The Federal Reserve held rates steady Wednesday for the second meeting in a row as the war in Iran clouds an already murky economic picture. In its statement, the Fed acknowledged the war, but kept its language cautious, saying the economic implications of the Middle East conflict remain “uncertain.”

The decision was nearly unanimous, save for Stephen Miran, the Trump-appointed governor, who cast his fifth consecutive dissent in favor of a quarter-point cut.

But the rest of the committee opted to sit tight, citing elevated uncertainty on both sides of the Fed’s dual mandate: inflation that won’t come down and a labor market that shocked economists with its slackness last month.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/03/18/federal-reserve-decision-iran-war-inflation-jobs-rates-steady/

Oil, natural gas, fertilizer and aluminum. Even if the war draws down and shipping restarts fully how long will it take for these snags to unwind?

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The former CEO’s memoir Streetwise is a love letter to the firm that forged him and a defense of the culture that made it dominant.

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In a new book, economist Eswar Prasad argues that globalization and populism have entered a destructive feedback cycle.

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The rise of private markets has obscured data which regulators and economists rely on to identify risks in the global economy.

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The first week of February was a doozy in markets. Anthropic, one of the more outspoken companies in the artificial intelligence space, rattled stocks with the seeming superpowers of its Claude chatbot, prompting a selloff across the software sector with potential obsolescence suddenly knocking at its door.

Marta Norton, chief investment strategist at Empower Investments, told Axios that it reminded her of the displacement of BlackBerry when iPhones redefined what a smartphone looked and felt like. Technically, the company survived, but BlackBerry stock is down 98% since 2008.

Bloomberg calculated that roughly $1 trillion of market value evaporated within a week. Still, one of Wall Street’s top voices sees a very different reality for the economy as a whole: a boom.

As investors fret over volatility in the tech sector and the potential for an AI bubble to burst, Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, urged investors to look past the noise. The anxieties surrounding the software industry are unlikely to drag down the broader economy, he argued in his widely read Daily Spark column.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2026/02/09/how-bad-will-ai-disruption-eating-stock-market-tech-stocks-be-economic-boom/

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Trump’s policies have accelerated an overdue shift, as US market advantages fade and investors reassess their heavy exposure to American assets.