Many of those journalists in the room will now spend the weekend writing patient eulogies for Powell, the man whose nuanced opinions, measured language and slight facial expressions they’ve learned to read. Jon Hilsenrath used to be the most revered of those Fed watchers. But after nearly two decades covering the Fed for the Wall Street Journal, he left the beat to run his own advisory firm, Serpa Pinto Advisory—which means he can now say what he actually thinks.

“I give him two grades,” Hilsenrath told Fortune after Powell’s conference. On managing the institution and representing it publicly, “I think he gets high marks.” Powell, he said, “managed the place through a deal of turbulence, and the most significant that we’ve seen ever.”

Indeed, he faced a pandemic that shut down the global economy, the fastest tightening cycle in 40 years, a regional banking panic, and a sitting president who called him everything from a “numbskull” to a “loser” while floating his firing on a near-weekly basis. 

Throughout it all, Powell steered the Federal Open Market Committee to mostly unanimous decisions, building consensus across 11 other central bankers who almost certainly didn’t agree with him or each other. He kept his public language careful enough that markets could hear him without panicking. And when Trump’s attacks escalated into legal action this spring, Powell responded swiftly and strongly in a calm video message rather than on cable news. “I think he went about his business with integrity and goodwill,” Hilsenrath said.

That’s the first grade. The second was a bit harsher. 

“On the economics, frankly, I don’t think he was very good at it,” he said. “I think they made a lot of mistakes under his leadership, on the economics and the monetary policy.”

Hilsenrath’s core charge is that Powell, shaped by his years at the Fed during the Great Financial Crisis, mismanaged the COVID crisis by reaching for the same tools. “It was a supply shock, and they responded to the crisis using policies that were formulated the decade before to deal with a demand shock,” he explained.

During the pandemic, the Fed launched massive bond-buying programs, cut rates to zero, and promised to keep them there, flooding the economy with cash and stoking inflation. 

Another mistake was timing. When inflation finally began to move up in 2021, the Fed was slow to respond. Hilsenrath pointed to a specific Powell line that, in retrospect, captured the freeze: “I don’t even want to talk about talking about it.”

He said it at his June 2021 press conference, when reporters pressed him on whether the Fed should start discussing winding down its bond purchases. The phrase was a deliberate signal, Hilsenrath said: Powell had lived through the 2014 “taper tantrum,” when bond markets panicked at the mere mention of the Fed slowing stimulus, and he was determined not to repeat it. So he refused to even open the conversation. But by the time the FOMC started raising rates nine months later, inflation was already at 7.9%.

“Powell saying, ‘I don’t even want to talk about talking about it’ was an example of him not recognizing that this moment was different and they had to respond in a different way,” Hilsenrath said.

Powell did eventually recognize it. His August 2022 Jackson Hole speech—which was the most hawkish in decades—embraced the “pain” of breaking inflation. But by then, it was too late.

Six years after Covid, inflation remains above the Fed’s 2% target. To be fair, Powell continued to weather a series of inflationary shocks, such as Russia’s war in Ukraine, two rounds of Trump’s tariffs, and the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran. 

But Hilsenrath sees those shocks as a symptom of a “a deeper disease” Powell missed, namely the unwinding of decades of hyper-globalization that perennially kept goods cheap. Hilsenrath thinks it was a mistake to keep treating each shock as a one-off it could look through.

“I don’t think you could give him high marks on the economy when they’ve failed to hold inflation to their stated goal for so long,” he said. “The 2% inflation target is sacred and balanced of what all central banking should be about.”

While that part of his legacy is more or less settled, Powell confirmed he’ll stay on as a Fed governor until 2028—the first outgoing chair to remain on the board since Marriner Eccles in 1948. Powell framed the decision as a response to the legal attacks on the institution, but Hilsenrath reads it as something more strategic.

If Powell gave up his governor seat alongside the chair, that would be four governor seats going to Trump appointees, creating a working majority on the seven-member board. With that majority, they could fire and appoint new regional Fed bank presidents who take turns serving on the rate-setting FOMC. 

By staying, Powell denies them those chances. Even if he leaves after a few months, he’ll have bought the institution time for the legal challenges to play out and the political climate to shift.

“Powell is effectively saying he’s not going to hand over a critical seat to a president who he still thinks is a threat to the independence of the institution,” Hilsenrath said. “That’s his line in the sand.”

The Pentagon on Friday had initially announced it would pull some 5,000 troops out of Germany, but when asked Saturday about the reason for the move, Trump didn’t offer an explanation and said an even bigger reduction was coming.

“We’re going to cut way down. And we’re cutting a lot further than 5,000,” Trump told reporters in Florida.

Earlier on Saturday, Germany’s defense minister appeared to take in stride the news that 5,000 U.S. troops would be leaving his country.

Boris Pistorius said the drawdown, which Trump has threatened for years, was expected, and he said European nations needed to take on more responsibility for their own defense. But he also emphasized that security cooperation benefited both sides of the trans-Atlantic partnership.

“The presence of American soldiers in Europe, and especially in Germany, is in our interest and in the interest of the U.S.,” Pistorius told the German news agency dpa.

