty committee convened by Yale President Maurie McInnis released a sweeping report Wednesday on the collapse of public confidence in higher education, offering a blunt assessment of the sector’s failures on cost, admissions, free speech, and governance. The findings, a year in the making, represent one of the most self-critical examinations any elite university has publicly undertaken. The report arrives as Yale and its Ivy League peers are under pressure from multiple directions — not just a skeptical public, but a federal government that has used funding as a direct lever against campus autonomy.

“We believe the issue of declining trust is real, urgent, and must be addressed,” the committee wrote in its opening letter to McInnis.

The numbers back them up. Just a decade ago, 57% of Americans said they had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education. By 2024, that figure had fallen to a historic low of 36%, according to Gallup and Pew polling cited in the report. Though trust ticked upward slightly in 2025, 70% of Americans still say higher education is “heading in the wrong direction.” And no corner of academia faces more skepticism than the Ivy League — the very institutions that have long positioned themselves as the gold standard.

The report identifies three primary culprits behind the trust collapse:

• Runaway costs
• An opaque and inequitable admissions system
• A campus climate increasingly hostile to free expression

The committee was careful to note that the rot runs deeper than any single issue. “In recent years, universities have been expected to be all things to all people — selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable,” the report states. “Rather than build public support, this diffusion of purpose has contributed to distrust.” In other words, you can’t please everyone and risk making no one happy instead.

Skyrocketing tuition costs

On cost, the committee pulls no punches. Yale’s full cost of attendance this year is $94,425, in a country where the median family income sits below $84,000. In a national poll, 86% of respondents said “too expensive” described Yale. The committee concedes that the university’s high-tuition, high-aid model — under which roughly one in five undergraduates attends on a full ride — has quietly made Yale more accessible, but argues the system is “complicated, unpredictable, secretive, and highly variable.” The result: nearly half of Americans don’t even believe financial aid of that magnitude exists.

Yale moved to address that perception gap in January, announcing it would eliminate tuition for families earning less than $200,000 and cover the full cost of attendance for families earning less than $100,000 — a policy set to take effect for incoming students in fall 2026. More than 80% of American households would qualify for at least partial scholarship coverage under the new rules, the university said. The committee’s report, however, found that messaging failures are as damaging as policy failures — and that Yale must do far more to make its affordability story legible to the public.

Admissions process questioned

The admissions chapter may generate the most controversy. With Yale’s acceptance rate at 4.2% for the Class of 2030, the committee questioned whether the holistic review process — long defended as a tool for assembling a diverse, talented class — is actually delivering on its promises. Citing research by economists Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman, the report notes that applicants from the top 1% of the income distribution are substantially more likely to gain admission than equally credentialed middle-class peers. Legacy preferences and recruited athletics account for much of that disparity. Still, elite universities have had more than two years since those findings were published to act on them; the Yale committee’s report suggests most of that window was squandered.

Self-censorship on campus

Free speech and self-censorship drew equally sharp scrutiny. A 2025 Yale survey found that nearly a third of undergraduates don’t feel free to express their political views on campus — up from 17% in 2015. The committee also flagged a troubling new development: post-doctoral fellows and international students report hesitating to speak about even their own research, for fear of government retaliation.

That fear is grounded in documented reality. Over the past year, the Trump administration froze $2.2 billion in federal grants to Harvard after it refused to comply with White House demands to limit campus activism, later threatened to cut all federal funding, and opened a task force probe into $8.7 billion in total Harvard contracts and grants. The chilling effect has rippled across the Ivy League, with postdocs and international researchers at multiple institutions reporting heightened anxiety about speaking publicly on their work.

The committee issued 20 recommendations spanning admissions reform, greater budget transparency, curbs on administrative bloat, and a renewed commitment to Yale’s 1974 Woodward Report principles on free expression. It urged the university to move beyond performative gestures. “Building trust will require sustained attention to what the public wants and needs from its system of higher education,” the report states.

The committee submitted its findings unanimously — a signal, perhaps, that elite academia is finally willing to say out loud what the public has long believed.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.

In light of the Artemis II’s successful mission earlier this month, which saw astronauts fly by the moon for the first time in 50 years, both Musk’s SpaceX and Bezos’ Blue Origin have turned their attention away from other projects to prepare for future lunar missions. Both companies were awarded multi-billion-dollar contracts from NASA years ago to develop lunar landers for two future Artemis missions that plan to land humans on the moon by the end of the decade for the first time since 1972.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX versus Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin

SpaceX is developing its Human Landing System, an ambitious lander that at 165 feet tall, or 15 stories, is larger than any that has been previously made and will use an elevator to transport both astronauts and cargo to the lunar surface from the crew cabin near the top of the lander. 

