This month, American shopping malls received another nail in the coffin. Francescas, the women’s fashion and accessories chain, has reportedly quietly begun shutting down all its stores. Heres what you need to know.
Whats happened?
The women’s fashion and accessories chain Francescas has reportedly begun the process of going out of business, which will involve shutting down all of its stores.
The news of the closures was first reported by Womens Wear Daily. Per that report, a customer service representative confirmed it is currently closing all its stores, with liquidation sales underway.
However, the chain has not broadly announced the news. Fast Company has reached out to Francescas for comment. An automated recording on the company’s customer service line said all associates were busy. Emails to Francescas went unreturned. We’ll update this post if we hear back.
The womans fashion chain was once ubiquitous in shopping malls across the country. Founded in 1999, the retailer rose to prominence during the early 2000s as malls were at the height of their cultural relevance just before online competitors began to reshape the shopping landscape.
In 2011, Francescas debuted as a publicly traded company on the Nasdaq, but by 2020, the retailer was facing severe financial struggles, not helped by the onset of Covid-19 lockdowns and the decline in mall foot traffic.
That year, the company filed for bankruptcy and was delisted from the Nasdaq.
After exiting bankruptcy, the chain attempted a comeback, and even now its website lists 457 boutique stores in 45 states that employ more than 3,400 individuals.
But Francescas has struggled over the past few years, incurring significant debt. One vendor told Womens Wear Daily that Francescas owes approximately $250 million in unpaid invoices.
What has Francescas said about its shutdown?
As of the time of this writing, Francescas hasnt made public comments about its going out of business. Currently, its website continues to operate as normal, with no mention of store closings.
The only information on the website that even implies its stores are closing is its updated Return Policy page, which now states that As of January 14, 2026, all sales are final.
It also says that gift card sales are final and gift cards won’t be returned.
Employees were also reportedly blindsided by the shutdown, with a source telling Womens Wear Daily that merchants were laid off last week with no warning.
Which Francescas stores are closing?
Reportedly, all of them. When stores close, they usually only keep their doors open until all their remaining inventory has been liquidated.
Francescas shoppers looking for good deals in liquidation sales are advised to contact the store directly before heading there to confirm it is still open.
When are Francescas stores closing?
It was not immediately clear when all this will happen. As of Monday, Francesca’s was still posting on Instagram as if everything were normal, although it is being inundated with questions from users about the reported closures.
Mall retailers have had a bad year
Unfortunately, Francescas is not the only mall retailer to have faced financial struggles over the last 12 months.
In the first half of 2025, fast-fashion retailer Forever 21 closed hundreds of locations in America. And in August, teen and tween fashion and accessory chain Claires also decided to shutter hundreds of stores.
The story behind such closures is the same for many retailers involved: rising costs, consumers who are increasingly more choosy about where and what they spend their money on, and foot traffic that never fully recovered after the Covid-19 pandemic.
The CEO job description has remained remarkably stable for decadesbut the times they are achangin.
That stability persisted through wave after wave of technological change. The internet, mobile, cloud computingeach transformed business operations, but none fundamentally altered the CEO’s core responsibilities. Strategy, culture, resource allocation, organizational designthe essential functions remained constant even as the tools improved.
AI is different. It isnt just a tool that executes; it is also a system that makes choices. It makes judgments about customers, employees, and strategy. And this means that when you deploy AI, youre not just installing software. You are importing a decision-maker with its own values into your organization.
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That changes what it means to be the CEOthe person who is ultimately responsible for how the organization thinks and acts. Four competencies will be central to CEOs who want to thrive in this new reality.
1. Chief AI Orchestrator
Effective CEOs do not simply delegate AI to the CTO and then just forget about it. They actively orchestrate their organizations innovation portfolioa curated collection of initiatives that balances transformational ambition with incremental wins.
This means excelling in three areas.
Vision setting: articulating how AI aligns with organizational purpose. When employees understand why AI matters beyond cost savings, adoption accelerates and resistance diminishes.
Boundary setting: defining where AI should and shouldnt operate. Which decisions require human judgment? Which processes can be automated? If a CEO wants to remain in control of the organizations actions and culture, they must draw these lines deliberately rather than allowing them to emerge by default, depending on what kind of product the AI labs ship.
Cultural transformation: personally modeling the mindset shift AI requires. When the CEO publicly shares their own AI learning journeyincluding their mistakesit fosters an organizational culture that legitimates the kind of experimentation needed to adopt and adapt this new technology to the companys needs.
Organizations stumble when they become intoxicated by grand visions while neglecting smaller victoriesand they also fail when they ignore the big picture and get lost in the weeds. The key, as always, is balance. CEOs must operate on both macro and micro levels simultaneously. They need to be just as comfortable asking how AI might reshape their entire industry as they are asking how AI helps a product team ship improvements next month.
2. Business Philosopher
AI systems make choices about what is true, what matters, and what is allowed. When you deploy AI, you are importing an entire philosophy into your organizational decision-making.
This creates three types of misalignment risk.
Ethical misalignment occurs when AI absorbs values that are at odds with your organizations stated principles. Amazon developed a hiring algorithm trained on years of historical data. The system mirrored those years of data perfectlyand systematically discriminated against women. It translated past discrimination into automated future decisions.
Epistemic misalignment emerges when AI systems apply different standards for determining truth than your organization would under other circumstances. A healthcare AI that privileges peer-reviewed studies over clinical experience embodies a specific stance about formal knowledge versus practitioner wisdom. These architectural decisions, made by engineers who may never meet your team, become constraints your organization lives with.
