What kind of improvements? Think upgraded tracks that reduce delays, better signals that prevent collisions, safer road crossings where cars and trains meet, and stronger connections for short-line railroads. They mostly cover the smaller regional lines that carry grain, timber, and manufactured goods out of rural America.

Passenger rail gets attention too, particularly for lines that have grown overcrowded as ridership rebounds from pandemic lows.

“Under President Donald Trump, America is building again. This administration is focused on improving passenger rail to help American families connect to jobs, education, and medical appointments, as well as fast-tracking the movement of commerce. At USDOT, we are laser-focused on ushering in the Golden Age of American rail,” said US Transportation Secretary Sean P Duffy.

Applications are open until June 22, and eligibility is broad. The administration says priority will go to projects that create jobs, improve safety, and keep freight moving efficiently.

A more resilient US rail is a direct counter to Chinese supply chains, and cheaper domestic freight gives some respite against tariff wars, and boosts defence logistics for an Indo-Pacific pivot.

The stakes are real. Rail trespassing alone kills hundreds of Americans every year. Freight bottlenecks on key corridors push up costs for businesses and, eventually, consumers. This $2.04 billion is part of a larger push. The government has separately committed $6.7 billion to the Northeast Corridor, the busiest passenger rail stretch in the country. Together, they signal genuine ambition to rebuild infrastructure that, in many places, hasn’t seen serious investment in decades.

The challenges are equally real as private railroad companies control much of the network, environmental reviews take time, and coordinating across federal, state, and local layers is never simple. But if the money is deployed well, the payoff of cheaper freight, cleaner transport and safer crossings could be substantial.

The post USD 2.04 billion investment to modernise America’s rail network appeared first on International Finance.

As a result, if you weren’t savvy and didn’t put in a considerable amount of footwork, you consistently overpaid on your down payments. Studies reveal that before Zillow’s data democratisation, an investor paid 2%-5% as an ignorance tax. If you were from out of town, you paid an additional 2%. The informed buyer who uses an app like Zillow saves 4.75% on their payments.

The author of Freakonomics, Steven Levitt, examined the selling habits of real estate agents when it came to their own homes and found that they kept their properties on the market around 10 days longer and sold them for roughly 3% higher than those of their clients. This is not a trivial sum. To put things into context, the 5% overpayment is approximately $20,500 to $25,650 for the average American homebuyer. That can get you a brand new Honda Civic or Toyota Corolla, a full kitchen renovation, or the entire down payment for a first-time buyer. Zillow is a revolution in the real estate industry. It is a boon to the buyer, saving American homeowners $750 billion in aggregate since 2010.

When Jeremy Wacksman took the helm as Zillow’s CEO in late 2024, the company had just shuttered its ambitious home-flipping venture, Zillow Offers, after some spectacular miscalculations, leaving it holding properties it had overpaid for. Wall Street was sceptical. Agents were wary. Competitors were circling. Jeremy Wacksman proved the doubters wrong as Zillow made a miraculous comeback with mid-teens revenue growth, which got investors cheering.

In a letter to shareholders, Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman and CFO Jeremy Hofmann wrote, “Our consistently strong performance reinforces that Zillow can grow regardless of what the residential real estate market is doing,” proving that Zillow has decoupled itself from the fate of interest rates and will continue to grow irrespective of the number of homebuyers.

Jeremy Wacksman’s vision is transforming Zillow into what he calls a “housing super app,” a one-stop digital ecosystem that touches every step of buying or selling a home.

What exactly is PropTech, anyway?

Before we deep dive into Zillow and its software-realty revolution, let’s look at the industry it operates in. Zillow can be classified as what economists and technologists call PropTech, just short for property technology. The company uses information technology and digital platforms to give you, the consumer, insights into the real estate market, which is traditionally known for its opacity. Think of it as everything that happens when Silicon Valley meets the housing market.

Even though the global real estate market is valued at hundreds of trillions, the technology that services it is in its adolescence, with annual revenues at around $35 to $45 billion and growing at roughly 12%-16% (in places like Bangkok and Manila, that rate is much higher at 19%). Among global giants like China and Europe, the US dominates PropTech, holding 35%-45% (approximately $12 billion to $16 billion) of the global market. The reason for that is companies like Zillow, CoStar, and Procore. America has a unique combination of standardised data (MLS), high transaction volume, and a tech-centric culture that encourages digital adoption.

Zillow doesn’t control the housing market, but it is definitely in charge of the digital front door of the real estate business. It generated a revenue of $2.5 billion in 2025 and has a massive 15%-20% of the American PropTech market share. Over 60% of Americans who use their mobiles to browse real estate do so through Zillow, and in the residential sector, Zillow is the de facto search engine. It’s Google for home buyers. While they only capture a small slice of the commission dollars (via agent fees), they control the flow of customers.

And why is this happening? It’s because of three major technological shifts. For starters, generative AI is no longer about experimental chatbots and is adept at statistical analysis and can accurately predict which homeowners will sell their property. Artificial intelligence (AI) also performs exceptionally well in automated mortgage underwriting (which improves liquidity by reducing underwriting time from weeks to days), and writes listing descriptions tailored to each customer and with better precision than most human agents.

Then there are immersive technologies like virtual tours and 3D walkthroughs, which help you visualise and feel which home is right for you. Finally, sustainability tech has emerged as a serious value driver, especially in Europe, where buildings are increasingly valued based on their energy efficiency and carbon footprint.

What makes PropTech fascinating is that it varies significantly by location. In Southeast Asia, it’s about managing rapid urbanisation through state-level infrastructure; think government platforms that coordinate transit systems with residential development. In Europe, it’s driven by sustainability regulations, with digital twins of buildings used primarily for energy optimisation and compliance.

American PropTech solves a uniquely American problem. Companies like Zillow have figured out how to bring efficiency and transparency to a fragmented market dominated by 1.5 million independent agents and a patchwork of local Multiple Listing Services.

The story of Zillow

Zillow, an idea thought up by Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink, was launched in 2004. What’s interesting is that both these men were former Microsoft employees who launched Expedia in the 1990s. It’s interesting because Expedia was a web portal that freed information from travel agents and ensured that ticketing and hotel prices were transparent. It was a data democratisation company that disrupted travel. All Barton and Frink did was to apply the successful techniques they used in the travel industry to disrupt the real estate industry. The duo were about to revolutionise real estate by making all home values public.

At the time, this was a radical move. Real estate data was locked away behind agent gates, and if you wanted to know what your neighbour’s house sold for or what your own home might be worth, you had to call a real estate agent and hope they’d share that information. Zillow’s “Zestimate” (an algorithmic home valuation tool) changed everything. Suddenly, anyone with an internet connection could get an instant estimate of any property’s value. The industry opposed it, with agents concerned about job security and critics lamenting inaccuracies in price. However, consumers loved it. Within a few years, Zillow had become the most visited real estate website in America, attracting millions of people who were curious about home values, not necessarily looking to buy or sell.

For years, Zillow operated as what insiders call a “media portal.” It made money by selling advertising and leads to real estate agents through its Premier Agent programme. Think of it as the Google of real estate, a place where buyers started their search, but where the actual transaction happened elsewhere, facilitated by traditional agents and lenders.

Then came the iBuying era. Flush with investor confidence and inspired by the success of companies that were “disrupting” traditional industries, Zillow launched Zillow Offers in 2018. The concept was a simple one. We will use data and algorithms to buy homes directly from sellers, make light renovations, and resell them at a profit. You cut the middleman off and inefficiencies of the traditional market, and capture more of the transactional value. It made absolute sense and was a bold move, championed by Barton, who returned as CEO in 2019 to steer the ship through this “Moonshot.”

However, the algorithms miscalculated. The company overpaid for properties just as the market softened. By November 2021, the real estate market had become erratic, COVID-19 had hit, and home price appreciation was behaving unpredictably. Zillow’s algorithms, designed to forecast prices, struggled to keep up with the wild swings of a market influenced by a pandemic, inflation, and supply chain shocks. A simultaneous labour shortage and supply chain crisis meant that Zillow could not renovate and flip homes fast enough. The company discovered a backlog of inventory it could not clear, comprising thousands of homes that were depreciating each passing day. In the third quarter of 2021 alone, the Zillow Offers segment posted a staggering loss of $339.2 million, necessitating a write-down of over $540 million. Zillow Offers shut down, and a quarter of Zillow’s employees paid the price with unemployment. A truly humbling moment for a company that had spent years positioning itself as the smart data-driven disruptor.

Innovation of the Housing Super App

Instead of doubling down on Zillow Offers, caught in a vicious sunk cost fallacy, Zillow shut down the venture. The brilliance of this move became apparent in the years that followed. By exiting the capital-intensive, low-margin business of house flipping, Zillow was able to pivot back to its core strengths of audience, data, and software. This strategic retreat gave birth to the “Housing Super App” strategy, the engine driving Zillow’s success in 2025. So, the whole Super App vision is really about playing the role of the conductor in a real estate orchestra. It’s managing the transaction from start to finish without actually owning any of the assets involved. It integrates buying, selling, renting, and financing into a seamless, all-in-one digital experience. Zillow profits at each stage, avoiding the headaches and risks associated with holding inventory.

Jeremy Wacksman was the one who made this vision a reality. He was the COO right in the thick of that big pivot, and then he stepped up to CEO in August 2024. Under his guidance, this Super App approach has completely revamped Zillow’s financial picture.

The company shifted its focus to “Enhanced Markets,” cities like Phoenix and Atlanta, where it deployed a full suite of integrated services. The results have been spectacular. In these markets, customer transaction share has increased by over 80% since 2022. By early 2025, Zillow had expanded its Enhanced Market footprint to cover 21% of its connections, with a clear path to 35% by year-end and a long-term goal of 75%.

This pivot restored Zillow’s profitability and financial health. In 2024 and 2025, the company maintained gross margins above 75%, a figure characteristic of elite software firms rather than the slim margins of the construction industry. It’s quite impressive how this company managed to make a major comeback. They achieved positive GAAP net income in Q1 2025, and projections indicate they will remain profitable throughout the entire fiscal year. This marks a significant shift from the substantial losses they experienced back in 2021. Their balance sheet? It’s like a fortress now, sitting on $1.6 billion in cash and investments as of early 2025. That level of liquidity allows them to invest in innovation and weather any economic challenges that may arise.

Zillow owes this turnaround to Jeremy Wacksman’s leadership. As a former engineer at Xbox (another Microsoft subsidiary), he was well versed in that sharp, product-focused discipline. And he brought that over to the C-suite. His intellectual curiosity and willingness to admit ignorance when he did not know something were conducive to a team-based problem-solving approach crucial to tackle the crisis at hand. He took this fuzzy idea of a “Super App” and turned it into real, tangible products like Zillow Rentals, Zillow Home Loans, and the agent-facing Zillow Pro. Just look at Rentals now. It grew revenue by 33% year-over-year in Q1 2025, and aims for a $500 million run rate.