The plan faces bipartisan resistance

The planned withdrawal faced bipartisan resistance in Washington, with swift criticism from Democrats and concern from Republicans that it would send the “wrong signal” to Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose full-scale invasion of Ukraine recently entered its fifth year.

Trump’s decision comes as he seethes at European allies over their unwillingness to join his campaign with Israel against Iran. He has lashed out at leaders like Merz, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.

Merz last week criticized the war in Iran, saying the U.S. is being “humiliated” by the Iranian leadership and calling out Washington’s lack of strategy.

In another sign of friction, Trump accused the European Union of not complying with its U.S. trade deal and announced plans to increase tariffs next week on cars and trucks produced in the bloc to 25%, a move that would be particularly damaging to Germany, a major automobile manufacturer.

At least one EU lawmaker called the tariff hike “unacceptable” and accused Trump of breaking yet another U.S. commitment on trade.

US increased troops after Russian invasion of Ukraine

A pullout of 5,000 soldiers from Germany would amount to about one-seventh of the 36,000 American service members stationed in the country. The Pentagon offered few details about which troops or operations would be affected. The Pentagon on Saturday did not immediately respond to a message seeking details on the further reductions.

The withdrawal of the 5,000 troops is scheduled to take place over the next six to 12 months, according to the Pentagon. Trump previously said he would pull 9,500 troops from Germany during his first term, but he didn’t start the process and Democratic President Joe Biden formally stopped the planned withdrawal soon after taking office in 2021.

More broadly, around 80,000-100,000 U.S. personnel are usually stationed in Europe — depending on operations, exercises and troop rotations. The U.S. increased its European deployment after Russia launched its full-scale war on Ukraine in February 2022. NATO allies like Germany have expected for over a year that these troops would be the first to leave.

Pistorius, in his comments to dpa, said, “We Europeans must take on more responsibility for our security,” while stressing recent efforts by Germany to boost its armed forces, accelerate procurement and develop infrastructure.

NATO spokesperson Allison Hart, in a post Saturday on X, said the trans-Atlantic alliance was “working with the U.S. to understand the details of their decision on force posture in Germany.”

“This adjustment underscores the need for Europe to continue to invest more in defense and take on a greater share of the responsibility for our shared security,” she added, noting “progress” toward a target among NATO allies to each invest 5% of their economic output to defense.

A ‘thorough review’ prompted drawdown decision

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said in a statement that the “decision follows a thorough review of the Department’s force posture in Europe and is in recognition of theater requirements and conditions on the ground.”

A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters, said the branches of the U.S. military didn’t have prior knowledge of the decision to draw down the 5,000 troops and learned about it “in real time.”

In response, the Defense Department reiterated that it conducted a thorough review of its force posture in Europe.

“The decision to withdraw troops in Germany follows a comprehensive, multilayered process that incorporates perspectives from key leaders in EUCOM and across the chain of command,” acting Pentagon press secretary Joel Valdez wrote in an email, using the abbreviation for U.S. European Command.

Most U.S. troops in Germany come from the Army and Air Force.

Germany hosts several American military facilities, including the headquarters of the U.S. European and Africa commands, Ramstein Air Base and a medical center in Landstuhl, where casualties from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were treated. U.S. nuclear missiles are also stationed in the country.

Withdrawal of 5,000 troops — the size of a brigade combat team — from Germany would likely have limited impact on combat power, but “in terms of messaging of U.S. commitment though, it’s very different,” another U.S. defense official said.

The only permanent brigade combat team in Germany is the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, alongside an aviation brigade and other assets, which is considered to have an important role in America’s — and NATO’s — ability to deter threats.

GOP lawmakers voice concern about withdrawal plan

After swift pushback from Democrats on Friday, Republican leaders of both armed services committees in Congress said Saturday they were “very concerned” about the troop withdrawal.

Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi and Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama said the decision risked “undermining deterrence and sending the wrong signal to Vladimir Putin.”

They also said the Pentagon had decided to cancel the planned deployment of the Army’s Long-Range Fires Battalion. Parnell’s statement made no mention of that.

Wicker and Rogers said any significant change to the U.S. force posture in Europe warrants review and coordination with Congress.

“We expect the Department to engage with its oversight committees in the days and weeks ahead on this decision and its implications for U.S. deterrence and trans-Atlantic security,” they said in a joint statement.

They also noted that Germany has heeded Trump’s call to shoulder more of the burden of defense spending in Europe, while giving U.S. forces access to its bases and airspace in the war against Iran.

Americans got a reminder of that outlook as the U.S. crossed a grim fiscal threshold this week, when first-quarter data confirmed debt is now bigger than the economy.

As of March 31, debt held by the public stood at $31.27 trillion, while nominal GDP over the prior 12-month period was an estimated $31.22 trillion, pushing the debt-to-GDP ratio to 100.2%

“US sovereign debt has hit levels where interest expense is becoming a primary driver of the deficit. In a ‘Fiscal Dominance’ regime, the Fed’s ability to aggressively hike rates to curb inflation is constrained, as doing so risks a fiscal or financial crisis,” analysts at Deutsche Bank said in a note on Thursday, adding that such an environment often encourages higher-for-longer inflation.