Strategic misalignment happens when algorithmic tactics undermine broader organizational goals. An algorithm designed to maximize ad views might place advertisements alongside any high-engagement contentincluding content that damages brand safety.
The AI-ready CEO must develop philosophical literacythe ability to recognize when AI outputs reflect built-in value systems and to evaluate how those value systems align with organizational purpose and culture.
3. Paradox Navigator
The test of a first-rate intelligence, wrote the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
The hybrid reality of human-AI business demands exactly this. Every significant decision now involves navigating tensions that must be managed: personalization versus privacy, automation versus authenticity, speed versus reflection.
Most leaders instinctively try to resolve these tensionspick a side, optimize for one value, move on. Thats a mistake. Fully prioritize efficiency over employment, and you lose the institutional knowledge that drives innovation. Fully prioritize privacy over personalization, and competitors who found the balance take your customers. The tensions dont go away because you chose a side; they resurface as consequences.
Traditional leadership resolved contradictions. The new CEO holds them in creative tension, responding not with either/or but both/and.
And this creates opportunity. For example, At Moderna, AI helped design the COVID vaccine in just 42 days. AI created mRNA sequences, scientists tested them, AI analyzed the results. Neither could have succeeded alonethe breakthrough emerged from holding human intuition and algorithmic analysis in productive tension.
4. Ecosystem Steward
The three competencies above focus on your organization. This one looks beyond it.
Every CEO faces pressure to use AI for cost-cutting through automation. The math looks obvious: automate tasks, reduce headcount, boost margins. But theres a collective action problem hiding in plain sight.
When every company simultaneously eliminates jobs to boost efficiency, they collectively undermine the purchasing power that sustains their markets. You cant sell products to people your industry laid offor to communities where mass unemployment has cratered demand.
Unlike previous technological disruptions, AI can hollow out employment faster than new opportunities emergeover quarters, not decades. Gartner predicts that by 2026, 20% of organizations will use AI to eliminate more than half their middle management roles. And CEOs who think our layoffs wont matter in the grand scheme are making a serious errorindividual rationality creates collective destruction.
Companies that resist the race to the bottom gain three competitive advantages:
Talent magnetism: Top performers increasingly choose employers who demonstrate responsibility. When your industry races to eliminate humans, being the company that augments rather than replaces becomes a recruiting superpower.
Knowledge retention: Institutional memorythe kind that knows why that process exists, which client relationships are fragile, what the last restructuring actually brokelives in people. Fire them and youre training AI on an organization that no longer understands itself.
Relationship preservation: Customer relationships that took decades to build cant be replicated by chatbots. Companies keeping humans in the loop preserve connections that their automated competitors are quietly severing.
The ecosystem steward sees beyond their own companys efficiency gains to the systemic risk that executives are creating together.
Four Moves for Tomorrow
Adopt a portfolio approach: Balance quick wins (1-3 months), strategic bets (3-12 months), and moonshots (12+ months). The high pilot failure rate42% of companies scrapped most AI projects this yearpunishes all-in bets.
Stress-test for values alignment: Before deployment, ask three questions. What does the data say? How will stakeholders feel? Should we do this? Run red-team exercises to surface hidden philosophical boundaries.
Protect human judgment deliberately: Schedule regular no-AI problem-solving sessions. Maintain decision logs documenting AI overrides. Watch for dangerous dependency creeping in.
Model the second-order effects: Before announcing automation-driven layoffs, ask: What happens if every company in our industry does this simultaneously? Map the impact on customer purchasing power, talent availability, and supplier stability. The CEO who sees only their own efficiency gains is optimizing for an economy that wont exist.
The Stakes Have Changed
No board will hire a CEO who cant read a balance sheet. Were approaching the point where they wont hire someone who cant articulate an AI strategynot because AI is fashionable, but because its becoming inseparable from strategy itself.
The job description has changed. Orchestrating an AI portfolio, detecting values misalignment, navigating paradoxthese arent optional upgrades for the technically curious. Theyre becoming as fundamental to leadership as financial literacy.
But you can master all three and still fail.
If you optimize your way into an economy that can no longer sustain your businessif your industry collectively eliminates the customers, talent, and communities it depends onno amount of AI fluency will save you. The companies that thrive wont just be the ones that deploy AI best. Theyll be the ones whose leaders understood that the race means nothing if you destroy the track.
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Want to be wealthier? Get married. According to a study published in Journal of Sociology, the net worth of a married person grows approximately 75 percent more during their thirties, forties, and fifties than the net worth of an unmarried person. (Thats per person in the relationship, not per couple.)
Want to make a higher income, and feel more satisfied with your job? Get married. A Washington University in St. Louis study found that people with relatively prudent and reliable partners tend to perform better at work, earning more promotions, making more money, and feeling more satisfied with their jobs.
What the researchers call partner conscientiousness predicts future job satisfaction, income, and likelihood of promotion (even after factoring in the participants original level of conscientiousness). According to the researchers, conscientious partners perform more household tasks, exhibit more pragmatic behaviors that their spouses are likely to emulate, and promote a more satisfying home life, all of which enables their spouse to focus more on work.
As one researcher said, These results demonstrate that the dispositional characteristics of the person one marries influence important aspects of ones professional life. Or in non-researcher-speak, a good partner sets a good example and helps create an environment where you can be a better you.
Other data backs up the above findings. A 2021 Census Bureau report found that married adults tend to earn substantially more than unmarried adults, and have three times the net worth. A 2021 Bureau of Labor Statistics survey found that married couples spend about $10,000 less per person than unmarried people. Making more and spending less? Great formula for a higher net worth.