Sure, detractors love to bring up the flop of Zillow Offers as some kind of permanent stain, but by 2025, industry folks see it as a “clarifying moment” that actually highlighted the company’s resilience. It eliminated a distracting business model and encouraged everyone to focus on digital integration. The Zillow that emerged from that 2021 situation is leaner, more focused, and much more scalable. They realised their real strength isn’t in owning actual homes, but in owning the digital backbone that makes homeownership happen. That lesson, earned the hard way, is what’s driving all this optimism now. It’s shifting their strategy away from betting on market prices and toward capitalising on the efficiencies they build.

The future of home sales

In 2025, Zillow really dug in this massive technological moat that’s so deep and wide, it’s struggling to seize its market share. They’ve ditched the old-school world of flat 2D photos and scattered data bits, and stepped right into the era of the “Digital Twin.” We are talking about the super immersive, data-packed virtual copy of a home. It’s not just for show, and this tech jump is what makes remote deals possible and sets Zillow miles apart from everyone else.

The star of their tech lineup is “SkyTour,” which they launched in July 2025 just for “Showcase” listings. SkyTour, a breakthrough in computer vision, is powered by this rendering method called “Gaussian Splatting.” Instead of those clunky traditional 3D models with meshes of triangles, it uses millions of “splats,” which are these ellipsoidal bits that nail complex surfaces and lighting with spot-on photorealism. This stuff was once only for fancy movie effects and games, but now it lets you “fly” around a property on your phone, checking out the roof, backyard, and whole neighbourhood like you’re piloting a drone.

The engineering feat behind SkyTour is huge. Scientists like Will Hutchcroft and executives like Steve Anderson, who headed the Zillow crew, figured out how to tweak this heavy-duty process so it runs butter-smooth on regular web browsers and smartphones. It’s basically made high-fidelity spatial data accessible to everyone, and that shifts how people think about house hunting. It gives buyers that “being there” vibe that plain pics can’t touch, cutting down on in-person visits and speeding up decisions. The numbers back it up. Showcase listings with SkyTour pull in 79% more page views, 76% more saves, and 91% more shares than comparable non-Showcase ones. This initiates a positive cycle where sellers are eager to utilise Zillow’s premium marketing tools, generating additional revenue and enhancing the platform.

But killer visuals are just one piece of Zillow’s 2025 tech puzzle. They’ve gone all-in on weaving AI into the money and search sides of things, too. Take the “BuyAbility” tool. They have nailed it in 2025, and it hits right at the biggest worry for today’s homebuyers: Can I afford this? Old mortgage calculators are rigid and often off-base, ignoring how credit scores, debt-to-income ratios, and changing interest rates all mix together. BuyAbility? It’s live and adaptive. It retrieves real-time mortgage rates customised for your location and credit profile, producing a personalised “purchasing power” score that updates daily.

As rates bounce around in the wild 2025 economy, your BuyAbility score updates on the spot. When you’re scrolling the Zillow map, homes get marked as “Within BuyAbility,” so you can ditch the ones that are a financial stretch and zero in on real options. But it doesn’t stop at crunching numbers. It breaks down how boosting your credit or increasing your down payment tweaks your power, turning you into your personal digital money coach. And by baking Zillow Home Loans right in, they snag you when you’re most ready, making the jump from looking to locking in financing seamless.

On top of that, Zillow flipped the search game with Generative AI. They hooked up a ChatGPT plugin and natural language smarts, so you can do full-on conversational searches. No more fiddling with a ton of filters. Just type something like, “Find me a three-bedroom house in Austin with a big backyard under $500k that’s near good schools.” The AI gets the subtleties and serves up tailored results. This technology also enhances the agent tools. Through the “Zillow Pro” suite, AI analyses user habits to provide agents with “smart lists” and recommended actions. If a buyer keeps eyeing a listing or shares it with someone, the AI pings the agent to follow up, cranking up how well leads turn into deals.

What’s next for Zillow?

As Zillow looks toward 2030, its vision extends beyond profits to stewardship of the housing ecosystem. Through its Super App, the company wields technology for social good, exemplified by the Housing Connector partnership. Since 2019, this initiative has housed over 10,000 homeless individuals by linking case managers with flexible landlords, turning Zillow’s database into a lifeline. Plans aim for 30,000 more placements, proving data can solve systemic crises.

By 2030, the Super App may become the “One-Click Home,” integrating title, escrow, and insurance for seamless transactions, targeting 45% EBITDA margins.

The efficiencies of PropTech are saving tens of thousands of dollars for families at a time when housing prices are near inaccessible for most Americans. Zillow is bringing the American Dream, of which owning one’s own home is a major symbol, closer to every family. It will be a steady and slow process, with Wacksman proclaiming, “Affordability conditions are projected to improve… but it should be a gradual recovery and a year of ‘small wins’.”

In triumph, Zillow has overcome its iBuying woes, forging resilient software and partnerships. Spanning from the 2006 server crashes to the AI immersion of 2025, it empowers consumers, emerging as the optimistic, accessible, and enduring cornerstone of the digital infrastructure for the American Dream.

The post Zillow rewrites the American Dream appeared first on International Finance.

The narrative is a deliberate distortion designed to evade moral responsibility and commit grave political wrongdoing. Canada, a prosperous nation, is abandoning its most vulnerable citizens, leading to soaring poverty and starving children. This catastrophe is wrongly labelled a temporary economic headwind, not a policy failure. We must immediately reject this sanitised view.

The evidence is overwhelming and utterly damning. Canada’s official poverty rate, measured by the Market Basket Measure (MBM), is expected to have climbed significantly to 10.2% in 2023, reversing years of hard-won progress and signalling a structural breaking point.

This distressing climb follows a staggering 21.8% jump in the poverty rate just from 2021 to 2022, confirming that the economic floor supporting low-income Canadians is fragile, inadequate, and wholly dependent on temporary governmental goodwill, which is now receding.

Look around and watch the financial anxiety spread like a contagion through every province. One in six Canadian households now experiences food insecurity, representing a crushing 15.6% prevalence in 2022.

This rate of insecurity closely tracks peak inflation and the soaring costs of necessities like shelter and transportation, confirming the economic origins of hunger. When Food Banks Canada assesses the country’s performance, it returns a dismal D grade for meeting food security needs and a failing grade for food insecurity overall. This is not an evaluation of charitable success, but an indictment of a state that failed its most basic duty, which is to ensure its citizens do not go hungry.

The moral obscenity is most acute when we count the children. 2.5 million children in the ten provinces are now growing up in food-insecure households in 2024, representing a third of all Canadian children, condemned to the stress and lifelong stigma of going without because their government prioritised fiscal inertia over feeding its young.

The rapid collapse in basic material well-being, evidenced by the increase from 2.1 million children in 2023, shows economic growth is failing to benefit everyone, resulting in stark, widening inequality.

These failures are most clearly demonstrated when examining the key indicators of structural neglect, showing a distinct reversal of progress immediately following the temporary relief offered during the pandemic years.

How Ottawa hurt workers

The structural origins of this current catastrophe can be traced back to the deliberate economic restructuring that began decades ago, a political project rooted in the neoliberal dogma that crushed the manufacturing sector and enshrined labour precarity as the new normal, ensuring that wages would stagnate while the cost of living exploded.

We see this criminal neglect in the data on wages. Overall median household income increased by a paltry 14.6% over 41 years between 1976 and 2017 in constant dollars. This near-stagnation of pay, spanning generations, confirms that the rewards of national productivity have been systematically diverted away from the workers who generate them.

Income inequality has persisted at or near record highs over the past decade. It has been engineered through policy choices that systematically weakened collective bargaining power.

When policy analysts discuss precarious employment, they are talking about a quantifiable lack of security, low wages, income volatility, and little opportunity for career advancement. This is the changing nature of work dictated by economic policy, a deliberate erosion of worker protections.

Worse still, the Canadian state has actively constructed a system of legal exploitation through its Temporary Foreign Worker Programme, a scheme that privileges corporate access to cheap labour over the human rights of migrants.

The policy shift favouring temporary migration over permanent residency has created a vast, vulnerable underclass of workers who are denied access to federally funded settlement services and are often bound to single employers, subjecting them to abuse and limiting their mobility. The absence of systematic monitoring to ensure their rights are protected further cements their precarious status, making them highly vulnerable to mistreatment.

This structure is marketed as necessary for economic efficiency, but it functions as a wage suppressor, ensuring that low-wage firms retain talent without having to offer competitive wages or working conditions.

The expansion of the TFWP, as experts have shown, actively contributes to maintaining wider discrepancies in regional unemployment rates than would otherwise exist, preventing the structural adjustments necessary to raise wages for all low-income Canadians.

The system is creating a two-tier economy, which is precarious by design and ensuring that those who harvest our food and staff our services remain perpetually marginal.

The long-term wage stagnation, when directly contrasted with the explosive growth in housing prices, a phenomenon where home prices in major markets rose by as much as 460% over three decades, fundamentally proves that political decisions prioritised capital accumulation and speculative wealth over worker compensation, a moral betrayal that doomed millions to financial strain even while holding down jobs.

How US Power crippled Canada

Being a neighbour to the world’s richest country should be a blessing, at least on paper. But Canadians have, until very recently, held deep fear of being a satellite, or vassal state to the great American hegemon. The anxiety was so terrible that in 1957, the “Gordon Commission” rang the alarm bells about the US economic takeover. By the early 1960s, the US interests controlled roughly 60% of Canada’s manufacturing and 70% of its oil and gas.

It’s important to note that just 15 years prior, Great Britain was Canada’s number one customer. World War II had wrecked Britain, and the English population could no longer buy Canadian goods. The Arctic giant had come out of the Great War without any casualties to citizens or factories, but was losing to the economic imperialism of its exceptional neighbour. In 1955, Canada had the highest standard of living in the world. The US slowly and steadily captured the Canadian market. And Canadians embraced protectionism as a policy, much like how the US under Trump operates today. American companies had to manufacture in Canada if they had to sell in Canada. This made American goods in Canada slightly more expensive than in America, but it also meant Canadians had ownership, jobs and a robust economy.

All this came to an end in the late 60s when the “Clarence Decatur Howe” Strategy came into being under the Canadian Minister of Trade (C.D. Howe). He aggressively courted American investment. His view was, “Who cares if they own it, as long as the jobs are here?” This policy built modern Canada, but laid the foundation for the dependency that exists today.