Federal budget deficits are already tracking at more than $2 trillion this fiscal year, adding to the mountain of debt, with interest payments alone headed for $1 trillion.

Interest costs will soar to $2.1 trillion by 2036, when publicly held debt is expected to balloon to 120% of GDP, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

An earlier analysis from Deutsche Bank pointed out that the CBO assumes the primary deficit—the shortfall between revenue and spending excluding interest payments on debt—is expected to remain relatively stable over the next decade and beyond at about 2% of GDP.

That’s the view even as spending on Social Security and Medicare will jump to account for the growing numbers of baby boomers heading into retirement.

But after including interest payments, the total deficit will steadily widen from around 6% of GDP today to nearly 10% by the mid 2050s.

The gap between primary and total deficits has historically been narrow, analysts said in February, but it started growing in the years after COVID, when massive spending blew up the deficit and high inflation forced the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates aggressively.

The CBO’s forecast also assumes interest rates and nominal GDP growth largely remain steady, meaning the future debt surge isn’t due to higher borrowing costs or an economic slowdown.

“Those assumptions could, of course, prove wrong in either direction,” Deutsche Bank said. “But even if they hold, it is clear that the sheer size of the outstanding debt stock is becoming a far more significant driver of deficits than it was even at the start of this decade. As a result, future US administrations may increasingly find that fiscal policy is constrained not by their willingness to run primary deficits, but by the need to manage the debt stock itself in order to meet broader fiscal ambitions.”

Fiscal ambitions have since become more ambitious. The war against Iran has severely depleted inventories of the most expensive munitions in the U.S. arsenal, requiring a costly restocking effort.

The Trump administration also seeks to boost the Pentagon’s budget by nearly half to $1.5 trillion a year as it eyes a transformation of the defense industrial base to produce greater quantitates and more advanced weapons.

But sources told The Washington Post earlier this year that White House budget chief Russell Vought was among the critics of giving the Pentagon an additional $500 billion, warning on its potential impact on the federal deficit.

His aversion to seeing the deficit widen further on the back of a bigger military bill highlights a phenomenon observed by historian Niall Ferguson, who has said any great power that spends more on debt servicing than on defense risks ceasing to be a great power.

“This is because the debt burden draws scarce resources towards itself, reducing the amount available for national security, and leaving the power increasingly vulnerable to military challenge,” he wrote.

In fact, the U.S. hit reached this threshold in 2024 and continues to meet the conditions for “Ferguson’s Law.” Of course, ratcheting up defense outlays to $1.5 trillion would put the Pentagon budget back above debt-servicing costs, but only temporarily. Even without the added military spending, interests costs are expected top $2 trillion next decade.

The CBO’s sobering outlook may even be a bit optimistic. While it sees interest rates and GDP growth largely holding steady over the long term, there are years in the 2030s when borrowing costs will outpace the economy.

“Later in the decade, under CBO’s baseline, the average interest rate on all federal debt will exceed nominal economic growth, which could represent the start of a debt spiral,” the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said in February.

But as the oldest Gen Zers approach the 30-year-old benchmark, the economic habits of a generation who was born during a financial regime change are looking increasingly different from those of the generation that lived through it. 

The zoomers double as the so-called “doom spenders,” dishing out hundreds of dollars on concert tickets or international travel, entrenching the “YOLO economy” that emerged in 2021 amid the meme-stock craze. Gen Zers average $94,101 in personal debt, the highest of any generation and far more than millennials ($59,181) and Gen X ($53,255). 

This could be easily written off as the financial mismanagement of youth, but taken as a whole, Gen Z’s outlook on the economy is at once a rejection of conventional wisdom and a deep, almost subconscious absorption of the commodification of everything. Economist and author Alice Lassman, a (British) Gen Zer herself, has written for Business Insider about her personal disillusionment after her stint at Columbia led to a verbal, later rescinded offer to be an economist at USAID. She calls Gen Z’s approach to economic life “disillusionomics,” or a way to cope with an uncertain and mystifying financial future. 

Lassman wrote about her theory for the Guardian in October 2025, and told Fortune that she came up with the term herself. “I actually was sitting for a while with trying to understand this broad trend, or this broad glue that was connecting together a lot of the disparate Gen Z trends that we were seeing.” She said she thinks much of the way people relate to her generation has to do with this underlying economic phenomenon.

Gen Z’s rejection of traditional financial prudence is deeper than coming of age during an economic crisis, like their millennial counterparts, she told Fortune in an interview. With some members still in middle school, they are much younger than millennials were in 2008 and are more skeptical about their financial futures, according to the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School. 

“The economic system their parents are talking to them about isn’t really going to work out for them in the same way,” Lassman explained. Her first taste of economics was the 2008 financial crisis, which hit when she was in elementary school. “Since then it’s been kind of a perpetual crisis,” she said. Gen Z has internalized a mismatch between what they were told about how the economy works and what they’ve experienced much more deeply than is often appreciated, she argued. 

“I think there’s this general sense of kids at school and … the content that they’re being exposed to, that things aren’t fitting, that like the economic system they think their parents are talking to them about isn’t really going to work out for them in the same way,” Lassman said. 