Meanwhile, Blue Origin is developing its Blue Moon lander. Although it looks more like a traditional lander, it is also technologically advanced. It will reportedly be equipped with LIDAR sensors that will map the moon’s surface to avoid hazards and find the flattest landing area, according to Space.com. Both companies’ landers are designed to be reusable, which is meant to cut down on the cost of future moon missions.  

The stakes for SpaceX and Blue Origin are high. Whichever lunar lander is ready first and is successfully tested will ultimately help the U.S. beat out China by landing astronauts on the moon before the world’s second largest economy plans to do so in 2030.  

The first test will be the Artemis III mission, scheduled for mid-2027, which will potentially test both SpaceX and Blue Origin’s landers—if they are ready on time. As part of the mission, astronauts will launch into low Earth orbit aboard a rocket carrying NASA’s Orion capsule, similar to the one used for the Artemis II mission. Provided everything goes as scheduled, both SpaceX and Blue Origin will separately launch their landers into space to test their docking ability with the Orion craft. This will be the first test of a process that is key to the Artemis lunar landings in 2028. During the lunar landings, the Orion capsule and moon lander will launch separately and dock in lunar orbit before the astronauts descend to the moon’s surface.

This first competition will also bring NASA closer to establishing a permanent presence on the celestial body.

NASA last month announced a phased plan to build a permanent lunar base and outlined a strategy for crewed surface landings every six months to build up the infrastructure for a moon base following the first lunar landings in 2028. The efforts are part of a push by NASA to establish a human presence on the Moon’s south pole that “will strengthen American leadership in space, usher in scientific discoveries, and serve as the proving ground for crewed Mars missions,” according to a NASA presentation.

While Musk’s SpaceX was founded in 2002, two years after Blue Origin, the company is, in many ways, light years ahead of competitors. It was the first to develop a commercially proven reusable rocket, the Falcon 9, which since its first successful mission in 2010 has emerged as a lodestar for the industry. SpaceX used the Falcon 9 in 165 launches last year, breaking its record for launches from the year prior while making up 85% of all American orbital launches, according to Space.com. It has also used the Falcon 9 to amass the biggest satellite fleet ever with 10,000 satellites in orbit to power its Starlink satellite internet service. 

Despite these achievements, Bezos is betting Blue Origin will win by moving slowly and steadily. 

The company completed its first orbital launch with its New Glenn rocket in 2025 and successfully reached orbit, although its booster wasn’t recovered to be used again as was planned. In November, the company successfully landed its booster back on Earth after helping launch two probes to Mars as part of NASA’s Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission. 

AI infrastructure in space

As AI continues to accelerate on Earth, both Blue Origin and SpaceX are exploring the idea of moving the infrastructure that powers it to space. While the idea is still in its early stages, with more powerful solar arrays, in the future, space data centers would have the advantage of harnessing cleaner solar energy, Jeff Thornburg, a SpaceX veteran and CEO of Portal Space Systems previously told Fortune. Far above the Earth, these future floating data centers would also be free from the regulations and myriad protests against data centers companies have faced when building infrastructure on Earth.

Still, it’s unclear whether it’s feasible to put AI data centers in space. The technical and financial challenges are staggering, especially when launching hardware into orbit is far more expensive than building AI infrastructure on Earth. And yet, both SpaceX and Blue Origin are already making moves to prepare, just in case.

SpaceX has already filed plans with the Federal Communications Commission to launch up to 1 million satellites with AI computing ability into space. Blue Origin, for its part, asked the FCC last month for permission to launch nearly 52,000 satellites into space that are capable of AI computing. 

“Orbital data centers are the most efficient way to meet the accelerating demand for AI computing power,” SpaceX wrote in its filing. 

As Bezos predicted at a tech conference in Turin, Italy, last year, in the coming decades, the next frontier for AI could be off-planet.

“Space will end up being one of the places that keeps making Earth better. It already has happened with weather satellites. It’s already happened with communication satellites,” he said. ”The next step is going to be data centers and other kinds of manufacturing.”

“I now take lunch early and at my desk,” Bérard told the Financial Times in a recent interview. “This is a big cultural change because French meals can be long. This has been one of my adjustments.”

The bank has been taking hits since the financial crisis, having previously been rescued from collapse—and more recently, ABN Amro’s 2025 fourth quarter net profit was lower than market expectations. Last November, the bank announced a plan to increase return on equity (ROE) to at least 12%, while keeping cost/income ratio below 55%. However, the bid to turn things around required some sacrifices, including cutting 5,200 staffers between from 2024 to 2028. By the end of 2025, 1,500 employees had already been cut, ABN Amro informed Fortune. 

