The military conflict involving the United States, Israel, and Iran began on February 28, 2026. It was not just a geopolitical event, but the beginning of an economic crisis reshaping the daily lives of millions of people in the United Kingdom.

This article is an attempt to explain what is happening, why it matters, and what it means for ordinary British workers, families, and businesses.

Distant war and British utility bills

The worst part of the Middle East conflict has been the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which passes one-fifth of all oil and LNG. Both Iran and the United States tried to play hardball with the maritime chokepoint to get the better of each other at the negotiation table in Islamabad. The biggest victim of the geopolitical power play has been global energy security.

Before the war, a barrel of Brent crude oil traded at $70-$72, but within weeks, future prices shot up to $119 per barrel. The prices that buyers were actually paying on the spot market (where oil is bought and sold for immediate delivery) reached $150 at the time, driven by intense panic buying and shortage fears.

The shock was specifically compounded for the United Kingdom, as the European country imports a large portion of its energy. Net import dependency stood at 43.8% in 2024, which means that when global energy prices spike, the UK does not have enough domestic supply to shield itself.

Wholesale gas prices inside the UK surged from 78 pence per therm at the end of February to 171 pence per therm in the weeks that followed. That is more than double in a matter of weeks.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) described what happened as the single most significant supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Global oil supply fell by over 10 million barrels per day in March 2026 alone.

The ripple effects were felt almost immediately at petrol stations across the UK. The average price of petrol rose from 131.6 pence per litre to 140.2 pence per litre. Diesel jumped from 141.1 pence to 158.7 pence per litre. These were not gradual, creeping increases. They happened within a month.

Inflation is back, and it is stubborn

The official measure of inflation in the UK, known as the Consumer Price Index (CPI), rose to 3.3% in March 2026. That sounds like a modest number until you consider that just two months earlier, the Bank of England (BoE) had been close to hitting its 2% target and was preparing to start cutting interest rates. Those plans are now on hold indefinitely.

The largest driver of the March inflation rise was motor fuel, which went up by 8.7% in a single month. The last time fuel prices rose that sharply in a single month was during the early period of the Ukraine war. Food inflation is expected to follow.

The Food and Drink Federation has warned that food prices could rise by as much as 9% by the end of 2026 if supply disruptions continue. Part of the reason is fertiliser. Producing nitrogen fertiliser requires enormous amounts of natural gas, and many fertiliser suppliers in the Gulf and Egypt can no longer export their products because of the maritime blockade.

British farmers are facing doubled fertiliser costs, and many have decided it is simply not worth planting crops this year. Less domestic food production means more imports. More reliance on imports, in a disrupted global market, means higher prices at checkout.

There is also an unusual and little-discussed risk around carbon dioxide gas, which the food industry depends on for slaughtering livestock humanely, carbonating drinks, and preserving packaged goods.

The government has already invested 100 million pounds to reopen an industrial plant on Teesside specifically to ensure a domestic carbon dioxide supply. Major retailers like Tesco say shortages have not yet reached shelves, but the Food and Drink Federation is not ruling out significant gaps in availability by the summer if the Strait remains closed.

Growth has stalled

Britain’s economy was beginning to recover early in 2026. GDP grew by 0.5% in February, which was a small but encouraging sign. That momentum has now been cut short. The EY Item Club, one of the UK’s most respected economic forecasting bodies, now expects the economy to grow by zero in both the second and third quarters of the year. For the full year of 2026, it has cut its growth forecast from 1.4% down to 0.7%.

Matt Swannell, the Chief Economic Adviser to the EY Item Club, warns that the labour market is entering a period of severe distress. Matt remarked, “Spiralling energy costs and disruption to supply chains will push the UK to the brink of a technical recession… The heightened energy prices from the war are also set to deliver the ‘biggest hit since the pandemic’ to the jobs market, with the jobless rate projected to peak at 5.8% by the middle of 2027.”

The International Monetary Fund has gone further in some respects. It identified the United Kingdom as the country that suffered the biggest downward revision to its growth forecast among wealthy nations in its spring 2026 outlook. The IMF now expects UK GDP to grow by just 0.8% in 2026, compared to 1.3% predicted earlier.

The OECD, another major international economic body, expects Britain to have the second-lowest growth rate and the second-highest inflation rate among G7 nations. The United States, by contrast, is expected to grow by 2.3%. The gap is stark.