Lack of faith in the future promised to them

Familiar markers of stability, such as homeownership, family and retirement feel unattainable. The unemployment rate for 16-to-24-year-olds reached 10.8% last year compared to 4.3% overall. One-third of Gen Z says they believe they’ll never own a home, and many are planning to forgo having children.Disillusionment, to Lassman, explains why Gen Z is no longer playing by the rules as they grow in their distrust of institutions like government, media, and business.

While alluding to “economic nihilism,” the term coined by entrepreneur Demetri Kofinas and made famous by the influential Substacker Kyla Scanlon, Lassman said her theory of disillusionomics has to do with the “late-stage commodification of anything.” Riffing off how Airbnb pushed a model of turning a spare room into more income, she said “Gen Z has taken that logic to the max,” with their habit of “house hacking,” or renting an apartment larger than they need, chopping it up, and renting out rooms. She sees a generation constantly looking to diversify their sources of income, and seeing content creation as a kind of passive income. 

“When every conventional path narrows, people start to look for alternatives. And in practice, that has meant turning toward the few places where a real upside still appears possible, even if the risks are high.” Scanlon wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “When people start treating the economy like a game, it’s a sign that the traditional ways of winning no longer feel real.”

JD Power has noted that Gen Z is more likely to use buy-now-pay-later services than traditional credit cards, affording them flexibility as they commodify their lives. Despite their affinity towards BNPL, Gen Z seems to be, in line with Lassman’s theory, spending less in general and spending differently than older generations. 

“You know, Gen Z’s so interesting,” PwC’s global retail leader Kelly Pedersen told Fortune, expressing surprise at how little they’re spending as they age. He estimated that Gen Z spent 10% to 12% less in the recent holiday season than the previous year. “For their spend to decrease as much as they say it was going to decrease is pretty significant,” she said. 

“That generation should be increasing spending more than anybody,” Pedersen said, “because they have the highest income growth out of any generation,” but it’s just not happening. He added that while it was “pretty surprising” to see this, any close watcher of Gen Z would expect it as this approach to spending is “pretty pervasive in terms of that generation and some of their habits … what we found overall is that the generation is very, very value-conscious.”

Pederson alluded to “dupe culture,” or Gen Z’s love of cheaper alternatives to luxury goods. “We find that if that generation doesn’t see the value there very quickly, they will very quickly trade down into a dupe, right, or into something that is like what they want, but maybe isn’t as expensive. So it’s all about value, value, value to that generation.” Gen Z disillusionomics, in other words, means they quite literally see past the illusion of luxury fashion into the value they can get from an object. Sustainability and longevity also play a big role in how Gen Z spends their money, he added.

Economic nihilism is growing

Gen Z also displays some “hostile” attitudes, Lassman said, being increasingly prone to shoplift in person or online because they feel like it is justified to steal from corporations that can absorb the loss. Others fall into zero-sum thinking about resources and an increasingly competitive labor market.   

They are also more likely to experience age and money dysmorphia, Lassman said, a need to feel like they are always catching up. Short-lived financial trends and coping mechanisms such as treat culture and fast-yield dividend investments are material and psychological “survival strategies” to manage life in an affordability crisis. 

“People are thinking that they’ve lost time, so we’re all kind of panicked about where things are going, also living in a very, very volatile world, politically, socially, economically,” she said. 

Economic nihilism has been another strong reaction to an economy some say does not reward long-term planning. By gamifying their finances with prediction markets, sports betting and cryptocurrency, Gen Z is creating new opportunities to build lives for themselves in the system they don’t believe serves them.

Lassman told Fortune that she doesn’t think Gen Z is even really aware of how it’s acting, economically, but they are shaping the 21st century as they grow up. “A lot of it is just kind of reactive,” she said. “And so they’re kind of defining their own income streams.”

A version of this story was published on Fortune.com on January 10, 2026.

Are you a Gen Zer with a firsthand experience of “disillusionomics?” Get in touch with Jacqueline.munis@fortune.com.

More on Gen Z:

• Young Americans are braving the housing market alone
• Gen Z is “Chinamaxxing” and romanticizing what their lives could be like abroad
• More young workers are turning to several part-time roles instead of full-time employment

And bettors wagered a record $234.4 million on the race itself: $349 million on the full Derby Day program and $473.9 million across Derby Week, all records for the fourth consecutive year.

That’s a lot of betting for a single two-minute race. But for anyone who has tried to bet on the Derby through a mainstream sports betting app, it’s surprisingly hard to get in on the action. That’s because the Kentucky Derby runs on a fundamentally different legal system than the one powering America’s $166.94 billion sports betting boom.

Kentucky’s betting laws

Horse race wagering in Kentucky is legally required to be pari-mutuel, a requirement that creates an entirely different experience than anything FanDuel, DraftKings, or BetMGM offers on the Super Bowl.

In a pari-mutuel system, bettors wager against each other, not the house. Every dollar bet on a horse goes into a communal pool. The track skims a percentage—the “takeout”—for operations, purses, and regulatory fees. Whatever remains is divided among winners proportionally. It’s the one true example where the house always wins.

As a result, the odds fluctuate until the race starts, based on how much money is placed on each horse. A bettor might place a wager when a horse appears to be 5-1, only to see those odds drop to 3-1 and receive a smaller payout if the horse wins. Kentucky law enshrines this requirement for every legal horse racing wager in the state, whether at a Churchill Downs window or through an app.