Thats why deciding whom to marry is one of the most important decisions youll make where your overall happiness, career prospects, and financial success are concerned.
Clearly, you have to choose the right person to spend your life with.
But just as clearly, you have to choose to be the kind of partner they deserve to spend their life with.
For example, a study published in Journal of Physical Activity and Health found that people in romantic relationships exercise less than people who are single, especially where moderate to vigorous physical activity (running, lifting weights, cycling, etc.) is concerned.
Why? Become a couple and youre more likely to do couples things: eat meals together, watch TV together, hang out together. Over time, Lets go to the gym is much less likely to top the list, even if you consistently exercised before you became a couple.
As the researchers write:
For those with a partner, current (exercise) levels are substantially lower when the partner is present than when the partner is absent. When partners spend leisure-time activities apart, their (exercise) levels are higher than those of individuals without a partner.The results suggest that it is not the mere existence of a romantic relationship but the current co-presence with a partner that affects physical activity behavior.
Bottom line? Spending time together means youre a lot less likely to exercise.And then theres this. A study published in Health Psychology found that after four years in a stable relationship, people tend to gain significantly more weight than they would from the natural result of aging. A Social Science & Medicine study found that people in a long-term relationship are more likely to gain weight, and less likely to exercise. (Unsurprisingly, the study also found that when a relationship ends, people tend to lose weight and exercise more.)
When time together feels short, going to the gym doesnt sound like couples time. Granted, youre together . . . but only in proximity. The researchers also speculate that feeling secure in a relationship tends to cause people to focus less on their appearance, and therefore less on healthy behaviors, like exercise and diet, that affect appearance.
Which takes us back to whom you choose to marry. Clearly you shouldnt choose your life partner on the basis of how conscientious they are, or whether you think they not only eat well and exercise but will continue to eat well and exercise. To paraphrase the Washington University in St. Louis researchers, marrying a conscientious partner could sound like a recipe for a rigid and lackluster lifestyle.
But it does appear that having a conscientious and prudent partnerboth in a practical sense, and in a healthy lifestyle senseis an ingredient in the recipe for a better, more rewarding career, and for a healthier and longer life.
So what should you do? Instead of expecting your partner to change some of their habits, think about what you can do to be more supportive of their goals. In a practical sense, maybe you can take on managing the finances. Or take care of more household chores, or repairs, maintenancethe things that keep your trains running on time.
After all, the best way to lead is by example.
Take health and fitness. You can decide to make exercising and eating better a priority, and do things to support that goal. You can take on the grocery shopping. You can cook some meals. You can fix a healthy lunch for your partner to take to work. You can choose to be the conscientious one.
Thats the real key. Marrying the right person helps, but being the right person to have marriedbeing supportive, encouraging, and leading by exampleis the best way to help your marriage be successful, both practically and, more important, emotionally.
Because the person you choose to marry mattersbut what you do for your partner, and what that does for your relationship, matters most.
Inc.
President Donald Trump plans to use a key address Wednesday to try to convince Americans he can make housing more affordable, but he’s picked a strange backdrop for the speech: a Swiss mountain town where ski chalets for vacations cost a cool $4.4 million.On the anniversary of his inauguration, Trump is flying to the World Economic Forum in Davos an annual gathering of the global elite where he may see many of the billionaires he has surrounded himself with during his first year back in the White House.Trump had campaigned on lowering the cost of living, painting himself as a populist while serving fries at a McDonald’s drive-thru. But in office, his public schedules suggest he’s traded the Golden Arches for a gilded age, devoting more time to cavorting with the wealthy than talking directly to his working-class base.“At the end of the day, it’s the investors and billionaires at Davos who have his attention, not the families struggling to afford their bills,” said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank.Trump’s attention in his first year back has been less on pocketbook issues and more fixed on foreign policy with conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine and Venezuela. He is now bent on acquiring Greenland to the chagrin of European allies a headline likely to dominate his time in Davos, overshadowing his housing ideas.Trump noted the Europeans’ resistance, telling reporters Monday night, “Let’s put it this way: It’s going to be a very interesting Davos.”The White House has tried to shift Trump’s focus to affordability issues, a response to warning signs in the polls in a year where control of Congress is at stake in midterm elections.About six in 10 U.S. adults now say that Trump has hurt the cost of living, according to the latest survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It’s an issue even among Republicans, who have said Trump’s work on the economy hasn’t lived up to their expectations. Only 16% say Trump has helped “a lot” on making things more affordable, down from 49% in April 2024, when an AP-NORC poll asked Americans the same question about his first term.The president is banking on investment commitments from billionaires and foreign nations to create a jobs boom, even as his broad tariffs have crimped the labor market and spurred inflation. Trump supporters who attend his rallies which the president resumed last month are left to trust that Trump’s business ties can eventually help them.This strategy carries political risks. Voters are more interested in the economy they’re experiencing in their own lives than in Trump’s relationships with billionaires, said Frank Luntz, the Republican-affiliated pollster and strategist.“If you’re asking me, ‘Are billionaires popular?’ The answer is no and they’ve haven’t been for some time,” said Luntz, who last year identified “affordability” as a defining issue for voters.