In 1965, Canada took the first step towards the forfeiture of its economic servitude. A move that would enrich Canada temporarily at the expense of the future of working-class Canadians and children. The Auto Pact (1965) destroyed Canada’s automobile industry. Many domestic industries went bust and America brought its branch plants into Canada. Ottawa became an assembly line with no access to real R&D or innovation. Yet Canadians were happy to have jobs.

In 1989, a comprehensive free trade agreement was signed that included all sectors of the economy, not just automobiles. This led to factories shutting down and relocating to the United States, and later to Mexico. As a result, there was widespread unemployment, and poverty levels rose significantly. Social spending was also reduced, causing the standard of living to decline. This marked the beginning of the decline of the Canadian dream, sacrificed for the benefit of American businesses and facilitated by Canadian politicians working on behalf of American lobbyists.

Today, an astonishing 77% of Canada’s exports are sent to the United States. This dependency gives the US considerable leverage; if America alters its trade policies—such as imposing 10% tariffs on aluminium or enforcing “Buy American” provisions—the Canadian economy feels the impact. The Canadian people took a bad deal, and to top it all off, the Trudeau government started a massive migration campaign to protect the housing bubble. But Canada’s poor and working class are the ones who suffer at every turn. From a nation with the highest living standards to economic indenture, Canada has come a long way and might want to rethink its policies and allies.

The decades-long policy crime

Of all the policy decisions in Canadian history, none more clearly embodies political malice than the federal government’s calculated withdrawal from social housing in the mid-1990s. More than any other decision, it entrenched the structural divide between those who own property and those condemned to struggle without it.

The evidence is surgical in its precision. The federal government froze social housing investments in 1993, ended its co-operative housing programme in its 1992 budget, and by 1995, it ceased funding new affordable housing development entirely, ending a 50-year commitment to shelter the most vulnerable. This act of institutional cruelty was immediately followed by the devolution of existing social housing administration to provincial and municipal governments in 1999.

This devolution coincided with the replacement of the “Canada Assistance Plan”, which had provided open-ended, 50-50 cost-sharing for social programmes, with the fixed, inadequate block grants of the Canada Health and Social Transfer. This manoeuvre effectively starved the social housing sector of resources, ensuring that between 1995 and 2002 almost no new non-profit units were created, a historical failure that created the decades-long supply void and the affordability crisis we now face.

The gap created by the government’s withdrawal was eagerly filled by financial speculators, transforming housing from a fundamental human right into the primary means of wealth generation for the middle and upper classes. Policies that supported the securitisation of mortgages fuelled the financialization of the housing sector, completely disconnecting increases in housing prices from economic fundamentals and income levels.

The result is that in major urban centres like the Greater Toronto Area, home prices jumped over 436% between 1994 and 2024, while household incomes climbed only about 34.6% over the same period.

The tragic consequence of this policy crime is visible on every street corner across the country. Over 10% of Canadian households, equating to 1.5 million individuals, are currently in ‘core housing need,’ and Canada is experiencing the proliferation of unstructured encampments in large, medium, and smaller cities.

When vulnerable people are discharged from systems like hospitals, corrections facilities, or mental health facilities and find no exit housing, they are forced directly into homelessness, a system failure directly attributable to the decades-old policy of gutting affordable housing programmes.

This lack of non-profit and cooperative housing supply is a systemic factor, compounded by high inflation and rising interest rates, demonstrating that the market cannot be relied upon to solve the crisis created by the state’s retreat.

And let us not forget the green blunder. As per policy think tank Fraser Institute, the previous Justin Trudeau government introduced a series of tax measures, spending initiatives, and regulations to actively constrain the traditional energy sector while promoting what the administration termed the “green” economy. However, the results were not encouraging.

Ottawa introduced regulations to make it harder to build traditional energy projects, banned tankers carrying Canadian oil from the northwest coast of British Columbia, proposed an emissions cap on the oil and gas sector, cancelled pipeline developments, mandated almost all new vehicles sold in Canada to be zero-emission by 2035, imposed new homebuilding regulations for energy efficiency, changed fuel standards, and the list goes on and on.

“Despite the mountain of federal spending and regulations, which were augmented by additional spending and regulations by various provincial governments, the Canadian economy has not been transformed over the last decade, but we have suffered marked economic costs. Consider the share of the total economy in 2014 linked with the ‘green sector,’ a term used by Statistics Canada in its measurement of economic output, was 3.1%. In 2023, the green economy represented 3.6% of the Canadian economy, not even a full one-percentage point increase despite the spending and regulating,” the Fraser Institute remarked.

Ottawa’s initiatives failed to deliver the promised green jobs. From 2014 to 2023, only 68,000 jobs were created in the entire green sector, which now represents less than 2% of total employment. Canada’s economic performance cratered in line with this new approach to economic growth. Rather than delivering the promised prosperity, it delivered economic stagnation.

According to the Canadian living standards (measured by per-person GDP), lifestyle prosperity was recorded on the lower side as of Q2 2025 compared to six years ago. In other words, Canadians are poorer today than they were six years ago. In contrast, the United States’ per-person GDP grew by 11.0% during the same period.

Cruel math of the safety net

The sheer, calculated cruelty of Canada’s current social safety net is evident in its outcomes. The system is fragmented, difficult to access, inefficient, outdated, inadequate, and is a bureaucratic maze meant to traumatise and deter those who seek aid.

The defining failure of this system is its persistence in keeping people in poverty. An annual report shows that 98% of household types receiving social assistance in Canada are below the country’s Official Poverty Line.

Furthermore, 73% of these households are trapped in deep poverty, defined as having less than 75% of the poverty threshold. This is clear evidence that social assistance is quite literally designed to be a poverty trap, normalising destitution rather than facilitating escape.

This calculated inadequacy is exacerbated by rapid economic erosion, particularly due to high inflation. Between 2023 and 2024, more than a third of welfare recipients, 36% of tracked households, saw their total incomes increase at a rate below inflation, meaning that in real dollars, they are becoming poorer every year, actively losing ground against the rising cost of living.

This real income decline occurred despite some provinces attempting to offer one-time cost-of-living supports, demonstrating that the underlying provincial social assistance benefit rates are simply too low and frequently stagnant. When provinces like Ontario fail to adjust basic social assistance benefits, it is a conscious decision to normalise destitution and push vulnerable citizens deeper into the deprivation abyss.

This systemic cruelty falls hardest on specific groups. The poverty rate among people with disabilities is drastically high, solely because the benefits provided are fundamentally detached from the actual, significantly higher costs of living with a disability. The increasing reliance on the “Ontario Disability Support Programme,” as shown in Ontario data, reflects the reality that people with disabilities are being failed by both the labour market and an inadequate social net, leading to their over-representation in the poverty statistics.

For new parents, the mandated drop in income resulting from “Employment Insurance” benefits during maternity and parental leave creates significant financial stress precisely when costs are highest, a structural contradiction that pushes middle-class families toward financial instability.

Furthermore, Canada remains the only G7 nation without a comprehensive national school food programme, ignoring the overwhelming evidence that such programmes are highly successful drivers of improved health, education, and economic growth internationally. International experience, notably programmes like the United States’ “National School Lunch Programme,” shows that school meals yield a massive return on investment. Yet Canadian policymakers prioritise corporate tax breaks and speculative wealth over ensuring that millions of children eat nutritious food. This is a policy of moral bankruptcy.

And what of the medical costs? The financial burden of necessary prescription drugs is a known structural driver of poverty, yet Canada maintains significant gaps in coverage, refusing to implement a national pharmacare plan that works like Medicare. This deliberate policy decision forces low-income families and workers to choose between medicine and food, increasing health disparities and driving up overall healthcare costs unnecessarily. The political resistance is rooted in fears over escalating costs, yet a national plan would save Canadian families money while expanding access.

Indictment of a nation

From the destruction of stable manufacturing jobs under free trade to the calculated withdrawal of social housing funding in the 1990s, from the institutionalisation of precarious migrant labour to the maintenance of a welfare system designed to keep people in deep poverty, every data point confirms this reality. The combination of various crises has increased the desperation of the population, resulting from these compounded policy failures.

The evidence presented by national bodies and academic experts is indisputable. The “Market Basket Measure” tells us that the working poor cannot afford a modest, basic standard of living. Statistics Canada confirms that food insecurity tracks peak inflation, and human rights advocates warn that the refusal to make the right to food justiciable is the ultimate mechanism of governmental evasion.

The “Poverty Reduction Strategy”, launched in 2018, while ambitious in its targets, has stalled dramatically, showing that good intentions without enforceable rights and structural economic correction are merely political rhetoric.

Canada must choose immediately between two futures, one where we continue this shameful path of structural neglect, managing poverty through ineffective charity and political platitudes, and one where we implement a rights-based, income-guaranteed system that recognises the dignity and inherent worth of every person.

The post The collapse of Canada’s promise appeared first on International Finance.

As one of Europe’s leading digital banks, Bunq hoped for quick approval when it applied for a US banking licence in 2023. One year later, the Amsterdam-based fintech withdrew that application due to a misalignment between American and Dutch regulators. Now Bunq is trying a different route. In April 2025, it filed for a US broker-dealer licence, which would allow its American users to invest in stocks, mutual funds, and ETFs.

This two-step approach is only the first move in an ambitious American adventure, a Bunq spokesperson says, adding that the company will “start by making investing effortless and fully transparent, with no hidden fees.” It’s possibly a jab at some US competitors’ less transparent practices.

Prioritising growth above all else

Bunq is not the only European digital bank casting eyes across the Atlantic. UK-based neobanking leaders Revolut and Monzo have also been plotting entry into the US market, riding a wave of renewed investor interest following a post-pandemic fintech funding crunch.

The strategy is a no-brainer for these firms, given slowing customer acquisition in Europe after a decade of breakneck growth and intensifying competition that has compressed margins. After years of explosive expansion in their home markets, growth at home has cooled.

A sense of urgency now permeates the fintech sector as it matures, and it’s expected that only a few digital banks (also known as neobanks) will ultimately dominate globally. Many players have spent years in the red chasing scale, but now some are finally in the black. For example, 2024 was Bunq’s second consecutive year of profitability, reporting €85.3 million net profit (up 65% from 2023’s €51.6 million).

Bunq achieved this feat by capitalising on higher interest rates (earning yields on customer deposits) and maintaining lean operations. It’s a trend mirrored by peers like Germany’s N26 and the United Kingdom-based Monzo, which have also edged closer to breakeven as investor pressure to show viable business models mounts.

One persistent problem for neobanks is that they lag far behind traditional incumbents in the quintessential banking business, i.e., lending. These fintech upstarts have relatively small loan books, so they generate far less revenue from credit products than established banks.