Unsurprisingly, this is pretty hard to replicate in the modern sports betting ecosystem. When you open BetMGM or other apps and bet on the Super Bowl, your odds are fixed the instant you confirm: you know your payout and it can’t change. It’s what tens of millions of Americans now expect from a wagering experience, yet this structural incompatibility presents a major problem, especially when you throw in bet types like moneylines, spreads, and totals. Legal Derby wagering offers win, place, show, exactas, trifectas, superfectas, Pick 4s, and more—each with its own pool and its own odds dynamics. For a casual bettor, this is a different language.

You might not even be a casual bettor and still need some definitions: win (finishes first), place (finishes first or second), show (finishes first, second, or third), exactas (pick the top two finishers in exact order), trifectas (pick the top three in exact order), superfectas (pick the top four in exact order), and Pick 4s (pick the winner of four consecutive races). Then this compounds with Pick 5s and 6s, etc.

This is also why the nine licensed Kentucky sportsbooks—DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars, bet365, Fanatics, theScore Bet, Circa, and Prime—cannot simply bolt horse racing onto their existing platforms. A sportsbook that has cleared every hurdle to offer fixed-odds NFL betting in Kentucky has not automatically cleared the separate licensing, totalizator systems, simulcast rights, and advance-deposit wagering approvals required for pari-mutuel racing.

In fiscal year 2025, those nine books took more than $2.72 billion in Kentucky sports bets and kept $284.7 million, with DraftKings leading at $115.3 million in gross revenue and FanDuel close behind at $111.7 million. But the dominant platform remains Churchill Downs’ own TwinSpires, built from the ground up to operate inside the pari-mutuel system the law requires.

Legal U.S. sports betting handle hit $166.94 billion in 2025, with 20% of U.S. adults placing a legal bet, up from 12% in 2023. More than 80% of wagers happened on mobile. The NFL alone drew an estimated $30 billion in legal wagers during the 2025 season. The U.S. Thoroughbred pari-mutuel handle, meanwhile, was roughly $11 billion in 2025—down from a peak of over $15 billion in 2003, and about 6.6% the size of the sports betting market.

A current federal fight in the middle of the pack

While Kentucky’s pari-mutuel laws create friction at the consumer level, a federal legal battle nearly produced something far worse this year: a scenario where no one outside Louisville could legally bet on the Derby at all.

A 2020 law created the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority (HISA), a federally-authorized private body charged with imposing national uniform safety and anti-doping standards on Thoroughbred racing. To fund its operations, HISA charged tracks using a formula that blended racing starts with purse sizes—meaning high-purse tracks like Churchill Downs paid disproportionately more. Churchill refused, arguing the statute authorized fees “based on racing starts,” and paid HISA nothing throughout 2025.

By early 2026, a HISA panel ordered Churchill Downs to pay approximately $5.27 million or face suspension of racing at company tracks. HISA threatened to bar Churchill from simulcasting its races—including the Kentucky Derby and even called the company a “freeloader.” The modern Derby’s entire $349 million handle depends on national simulcast distribution, and a ban would have shut down legal Derby betting for millions of Americans.

A confidential settlement was reached on March 24, resolving the immediate dispute on undisclosed terms—drawing criticism from industry publications who noted the irony of HISA, created to replace racing’s opaque governance. Then on April 1, Judge Benjamin Beaton of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Kentucky ruled on the underlying lawsuit, finding HISA’s purse-weighted methodology “arbitrary and capricious, and therefore unlawful.”

Churchill Downs CEO Bill Carstanjen called it a vindication, saying the ruling was “indicative of HISA’s ongoing fiscal mismanagement.” HISA said the decision was narrow and that it remained “focused on advancing its safety and integrity mission.”

Another Kentucky law in the mix

That same day last month, Kentucky’s legislature passed the Wagering Consumer Protection Act, which legalizes fixed-odds wagering on live horse racing for the first time, letting bettors lock in a payout at the time of the bet. After Governor Andy Beshear vetoed it, lawmakers overrode him just weeks ago.

Supporters say it brings horse racing more in line with mainstream sports betting and could attract younger bettors. It also raises the minimum sports betting age from 18 to 21 and bans any Kentucky-licensed entity—sportsbooks, racetracks, fantasy operators—from partnering with prediction market platforms like Kalshi or Polymarket.

Under federal Commodities Futures Trading Commission oversight, prediction markets offer consumers a way to effectively bet on Derby outcomes without any pari-mutuel complexity, with no changing odds, no separate account, and no exotic bet types. While the new law passed the Kentucky legislature, it’s not operational just yet and certainly won’t be in time for Saturday’s race, meaning for another year, if you want to bet on the on the most famous betting event in American sports, you won’t know the odds

Trump emphasized that a deal to rescue the financially strapped airline remained under review. The president did not provide details but said an announcement could come later Friday or Saturday.

“We’re looking at it. If we could do it, we’ll do it. But only if it’s a good deal,” he said, speaking to reporters before departing the White House for Florida.