Now, once a week, the French banker has sandwiches with eight to 10 colleagues in an effort to “hear their views on the bank” through the transition.

“Building consensus and coalitions is often important in the Netherlands,” the CEO continued. “It’s something that the French don’t always know how to do well.” 

The gesture is essential in getting staffers on board as the company reduces costs and staffers, the CEO explained, while attempting to boost profits and stay competitive. Bérard said that employees have “understood” the reasoning behind the company’s strategy, and that redundancies would be handled in a “very responsible manner,” as the European bank has committed to helping laid off workers find new jobs. However, it follows that not everyone would be satisfied with the plan, and Bérard is committed to making progress over time.

“[But] we also recognise that consensus may take time to build, and sometimes the status quo is not a good option and you have to move at pace.”

The CEOs who eat lunch with staffers to better their businesses

ABN Amro’s CEO isn’t the only leader of a billion-dollar business sitting down to break bread with staffers—others are leveraging the mundane meal as a powerful connection strategy.

Chris Tomasso, the CEO of breakfast and lunch chain First Watch, is uniting with his staffers through small moments that have an outsized impact. Not only does he write congratulation letters to his staff celebrating career milestones like 10, 20, or even 30 years at the billion-dollar business, but the leader also likes to dine among employees for his midday meal. Tomasso said it’s critical for employees to feel happy and appreciated. 

“I tried to minimize the [CEO] title as best I can when I’m interacting with people,” Tomasso told Fortune in a 2025 interview. “I eat lunch in the break room with everybody, which always, for whatever reason, blows new employees away—that I just sit down next to them and bring my lunch and have lunch with them. I think it’s a shame that there’s that feeling.”

Even the leader of one of the biggest companies in the world, $3.8 trillion tech behemoth Apple, doesn’t always take lunch in the corner office. CEO Tim Cook has frequently sat down with random employees at the company’s cafeteria during lunch—a shift from his predecessor, the late Steve Jobs, who often dined with design executive Jonathan Ive. 

Leaders at Duolingo also like to gather with their fellow executives—only in the public commissary, so they can rub shoulders with all kinds of staffers. The CTO and cofounder of the $4.5 billion learning platform said that these daily team lunches, which include cofounder and CEO Luis von Ahn, are “fundamental to our company culture.” He said that connecting with employees is better than any engagement survey, because they’re more open about how things are going at the company: “That’s when the real stuff comes out.”

“Lunch is an opportunity for people who don’t normally work together to actually talk. On any given day, Luis or I might be sitting next to a new hire fresh out of school. Or people from completely different teams,” Hacker wrote in a LinkedIn post a year ago. 

“What’s important is that lunch lets us hear what’s actually on the team’s mind,” the cofounder continued. “There’s no rehearsed feedback or polished updates—I get to hear things I’d never learn in a formal meeting.”

	oil price per barrel	% Change
Price of oil yesterday	$100.19	-3.35%
Price of oil 1 month ago	$104.19	-7.06%
Price of oil 1 year ago	$65.04	+48.87%

Will oil prices go up?

Nobody can predict the future path of oil prices with certainty. A range of factors influence how oil trades, yet supply and demand remain the main drivers. When fears of economic slowdown, conflict, or similar shocks rise, oil prices can move sharply.

How oil prices translate to gas pump prices

The price you see at the gas pump reflects more than just crude oil. Also built in are the costs of refining, distribution through wholesalers, various taxes, and the margin your neighborhood station charges.

Crude oil is still the largest single driver of the final pump price, typically representing over half of each gallon’s cost. Spikes in oil prices tend to push gas prices higher in short order. But when oil prices decline, gas prices often ease down gradually, a behavior known as “rockets and feathers.”

The role of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve

In the event of an emergency, the U.S. maintains a stockpile of crude oil known as the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Its main goal is to safeguard energy security when disasters strike—think sanctions, severe storm damage, or war. It can also do a lot to ease the pain of sudden price jumps when supply gets disrupted.

It’s not a permanent fix, as it’s more meant to provide immediate support for consumers and ensure critical parts of the economy like key industries, emergency services, public transportation, and so on can keep operating.

How oil and natural gas prices are linked

Both oil and natural gas play key roles as major sources of energy. A big change in oil prices can affect natural gas by proxy. If oil prices increase, some industries may swap natural gas for some segments of their operations where possible, increasing the demand for natural gas.