Instead, much of their income comes from sources like interchange fees on card payments, subscription fees for premium accounts, and other transactional charges. This model worked during growth phases, but as expansion slows, the limitations become clear, especially since interchange fees in Europe are capped at low levels (around 0.3–0.4% of a transaction), unlike in the United States, where they average closer to 2%. In other words, European neobanks have been operating with thinner margins on payments and must convince investors they can find new revenue streams.

Compounding these business challenges, funding conditions have tightened, and regulators have toughened up in Europe, creating a more hostile environment for fintechs. Venture capital investment in European fintech plunged in 2023 (falling about 65%, from $24 billion in 2022 to just $8.4 billion in 2023), leaving many startups strapped for cash and under pressure to become self-sustaining.

Navigating the regulatory maze

Obtaining a full banking licence in the US requires approval from multiple authorities, as well as securing federal deposit insurance and meeting strict capital requirements. In practice, a foreign fintech that wants to operate nationally as a bank might need a US banking charter that can be federal (through the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency) or state-by-state. This might include obtaining FDIC (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation) deposit insurance to protect customers’ deposits, securing a state money transmitter licence, and demonstrating sufficient funding and compliance.

This multi-layered regime creates a regulatory minefield for newcomers. It’s no wonder that rising American economic nationalism adds an extra barrier, warns Hatami, “Current instability in engagement with foreign providers is possibly making the rollout of a European fintech in the US problematic.” In short, even if laws are becoming more fintech-friendly in theory, foreign applicants may face subtle protectionist scepticism.

Dealing with the American payment infrastructure can also be tricky for entrants accustomed to Europe’s more modern systems. In Europe, neobanks benefit from near-instant interbank payment networks (such as SEPA Instant) that let customers move money seamlessly 24/7.

By contrast, US banks have been slower to adopt real-time payments, and the Federal Reserve’s new FedNow instant payment system launched in mid-2023; the decades-old reliance on paper cheques persists.

European fintech executives who view the United States as one single market often struggle, notes Dave Glaser, CEO of US payments firm Dwolla. Indeed, past attempts by European neobanks to crack the United States have proved traumatic. Monzo withdrew its US banking licence application in 2021 after regulators signalled that approval was unlikely.

Berlin-based neobank N26 also pulled the plug on its US operations in 2021, having failed to gain traction, in part because it never managed to offer its lucrative premium accounts or bring its full feature set stateside.

Revolut, meanwhile, has been stuck in regulatory limbo; a long delay in obtaining a British banking licence made pursuing a US banking licence impractical until recently. Without their own American banking charters, these digital banks have been unable to offer credit products or hold customer deposits directly, limiting their revenue opportunities in America.

“Previous attempts faltered due to underestimating the complexity of US regulation, overestimating brand pull, and launching without a compelling local value proposition,” observes David Donovan, head of financial services for North America at consulting firm Publicis Sapient.

For fintechs that cannot obtain their own banking charter, the shortcut into the market is partnering with an American bank, a model known as Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) or using a sponsor bank. Monzo, for example, has partnered with Ohio-based Sutton Bank to hold American customer deposits, allowing Monzo to offer accounts without a licence of its own.

Similarly, smaller British fintech Cleo (which provides a personal finance chatbot) entered the United States by teaming up with community banks (Thread Bank and WebBank) and now serves over seven million customers in North America. These arrangements let fintechs piggyback on a licensed bank’s infrastructure.

However, the compromise is that the partner bank typically retains a slice of the interchange fees and imposes its own compliance requirements. Given that interchange fees on the American credit and debit cards are significantly higher than in Europe, those fees are a major revenue source, and splitting them “eats into your margins,” notes Stephen Greer, a banking industry consultant at SAS.

Recent events have also highlighted the risks of the partnership route. In early 2024, the American fintech world was rocked by the collapse of Synapse, a once-promising BaaS (Backend as a Service) provider that sat in the middle between fintech apps and their partner banks.

Synapse’s “gross mismanagement” of customer funds led to around $85 million going missing and the firm filing for bankruptcy. One of Synapse’s key partner institutions, Evolve Bank & Trust, became embroiled in the fiasco as customers of various fintech apps lost access to their deposits. Regulators have since intensified scrutiny of these bank-fintech partnerships.

The US Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the FDIC have even solicited public input on tightening oversight of BaaS arrangements, and the FDIC proposed new rules requiring daily reconciliation of funds between tech firms and banks to prevent another Synapse-style incident. The lesson for ambitious neobanks: hitching your American expansion to a partner bank can carry significant compliance and reputation hazards if that partner or an intermediary mismanages funds.

Given these constraints, more ambitious European neobanks have decided that going it alone with a full licence is a bet worth taking, despite the up-front pain. Revolut, for instance, still offers its cards and accounts in the US via a partner (Missouri-based Lead Bank) and holds a US broker-dealer licence, but it has made clear it is pursuing its own US banking licence. Bunq also views the broker-dealer move as a prelude to eventually launching a fully licensed US bank of its own.

“The best strategy for a European fintech is to create a US entity and nurture this by tapping into the US investor markets, from venture capital all the way to IPO. And to play down its European roots as far as possible,” Hatami advises.

In other words, treat the US expansion almost like founding a new company, build a dedicated local team and product, raise money from American investors who understand the market, and don’t lean too heavily on your European brand if it doesn’t resonate locally. The subtext is that American consumers (and regulators) might be more receptive if a service feels homegrown rather than an import.

Cut-throat competition in the USA

Even with a charter in hand and funding secured, European neobanks will land in a fiercely competitive arena. The US retail banking market is crowded with over 4,000 institutions, from giants like Chase and Bank of America to regional banks, credit unions, and community banks, all fiercely guarding their customer bases.

New entrants must be prepared for slower growth and higher customer acquisition costs than they faced in the relatively consolidated markets of Western Europe. US fintech darlings like Venmo, SoFi, Zelle, and Chime have set a high bar with massive marketing budgets and ubiquitous branding.

On the other hand, the sheer size and diversity of the US market mean new entrants can aim for niche segments that are still large in absolute terms. Unlike in smaller European countries, in the United States, a niche play can yield millions of customers. European neobanks can try to differentiate by offering one-stop, digital-first banking solutions to Americans who are hungry for modern user experiences.

This might include slick apps that combine checking, savings, investing tools, real-time spending analytics, budgeting features, and more under one roof, something many US legacy banks have struggled to deliver.

Publicis Sapient’s Donovan said, “Many US fintechs are built on banking-as-a-service models that limit control and innovation. European firms, having built more of their stack in-house, can differentiate on both cost and customisation.”

In other words, a neobank that owns its own tech and platform can potentially out-innovate competitors who rely on white-label banking providers. For example, a European entrant might roll out features Americans aren’t used to seeing from their bank, think instant international transfers with low fees, or multi-currency accounts that update exchange rates in real time.

One obvious opportunity area is remittances and cross-border banking, given the large population of immigrants and expats in the United States. Roughly 20 million US residents are foreign-born Americans from countries in Europe, Africa, and elsewhere. These globally mobile customers often face steep fees and frustration when sending money abroad or managing finances across borders. A case in point is the success of Wise (formerly TransferWise), a London-based platform that has gained a strong US following by offering international money transfers with transparent fees and exchange rates.

“Wise addresses international money movement with a clarity and fee structure that is still uncommon in the US,” Hatami notes.

Bunq, for its part, explicitly says it is targeting digital nomads and expats. The company points out that “nearly five million European expats, entrepreneurs, and professionals” live in the US and often struggle with banking bureaucracy.

Those users are frustrated by traditional banks that aren’t set up for cross-border life. Bunq’s hope is that its experience serving such customers in Europe (with features like travel accounts and easy international transfers) will resonate strongly with this segment in America.

However, cultural differences in consumer expectations also come into play. American customers tend to be far more credit-focused than Europeans. Decades of aggressive credit card marketing have conditioned US consumers to expect rich rewards programmes (cashback, airline miles, points, etc.), sign-up bonuses, and easy credit.

New entrants who only offer debit cards and basic accounts might find it hard to lure customers away from incumbent banks or specialist credit card issuers unless they, too, dangle attractive perks that can be expensive to provide.

Additionally, Americans exhibit a certain stubborn loyalty to traditional banks. Despite the prevalence of fintech options, most consumers are not itching to switch their primary bank. A recent survey by Phoenix Synergistics found that 81% of US consumers considered themselves “loyal” to their main financial institution. Lerner from Javelin agrees, “Americans are largely satisfied with their financial institutions. They are not eager to switch banking relationships.”

According to Javelin’s research, roughly three-quarters of consumers say they are unlikely to move their primary account to a new provider.

This inertia indicates that a foreign neobank requires a compelling proposition or significant incentive to encourage Americans to give it a try. It might require offering significantly better interest rates, zero fees, or unique products to entice customers to overcome the hassle of switching, especially when many Americans have multiple products like direct deposits, bill pays, and maybe a safe deposit box tied to their current bank.

Some industry insiders believe that European neobanks focusing exclusively on direct-to-consumer services face significant challenges in the US due to high customer acquisition costs and established brand loyalties.

“Without a pivot to some differentiated credit product, prepaid and debit offerings often don’t generate enough revenue to warrant those costs,” notes Kevin Fox, chief revenue officer at Thredd, a UK payments processor that expanded to the United States and has helped several neobanks scale internationally.

Fox suggests that fintechs stand a better chance if they expand into business services (B2B) or partner more closely with businesses. For example, some challengers have found success offering expense management cards and software to small companies, or white-labelling their tech to employers and other brands.

These business customers can be more lucrative and cheaper to sign up than millions of individual consumers. Indeed, several European fintech “unicorns” have been extending into SME banking or payments (even Revolut has rolled out business accounts and tools for companies). This B2B focus could provide a beachhead in the United States where pure retail banking might be hard to crack.

Money lies in the stock market

Beyond immediate revenues, a major prize that comes with a US expansion is the possibility of a public listing on a US stock exchange. New York’s capital markets remain the deepest in the world, and IPOs in the US tend to achieve higher valuations and attract a bigger pool of investors than those in Europe.

For Europe’s most valuable fintechs, a US footprint makes it more plausible to court American investors and eventually float on the Nasdaq or NYSE. Both Revolut and Monzo, for instance, are widely expected to go public by the end of the decade, and their leaders have hinted at preferring a US listing over a London one.

Revolut’s CEO, Nik Storonsky, has even publicly complained about the UK’s business climate and suggested the company might list in the US if conditions in London don’t improve.

Such decisions have political undercurrents: European governments are eager to have their “unicorn” fintech champions list at home, while founders and early investors often lean toward the higher liquidity and valuations available in New York.