Wooing billionaires instead of the working class
Since Trump’s first term in 2017, the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans have seen their wealth increase by $11.98 trillion to $23.46 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.The magnitude of those gains dwarfs what the bottom 50% of households the majority of the country received during the same period. Their net worth rose by $2.94 trillion, roughly one-fourth what the top 0.1% got.One of the biggest concerns for voters is the cost of housing. In recent weeks, Trump has floated proposals like reducing interest rates on home loans by buying $200 billion in mortgage debt and banning large financial companies from buying homes. Yet those efforts would do little to address the core problem in the housing market: a multi-year shortfall in home construction and home prices that have generally risen faster than wages.Trump regularly points to the investments made by the wealthy and powerful as signs of economic growth to come. To encourage billionaires to deliver, Trump in his first year pursued policies on artificial intelligence and financial regulation that can benefit the wealthy, along with tax cuts, reduced IRS enforcement and fewer regulatory burdens for large-scale investments.“Most billionaires don’t share the interests of the working class,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written about the “wealthification” of U.S. politics. “The ultrawealthy love tax cuts and deregulation, and those preferences make it difficult for government to provide the help that working class people want.”Trump has been trying to sell tax breaks on tips and overtime pay from what is known as the ” One Big Beautiful Bill ” as benefiting workers. But a Congressional Budget Office analysis indicated that middle-class families may only see savings of $800 to $1,200 a year, on average, while the top 10% of earners would receive $13,600. A separate analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a think tank, said those earning above $1 million would save on average $66,510 this year.
The company Trump keeps
Trump regularly holds public events with the wealthy and powerful at the White House and beyond. He jetted to the Middle East and Asia with billionaires in tow as he had foreign countries announce investment commitments, promising that the money would flow down into factory jobs for the middle class.At a September dinner with tech billionaires, Trump said it was an honor to be surrounded by the likes of Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg.“There’s never been anything like it,” Trump said. “The most brilliant people are gathered around this table. This is definitely a high-IQ group and I’m very proud of them.”The White House said the previous Biden administration had alienated the business community to the detriment of the economy. “President Trump’s pro-growth policies and friendly relationships with industry titans, on the other hand, are securing trillions in investments that are creating jobs and opportunities for everyday Americans,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said.Last month, Trump celebrated a charitable contribution of $6.25 billion to the “Trump” investment accounts for children by Michael Dell. It was a chance to talk about economic inequality but also another opportunity for Trump to showcase his relationship with billionaires.Trump takes phone calls from billionaires and CEOs to chat about business, politics and interests such as his planned White House ballroom. He regularly peppers his speeches with shoutouts to Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, whose net worth was estimated by Forbes at roughly $162 billion as of Sunday.He’s installed billionaires in his inner circle such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (net worth: $3.3 billion) and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff (net worth: $2 billion). He put Elon Musk (net worth: $780 billio) in charge of slashing government payrolls before a dramatic falling-out and, later, a public reconciliation.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at a briefing last month portrayed Trump’s own status as a billionaire as a positive for him with voters.“I think it’s one of the many reasons they reelected him back to this office, because he’s a businessman who understands the economy and knows how to fix it,” she said.
Josh Boak, Associated Press
While working as an engineer at Tesla, Niccolo Cymbalist never planned to start a business. But he’d been considering an idea for new technologyan autonomous, wind-powered cargo ship. Then, while on paternity leave in 2024, he discovered a free program that helps scientists and engineers launch businesses for the first time.
Weeks after finishing the program, called 5050, Cymbalist had launched a startup called Clippership. The companys first ship is being built in the Netherlands this year. Without the accelerator, he says, the company likely wouldnt exist.
The program has now helped scientists and engineers launch 100 businesses, from Huminly, which uses enzymes to make clothing infinitely recyclable, to Plasmidsaurus, which offers ultra-fast DNA sequencing.
[Photo: courtesy Fifty Years]
The course is run by Fifty Years, a San Francisco-based VC firm focused on deep tech that tackles the worlds largest problems, from disease to climate change. Soon after the firm started a decade ago, the team saw that good ideas were stuck in academic labs.
The transition from academic scientist to founder is actually much more difficult than the transition from sophomore dropout to founder, for a whole host of reasons, says Seth Bannon, a founding partner at Fifty Years. Because of that, the best people to start these startupsthe scientists that invented the technologyweren’t doing that. So we said, ‘okay, can we help fix that?’
[Photo: courtesy Fifty Years]
From idea to startup
Potential founders go through a 13-week programwith some in-person weekends and weekly Zoom sessionsthat helps them figure out if their idea is worth pursuing and whether it’s ready to commercialize.
The founder of Plasmidsaurus, for example, who was a postdoc at Caltech, initially joined the program planning to turn his lab research on synthetic gene circuits into a medical product. But the 5050 team helped him realize that it was around 10 years from being commercializable, and one of his other ideastechnology he’d developed to speed up his own researchwas ready now. The company is growing quickly. “At year one, they just crossed a $50 million run rate,” Bannon says. “They’ve been profitable every month since they started. And they’re now one of the most beloved names in biology.”
[Photo: courtesy Fifty Years]
Participants also learn how to build a startup team, understand what makes founders successful, and decide if entrepreneurship is a fit for them.
“One of the workshops that we do is the ‘story of self,’ where it’s a deep dive into their core motivationtheir entire story of life and like what they’re doing today to really make sure that they’re actually pursuing something that they’re really really excited about,” says Ale Borda, who runs the 5050 program. “Then they can use that same story to share about their work and why they will go through walls to enable this to happen.”