Historical performance of oil

Oil prices are often measured by two key benchmarks:

• Brent crude oil is the main global oil benchmark.
• West Texas Intermediate (WTI) is the main benchmark of North America.

Between the two, Brent is a better representation of global oil performance because it prices much of the world’s traded crude. It’s also often the best way to review historical oil trends. In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Administration now leans on Brent as its primary reference in its Annual Energy Outlook.

When you look at the Brent benchmark across multiple decades, you’ll see that oil has been anything but consistent. It has experienced spikes driven by wars and supply cuts, as well as crashes linked to global recessions and an oversupply (called a “glut”). For example:

• The early 1970s brought the first big oil shock when the Middle East cut exports and imposed an embargo on the U.S. and others during the Yom Kippur War.
• Prices dropped in the mid-1980s for reasons such as weaker demand and more non-OPEC oil producers entering the industry.
• Prices spiked again in 2008 with rising global demand, but soon crashed alongside the global financial crisis.
• During the 2020 COVID lockdown, oil demand collapsed like never before, bringing prices to under $20 per barrel.

In short, oil’s historical performance has been far from steady. It’s massively affected by wars, recessions, OPEC whims, evolving energy initiatives and policies, and much more.

Energy coverage from Fortune

Looking to stay up-to-date regarding the latest energy developments? Check out our recent coverage:

Frequently asked questions

How is the current price of oil per barrel actually determined?

The current price of oil per barrel depends largely on supply and demand, including news about potential future supply and demand (geopolitics, decisions made by OPEC+, etc.). In the U.S., prices also move based on how friendly an administration is to drilling, as it can affect future supply. For example, 2025 saw the Trump administration move to reopen more than 1.5 million acres in the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas leasing, reversing the Biden administration’s policy of limiting oil drilling in the Arctic.

How often does the price of oil change during the day?

The price of oil updates constantly when the “futures” markets are open. A futures market is effectively an auction where people agree to buy or sell oil in the future. As long as people and companies are trading contracts, the oil price is changing.

How does U.S. shale oil production affect the current price of oil?

In short, shale is rock that contains oil and natural gas. Think of shale as energy yet to be tapped. The more shale the U.S. accesses, the more energy we’ll have—and the more easily oil prices can keep from spiking as much thanks to a greater supply.

How does the current price of oil impact inflation and the broader economy?

When oil is expensive, it tends to make everyday items cost more. This can be related to energy (your heating, gas utilities, etc.), but it’s also due to the logistics involved with making those items accessible to you. Shipping, for example, can affect the price of things at the grocery store, as it’s more expensive to get those products from warehouses and farms onto the shelf.

“I’m a bit of an extreme person,” he said. “And I took it in a way [that’s] extreme and logical. I was sort of thinking: ‘What is your best?’ And how do I know I’ve done my best? It must mean to the point of complete exhaustion, just prior to near death, then you’ve done your best, have you? Isn’t that logical?’”

Hassabis was speaking at an event in London hosted by Intelligence Squared (there is a joke about Hassabis being “intelligence cubed”). Alongside him was Sebastian Mallaby, the author of Hassabis’s new biography, The Infinity Machine. “AI is the most interesting transformation in the world, and Demis Hassabis is the most interesting figure in AI,” Mallaby said when asked “why now” about the book.

“Doing his best” —to the point of exhaustion—has been a guiding mantra for Hassabis’s life. Interviewed by Fortune in February, the co-founder of Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs revealed that he has two workdays—daytime hours that most of us do, and a 10pm to 4am shift to execute “side projects” and other smart ideas.

“Using all my chess training [Hassabis was a recognised Master-level chess player by the age of 13], that’s the way I think about life. In a very considered way, planning back from your goal, breaking that down into sub-goals. I think it’s generally applicable to life, or at least that’s what I’ve tried to do and it’s been pretty effective.”

Being effective while based not in the global home of AI innovation—Silicon Valley—but in London, has raised eyebrows. Surely, after DeepMind was bought by Google in 2014, a move to Mountain View would have been a natural next step?

Not for Hassabis, who has argued that there needs to be more than one centre of thinking in the world if we are to correctly balance the risks and opportunities of AI.

“There’s a bit of an underdog in me,” he said. “I wanted to show that I’m passionate about the UK and that London and the UK could do this. But the main thing was: I knew there was the talent here.”

“I knew we would have the field to ourselves for about four or five years, the formative years of DeepMind, and we had this incredible talent that was being overlooked in the US.”

“And with the success of DeepMind and a few other companies here, it’s shown that deep tech can be viable outside of Silicon Valley. Of course, the US giants have realized this, both the VCs and the big tech companies, and they’ve invested now—many of them have their European head offices here in the UK and in London.”