“Revolut was recently granted a UK banking licence, probably in part because of a promise to list in London, not in the US. Most companies want to list on Nasdaq or the NYSE, raise a ton of money, and cash out. But governments want to keep their unicorns close to home,” Azizov observes.

He adds that if a European fintech truly wants to win in the US market, “they will need to go all in, full teams, full infrastructure, full commitment. They may even need to move their HQ.” In other words, dabbling in the US with a small satellite office won’t cut it if the goal is to become a global player, as it requires a fundamental shift to treat the US as core to the company’s identity.

The holy grail for digital banks is proving that their tech-first, product-led model can generate consistent profits even in the world’s most competitive and entrenched banking market. If a European neobank can crack that code in the US, achieving American-scale profitability while keeping true to its innovative roots, it would validate the entire fintech disruption playbook. But that remains a big “if.” Until then, Europe’s neobanks will continue eyeing American wallets, cautiously optimistic that they can bring something new to the land of red, white, and plenty of green.

The post Neobanks aim to conquer America appeared first on International Finance.

Under the GENIUS Act’s framework, stablecoin issuers must play by strict rules designed to safeguard users and the broader financial system.

Only regulated institutions can issue US dollar stablecoins. This means insured depository institutions (banks, credit unions, and their subsidiaries) or other non-bank firms that secure Federal Reserve approval and demonstrate compliance capabilities. In other words, no fly-by-night startups, because issuers must have serious oversight.

Every stablecoin must be backed 1:1 by high-quality liquid assets. Issuers are required to hold an equivalent dollar in reserve (cash, US Treasury bills, repurchase agreements, or other low-risk assets) for each token in circulation. They must also report their reserve holdings and undergo regular audits by accredited accounting firms, ensuring the promised peg isn’t a mere mirage.

All stablecoin issuers fall under “Bank Secrecy Act” obligations, meaning robust anti-money laundering (AML) and know-your-customer (KYC) programmes are mandatory. This brings stablecoins in line with traditional financial norms, aiming to prevent illicit use and bolster consumer protection.

Opening Door To A Digital Dollar Economy

The GENIUS Act’s passage marks a new era for stablecoins and the broader crypto sector. For the first time, there are clear federal guidelines acknowledging these digital dollars as legitimate financial instruments.

Stablecoins, which maintain a constant value (typically 1:1 with the dollar), have already exploded in use in recent years, primarily as grease in the wheels of crypto trading. Traders use them to hop in and out of volatile cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ether. Now, with official rules in place, stablecoins are poised to move from trading desks to everyday wallets.

Experts say this law “could pave the way for [stablecoins] to become an everyday way to make payments and move money” in the real economy. The allure is clear because transactions in stablecoins settle in seconds, 24/7, instead of days.

Sending money via traditional bank networks can take several business days, and even longer for international wires, but a stablecoin payment can zip across the world almost instantly, at any hour.

Fees can be pennies, not the hefty charges typical of cross-border bank transfers. For consumers and businesses, that means faster e-commerce checkouts, cheaper remittances to family overseas, and the ability to transfer funds without banking delays.

No wonder a slate of companies is now exploring how stablecoins might fit into their strategies. Imagine checking out online and opting to pay with a Walmart or Amazon stablecoin, an idea those retail giants have reportedly considered in recent months. Such a token could give customers a seamless digital payment method and potentially power loyalty rewards or other perks.

Walmart and Amazon, among others, see the promise of instant, low-cost payments to improve user experience, though neither has publicly detailed plans yet. On the corporate side, stablecoins could also revolutionise business treasury operations. A multinational could use stablecoins internally to shuffle funds between international subsidiaries in real time, avoiding slow correspondent banking networks. In sum, stablecoins offer the internet’s speed in finance, and the GENIUS Act provides the green light for companies to harness that.

A banner for Bullish, a crypto exchange operator, was displayed on the New York Stock Exchange floor during its IPO in August 2025. Bullish’s public debut amid new US crypto regulations highlights growing mainstream confidence in the sector.

The optimism extends to the broader crypto market as well. Bullish, a cryptocurrency exchange backed by investor Peter Thiel, made headlines by doubling in value in its NYSE debut this August, reaching a staggering USD 13.2 billion valuation. Its stock launch, one of the first major US listings of a crypto exchange, underscored rising investor confidence in the sector’s future under clearer regulations.

In fact, Bullish announced its plans to convert a significant chunk of its IPO proceeds into stablecoins, signalling just how bullish (no pun intended) it is on this segment of crypto. The company noted that stablecoin usage has boomed since the GENIUS Act was signed, thanks to the new regulatory regime for these dollar-pegged tokens.

To market watchers, moves like this suggest that Washington’s crypto-friendly shift, described by Reuters as “a string of regulatory wins under a pro-crypto White House,” is encouraging mainstream adoption and investment.

Even beyond Bullish, several US financial institutions (from exchange Gemini to asset manager Grayscale) are eyeing public listings, emboldened by the sense that the crypto industry is stepping out of legal limbo and into the regulated mainstream.

Perhaps the strongest sign of stablecoins’ coming of age is the lineup of heavyweight companies now preparing to launch their own dollar-backed coins. Reuters reported that “financial companies from Bank of America to Fiserv are preparing to launch their own dollar-backed crypto tokens” in the wake of the GENIUS Act.

This range spans traditional Wall Street titans (like Bank of America, the second-largest U.S. bank) to fintech service providers (Fiserv, a Fortune 500 payments and tech company), which shows that interest in stablecoins is broad-based across financial services.

Tricky Considerations

The GENIUS Act may open new doors for stablecoins, but experts warn that implementation involves “numerous tricky considerations” spanning strategy, compliance, and technology. Firms must first clarify purpose, which means deciding whether to issue customer-facing coins for loyalty and payments or internal tokens for cross-border settlements, since intended use shapes every decision.

Then comes the build-versus-partner dilemma, because launching an in-house stablecoin offers control and branding but requires massive technical, regulatory, and governance investment, while partnering with issuers like Circle provides speed and credibility. Compliance is another major hurdle, with non-bank firms needing to adopt bank-level KYC, AML, and reporting systems, while banks face capital treatment questions that could affect profitability.

Technology choices add complexity, as public blockchains like Ethereum offer scale and accessibility but less control, while private ledgers ensure governance but may lack resilience and interoperability.

In addition, regulatory uncertainty remains, as agencies like the OCC and Treasury must still draft detailed rules, meaning stablecoin adoption will phase in gradually. Companies face a long list of strategic, technical, and financial hurdles before the GENIUS Act’s promise can be fully realised.

The post The GENIUS Act: All you need to know about America’s first ‘Stablecoin Law’ appeared first on International Finance.

Before each journey, he cleans both and loads only the information he will need. Lackey has even gone so far as to maintain separate travel sets for each country to forensically examine the devices upon his return home and look for indications of manipulation.

According to Lackey, the United States may also warrant a paranoid approach to travel. This applies not only to Americans like him but also to anyone with a foreign passport who might be subject to the increasingly harsh and unpredictable scrutiny of the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

“All of this applies to America more than it has in the past. If I thought I were likely to be a targeted person, I would go through this same level of protection,” Lackey stated.

The number of foreign visitors to the United States who are denied entrance and sent back to their original destinations or detained appears to have increased since the beginning of the second Trump administration. When trying to enter the United States, citizens from Germany, the United Kingdom, and France have all reported being delayed, sometimes for weeks, or denied admission.

Several of these individuals claim to be legal residents with Green Cards. According to the country’s education minister, a French scientist was refused admission after immigration officers looked through his phone and discovered chats in which “he expressed a personal opinion on the Donald Trump administration’s research policy.”

Officials in Germany and Britain have revised their travel advice in response to the more stringent enforcement of visa and travel permit laws; Britain has warned that the rules are applied “strictly.”

If the Trump administration moves forward with its plan to implement a new “travel ban” on over 40 countries, that de facto border crackdown is expected to become much more explicit. The ban would reportedly completely bar entry from at least 10 countries and subject visitors from another five to additional scrutiny and automatic interviews at the border. The policy’s implementation would determine the status of another 26 nations, placing them in a third group.

Given all these developments, it appears that US borders will soon become less welcoming to visitors and even to Americans returning from outside. Additionally, there will undoubtedly be aggressive attempts to monitor travellers’ electronic devices in conjunction with these new border enforcement procedures. This poses a threat to digital privacy and free expression for foreigners and US citizens.

And warning signs are already emerging. In May 2025, workers building an apartment complex near the Florida State University campus were detained by agents from the US Homeland Security, the US Marshals Service, and the Florida Highway Patrol. After entering a construction site in Tallahassee, federal and state officials asked workers for identification and separated them into two categories. After that, some were allowed to go, while others were handcuffed and led onto white buses with metal-covered windows to be transported away from the worksite, escorted by the Highway Patrol.

The Trump supporters were not spared either. In Nashville, the restaurant named “Kid Rock’s,” owned by the conservative restaurateur Steve Smith, where undocumented kitchen staff were asked to go home to avoid rumoured immigration raids. The restaurant, licensed by the right-wing musician Kid Rock, who has also become one of the US president’s highest-profile backers, reportedly found itself struggling to serve post-concert crowds on one Saturday night after the order from managers instructing employees without legal status to leave.

“Around 9.30 pm on Saturday, our manager came back and told anyone without legal status to go home. Events at the Ryman, Ascend, and the Savannah Bananas’ baseball game all let out, and it was crazy busy. But there was no one in the kitchen to cook the food,” an anonymous employee narrated the ordeal to the Nashville Scene.

An aggressive immigration sweep began on 3rd May, when state troopers and unmarked ICE vehicles significantly increased traffic stops throughout South Nashville. The operation has resulted in at least 196 arrests, including 101 individuals with no criminal history, according to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) press release. While Trump and the DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, have publicly celebrated “accelerated deportations” nationwide, these actions have created panic among legal residents as well.

Nathan Wessler, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said, “We’re witnessing incredibly unsettling instances of retaliatory action based on people’s speech and political opinions. People of all political persuasions—as well as those with various citizenship and immigration statuses—should be especially concerned when that is coupled with extremely broad authority to search through the contents of our phones and laptops, looking at what we have written and what others have sent us.”

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has long regarded US borders and airports as a Fourth Amendment loophole, granting them broad authority to detain and inspect travellers’ devices. With little official justification or supervision, the agency has long taken advantage of that chance to detain border-crossers based on the smallest suspicion and seek access to their phones and computers.

Citizens are not immune at all. Agents have confiscated the gadgets of CBP detainees, including journalists, filmmakers, and security experts.