The possibility of a bailout first emerged publicly last week, when Trump floated the idea of the U.S. government offering Spirit a financial lifeline to help keep the airline from going bust and out of business. Separately, a lawyer for the airline told a U.S. Bankruptcy Court that Spirit was in advanced talks with the government over financing that could allow it to exit Chapter 11 protection.

The president suggested the government would be able to resell the airline known for its bright yellow planes and “no frills” service for a profit once oil prices driven up by the Iran war come down.

Lawmakers from both parties and some members of the Trump administration have criticized the idea of using taxpayer funds to keep the ultra-low cost airline afloat. Speculation around Spirit’s future and the likelihood of a deal emerging has mounted with every day that passes without a resolution as the airline’s operating expenses and debts mount.

A spokesperson for Spirit, which has its headquarters in Dania Beach, Florida, declined to comment on ongoing discussions Friday and said “Spirit is operating as usual.”

The Trump administration has delivered what the president described as a “final proposal” to the airline. He framed the possible federal intervention as an effort to preserve jobs but stressed that any financial arrangement worked out would have to benefit the government.

“If we can help them, we will,” Trump said. “But we have to come first.”

Supporters of a rescue — including labor unions representing Spirit’s pilots and flight attendants — say that a collapse would cost jobs, reduce competition and push fares higher.

The airline has struggled financially since the COVID-19 pandemic, weighed down by rising operating costs and growing debt. By the time it filed for Chapter 11 protection in November 2024, Spirit had lost more than $2.5 billion since the start of 2020.

The budget carrier sought bankruptcy protection again in August 2025, when it reported having $8.1 billion in debts and $8.6 billion in assets, according to court filings.

Shortly before, its parent company revealed in a quarterly report that it had “substantial doubt” about Spirit’s ability to stay in business over the next year, citing “adverse market conditions” — including weak leisure domestic travel demand and ongoing “uncertainties in its business operations.”

The company, Spirit Aviation Holdings Inc., gave a more optimistic assessment earlier this year, saying in February that it had reached a preliminary deal with creditors and expected to exit Chapter 11 in late spring or early summer. The reorganization would result in “a new Spirit” — a smaller, leaner carrier still focused on low fares but offering premium economy options and a version of first-class seating with more legroom for customers willing to pay more.

Instead, the war that started days later when the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran intensified the airline’s cash flow problems. With rising jet fuel costs tied to the war generating unexpected costs across the industry, Spirit’s creditors last month expressed doubts about whether it could continue operating, raising the possibility of the airline being forced to sell off assets and shut down.

If Spirit were to cease operations, budget-conscious and leisure travelers would likely feel it the most — especially where the airline has a big footprint, such as Las Vegas and the Florida cities of Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.

The carrier flew about 1.7 million domestic passengers in February, roughly half a million fewer than it did during the same month a year earlier, Cirium said. Spirit has also sharply reduced its capacity. According to Cirium data, there are about half the number of seats available this month on Spirit flights than in May 2024: 1,646,878 compared to 3,399,378.

Exxon and Chevron reported first-quarter profits May 1 that beat market expectations, but they both saw their net incomes dip precipitously year-over-year because of lower oil prices early in the year, poorly timed financial hedges, and operational woes in the Middle East and beyond. Chevron, for instance, had to recover from a major fire in January at its massive Kazakhstan operations.

Woods said oil prices—even above $100 per barrel—don’t come close to matching the “historically unprecedented disruption” of almost 20% of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) flows through the Strait of Hormuz from the ongoing war in Iran.

“If you look at the unprecedented disruption in the world’s supply of oil and natural gas, the market hasn’t seen the full impact of that yet,” Woods said. “So there’s more to come if the strait remains closed.”

There were lots of waterborne deliveries already on their way during the first month or so of the war, so those volumes temporarily kept supplies coming. But those are gone now, and commercial and national inventories are being drawn down each day, Wood said.

Exxon and Chevron are not hiking spending plans and drilling activity to ramp up oil and gas production any further than planned—despite the White House’s pleas to pump more oil—but they are increasing the utilization of their oil refineries and petrochemical plants—including delaying planned maintenance—to take advantage of global supply shortages.

Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said it doesn’t make sense to enact long-term spending changes when so many question marks from the war remain.

“It’s early to have firm conclusions about how the energy system will change in the long term. I do think there will be changes,” Wirth said. “But we have to see how things play out over the coming weeks—hopefully not longer than that.”

Whenever the strait is fully reopened, Woods said it will take a couple of months to resume normal flows, excluding longer-term repairs needed to Qatar’s LNG operations, which are partially owned by Exxon.

“Whether or not a risk premium gets put into the market, I think, is a question that is yet to be answered,” Woods said of longer-term price hikes. A lot of that depends on how much control Iran has over the strait after the war, and how “uninterrupted” the strait remains once opened.

Both Exxon and Chevron are heavily involved in the Middle East, but the region makes up less than 5% of their global operations. Exxon’s refining and petrochemicals in Saudi Arabia are disrupted, as well as LNG in Qatar, and so is its oil production in the United Arab Emirates. With the UAE announcing plans to exit OPEC in order to produce more oil after the war, Woods said Exxon would follow suit to ramp up its activities in coordination with the UAE.

