As the Treasury Department looks to ensure investors continue absorbing the fresh supply of debt it must sell, growing competition from companies issuing their own bonds could send rates higher, according to Apollo Chief Economist Torsten Slok.⁠ ⁠ In a note on Saturday, he pointed out that Wall Street estimates for the volume of investment grade debt that’s on the way this year reach as high as $2.25 trillion.⁠ ⁠ That’s as the AI boom increasingly sends companies, including hyperscalers and adjacent firms, to the bond market to fund massive investments in data centers and other infrastructure.⁠ ⁠ Read more: https://trib.al/Mp64arA

America has had gigantic budget deficits and debt that have been dangerous and ballooning for years, yet it’s only recently that they’re stirring alarm among voters in a big way. In the spring of 2025, a poll conducted by the nonpartisan Peterson Foundation found that 76% of all voters, including 73% of Democrats and 89% of Republicans, agree that addressing the rampant borrowing that’s endangering our economic standing and threatens their own financial futures should be a top priority for the president and Congress.⁠ ⁠ Since that survey’s release, the picture’s deteriorated at a far faster pace than the Congressional Budget Office and private forecasters anticipated, due in part to the coming tax rate reductions and spending increases embodied in President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill.⁠ ⁠ Read more: https://trib.al/4VMfp4J

In detailing the U.S. military action that led to the arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, President Donald Trump referenced the Monroe Doctrine, a maxim that has shaped American foreign policy for two centuries.⁠ ⁠ The doctrine formulated by President James Monroe was originally aimed at opposing European meddling in the Western Hemisphere. It has since been invoked repeatedly by subsequent presidents angling to justify U.S. intervention in the region.⁠ ⁠ Political scientists are now looking back on the use of the Monroe Doctrine through history and drawing connections to how the Trump administration is seeking to apply it to current foreign policy, including the president’s assertion that Washington would “run” Venezuela until a suitable replacement for Maduro was in place.⁠ ⁠ Read more: https://trib.al/eLuoqn9

For the second time in his career, luxury executive Geoffroy van Raemdonck has been tasked with fixing an iconic department store company brought low by financial engineering. In 2018, he was hired to fix Neiman Marcus Group, which was struggling to to keep up with shifting consumer trends and unprofitable under the weight of heavy debt from years of private equity ownership.⁠ ⁠ This time, the job is twice as big. On Tuesday, Van Raemdonck was appointed CEO of Saks Global, the same day as the luxury department store giant, which includes Neiman Marcus Group (and its Bergdorf Goodman division) and Saks Fifth Avenue, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.⁠ ⁠ Saks Global is the result of a $2.7 billion deal in 2024 masterminded by real estate scion Richard Baker—one that failed spectacularly because of the confluence of slumping sales and sky-high debt, leaving in its wake angry vendors, empty shelves, and AWOL consumers.⁠ ⁠ Read more: https://trib.al/ZQZStT0

Without hiring from the health care and social assistance industries, the U.S. economy lost jobs in 2025—an uncomfortable reality hidden beneath modest payroll gains and an improved unemployment rate.

Nonfarm payrolls rose by 50,000 in December, while the unemployment rate edged down to 4.4%, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday. But the December gain did little to change the broader picture: employers added just 584,000 jobs in all of 2025, a sharp decline from 2 million jobs in 2024. Read more: https://trib.al/tAhE65j

As President Donald Trump has initiated tariff wars and threatened individual companies, his second term has been marked by pilgrimages of CEOs from Big Tech and beyond to bestow gifts upon POTUS and perform public acts of praise.⁠ ⁠ Big Oil executives took their turn Friday when they were called to the White House to discuss the prospect of investing billions of dollars in revitalizing the dilapidated Venezuelan industry. But Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods politely poured cold water on Trump’s preferred expediency, calling Venezuela “uninvestable” until a prolonged period of reforms can be enacted.⁠ ⁠ A clearly miffed Trump on Sunday called Exxon “too cute,” and he said he’s inclined to keep the world’s largest Big Oil giant out of Venezuela.⁠ ⁠ Read more: https://trib.al/Ve1ATB1

Long before he became a self-made billionaire, best-selling author, and one of the world’s most recognizable motivational speakers, Tony Robbins was a janitor making just $40 a week with no plans to go to college and little clarity about his future. By his early 20s, he was scrambling for opportunity—studying successful people obsessively, seeking mentors, and testing ideas in real time. By 24, he had made his first million as a motivator. According to Robbins, the most successful people aren’t those who predict the future perfectly, but those who learn to master patterns. And in today’s volatile economy, Robbins said three pattern-based skills separate those who thrive from those who stall. Read more: https://trib.al/mT0bzgM

Jamie Dimon has spent the past 20 years atop JPMorgan and is known for rarely cashing in his stock. ⁠ ⁠ With that bent, he amassed an ownership stake in JPMorgan of nearly 8.5 million shares, and only began shaving off his holdings in a small handful of pre-planned sales in 2024, beginning with a sale valued at $150 million. ⁠ ⁠ Dimon started off 2025 with about 7.3 million shares and, through stock value gains, dividends, and compensation, will see about $770 million for his work last year, according to reporting by the New York Times that was verified for Fortune by independent compensation firm Farient Advisors. ⁠ ⁠ Read more: https://trib.al/jTqWKoa

Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and Oprah Winfrey all share a daily habit that most Americans have quietly abandoned: reading books.⁠ ⁠ In fact, according to a new JPMorgan survey of more than 100 billionaires, reading ranks as the top habit that elite achievers have in common.⁠ ⁠ But among the broader public, the habit is collapsing. Four in ten Americans did not read a single book in 2025, according to a new YouGov survey, and daily reading for pleasure has plummeted some 40% over the past two decades.⁠ ⁠ Read more: https://trib.al/n7ZkHB9

Donald Trump, CEO-in-Chief. In the first year of his second term, President Trump has rewritten the government’s relationship with business more radically than any predecessor. Some CEOs, especially in tech, praise him fulsomely. But when CEOs express their views anonymously in surveys, they don’t seem any happier, collectively, after a year of Trump’s pro-business policies. In the fall 2024 Fortune/Deloitte CEO Survey, conducted just after that year’s presidential election, 61% of CEOs said they were “optimistic or very optimistic for my industry.” A year later, under Trump, only 47% felt that way, while those who felt pessimistic or very pessimistic more than doubled, from 10% to 22%. (Tariffs are among the CEOs’ biggest worries.) 🔗 Fortune’s new cover explores how the president’s dealmaking instincts are shaking up business and the government. Read the full story here: https://fortune.com/article/president-donald-trump-ceo-in-chief-dealmaking-business-government-tariffs-nvidia-intel-columbia-university