The following tips from legal and security professionals have been compiled to assist in protecting your digital privacy when travelling across US borders, as those incursions become more frequent and forceful under the second Trump administration.

Call home

If you suspect you may be stopped or interrogated at the border, notify a lawyer or a loved one who can be contacted before crossing customs.

Then, get in touch with them again after you exit. You may not have access to your devices or other means of communication while in custody. Additionally, you’ll want legal counsel and an advocate for your release in the worst-case event of a protracted imprisonment.

Lock down devices

Don’t make it simple for customs officers to steal your electronics. Select a secure passcode and encrypt your hard drive using programmes like Apple’s FileVault, BitLocker, or VeraCrypt. Create a secure PIN on your phone.

The most effective way to secure your phone is to use a hard-to-crack alphanumeric code instead of biometrics or a four-digit PIN. Turn off “Allow Siri When Locked” from the Siri menu in Settings on an iPhone to prevent Siri from appearing on the lock screen.

Don’t forget to switch off your electronics before going through customs. Hard-drive encryption solutions only provide complete safety when a machine is completely shut down. An iPhone is the safest when it’s off because Face ID requires a PIN instead of a face scan when it initially boots up, eliminating any doubt about whether border officials may force you to unlock the device using your biometrics.

You can now keep sensitive apps separate from other apps on your phone by putting them in a different folder and adding an extra degree of verification. Apple and Google have made this feature possible in recent years. Private spaces on Android may be enabled through the security and privacy settings menu, and on iOS, you can choose to hide an app by long-tapping on it.

Lastly, Wessler advises visitors to make sure they update the operating systems on their phones and laptops before entering the country. This is because, in certain situations, CBP might utilise programmes like Cellebrite or GrayKey to take advantage of unpatched flaws in certain devices, gaining access to them without the user having to unlock them.

Wessler said, “Your device may be vulnerable if your operating system is six months out of date.”

Don’t divulge passwords

Wessler of the ACLU claims that Americans cannot be deported for refusing to disclose the passwords to their encrypted devices or social media accounts.

Accordingly, you may be arrested and have your devices seized, even taken to a forensic facility, if you refuse to give up your passwords or PINs, but you will ultimately escape with your privacy much more intact than if you reveal secrets.

“They can seize your device, even for months, while they try to break into it. But you’re going to get home,” Wessler added.

This protection also extends to green card holders, Wessler notes, notwithstanding the Trump administration’s startling treatment of foreign permanent residents in certain situations.

However, be advised that refusing entry to customs officers may result in hours of uncertain incarceration in a desolate, windowless CBP office, at the absolute least. Court rulings have limited the powers of CBP officials at some US airports and states, but these restrictions may not be enforced if border agents have your computer or phone unsupervised.

The CBP distinguishes between two kinds of device searches. Basic, in which the content of a device is examined “manually” by an officer, and advanced, in which a device is linked to other devices and its contents can be examined or copied.

According to CBP, the latter search necessitates a “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity. The agency’s official advice avoids specifically stating that individuals must turn over passwords by stating that devices should be submitted “in a condition that allows for the examination.”

According to the agency’s website, “If the electronic device is protected by a passcode, encryption, or other security mechanism and cannot be inspected, that device may be subject to exclusion, detention, or other appropriate action or disposition.”

Wessler cautions that non-Americans entering the US with a visa or from a nation that waives visas face a much more difficult situation: you risk being refused entrance if you refuse to provide a passcode or PIN.

According to him, “People have to make a very practical assessment about what’s most important to them: entry into the country at the risk of being turned around at the border, either by sacrificing or by protecting your privacy.”

Reduce the amount of data you keep

The best approach to keep customs away from your data is to just not bring it on your trip. This is the obvious option for the most susceptible tourists. Set up travel devices that store the least amount of sensitive data possible, much like Lackey did.

Avoid connecting those “dirty” devices to your personal accounts. If you must, make new accounts with distinct identities and passwords, such as an Apple ID for iOS devices.

“If they ask for access and you can’t refuse, you want to be able to give it to them without losing any sensitive information,” Lackey explains.

Admittedly, social media accounts are difficult to delete. While keeping a more important account secret, some security experts advise developing backup personas that can be presented to customs agents. However, you may face extended detention and, in the case of noncitizens, even refusal of entry if CBP officers connect your name to an account you attempted to conceal.

To prevent border agents from accessing documents or data you store remotely, the Electronic Frontier Foundation also advises shutting down apps and cloud services like Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive if you are unable to set up a separate travel device. Backing up files or images to cloud services before your trip might facilitate data removal from the phone.

According to Wessler of the American Civil Liberties Union, “The only sure way to protect yourself is to not carry information with you or to carry as little as possible. As long as you have a device and there’s stuff on it, that’s potentially vulnerable to search.”

In light of the current political climate and the increasingly unpredictable nature of US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) scrutiny, travellers are advised to take proactive steps to protect their digital privacy. While the methods outlined above offer some degree of protection, it is crucial to remember that there is no foolproof way to guarantee privacy at the US border.

The erratic and often undocumented practices of CBP mean that any traveller could be subject to scrutiny, and their electronic devices could be searched without warning. Therefore, it is essential to weigh the risks and benefits of each privacy protection method and choose the ones that best suit your individual needs and circumstances.

For US citizens, the risk of deportation for refusing to divulge passwords is low. However, non-citizens may face more severe consequences, including denial of entry. Therefore, non-citizens must carefully consider the potential repercussions of refusing to cooperate with CBP officials.

Regardless of citizenship status, all travellers should be aware of the potential for lengthy detentions and intrusive searches. By taking steps to minimise the amount of sensitive data they carry and by being prepared for the possibility of a device search, travellers can help to protect their privacy and avoid unnecessary complications at the border.

Ultimately, the responsibility for protecting digital privacy at the US border rests with the individual traveller. By being informed and prepared, travellers can navigate the complexities of border security while minimising the risk to their personal information. While the future of digital privacy at the US border remains uncertain, travellers can take comfort in knowing that they have options to protect themselves and their data.

Remember, the border is a zone of heightened security, and CBP officials have broad authority to search and detain travellers. By understanding your rights and taking proactive steps to protect your privacy, you can ensure a smoother and less stressful border crossing experience. Stay informed, stay prepared, and safeguard your digital privacy.

The post Crossing into America? Lock down your tech appeared first on International Finance.

The prospect of an African currency has long been dismissed as a pipe dream. Yet, Donald Trump’s alleged stance could act as a catalyst, reviving conversations about the continent’s economic independence and unity. Historically, Africa has struggled with external influences shaping its destiny. This moment presents a chance to turn the tables.

Donald Trump’s rhetoric is no stranger to controversy. His “America First” philosophy, encapsulated in the slogan “Make America Great Again,” thrives on disruption and negotiation. Critics suggest that this latest move may be a calculated ploy, positioning the United States as the indispensable player in global trade while subtly nudging BRICS nations into negotiations favourable to American interests.

But Africa stands at a crossroads. With its abundant rare earth metals crucial to global energy transitions, the continent holds a strategic advantage. The African Union (AU) could seize this moment to establish a single African currency, bolstering intra-continental trade and reducing reliance on external powers.

Such a move would not be without challenges. BRICS nations, particularly China, have faced growing scrutiny for their handling of African debt. Donald Trump’s warnings could exacerbate concerns, steering African nations toward the dollar or prompting them to chart an independent course. In either scenario, the continent’s leaders must act decisively.

An African central bank and a unified currency could eliminate non-tariff barriers that currently stifle trade. A continental standards body could ensure product quality, paving the way for an e-mobility revolution led by African innovation. Citizens could travel across the continent freely, breaking down the artificial barriers that divide its airspace and economies.

The stakes are high. If the AU adopts this bold vision, it could redefine Africa’s economic future, making the continent a formidable force in global affairs. The decision, however, must be swift and strategic. As Donald Trump’s presidency looms, Africa has a unique opportunity to awaken as a unified, self-reliant power—or risk being pulled back into complacency.

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Over the past ten years, Michael Lohscheller has served as CEO of multiple other automakers. He oversaw Opel from 2017 until 2021 before taking a job as VinFast’s global CEO.

In just seven months, he left to join Nikola, a manufacturer of big rigs powered by hydrogen and batteries. According to his LinkedIn profile, he served as CEO and president of the company until September 2023.

Polestar, which offers three models at the moment, the Polestar 2, Polestar 3, and Polestar 4, had difficult sales first half of 2024. Around 20,200 cars were sold worldwide by the Geely subsidiary, a 27% decrease from the previous year.

Since import tariffs have increased, the aspiring automaker’s plans to expand into the United States have been almost hampered by the fact that all three models are currently being assembled in China.

At least domestically, its prospects are centred around the Polestar 3, which just started producing locally in South Carolina, avoiding expensive import taxes and minimising losses.

Polestar is aiming to compete against brands like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and Porsche. Put differently, the company is placing its bets on expensive vehicles in a market that seems to prefer less expensive vehicles, so it will be interesting to see what the new CEO can do.

Challenges Faced By Polestar

Polestar’s first product, the Polestar 1, was only available in limited quantities and has been discontinued. The Polestar 2, which began deliveries in mid-2020, is considered the brand’s first truly mass-produced model on sale, and is only built at a plant in China’s Zhejiang province.

On October 12, 2022, the Polestar 3 made its global debut. On February 27, 2024, Polestar said that production of the Polestar 3 had begun in Chengdu, Sichuan, in southwest China. With the manufacturing line now extending to the United States, the Polestar 3 has become the first Polestar model to be produced in both China and outside of the world’s second-largest economy, supporting the company’s growth ambitions in North America, Europe and Asia.

By producing vehicles in the United States and China, Polestar will be able to serve North America, Europe and Asia markets more efficiently, reducing lead times and costs, the venture informed the media.

Polestar vehicles produced at the United States plant will not only be supplied to the American market, but will also be shipped to Europe. The company also plans to begin production of the Polestar 4 in South Korea by 2025.

Outgoing CEO Thomas Ingenlath said in August 2024 that the US plant is expected to reach full capacity in two months and will begin supplying the local customers in September 2024, followed by deliveries to Europe. Polestar sold 3,555 Polestar 2 sedans in the United States in the first half of 2024, Reuters said, citing Kelley Blue Book estimates.

Polestar’s production line expansion in the American mainland comes at a time when Europe and the US have imposed tariffs on EVs from China. The US Trade Representative’s Office (USTR) has already announced that in 2024, the tax on Chinese electric vehicles will rise from 25% to 100%.

However, Polestar has been undergoing a rough patch. The first quarter of 2024 saw a sharp decline in the venture’s EV sales. In the initial quarter of the year, the automaker delivered approximately 7,200 cars, which is approximately 40% fewer than in Q1/2023.