[Photo: courtesy Fifty Years]
They learn about how to communicate differently. “In academia, just as one example, you are taught to communicate with data, data, dataand then here are the 10 ways my data might be wrong,” Bannon says. While that’s good for research, “if you communicate that way as a startup founder, you will have trouble hiring anybody, you’ll have trouble raising money, you’ll have trouble getting press,” he says. “And so you have to learn to talk in directionally correct abstractions.”
Universities often also have programs to help move tech to the market, but schools are disconnected from the startup world, and Bannon says the programs aren’t very effective. (Mentors might be Fortune 500 executives, for example, rather than other startup founders with direct experience.) There are also conflicts of interest. Universities own the IP for new inventions scientists develop on campus; scientists have to go through a complicated process of negotiating for the rights to the tech. The program at 5050 includes coaching onnavigating that process.
Turning scientists into founders
So far, the approach is working. “The stat we’re most proud of is that 96% of the teams that went out to raise a round were able to,” says Bannon. “That’s an insanely high stat for a program that accepts people who don’t have companies when they join.”
In the current political climate, as federal funding cuts have hit university labs, the program is already seeing an increased interest from scientists at a career crossroads. “A lot of them are seeing that they might not be able to continue their life’s work in academia anymore,” Bannon says. “Some of them happen to be lucky and be in a spot where maybe it could be a startup.” In the short term, he says, funding cuts might lead to more startups, though they’ll slow down future growth.
[Photo: courtesy Fifty Years]
Of the 100 companies that have launched from the program so far, around half wouldn’t have started without it. Others launched faster than they would have. “I probably would have started a company, but it almost certainly wouldn’t have been at the time that I did,” says Daniel Rahn, a former SpaceX engineer who launched Metal as Fuel, a company that makes metal fuels to decarbonize heavy industry.
“These are counterfactual companies,” says Bannon. “These companies are combating the climate crisis, they’re defeating disease, they’re doing important stuff. And so it just feels really, really good to help companies come into existence that wouldn’t otherwise.”
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will attend the Supreme Court’s oral argument Wednesday in a case involving the attempted firing of Fed governor Lisa Cook, an unusual show of support by the central bank chair.The high court is considering whether President Donald Trump can fire Cook, as he said he would do in late August, in an unprecedented attempt to remove one of the seven members of the Fed’s governing board. Powell plans to attend the high court’s Wednesday session, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.It’s a much more public show of support than the Fed chair has previously shown Cook. But it follows Powell’s announcement last week that the Trump administration has sent subpoenas to the Fed, threatening an unprecedented criminal indictment of the Fed Chair. Powell appointed to the position by Trump in 2018 appears to be casting off last year’s more subdued response to Trump’s repeated attacks on the central bank in favor of a more public confrontation.Powell issued a video statement Jan. 11 condemning the subpoenas as “pretexts” for Trump’s efforts to force him to sharply cut the Fed’s key interest rate. Powell oversaw three rate cuts late last year, lowering the rate to about 3.6%, but Trump has argued it should be as low as 1%, a position few economists support.The Trump administration has accused Cook of mortgage fraud, an allegation that Cook has denied. No charges have been made against Cook. She sued to keep her job, and the Supreme Court Oct. 1 issued a brief order allowing her to stay on the board while they consider her case.If Trump succeeds in removing Cook, he could appoint another person to fill her slot, which would give his appointees a majority on the Fed’s board and greater influence over the central bank’s decisions on interest rates and bank regulation.
Christopher Rugaber, AP Economics Writer
French President Emmanuel Macron says the European Union should not hesitate to use the trade bloc’s Anti-Coercion Instrument in face of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff threats over Greenland.
Macron, speaking at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss Alpine town of Davos, pushed back against aggressive U.S. trade pressures and an endless accumulation of new tariffs.
The anti-coercion mechanism is a powerful instrument and we should not hesitate to deploy it in todays tough environment, he said Tuesday.
The European Union’s top official on Tuesday described U.S. President Donald Trump’s planned new tariffs over Greenland as “a mistake especially between long-standing allies” and called into question Trump’s trustworthiness, saying that he had agreed last year not to impose more tariffs on members of the bloc.European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was responding to Trump’s announcement that starting February, a 10% import tax will be imposed on goods from eight European nations that have rallied around Denmark in the wake of his escalating calls for the United States to take over the semi-autonomous Danish territory of Greenland.“The European Union and the United States have agreed to a trade deal last July,” Von der Leyen said at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “And in politics as in business a deal is a deal. And when friends shake hands, it must mean something.”“We consider the people of the United States not just our allies, but our friends. And plunging us into a downward spiral would only aid the very adversaries we are both so committed to keeping out of the strategic landscape,” she added.She vowed that the EU’s response “will be unflinching, united and proportional.”Trump has insisted the U.S. needs the territory for security reasons against possible threats from China and Russia.Earlier Tuesday, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said America’s relations with Europe remain strong and urged trading partners to “take a deep breath” and let tensions driven the new tariff threats over Greenland “play out.”“I think our relations have never been closer,” he said.But Danish Prime Minister Mette Fredriksen, speaking in the Danish parliament, said that “the worst may still be ahead of us.” She said that “we have never sought conflict. We have consistently sought cooperation.”
Trump’s threats spark diplomatic flurry across Europe
The American leader’s threats have sparked outrage and a flurry of diplomatic activity across Europe, as leaders consider possible countermeasures, including retaliatory tariffs and the first-ever use of the European Union’s anti-coercion instrument.The EU has three major economic tools it could use to pressure Washington: new tariffs, suspension of the U.S.-EU trade deal, and the “trade bazooka” the unofficial term for the bloc’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, which could sanction individuals or institutions found to be putting undue pressure on the EU.Earlier Tuesday, Trump posted on social media that he had spoken with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. He said “I agreed to a meeting of the various parties in Davos, Switzerland.”