In 2010, when DeepMind was founded, Hassabis was already convinced that AI would be the transformative technology it has turned out to be.

“We planned for success even back in 2010, which seems crazy, because nothing was working,” he said. “[But that’s] how it’s turned out. And the people that are making it shouldn’t just be from 20 square miles of the US. It’s going to affect the entire globe. So, I think a global perspective on AI, what it should be used for, how it should be deployed, the ethics of it, the technology itself, [is important].”

“We contribute to that by having a big base here and thousands of researchers, and we’ve just opened a beautiful new office just around the corner as part of making that conversation global, even within Google, and hopefully for the whole field.” 

Although Hassabis has said he likes nothing better than a commercial battle (when ChatGPT launched ahead of Google Gemini his response was “this is war”), he is more motivated by the scientific discovery aspects of artificial intelligence. “Solving disease” and the climate crisis are, he believes, fundamental challenges AI can tackle.

There is also the issue of safety, particularly with the approach of the next level of AI: artificial general intelligence. “At the back of my mind, I’ve got this gnawing feeling that there’s something much more important, much bigger than the commercial race, which is getting AGI safely over the line for humanity and to make sure that the benefits fully outweigh the risks.”

“And, you know, I’m going to try. We’re only one actor in this now, there’s five or six [other] leaders, and there’s China as well, and the Chinese labs. And so I think in the next few years, the story is still to be written on how this is going to go.”

“There needs to be more cooperation and coordination at an international level, ideally—although that’s very hard with geopolitics as it is today—around safety topics and debates around the benefits versus the risks.”

Mallaby is asked at the end of the hour-long discussion whether the world can trust Hassabis which such a gargantuan task. 

“I think I can say with pretty good authority—having not only talked to him for more than 30 hours but also talking to 100 other people around Demis, including bumping into old friends of mine who had kids at the same school as Demis’s kids—I really do know the person next to me extremely well. And I’m very confident in saying that his values are good. He wants this—first of all for AI to be good for society. And secondly, his primary motivation is scientific discovery. And that’s what he’s dreamt of from the beginning. That is who he is.”

The two leaders were pledging closer bilateral ties and called for a joint front to preserve multilateralism—a pointed signal, directed at Washington, that Beijing intends to fill the vacuum left by America’s more unilateral posture on the world stage.

Xi’s dire assessment is increasingly shared by the world’s most prominent financial voices. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, speaking to the BBC in late March, laid out a bleak binary: Either the Iran war resolves in a way that reintegrates the country into global markets, pushing oil to $40 a barrel, or the conflict grinds on and oil climbs to $150 with years of supply disruption to follow.

“I don’t think anybody knows what the outcome will be,” he said.

The stakes are enormous. Iran borders the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway through which roughly 20 million barrels of oil flow daily—about 20% of global supply. Since the war began, the strait has been effectively choked: Mines have been laid, shipping traffic disrupted, and the price of passage elevated for the few vessels Tehran has permitted through. The consequences ripple far beyond energy markets. Fertilizer prices, supply chains, agricultural costs—Fink warned it all hangs in the balance.

“We’ll have global recession,” he said flatly about the worst-case scenario.

The International Monetary Fund is sounding similar alarms. In its April 2026 World Economic Outlook, the fund cut its global growth forecast to 3.1% for this year—a meaningful downgrade that it explicitly tied to the outbreak of war in the Middle East. The worst-case scenario was similar to Fink’s: just 2% global growth, the threshold for a global recession.

IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said ahead of the report, “Even our most optimistic scenario involves a growth downgrade,” noting without the Iran conflict, the fund had actually been preparing to upgrade its projections. Emerging markets and developing economies are expected to bear the most severe pain.

These doom-and-gloom projections coexist uneasily with a U.S. economy that continues to defy gravity, growing at a faster rate than the rest of the developed world and racking up huge stock-market wins, to boot. Earlier this week, the S&P 500 erased all of its losses since the war in Iran began, with many market commentators remarking the Trump TACO trade was going strong.

Economist Scott Sumner, in a widely circulated essay published earlier this month, noted pundits have consistently failed to predict recessions and their recurring warnings have become a kind of reflexive noise. He noted since 1983, there have been just four recessions in the U.S.—roughly one per decade—compared with 19 in the first 83 years of the 20th century. Recession calls tied to the Ukraine war, the Fed’s 2023 rate hikes, and Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs all proved premature.