The sales at Polestar are a reflection of the current model change. With the arrival of the Polestar 4 and the impending launch of the Polestar 3, whose production has now commenced, the company is transitioning from a manufacturer of just one model, the Polestar 2, to a more varied portfolio.

Even though the Polestar 2 has been greatly improved for the 2024 model year, some prospective customers might be undecided right now about whether to go with the slightly larger Polestar 4 or the updated but out-of-date Polestar 2, or they might decide to wait for an electric saloon from a competitor.

Some 1,200 of the 7,200 cars delivered in Q1 were Polestar 4s. They were all delivered in China because the model won’t be available in Europe until later in the year. Nonetheless, Polestar is probably going to break the run of four straight quarters of declining sales. Since Q3/2022, the 7,200 units represented the lowest quarterly result.

Since its IPO, Polestar’s only reporting requirement has been to release quarterly data. Before that, the business only occasionally released its numbers. In contrast, Polestar delivered 12,076 cars in Q1-2023, all of which were Polestar 2s at the time. Nevertheless, the manufacturer missed its yearly goal of 60,000 units with roughly 54,600 deliveries, failing to match the performance from the record quarter of Q4-2022 with 21,000 units throughout 2023.

The year 2024 will be a “transitional year,” according to Polestar, since two new models will go on sale. The company plans to deliver between 155,000 and 165,000 units by 2025, so expectations are high.

Polestar had a very significant first quarter from a corporate standpoint in addition to the change in the model portfolio. In order to fund the next phase of development, the company first obtained new external financing in February, totalling USD 950 million from a group of international banks.

Clarification was also provided regarding Polestar’s ownership structure, with Volvo Cars holding an 18% strategic stake and Geely Holdings emerging as a new significant shareholder with approximately 24% of the company.

Company Stages A Comeback

In January 2024, Polestar announced its plans to cut around 450 jobs globally, or about 15% of its workforce, amid “challenging market conditions.” Just like any other automaker, the venture was feeling the heat of headwinds like poor EV demand, heavy price cuts, high interest rate regimes, lower subsidies, and supply chain issues.

Polestar in November 2023 trimmed delivery forecasts and outlined a revised business plan, aiming for its cash flow to break even in 2025 and to reduce its reliance on external funding from key owners Volvo Cars and Geely. It also announced plans to double down on cutting costs to boost profit margins.

As 2024 kicked in, Polestar was struggling in its goal of turning profitable, as it missed the revised 2023 delivery target due to factors like high inflation, low demand and a price war ignited by Tesla.

In the coming months, Polestar had to receive a notice of noncompliance with Nasdaq’s USD 1 minimum bid price requirement. The venture has time till January 2, 2025, to regain compliance by having a closing bid price that meets or exceeds the USD 1 minimum for at least 10 consecutive business days.

However, the venture has now shown signs of overcoming the odds, as it plans to expand its commercial footprint and retail operations across existing and seven new markets. France has emerged as the largest volume market for electric cars in the European Union after Germany, thereby representing a significant opportunity for the company. In addition, Polestar will launch in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Thailand and Brazil via local distribution partnerships.

Polestar 4 SUV coupés deliveries in Europe have already started. The European car line-up has expanded from one to three electric vehicles (EVs) with the addition of the Polestar 4 SUV. The company also offers the Polestar 2 and the Polestar 3 in Europe.

The venture has also appointed Philipp Romers as the Head of Design. With 25 years of experience in the automotive design industry, Romers joined the automaker from Audi, where his most recent position was Head of Exterior Design. He designed the current Audi A6, among other vehicles. Before his stint at Audi, Romers was a designer at Volkswagen, where he was involved in the design of the Volkswagen Golf 7 and Passat B8.

The Road Ahead

Polestar’s immediate challenges are delayed model launches, missed delivery targets, and a gradual separation from its co-founder, Volvo Cars. Michael Lohscheller will officially take over as CEO on October 1, stepping into a tough role, which will require him to initiate a major cost-cutting strategy aimed at achieving profitability and cash flow breakeven by 2025.

Additionally, the company needs to tread a cautious path amid the punitive tariffs from the European Union, the United States, and Canada on China-made EVs. Polestar may require reducing its dependence on Chinese manufacturing.

“Michael Lohscheller’s extensive leadership background contrasts with Ingenlath’s design-focused career, who was Volvo Cars’ senior vice-president of design before taking the helm at Polestar in 2017. The leadership change also underscores Polestar’s shift away from its Volvo roots. This year, Polestar appointed a new chair, Winfried Vahland, replacing Hakan Samuelsson, a former Volvo CEO. The company also recently changed its head of design to another executive with Volvo ties,” reported CEOWorld Magazine.

“Polestar’s evolving relationship with Volvo is evident in its production strategy. While the Polestar 2 and 3 models are manufactured in Volvo facilities, the Polestar 4 is produced in a Geely-run factory and does not rely on Volvo’s platform, a trend expected to continue with future models. Volvo Cars has reduced its stake in Polestar from 48% to 18%, signalling a strategic withdrawal. Meanwhile, Geely, now Polestar’s majority shareholder, remains committed to supporting the EV maker, including providing further financial assistance,” it added.

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Big corporate power users immediately purchased clean energy from developers as it became competitive with dirty alternatives. Bettors on infrastructure, like Brookfield and Macquarie, placed significant bets on renewable energy. BP and other fossil fuel companies also did. Projects received funding from utilities like NextEra and AES in America and EDP and Iberdrola in Europe. From 3% in 2015 to 6% in 2019, the average returns on capital employed by developers increased, approaching the level of less volatile oil and gas extraction. The outlook for the sector was so promising that NextEra briefly overtook ExxonMobil, the largest oil company in the United States, in terms of market value in October 2020, making it the most valuable energy company in the country.

These prospects appear much less promising today. Over the last two years, growing interest rates, supply-chain bottlenecks, permit delays, and Western governments’ increasingly protectionist inclinations have all hurt the economics of renewable energy. What was once a “green premium” in stocks is now a “green discount.” Over the last 12 months, the global stock markets have increased by 11%, but the industry’s performance is tracked by the SandP Global Clean-Energy index, which has decreased by 32%. More than a third of AES’ value has been lost. The value of NextEra is about one-third that of ExxonMobil, which has benefited from a rise in oil prices. Wind turbine producers went from being roughly profitable to losing money. That is an issue for all parties involved, not just the shareholders of the renewable energy companies.

As part of their decarbonisation efforts, 118 countries committed to increasing their combined renewable-energy capacity to 11,000 gigawatts (gw) by 2030, up from 3,400gw last year, at the annual UN climate summit being held in Dubai on December 2. That will mean adding about 1,000 gw annually, which is three times what was accomplished globally last year. Renewables need to once again appear like a viable business venture for this to occur. The current issues facing the industry are the product of several interrelated factors. Increasing supply chain costs is one issue. Thanks to increased demand, the cost of polysilicon, a crucial component of solar panels, skyrocketed from $10 per kilogramme in 2020 to as much as $35 in 2022.

The price of wind turbines has also skyrocketed. Steel is a crucial input that both countries produce in large quantities, and its price increased as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Furthermore, to produce longer and more potent blades, their creators have ventured into a previously uncharted technological territory, testing materials other than fibreglass, such as carbon-fibre composites. The average tower today stands close to 100 metres tall to harness stronger winds at higher altitudes. A 260-metre offshore wind turbine, not much shorter than the Eiffel Tower, was unveiled by Ge in 2018. Vendors of the roughly 8,000 parts that make up a wind turbine have had difficulty keeping up. Football field-sized parts are too big for lorries and ships to handle.

All of this has resulted in production failures and delays for wind turbines. An Iowa wind turbine manufactured by Vestas, a Danish company, caught fire in October. At approximately the same moment, a German geothermal turbine broke and landed in a field. Manufacturers are required to cover the costs of such incidents under warranty provisions in sales contracts. Such warranties cost Vestas €1 billion ($1 point 1 billion) in the last 12 months. Siemens Gamesa’s quality issues, such as creases in its blades, caused its parent company, Siemens Energy, to incur €4.6 billion in operating losses annually. The German government gave the parents a loan guarantee on November 14th to help them avoid a crisis.

Can green stay out of the red?

Equipment manufacturers have been increasing their prices in an attempt to stop the bleeding. Western ones currently charge five per cent more than they did at the end of 2020, per data provider SandP Global. According to research firm Bloombergnef, these price increases along with rising interest rates have caused the LCOE for US offshore wind projects to increase by 50% over the last two years. This is even after accounting for the subsidies included in President Joe Biden’s massive climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Developers stuck with unprofitable projects are those who lock in electricity prices with customers before locking in costs.

According to BloombergNEF, for half of the offshore wind capacity being built in the United States, contracts have either been cancelled or renegotiated. The largest offshore wind developer in the world, Orsted, a Danish company, took a $4 billion writedown in October after scrapping two sizable projects off the coast of New Jersey. There were no bids in Britain’s September government auction for offshore wind power to be supplied to the grid at a maximum guaranteed price of £44 ($56) per megawatt-hour (MWh).

Supervisors of renewables also complain about bureaucratic hold-ups. Approval for a solar farm takes an average of four years in America, while approval for an onshore wind farm takes six. The majority of the violations adhere to an EU regulation that states approval periods for renewable projects within the bloc cannot be longer than two years. New transmission lines are frequently required for solar and wind farms because they often generate less energy than conventional power plants and are being built in more remote locations due to the availability of easy-to-connect sites being taken.

These also require approval. The line for renewable energy connections in America is 2,000 GW long and still growing. Growing green protectionism exacerbates all of this. With high anti-dumping duties and the Uyghur Forced Labour Prevention Act of 2021, which prevents American developers from importing polysilicon-containing modules from the Xinjiang region—the source of half of the world’s supply—America has effectively shut out Chinese solar manufacturers. According to consulting firm Wood Mackenzie, the cost of solar modules is more than twice as high in the US as it is overseas as a result of these regulations. These prices might go up even more.

The Department of Commerce discovered in August that certain Southeast Asian suppliers were only repackaging Chinese goods; as a result, they would likewise be subject to the same anti-dumping duties starting in the middle of the following year. The domestic content requirements of the IRA are being used by the Biden administration to entice production domestically. The largest module manufacturer in the United States, First Solar, plans to increase domestic production capacity from 6 GW this year to 14 GW by 2026. However, that is minuscule compared to what America will require to achieve its decarbonisation objectives. Furthermore, it won’t significantly reduce industry-wide prices.