France’s Macron suggests G-7 meeting in Paris this week
Trump also posted a text message from Emmanuel Macron in which the French president suggested a meeting of members of the Group of Seven industrialized democracies in Paris after the Davos gathering. An official close to Macron, who spoke anonymously in line with the French presidency’s customary practices, confirmed the message shared by Trump is genuine.Later, Trump posted some provocatively doctored images. One showed him planting the U.S. flag next to a sign reading “Greenland, U.S. Territory, Est. 2026.” The other showed Trump in the Oval Office next to a map that showed Greenland and Canada covered with the U.S. Stars and Stripes.In a sign of how tensions have increased in recent days, thousands of Greenlanders marched over the weekend in protest of any effort to take over their island.In his latest threat of tariffs, Trump indicated that the import taxes would be retaliation for last week’s deployment of symbolic numbers of troops from the European countries to Greenland though he also suggested that he was using the tariffs as leverage to negotiate with Denmark.
Calls for a stronger Europe against Trump’s threats
Denmark’s minister for European affairs called Trump’s tariff threats “deeply unfair.” He said that Europe needs to become even stronger and more independent, while stressing there is “no interest in escalating a trade war.”“You just have to note that we are on the edge of a new world order, where having power has unfortunately become crucial, and we see a United States with an enormous condescending rhetoric towards Europe,” Marie Bjerre told Danish public broadcaster DK on Tuesday.Speaking on the sidelines of Davos, California Gov. Gavin Newsom slammed Europe’s response to Trump’s tariff threats as “pathetic” and “embarrassing,” and urged European leaders to unite and stand up to the United States.“It is time to get serious, and stop being complicit,” Newsom told reporters. “It’s time to stand tall and firm, have a backbone.”On Monday night, Greenland’s European backers looked at establishing a more permanent military presence in the High North to help guarantee security in the Arctic region, a key demand of the United States, Swedish Defense Minister Pl Jonson said.Jonson said after talks with his counterparts from Denmark, Greenland and Norway that European members of NATO are currently “doing what’s called a reconnaissance tour in order to identify what kind of needs there are when it comes to infrastructure and exercises and so forth.”In Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov strongly denied any intention by Russia and China to threaten Greenland, while also describing Greenland as a “colonial gain” for Denmark. At a news conference, he said that “in principle, Greenland isn’t a natural part of Denmark.”
US-UK tensions over Chagos Islands
In another sign of tension between allies, the British government on Tuesday defended its decision to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius after Trump attacked the plan, which his administration previously supported.Trump said that relinquishing the remote Indian Ocean archipelago, home to a strategically important American naval and bomber base, was an act of stupidity that shows why he needs to take over Greenland.In a speech to lawmakers at Britain’s Parliament on Tuesday, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson said he hoped to “calm the waters” as Trump roils the trans-Atlantic relationship with his desire to take over Greenlnd.Johnson said the U.S. and the U.K. “have always been able to work through our differences calmly, as friends. We will continue to do that.”
AP writers Sylvie Corbet in Paris, Jill Lawless in London, Lorne Cook in Brussels, and Elaine Kurtenbach in Bangkok contributed to this report.
Jamey Keaten, Associated Press
The blockchain is coming to Wall Street.
The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) said on Monday that it was developing a platform to trade tokenized securities, digital representations of assets like stocks and bonds.
But exactly when the 233-year-old financial institution will turn it on is still up in the air.
Supporters of the technology argue that the change could modernize the NYSE, giving traders some of the same advantages that are enjoyed by investors in the cryptocurrency world.
But Wall Street stalwarts are wary of altering a system that has been the bedrock of securities trading for more than two centuries.
Curious what the fuss is about? Here’s what you need to know about the advantages and disadvantages that this sort of trading could mean for your portfolio:
What are tokenized securities?
Tokenized securities are digital versions of stocks and bonds that are traded on the blockchain, rather than a brokerage account. People who opt to use this platform would be able to use stablecoinsa crypto that pegs its value to another asset like the U.S. dollarto fund their trades.
The biggest shift to the platform, though, would be the introduction of 24/7 trading, much like Bitcoin investors currently enjoy.
For more than two centuries, the NYSE has transformed the way markets operate, said Lynn Martin, president of the NYSE Group in a statement. We are leading the industry toward fully on-chain solutions, grounded in the unmatched protections and high regulatory standards that position us to marry trust with state-of-the-art technology.
When will the NYSE launch the new tokenized platform?
That’s still very much up in the air, but Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which owns the NYSE, is hoping to launch trades on the platform later this year.
First, it will need to get regulatory approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The Trump administration has been encouraging a shift to crypto-friendly policies, though, which could bode well for the platform’s chances.
Why is the NYSE starting a tokenized platform?
Put simply, competition. Trading platform Robinhood has already proposed its own network of stock tokenization. And fintech companies like Coinbase and Kraken have shown an interest as well.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs, Bank of New York Mellon, and State Street are all working on projects that would digitize money-market fund shares. The NYSE is hoping to maintain its leadership position in the stock market, and to do so, it needs to meet the demands of traders.
Will the tokenized platform replace traditional stock trading?
No. The tokenized securities platform will operate as a separate addition to the NYSE. Traditional trading will continue uninterrupted and the opening and closing bell will still ring at the start and stop of trading five days a week (minus holidays).