Likewise, Chevron’s oil production in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait remains disrupted, as are its petrochemical operations in Saudi Arabia and Qatar. But Chevron’s natural gas production offshore of Israel already has resumed normal flows.

Exxon reported a $4.18 billion quarterly profit, but that’s down 46% year-over-year. Chevron posted a $2.21 billion profit, down 37% year-over-year.

Exxon’s and Chevron’s stocks both fell about 1% on May 1, although their market caps remains near all-time highs. That’s $635 billion for Exxon, and $380 billion for Chevron.

From the Permian to Venezuela

Chevron is the only U.S. company churning out oil in Venezuela, but Wirth said he is holding off before investing more.

While Chevron is making incremental production hikes using existing cash flows, Wirth said he’ll wait to see how Venezuela’s continues tweaking its laws and regulatory reforms first. Progress is being made, he acknowledged.

But “there are still questions,” Wirth said. “We need to see further progress before we would put more capital to work”

Exxon, which left Venezuela after having its assets expropriated almost 20 years ago, is considering re-entering the country while taking a wait-and-see approach on the reforms. Exxon’s experience with the heavier grades of Canadian oil sands should translate nicely to the extra heavy and thick crude oil from Venezuela, Woods said.

Where Exxon and Chevron are taking different approaches is the still-booming Permian Basin in West Texas where they rank first and second in total production.

Exxon is churning out more than 1.7 million barrels of oil equivalent per day from the Permian—its largest base of production globally—while aiming to grow to 2.5 million barrels by 2030.

“We’ve had the pedal to the metal here from the very beginning. We are running full speed, unlike many of our competitors,” Wood said in an apparent nod to Chevron.

Chevron grew its Permian volumes to more than 1 million barrels of oil equivalent daily, but has now chosen to cut costs and keep its production steady to turn the Permian into a cheaper cash flow machine.

More spending might “dilute that focus,” Wirth said.

“It’s really steady as she goes,” he added.

My reply went viral. My phone started ringing with calls from founders, venture capitalists, engineers, operators — people who had been quietly thinking about leaving San Francisco or New York or Boston — who wanted to learn more about relocating to Miami.

I have thought a lot since then about why the four words I posted hit so hard.

I realized that if you are building a company from the ground up, your default experience with government is that it does not help. City Hall is the place that slows you down. You experience a two-year permitting fight, unanswered emails, bureaucracy that treats your ambition like an inconvenience. So when someone in office showed up and asked “how can I help?” it resonated because it broke the pattern.

That moment taught me that the single greatest competitive advantage any region can offer ambitious people is not a tax incentive or a zoning variance. It is a culture that supports them and genuinely wants them to succeed.

That is why, when I recognized that same culture in the people behind “Ambition Accelerated,” I wanted to be a part of it.

Launched by The Florida Council of 100 and backed by Stephen Ross and Ken Griffin, the “Ambition Accelerated” campaign is a nationwide effort to reach CEOs, founders, investors and young, hungry, ambitious professionals with a simple message: Florida’s Gold Coast — Miami, Fort Lauderdale, West Palm Beach — is the best place for the next generation of American business.

I joined as a Senior Advisor because this is an effort led by people who deeply care about Florida, who have experienced what Florida did for them, and who want to extend that opportunity to others. I recognized in them the same grassroots energy that animated my own approach as mayor. And I knew I could speak to the benefits of this region honestly, because I lived it.

My grandfather was a political prisoner under Fidel Castro. His brother died in a Cuban jail. In Florida, my family found freedom and opportunity. My father became the first Cuban-born mayor of a major American city. I went to a state school and then a state law school, built a career in real estate and corporate law, then became city commissioner. Eventually I became the 43rd Mayor of Miami — the first Miami-born mayor in the city’s history. Every step of that path happened here and was made possible by this special place.

Millions of people, immigrants and native-born alike, have come to South Florida across generations with the same basic impulse: find a place that will let you work hard and get ahead. That impulse built this region. The same conditions that made my family’s story possible — low barriers, real opportunity, a culture that rewards effort — are exactly what business builders are looking for today. And these conditions are fundamental to what the region is today.

The problem is that many of the people who would benefit most from what exists here do not yet know it exists. That is the gap the “Ambition Accelerated” campaign was designed to close.

Florida and the Gold Coast are not perfect. No region is. But what sets this place apart is not the absence of problems — it is the will to solve them. There is a culture here, in government, in the private sector, in the civic institutions, that treats problems as things to fix rather than things to accept. When I was mayor, we did not sit around waiting for permission. We picked up the phone. We showed up. We asked what people needed and then we went and did it. That same problem-solving energy runs through this entire region, and it is one of the reasons companies that relocate here tend to stay.

In December 2020, I asked “How can I help?” and dozens of companies chose to take me up on my offer. The “Ambition Accelerated” campaign is that same question, asked by the entire Gold Coast region, backed by real capital, and directed at every ambitious company in America that is ready to stop fighting headwinds and start building with tailwinds.

If you are weighing where to base your next operation, your next fund, your next headquarters, I want to have that conversation.

How can I help?