“In 2026,” he wrote, “an economics grad student might have a clear memory of only one recession, as the economy has been officially in the ‘contraction’ phase of the business cycle for only two out of the previous 200 months—February to April 2020.”

Tyler Goodspeed, chief economist at Exxon Mobil and a former Trump White House economic advisor, makes a complementary case in his new history of recessions: that downturns, far from being inevitable features of capitalism, are historically contingent events—things that happen to economies, not things that simply happen. As Sumner notes, the U.S. recently pulled off its first-ever soft landing, gradually cooling inflation without cratering growth—“and no one seemed to notice.”

That historical amnesia cuts both ways. The same economy that has spent only two of the past 200 months in contraction is now staring down a hot war in the Persian Gulf, a fracturing trade system, and a Chinese president warning of moral as well as geopolitical collapse. Xi, Fink, and the IMF may yet be crying wolf. But the wolf has rarely been this close to the door.

“They’re more like supermarkets than traditional tech or industrial enterprises, but their turnover isn’t in the likes of grocery items. It’s the stuff that generate their large language models, vector search and other products,” Brightman told me in a phone interview. “They’re in an arms race where they need to replace their hardware very rapidly, in other words, restock their shelves in a hurry.” The problem, Brightman asserts, is that hyperscalers are taking losses on the large language models, vector databases and other products they’re selling to companies and consumers, so the more hardware they buy, the more money they lose. “Right now, each is using AI to maintain crucial dominance in their field, and that makes sense.” Brightman observes. But, he adds, the immense spending needed to maintain those “moats” and keep rivals at bay could generate puny returns going forward, and harm their overall profitability.

In the article, Brightman spotlights the historic surge in AI capex that’s mushroomed from $250 billion in 2024 to $650 billion this year by Bloomberg’s estimate, equal to 2% of GDP. That industry’s historic appetite for capital spawned the view that AI’s becoming the new steel or railroads. But as Brightman points out, the equipment and infrastructure that supported those businesses is far different from the gear that drives AI. “Steel mills and rail tracks depreciated over 40 to 45 years,” he writes. He then contrasts those multi-decade useful lives to the scenario in AI. Hyperscalers such as Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and Meta are depreciating their GPUs and other hardware over roughly 5 or 6 years on their income statements. Although those spans appear short, he says, their real “lives” are much shorter.

In an economic sense, assets become fully depreciated, or turn obsolete, when the revenues they generate no longer cover their cost of acquisition (reflected in yearly depreciation), operating expense, and cost of capital. According to Brightman, the industry numbers show that AI hardware loses its value over about three years. As proof, he cites data on the profitability of Nvidia’s industry-standard H100 GPUs. In their second year, a H100 spawned $36,000 in annual profit for a 137% return on investment. But by year four, the product was losing over $4,400 for a negative ROI of 34%, and the results sank fast from there. Writes Brightman, “The economic life of AI hardware is [a lot] shorter than its accounting life.”

It’s not that the equipment wears out. Physically, it can actually run a lot longer. The reason AI hardware lose potency so fast: Nvidia, AMD and the other producers are crafting fresh offerings that each year provide enormous increases in computing power per watt deployed. Since the hyperscalers face tough energy constraints, they’re constantly seeking gobs of new “compute” using dollops of extra electricity. Normally, if typical manufacturers were adding capital at the pace the hyperscalers are setting in AI, they’d already have built a gigantic base of equipment and infrastructure they could deploy for years, without the need to keep buying more. Not so in this brave new business. AI equipment is evolving so fast that each year, the hyperscalers need to replace an immense part of their capital base just to maintain the same capacity for forging AI wonders. “Most of their spending isn’t growth capex, it’s ‘maintenance’ capex,” says Brightman. Nevertheless, the overall numbers are so huge that although only about one-third goes to expansion, that’s still good enough to hugely grow the volume of products and services they can deliver each year.

The hyperscalers are using AI, and taking big losses, chiefly to protect their turf

In our phone calls, Brightman nailed the conundrum for the giants of AI. “As they ramp the compute, they lose more and more money,” he says. “But they have plenty of rationale to do so for now.” All of the Big Four aim to provide the best AI features to enhance their signature offerings, and recognize that they’ll lose their leadership in those staples if the AI component isn’t top notch. Amazon makes most of its money providing computations and storage in the cloud. It’s unable to recoup nearly the cost of the AI additions from its customers, says Brightman. “But it’s sensible because if Amazon doesn’t stay in the arms race, they’ll lose the cloud business. They need the AI services as part of the cloud component.”