What are the advantages of tokenized securities?
Proponents of tokenized securities point to the advantages of 24/7 trading. Under the system, trades could be funded and settled in real time. (Currently, there is a one-day delay.) That, they say, could increase traders’ liquidity, make fractional ownership of companies easier to achieve.
And because trading could happen at any time, the new platform could make the NYSE more accessible to retail (individual) traders.
What are the risks of tokenized securities?
As with almost anything on the blockchain, there is a danger of fraud. Some critics, including a handful of Democrats in Congress, have warned that companies looking to raise capital via tokenized securities could use the platform to scam investors.
Others point out that the technology is new and still relatively untestedand given the inherent risks of investing, it could open the door to substantial losses for retail investors.
Citadel Securities has urged the SEC to move slowly on the matter, saying there needed to be crystal clear rules for companies that want to tokenize their assets. And JPMorgan, in a note to investors last August, wrote that despite the hype, there’s very little interest in tokenized securities.
This rather disappointing picture on tokenization also reflects traditional investors not seeing a need for it thus far, it wrote. There is also little evidence so far of banks or customers moving from traditional bank deposits to tokenized bank deposits on blockchains.
Are other major markets embracing this sort of system?
Last September, the Nasdaq market asked regulators to approve trading of tokenized versions of Nasdaq-traded stocks.
Since doing so would require the SEC amend some of its rules, including the definition of a security, that request has not received a final response yet. Changes would also have to go through a comment period before they could go into effect, letting opponents explain what they object to.
Tuesday is the first trading day on U.S. stock markets since President Donald Trump escalated his threats over Greenland this weekend.
The president threatened additional tariffs on allied countries that objected to his desired takeover of the Danish territory. The geopolitical uncertainty that has emerged appears to be behind a decline in stock futures, particularly in Big Tech stocks.
And that fall has reignited concerns about a revived Sell America trade. Heres what you need to know.
Whats happened?
As Fast Company previously reported, over the weekend, President Donald Trump issued economic threats against eight allied nationsand NATO memberswho spoke out against the presidents desire to acquire Greenland, a territory of the Kingdom of Denmark.
Trumps threats included additional tariffs he says will be levied against goods imported to America from eight countries: Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
The president said an additional 10% tariff will be levied on those countries’ goods from February 1, and that additional tariff rate will rise to 25% on June 1 and last until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland, (sic).
European leaders and the European Commission have reacted strongly to Trumps threats, repeatedly stressing that Greenland is not for sale and that allies dont threaten other allies with harsh economic consequences when one of them doesnt get their way.
European governments are reportedly keen to resolve the situation diplomatically, but they are also considering a number of economic countermeasures should Trump go ahead with his plans to apply new tariffs on the stated nations.
Countermeasures under discussion include retaliatory tariffs on American products entering Europe, as well as a never-before-used Anti-Coercion Instrument (ACI).
The ACI is a tool at the EUs disposal that could not only restrict trade with a target nation but also pause all investments in that nation and suspend intellectual property rights.
Stock markets and Big Tech fall
The geopolitical uncertainty Trump has raised with his Greenland escalation is keeping governments on both sides of the Atlantic on the edge of their seats.
But they arent the only ones.
Currently, investors appear to be in a state of major jitters due to the latest geopolitical hand grenade lobbed by Trump. As of the time of this writing, in premarket trading, Americas stock market futures are all down significantly across the board.
This includes S&P futures, currently down 1.58%, Dow futures, currently down 1.38%, and Nasdaq futures, currently down 1.95%.
And it’s not just the overall markets that are looking set to fall once the opening bell rings this morning.
As of the time of this writing, Americas Big Tech companies are seeing their stock prices down across the board, including:
Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL): down 1.22%
Amazon (Nasdaq: AMZN): down 2.93%
Alphabet (Nasdaq: GOOG): down 2.84%
Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META): down 2.58%
Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT): down 1.73%
Nvidia (Nasdaq: NVDA): down 2.45%
Tesla (Nasdaq: TSLA): down 2.65%
Uncertainty or a revived Sell America trade?
While U.S. markets were closed yesterday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, other assets traded as usual, including cryptocurrencies and precious metals like gold.
Many major cryptocurrencies have fallen steadily since Trumps Greenland escalation over the weekend, while gold has reached all-time highs.
But these moves arent surprising.
The threat of America imposing economic retaliation on its NATO allies for refusing to relinquish Greenland to its possession generates a level of geopolitical uncertainty the world has not seen since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022.
And such uncertainty almost always rattles investors, sending them fleeing from volatile assets like cryptocurrency to safe havens like gold.
Yet what investors will be waiting to see today is whether the selloff in America’s Big Tech stocks is simply an ordinary, expected reaction we tend to see when geopolitical uncertainty arises, or whether it’s the beginning of a new Sell America trade.
What is a ‘Sell America’ trade?
The Sell America trade describes when global investors decide to sell off American assetslike U.S. stocks and bondseither to protect their profits from an economic downturn in the U.S. driven by geopolitical uncertainty, or as a punitive response to protest Americas actions they disagree with.
Right now, its probably too early to tell whether Tuesdays premarket selloff in U.S. stocks is being driven by a renewed Sell America trade or whether it’s just a normal investor reaction to uncertain times.
But expect to see much more speculation about the issue in the days ahead.
Like many industries, architecture has jumped on the artificial intelligence bandwagon. AI tools are becoming everyday parts of the practice of architecture, from iterating design concepts to optimizing floor plans to accelerating the creation of construction documents. Some architecture firms are even branding themselves as “AI-driven.”