Europe’s signals are conflicting. Previous anti-dumping duties imposed by the EU on Chinese solar panels have been lifted. However, the Net Zero Industry Act, which will impose minimum domestic content requirements for contracts involving public renewable energy, was passed by the European Parliament on November 22. The European Commission is also considering looking into China’s subsidies for its turbine producers, who sell their equipment domestically for 70% less than their international competitors. Chinese companies are beginning to make headway outside of their own country. The chief executive of EDP, Miguel Stilwell d’Andrade, has observed that they are now bidding on projects more frequently all over the world.

Trade restrictions will do more than just keep out low-cost wind and solar energy systems from China. They will have an impact on parts availability as well. To save expenses, Siemens Gamesa intends to outsource a larger portion of its supply chain. Since China produces the majority of turbines, Western manufacturers already buy nacelles, towers, and other parts from them. According to the Department of Energy, America will need to import the majority of components for offshore wind projects to meet its 2030 targets.

As the world rushes to deploy more renewable power, supply shortages are likely to occur. Regulations about local content and tariffs may exacerbate the issue. There’s not much evidence that the protective mindset is changing. However, the sector is at least beginning to address some of the more pressing issues. Polysilicon prices have decreased, and production capacity is growing throughout the solar supply chain. With increased financial and technological discipline, as well as a decline in commodity prices, it looks like Western turbine manufacturers are also making a turnaround. Henrik Andersen, CEO of Vestas, says the industry is beginning to realise that “bigger is not always better” when it comes to turbines. The Danish company announced on November 8th that it turned a profit in the third quarter.

Developers have the ability to increase their prices without causing a decrease in demand. Recent data from energy marketplace LevelTen Energy reveals that prices for solar and wind power that American developers receive through power-purchase agreements have increased by almost 60% within the last two years.

According to AES CEO Andres Gluski, the company is expected to commission over twice as much renewable energy capacity this year as it did in 2022 and the returns are holding steady.

Britain will increase the maximum price per megawatt-hour from £44 to £73 in the offshore wind auction held next year. Germany has also been increasing the maximum prices for auctions of solar and wind power.

During an interaction with The Economist, Mark Dooley of Macquarie said, “No one enjoys seeing prices go up, but they are accepting it. If approval rules are not relaxed and protectionism goes unchecked, a lot more acceptance will be necessary.”

Meanwhile, Amazon recently revealed that over one gigawatt of clean energy capacity has been added to European grids through the addition of 39 new renewable energy projects thus far this year. More than 160 wind and solar projects in 13 European countries have been made possible by Amazon to date. After all projects are up and running, 50.8 gigawatts of clean energy capacity—enough energy to power over 40.7 million households annually in Europe—are anticipated to be produced.

The post Green dreams to red realities: Renewable woes appeared first on International Finance.

According to the NRF’s poll of 7,843 consumers, families with children in elementary through high school anticipate spending an average of $510 on back-to-school supplies, which is approximately $125 less than the 2022 record. The largest percentage in the history of the NRF study, 53% of respondents did not purchase electronics or other computer-related accessories in 2023 so far, down from 65% in 2022.

Meanwhile, Washington-based business, Kent, was forced to pass along 15% price increases in January 2023 to its retail clients because of soaring transportation costs. But by May, as gas and food prices also surged, shoppers abruptly shifted away from the $35 higher-end rain boots to the no-frills versions that run $5 to $10 cheaper, its CEO Karl Moehring said.

“We are seeing consumers shift down, noting dramatic 20% sales swings in opposite directions for both types of products. Wages are not keeping up with inflation,” Moehring said, as reported by the AFP.

Parents, especially those in the low to middle-income range, are focusing on the necessities during the back-to-school shopping season while also switching to less expensive stores due to the inflationary trend, which reached a new 40-year high in June 2023.

Walmart stated that rising gas and food prices are preventing consumers from spending as much on discretionary products, particularly apparel. Inflation has slowed down consumer spending on devices, according to Best Buy, the biggest retailer of consumer electronics in the country. As a result, both businesses reduced their profit projections.

Such financial difficulties contrasted sharply a year ago when many low-income consumers were flush with government stimulus and encouraged by salary rises, and they were able to spend freely. This is because the industry is experiencing its second-most significant shopping season after the winter vacations.

When consumers received their two-hundred dollar monthly child tax credit checks in 2022, Footwear Distributors & Retailers of America CEO Matt Priest remarked, there was a noteworthy increase in online sales for the group’s retail members. Without that increase, he anticipates that consumers will purchase fewer pairs of children’s shoes this season and will turn to private-label goods.

Jessica Reyes, 34, took her children Jalysa, 7, and Jenesis, 5, to a “Back to School Bash” event in August in Chicago’s northside where students could receive free backpacks full of supplies due to inflation-straining household resources.

“I feel like everything is going up these days. We’re a one-income household right now…so I think it’s greatly affected us in all areas, in bills and in house necessities and school necessities,” she said at the event, as reported by CNBC.

While shopping, her daughters were lured to the school supplies that featured their favourite TV characters and animals, but she concentrated on the simple designs.

“They want the cute ones, you know, the kitty ones. And those are always more expensive than the simple ones. And the same thing with folders, or notebooks, or pencils,” Reyes said.

Earlier, Manny Colon dropped at the back-to-school fair to select backpacks for his daughters Jubilee age 8, and Audrey age 5.

Colon, 38, works at the primary school where his daughters go. He claimed that due to the high costs of petrol, groceries, and school supplies, his wife has been forced to take on additional jobs.

“I think it’s definitely impacted us,” he said.

Numerous predictions indicate a successful back-to-school shopping season.

According to Mastercard Spending Pulse, which monitors spending across all payment methods, including cash, back-to-school spending decreased by 7.5% from July 14 through September 5 compared to the same time in 2022, when sales increased by 11%.

Sales decreased by 0.8% for the 2020 back-to-school season as the pandemic severely disrupted preparations for school reopening and back-to-school purchasing. However, many of the figures are being supported by increasing pricing.

According to retail analytics company DataWeave, a basket of about a dozen supply items revealed an average price increase of about 15% for the 2017 back-to-school season compared with a year earlier. For instance, the cost of backpacks has increased by over 12% to an average of $70.

According to Matthew Kurtzman, the CEO of Back 2 School America, an Illinois-based non-profit that provides back-to-school kits to children from low-income families, there has been “a significant increase in the costs of supplies,” including a 10% increase from their vendor and another possible mark-up on the horizon. Additionally, shipping expenses have increased.

Back 2 School America will be able to cover the new expenses in 2023 because of increasing support, and the organisation is on schedule to provide more school kits than ever before – 12,000 so far and more than 30,000 by the end of September, according to Kurtzman.

Retailers struggle mightily to persuade customers to purchase, especially on apparel.

Walmart announced that it was offering more reductions on apparel in order to reduce inventory. Analysts predict that these sales will increase the pressure on competitors to offer deeper discounts in order to compete. Walmart, though, stated that it is encouraged by the early indications of school supply purchases.

In terms of Washington Shoe, Moehring stated that he will switch production in the next months from more expensive children’s boots to more reasonably priced goods. Although he’s being cautious, the company still expects annual revenues to surpass those of the previous year.

“I believe it is a muddy outlook,” he said.

Cost of raising a child

Meanwhile, USDA recently issued ‘Expenditures on Children by Families, 2023.’ This report is also known as ‘The Cost of Raising a Child.’ USDA has been tracking the cost of raising a child since 1960 and this analysis examines expenses by age of child, household income, budgetary component, and region of the country.

According to the most recent Consumer Expenditures Survey statistics, a household with two children and a middle-income ($59,200–$107,400) married couple will spend about $12,980 per child per year in 2022.

For food, shelter, and other requirements to raise a child to age 17, middle-class, married parents can anticipate spending $233,610 ($284,570 if expected inflation prices are taken into account). The price of a college education is not included in this.

Education and child care can take up another large portion of the family budget. Research shows that, on average, they account for about 16% of children’s spending. Young children can be particularly expensive, as day care can cost more than college. However, most families report not spending anything on childcare. They may rely on family members to babysit or send their school-age children to public school. That means families who hire nannies, send their children to private schools, and pay for a variety of summer camps and special programmes are likely spending far more than the average amount reported here.

Regardless of income, families tend to spend more on groceries as their children get older. Teenagers are the most expensive, said Mark Lino, an economist at the Department of Agriculture’s Centre for Nutrition Policy and Promotion and lead author of the USDA report. They eat more. Data shows that families spend about 18% of their childcare budget on groceries, a category that includes groceries, school lunches and restaurant meals, all of which are hit hard by inflation.

Car, gas, insurance, airfare and public transportation costs peak when children are between 15 and 17 years old. Of course, this is the time when many teenagers start driving. But this also reflects increasing participation in activities further from home, according to USDA data. These are the years when they start driving, so you include them in insurance or even buy them a car, Lino said.

Overall, healthcare accounts for about 9% of children’s spending, but higher-income families tend to spend much more. In addition to increased insurance premiums, these costs include medical, dental and psychiatric services not covered by insurance, as well as prescription medications.

From diapers to Dr. Martens and Garanimals to graduation gowns – clothing accounts for about 6% of children’s spending. Unlike most other costs, this number has fallen over the past 50 years as Americans turn to cheap, foreign-made clothing. Also unusual: The cost of clothing tends to fluctuate from year to year, depending on the latest trends.

What happens to the money?

With a 29% share of all child-rearing expenses for a middle-class family, housing costs are the highest single expense. Food comes in second at 18%, followed by child care/education (for those who can afford it) at 16%. Depending on the child’s age, costs change.

The USDA conducted the analysis based on the household income level, the child’s age, and the area of residence. It is not unexpected that more money was spent on a child the greater the family’s income, notably for child care/education and other ancillary costs.

Additionally, costs rise as a youngster gets older. For infants to toddlers, annual expenses were on average roughly $300 lower, while for teenagers between the ages of 15 and 17, they were on average $900 higher.

Teenagers have greater food and transportation expenditures because this is the age when they start driving, thus insurance is usually included or maybe even a second car is bought for them.

Additionally, regional diversity was noted. The highest money was spent on children by families in the urban Northeast, followed by those in the urban West, urban South, and urban Midwest. Families in rural locations across the nation spent the least money raising a child; costs for housing, child care, and schooling were 27% cheaper in rural areas than in the metropolitan Northeast.

The cost of raising children is susceptible to economies of scale. That is, costs for each child decrease as there are more children. Compared to families with two children, expenses for married couples with one child were on average 27% more for each child.

The average cost per kid in households with three or more children was 24% lower than the cost per child in a family with two children.

The “cheaper by the dozen” effect is another name for this phenomenon. Each extra child costs less because families may buy food in greater, more economical amounts, share bedrooms, pass down clothing and toys, and frequently babysit younger siblings.

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