As for Microsoft, its staple is office software that generates subscription revenues, notably on its 360 platform. That franchise now faces stiff competition from Google’s docs and sheets products. “To protect its existing business and keep its customers, Microsoft has to offer AI model services, even if it’s losing money on its AI capex,” declares Brightman. Alphabet is pre-eminent in “search,” and cleans up as the world’s biggest seller of online ads. Microsoft has mounted a challenge by launching its own search engine. “To continue its profitable line of business and keep its edge, Alphabet needs the AI element, and that requires big investments in data centers,” says Brightman.

Meta’s got to worry about the other three invading its highly-lucrative, social media advertising business. “People come to their platform to see the pictures and the video, and it costs Meta a lot of money to produce that content that supports the ads,” notes Brightman. Meta uses AI to personalize feeds for users, rank content on instagram and Facebook, and check postings for safety, and needs those uses to maintain its lead. Yet once again, says Brightman, it can’t yet charge enough for its ads to pay for its gigantic new spending needed to provide those fantastic features.

Brightman concludes that the gusher in AI investment doesn’t mean that this revolutionary advance will prove a big profit spinner for the Big Four. It’s more a weapon for each titan to defend its domain. “When capital turns over rapidly, and competition forces continuous reinvestment, extraordinary spending can sustain competitive position without creating value for shareholders,” he states in the article. Once again, the shelf life of this what’s filling our data centers is so brief that buying GPUs, say, is more like replenishing supermarket stocks than building a factories that endure for decades.

On the other hand, Brightman told me that stuff that’s costing these champions big time helped him greatly in preparing his analysis. “A year ago, this project would have taken me nine months to do the research and modeling. But I used the best of Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, and synthesized their feedback, and did it start to finish in three weeks,” he recounts. Brightman’s vignette tells the story. This new industrial era may be a lot more beneficial to the folks and businesses that use the AI-enhanced products than the enterprises that furnish them.

The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index fell to 47.6 in preliminary April 2026 readings released Friday—a 10.7% drop from March’s 53.3 and the lowest reading in the survey’s 74-year history. The figure blew past the prior record low of 50, set in June 2022 during the worst of the post-pandemic inflation crisis under President Biden, when gas prices and grocery bills were squeezing households nationwide. Three of the lowest consumer sentiment readings ever recorded have now occurred within the past nine months of Trump’s second term.

The milestone lands with political weight. Biden’s June 2022 nadir became a signature attack line for Republicans during the 2022 midterms and throughout the 2024 campaign—proof, they argued, that his economic stewardship had failed ordinary Americans. Now, with Trump owning a record that’s measurably worse, the tables have turned. And the causes, economists say, are different in kind, not just degree.

A war economy hits home

The proximate driver of the April collapse is the war in Iran. Survey director Joanne Hsu noted that sentiment has been sliding since the conflict began, and that demographic groups across age, income, and political party all posted declines this month—a broad-based erosion that signals the anxiety isn’t partisan. One-year business condition expectations plunged roughly 20% and now sit 6% below their level a year ago. Assessments of personal finances fell about 11%, with consumers citing rising prices and weaker asset values as their primary concerns.

Critically, 98% of the interviews in the April survey were completed before the announcement of a temporary ceasefire on April 7, meaning the data captures peak war panic—and may partially recover in the final May reading. “Economic expectations will likely improve once consumers feel assured that the supply disruptions caused by the Iran conflict have resolved and that gas prices have moderated,” Hsu said.

But the war is compounding pressures that were already building. The Bureau of Labor Statistics released March price data the same day as the sentiment survey, showing a 0.9% monthly jump in the all-items consumer price index—an annualized rate of nearly 11%—with energy prices the primary culprit. One-year inflation expectations surged from 3.8% in March to 4.8% in April, the largest single-month increase since April 2025. Five-year inflation expectations rose to 3.4%, their highest level since November 2025.

A familiar feeling, unfamiliar causes

The 2022 Biden low was overwhelmingly an inflation story—the Fed was behind the curve, supply chains were still tangled from COVID, and energy prices spiked after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The current collapse is more complex. Tariff uncertainty, the Iran conflict, spiking energy costs, and a stock market that has rattled retirement accounts are converging, hitting consumers from multiple directions.

During Biden’s worst stretch, sentiment eventually recovered as inflation cooled and the Fed’s rate hikes took hold. The path back this time is less clear. Unlike the supply-chain disruptions of the post-pandemic era, geopolitical conflict in a critical oil-producing region is harder to resolve with monetary policy. And unlike a tariff pause—which briefly lifted markets in mid-April—a war doesn’t respond to a White House press release.