AI’s infusion into architecture is well underway, but it’s also an ongoing process. Firms are finding new ways of making these emerging tools work for the way they design buildings, while also grappling with what AI could do to a profession so dependent on actual human intelligence. Fast Company asked architects from some of the top firms working in the U.S. and around the world how AI is making its way into their work and business, and what we might expect to see in the next year as AI adoption continues.
Here’s the question we put to a panel of designers and leaders in architecture: How do you see AI changing architecture in 2026?
Fluid movement
AI is moving from experimentation to expectation, particularly in early-stage exploration. Its real value isn’t replacing creativity but removing friction from the design process and making it easier for architects to express intent and quickly see viable options. Were moving toward a world where teams can load contextual project data and project outcomes and immediately explore design solutions, without getting bogged down in manual setup or repetitive tasks. With AI that supports seamless collaboration and iteration in context, architects will be able to collaborate freely with stakeholders and move fluidly between ideas, levels of details, and outcomes. The architects who succeed will be those who use AI to expand their creative range and sharpen decision-making, not replace it.
– Amy Bunszel, EVP of architecture, engineering and construction solutions, Autodesk
More rigorous and transparent design process
In 2026, the question will no longer be whether firms use AI, but how responsibly and intentionally they do so. At WXY, we see AI as a way to make design processes more rigorous and transparent, not faster for the sake of efficiency alone. Used well, AI can strengthen analysis, clarify tradeoffs, and support more informed decision-making. Used poorly, it risks flattening complexity and distancing designers from accountability. The fundamental shift that AI will spur at WXY will be cultural, honing our understanding of judgment, authorship, and ethical use rather than the firm’s technical capability.
– Claire Weisz, founding principal, WXY architecture + urban design
Option curation, not object generation
AI will continue to be less about sexy imagery, and more about rapid test-fitting. We’ve already created tools that incorporate climate analysis and evaluate massing iterations to maximize value for our clients. We will continue to develop systems with AI that enable option curation versus object generation, to assist more with early feasibility and storytelling.
– Trent Tesch, principal, KPF
Exploring, but safely
AI is rapidly changing design practice, in everything from the legal review of contracts to building code reviews of design solutions to how we generate design visualization. Its greatest impact to date has been in areas of practice that have large data sets, or that focus on repetitive and easily automated tasks. When it comes to creative exploration, the tools are changing so rapidly that designers are working hard to keep up with everything from protecting our intellectual property to communicating, disseminating, and training applications across the firm. We are already sandboxing AI to help us explore different creative tools safely.
– David Polzin, executive director of Design, CannonDesign
Power of persuasion
AI represents incremental (yet meaningful) gains in nearly every aspect of what we do as designers. From ideation and image generation to geometric optimizations and environmental analysis, AI is helping both architects and engineers move more quickly, be more creative, and communicate more persuasively.
– Colin Koop, partner, SOM
Augmented, not artificial, intelligence
There is an amazing opportunity to test ideas; the challenge is people see it as an opportunity to speed up the process, but that will not happen. It is far more nuanced. We expect to see different types of people come into the professioncoders, data analystswhich will provide an opportunity to analyze how we work and craft a relevant tool to support the design solution. The emergence of AI has sparked debates about the future of design professions, particularly in the built environment sector. However, rather than threatening to replace architects, urban planners, and landscape designers, AI can reshape their role and amplify their capabilities. The design profession of the built environment stands at a crucial intersection where human creativity meets technological advancement, where spatial understanding meets digital simulation, and where physical materiality meets virtual modeling.
Rather than being replaced by AI, design professionals’ roles aren;t diminishing but are evolving, becoming more vital than ever in our increasingly complex urban world. In a pervasive AI world, design and artificial intelligence should complement one another. Perhaps if we replace “artificial” with “augmented” we can get a better understanding how to use this powerful tool. While AI can process patterns and performance data, it cannot comprehend the subtle cultural tones, and community needs that inform great architecture and urban spaces. Designers bring this crucial layer of human insight, ensuring the built environment is not just technically efficient but culturally meaningful and socially sustainable. The future of architectural and urban design isn’t about choosing between human creativity and artificial intelligence it’s about leveraging both to create spaces that are more sustainable, livable, and impactful than ever before.
– Nick Leahy, co-CEO and executive director, Perkins Eastman
Human-AI collaboration
In 2026, the biggest challenge is not simply AI itself, but how humans and AI systems collaborate effectively – new workflows, authorship, copyright, ethical frameworks, responsibility of charge, and decision-making approaches to leverage collaborative intelligence rather than treating AI as a standalone tool. We hav incorporated and will extend the use in 2026, of an AI “embedded partner”an always-on reasoning layer that synthesizes emails, text, images, slides, presentations, calculation, drawings, data, and real-time context to support architects and engineers across ideation, analysis, images, coordination, presentations, and decision-making, rather than replacing human authorship.
By seamlessly integrating multimodal understanding, rapid scenario evaluation, cross-domain knowledge retrieval, and natural-language collaboration, this cognitive partner enables designers to think faster, test deeper, and act with greater confidence while keeping creative and ethical control firmly human-led. AI-enabled tools will accelerate early-stage design through rapid scenario testing, optimizing massing, structure, energy, carbon, daylight, and indoor air quality simultaneously, allowing teams to explore orders of magnitude more options while focusing human effort on judgment, synthesis, and design intent. Also, this process will be informed by past and present project data.
– Luke Leung, sustainable engineering studio leader, SOM