Why is Britain being hit harder than most? Several reasons compound each other. The UK is a net importer of gas. It has very limited gas storage, estimated at just two days of supply at the peak of the crisis. Its economy is highly integrated with international trade and supply chains. And its growth was already sluggish entering 2026, leaving very little buffer when the shock arrived.

The word economists are reaching for to describe this situation is stagflation. That is what happens when an economy stops growing, but prices keep rising. It is the worst of both worlds, and it is the same condition that devastated many Western economies in the 1970s during the oil embargo. The last thing any government wants to see return.

Jobs are being lost

Behind the big numbers are real people losing real work. British employers cut 11,000 jobs in March 2026, the first clear month where the economic fallout from the Iran conflict showed up directly in employment figures. Analysts from EY Item Club estimate that approximately 250,000 jobs could be lost by mid-2027 if current conditions persist.

The unemployment rate stood at 5.2% at the start of 2026. Forecasters now expect it to rise to 5.8% by mid-2027, which would mean over 2.1 million people looking for work. That would be the highest level of unemployment in more than a decade.

The sectors bearing the brunt are those that depend heavily on energy or on consumer spending. Manufacturing, hospitality, logistics and construction are all under severe pressure. Businesses that were already operating on thin margins are finding that rising energy costs, supply chain delays, and weakening customer demand are simply too much to absorb simultaneously.

Many companies are moving into what economists call a defensive posture. Instead of hiring, investing, or expanding, they are cutting costs and building cash reserves to survive the uncertainty.

The Deloitte CFO Survey, which measures confidence among finance directors at major British companies, recorded a collapse in sentiment to a net figure of minus 57% in late March. That is the most pessimistic reading since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Consumers are pulling back

Ordinary households are responding to the situation predictably. When things feel financially uncertain and prices are rising, people spend less. Consumer confidence, as measured by the Deloitte Consumer Tracker, fell to minus 14.1% in the first quarter of 2026, its lowest level since 2023.

Spending power is expected to fall by 0.3% across the year for the average household. People are cutting back on things they do not consider essential. Travel has taken a particularly sharp hit. Spending on travel fell by 3.3% in March 2026, the first such decline recorded by Barclays in five years.

Jet fuel prices have more than doubled since the conflict began, and airlines are passing those costs on to passengers. International holidays are being postponed. People are choosing domestic breaks instead, or simply staying home.

The hospitality sector, which was already struggling with the April 2026 increase in the minimum wage and higher business rates, is now facing what industry figures are calling a summer of shortages. Breweries are worried about carbon dioxide availability ahead of the football World Cup in June, usually one of the most commercially important periods in the calendar.

What the government is doing

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been walking a difficult line. On one side, there is enormous pressure to protect households and businesses from rising costs. On the other hand, the government is painfully aware that uncontrolled spending could damage Britain’s fiscal reputation and push up borrowing costs, as happened during the 2022 mini-budget crisis.

“This is not our war, but it is pushing up bills for families and businesses. That’s why it’s my number one priority to keep costs down… Obviously, no sensible person is a supporter of the Iranian regime, but to start a conflict without being clear what the objectives are… I do think that is a folly and it is one that is affecting families here in the UK,” The Chancellor said.

The approach taken has been cautious and targeted. Rather than offering blanket support to everyone, the government has focused on the most vulnerable. It has extended the existing 5 pence cut in fuel duty, saving the average driver around 90 pounds per year. It is also working on contingency plans for further energy bill support in the autumn, when demand for gas heating typically rises sharply.

To fund these measures, the government has expanded the windfall tax on electricity generators. Companies that generate electricity from gas-linked sources are currently making exceptional profits because of how electricity pricing works in the UK market.

The government has raised the Electricity Generator Levy from 45% to 55%, capturing more of those windfall profits and redirecting them toward household support. This levy has also been extended beyond its original 2028 end date.

The government has explicitly said it cannot absorb every price rise on behalf of the population. It is a difficult message to deliver, but it reflects the reality that with national debt on track to reach 100% of GDP by 2029, the room for large unplanned spending is very limited.

Internationally, Reeves has been vocal in criticising the war itself. She has called it a mistake and a folly, language that puts her at odds with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has defended the conflict as a necessary cost for long-term global security.

Reeves led a joint statement signed by finance ministers from 11 countries, including Japan, Australia, Spain, and the Netherlands, calling for a negotiated resolution and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The diplomatic tension with Washington adds another layer of uncertainty to the UK’s economic relationships.