What it means for spending

Consumer sentiment is a leading indicator: When Americans feel this grim, they tend to pull back on discretionary spending, delay major purchases, and prioritize financial caution over consumption. Buying conditions for durable goods and vehicles worsened sharply in April, again tied to high prices. If April’s preliminary reading holds or worsens in the final data, economists say the risk of a demand-side contraction—on top of whatever supply shock the Iran conflict delivers—becomes harder to dismiss.

Still, it’s worth posing a question that gets asked far too rarely: How good is consumer sentiment, actually, at measuring economic reality? The honest answer is: not very.

The University of Michigan survey asks people how they feel about the economy—not what they’re doing in it. And for at least a decade, economists have documented a widening and deeply troubling divergence between those two things. Since roughly 2021, consumer sentiment has serially underperformed what the underlying data would predict. Unemployment has stayed near historic lows. Median household income, adjusted for inflation, has risen. The share of American families in the upper middle class has tripled since 1979, according to a recent analysis by the American Enterprise Institute. By nearly every traditional yardstick, the economy has been performing better than sentiment suggests—and economists have been struggling to explain the gap ever since.

Part of the explanation is the media environment. A landmark body of research has found that Americans’ economic perceptions are increasingly shaped not by their own financial circumstances but by their consumption of news and social media—both of which have strong incentives to amplify alarm. The algorithm doesn’t show you that unemployment is 4.4%. It shows you the factory that closed, the family that lost their home, and the analyst forecasting a recession. Repeated exposure to economic catastrophizing—regardless of whether a catastrophe is actually occurring—mechanically degrades sentiment.

Another data point worth bearing in mind: Consumer sentiment hit an all-time high of 112 in January 2000—six months before the dotcom bubble burst and the economy began shedding jobs.

But the record is now official. Whether it marks a bottom or the beginning of something worse may depend on how quickly the guns go quiet.

Spring is usually when the U.S. housing market heats up, as potential buyers start shopping ahead of desired summer move-ins. But the 2026 housing market has gotten off to a rough start, as affordability concerns continue to weigh down activity and disrupt the industry’s seasonal rhythm.

Defying historical norms, home sales fell last month, according to data published Monday by the National Association of Realtors (NAR). Existing home sales for March dipped 3.6% compared with February, and were down 1% from a year prior. The drop—which pulled the annualized sales pace below 4 million for the first time since June—suggests high mortgage rates and weakening sentiment among homebuyers are already bleeding into spring.

“March home sales remained sluggish and below last year’s pace,” Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, said in a statement, attributing the falling numbers to shrinking consumer confidence and a lower job creation rate.

The traditionally hot spring buying season has coincided with a souring economic environment impacting the decisions of many homebuyers. Mortgage rates, which nationally are averaging between 6% and 6.5%, remain the biggest obstacle, according to NAR, and might be unlikely to fall significantly this year. An uneven jobs landscape and disrupted energy markets owing to the war in the Middle East has made the Federal Reserve more sensitive to inflation in recent months, resulting in a pause on rate cuts.

Mischa Fisher, chief economist at Zillow, put it similarly in an analysis last month, arguing that higher unemployment and persistently high mortgage rates were likely to act as a “slight drag on the spring season.” Zillow’s outlook for 2026 changed drastically depending on how long high rates and unemployment weigh down the housing market. If the numbers normalize by May, home sales for the year would rise 3.48%, a percentage point less than Zillow’s previous estimate. But if the same conditions persist for the whole year, home sale numbers are more likely to decline compared with 2025, a significant signal pointing to an economic slowdown.

Besides high loan rates, prospective buyers are saddled with exorbitant home prices. NAR’s Yun noted that housing stock in the U.S. remains limited, with demand outstripping supply in part because the vast majority of homeowners still hold relatively low rates and have decided to stay put rather than put their house on the market. The shortage means the median home price last month was $408,800, a record high for March. The environment for prospective homebuyers was stark enough for NAR to revise its expectations for home sales growth this year to 4%, down from its earlier projection of 14% released last fall.

The regional picture is mixed. The Midwest and parts of the northeastern U.S. have seen modest activity gains, while affordability constraints have been most acute in Western states. Yun said that adding between 300,000 and 500,000 homes for sale would help return the market “closer to normal conditions.” 

But because many homeowners are unwilling to swap out their relatively low rates, that shift might not happen this spring. Recent research has already pointed out how the housing market’s traditional seasonality has become an outdated norm since the pandemic. Factors like remote work and improved online real estate offerings have made it easier for prospective homebuyers to enter the market year-round. With mortgage rates stubbornly high and affordability still top of mind for shoppers, the traditional sweet spot for homebuying might be losing the last of its seasonal charm.