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

The company, which reported its first quarter results Wednesday afternoon, exceeded analyst expectations on both net income and revenue, which stood at $26.8 billion (partly boosted by a one-time $8 billion tax benefit) and $56.3 billion, respectively, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Meta also saw a 33% revenue increase compared to the same quarter last year, its biggest year-over-year increase in five years.

Yet, investors apparently paid more attention to the bad news.

The company recorded 20 million fewer global users for its family of apps in the first quarter compared to the previous three months, a setback that Meta’s chief financial officer, Susan Li, blamed on “internet disruptions in Iran, as well as a restriction on access to WhatsApp in Russia.” Still, Li said the company recorded more than 3.5 billion daily active users across its app portfolio, which includes Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, and that without the disruptions in Iran and Russia, daily active users for its family of apps would have been positive quarter over quarter. Meta has not yet responded to Fortune’s request for comment.

Maybe the bigger problem, though, was the company’s expected capital spending, much of which is due to the company’s increasing focus on AI, which jumped by almost $10 billion to between $125 billion and $145 billion. Li said on Wednesday’s earnings call that the new predicted expenditures were necessary because “we have continued to underestimate our compute needs even as we have been ramping capacity significantly, as the advances in AI have continued and our teams continue to identify compelling new projects and initiatives.” 

Notably for Meta, the company also reported Wednesday that it has continued to pour billions of dollars into the metaverse. In the first quarter, the company’s metaverse and virtual reality division, Reality Labs, reported an operating loss of $4.03 billion, even as the company has been laying off employees across multiple rounds in 2026, including a 10% cut to Reality Labs’ roughly 15,000 person workforce. Meta said earlier this month it would lay off 10% of its overall workforce, or about 8,000 employees. The company has lost approximately $80 billion on its Reality labs since it started breaking out its results in late 2020. 

While Meta’s stock sank, Alphabet’s stock hit an all-time-high Thursday and closed up more than 9% while it also raised its capital expenditure expectations. The company said it now expected to spend between $180 billion and $190 billion, up from its last estimate of between $175 and $185 billion. 

Matt Britzman, an analyst with U.K.-based investment platform Hargreaves Lansdown, wrote in a Thursday note that investors were more mixed than previously on AI spending. 

“The market was less united on what to make of the spending plans, with investors still trying to balance the scale of the AI opportunity against the cash required to chase it,” he wrote.

As for Meta, Britzman said while investors are focusing on costs they may miss the company’s strong fundamentals, including its advertising momentum and AI advances that improve monetization.

“Meta still looks like one of the clearest examples of heavy investment translating into returns for its core business,” he wrote.

Ternus, who will officially replace CEO Tim Cook in September, promised to continue the “deep thoughtfulness, deliberateness and discipline” in financial decision making that has marked Cook’s 15-year tenure leading Apple, calling his predecessor “one of the greatest business leaders of all time.”

He even showed off his proficiency with the Apple marketing playbook of secrecy-tinged hype, teasing that the iPhone maker is working on “an incredible roadmap” of products but that “you’re not going to get me to talk about the details of that roadmap.”

Investors seemed to shrug at their introduction to the new boss—which may have been exactly how Apple wanted it. 

Shares of Apple, which had dipped less than one percent in after-hours trading following the release of the company’s fiscal second quarter earnings report, barely budged during Ternus’ comments or those of Cook, who called Ternus “the right leader to step into the role.”

When Apple CFO Kevan Parekh provided a much stronger-than-expected revenue forecast for the current quarter, however, Apple shares sprang to life and rose more than 4%. Sales of iPhones in fiscal Q3 should increase between 14% and 17% year-over-year, Parekh said, compared to the 9% increase that analysts were expecting. 

The iPhone remains the critical pillar that supports Apple’s business, representing just over half of its $111 billion in revenue last quarter. Cook said demand for the smartphone was robust in virtually every geographic market in the first three months of the year despite challenges obtaining sufficient supply of the processors inside the devices. 

The right time for a change

Cook, who cut his teeth as an operations executive fluent in the intricacies of electronics supply chains, said the moment was right for him to hand over the reins, noting that among other things “the business has been performing extremely well.” 

While investors Thursday seemed more preoccupied with the business’ near term performance, particularly iPhone sales, than with the CEO transition, Ternus will likely face a more critical audience with broader questions as his tenure gets underway. Apple has fallen far behind on developing in-house AI models, to the point that it has had to partner with Google for its AI needs. And the successor to the iPhone, which is now nearly 20 years old, remains a mystery. Apple’s last attempt at a new device, the $3,500 Vision Pro augmented reality headset, has been a flop with consumers, and the company is already trailing rivals like Meta in the category of lightweight smartglasses.

During Thursday’s earnings call, an analyst cited Tim Cook’s previous anecdote about the advice he received from Apple cofounder Steve Jobs: Don’t ask what I would do, just do the right thing.

What advice is Cook giving CEO-in-waiting Ternus, the analyst asked?

“My advice is that one of the most important decisions he’ll make is where to spend his time. And I would spend it where the greatest benefit to the company and the users are,” Cook said.

“And never forget the north star for the company: We’re about making the best products in the world that really enrich other people’s lives,” he continued. “If you keep focusing on that and make your decisions around that, it will produce a great business and we’ll be able to build more products and do it all over again.”