BoE is stuck

Normally, when inflation rises sharply, a central bank’s response is to raise interest rates. Higher rates make borrowing more expensive, which cools spending and helps bring prices down. But the Bank of England (BoE) is in an unusual bind.

Before the Iran conflict, financial markets expected the Bank to start cutting its main interest rate in April 2026, as inflation had been falling toward the 2% target. Now, with inflation at 3.3% and rising, those cuts have been shelved. But the Bank is not raising rates either.

The reason is that the economy is simultaneously weakening. Raising rates aggressively into a slowing economy risks causing a deeper recession. The Monetary Policy Committee has held the rate at 3.75% and is expected to keep it there for some time.

Economists describe this as an unenviable balancing act. If the Bank holds firm, inflation may become entrenched, especially if workers begin demanding higher wages to keep up with rising petrol and food costs. If it cuts rates, it risks fueling inflation further. The most likely outcome, according to analysts, is that rates stay on hold until around mid-2027, when inflation is expected to gradually return closer to target.

For homeowners approaching the end of fixed-rate mortgage deals, this is unwelcome news. Over a million British households are expected to face higher mortgage payments in the coming months as their fixed deals expire, adding to the broader pressure on household budgets.

Industry under pressure

Some of the starkest stories from the current crisis involve British manufacturers. Energy-intensive industries (those that need enormous amounts of gas or electricity to operate) are in genuine difficulty. Steel, chemicals, glass, ceramics, cement, and paper are all facing input cost increases that many cannot absorb or pass on.

The British Plastics Federation has reported that 58% of its member companies are experiencing severe or significant operational impacts. Almost all of its members are reporting rising raw material and energy costs.

Some firms have added surcharges of up to 30% to their prices, which risks sending customers to overseas competitors, particularly American ones, who benefit from access to cheap domestic natural gas and are insulated from the Hormuz disruption.

The construction sector is also struggling. Output had already fallen by 2% in the three months to February 2026, with private housebuilding dropping 6.5%. The conflict has made things worse through supply chain delays and surging material costs.

Bricks, cement, asphalt, and insulation are all more expensive to produce when energy costs are this high. Construction experts have warned that many projects are moving from commercially challenging to commercially unviable.

One of the most unexpected consequences involves renewable energy. Two major offshore wind projects off the Norfolk coast are facing delays because key components, specifically steel turbine foundations and offshore substations, were ordered from suppliers in the UAE. Those components cannot currently be shipped through the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict that is driving demand for cleaner energy is simultaneously delaying the infrastructure needed to deliver it.

Where things stand

Growth has stalled. Inflation is rising. Jobs are being lost. Businesses are pulling back. Consumers are cutting spending. And the root cause of all of it, the blockade of a narrow waterway seven thousand kilometres away, shows no immediate sign of resolution.

What makes the situation particularly difficult is that even a ceasefire would not instantly fix things. Energy infrastructure that has been damaged takes time to rebuild. Supply chains that have been disrupted take months to restore. And business confidence, once lost, is slow to return.

Britain’s vulnerability at this moment reflects structural issues that existed long before the conflict began. The country is too dependent on imported energy. Its gas storage is inadequate. Its industrial base has been gradually hollowing out for decades. The current crisis has exposed all of that with uncomfortable clarity.

The months ahead will be tough, particularly for lower-income households, energy-intensive industries, and anyone whose livelihood depends on consumer spending. The government and the Bank of England are trying to prevent the worst outcomes. But the margin for error is small, and the decisions being made in Washington, Tehran, and on the waters of the Persian Gulf will matter as much as anything decided in Downing Street or Threadneedle Street.

The post What the Iran war is doing to everyday life in Britain appeared first on International Finance.

According to Beazley, whose survey covered 3,500 global business leaders, including senior executives across the energy and utilities sector, 29% of energy sector professionals now see cyber risk as the number one threat facing their business as digital systems, AI and connected supply chains become increasingly exposed to disruption.

“Despite the growing threat, almost 80% of firms said they felt prepared for a cyber-attack, while 78% claimed they could recover financially from a major incident,” Beazley said, while warning that confidence may not match reality.

As per the insurer, cyber threats are becoming more systemic, with attacks now spreading rapidly across interconnected supply chains and critical infrastructure. Technology disruption was highlighted by 23% of respondents, followed by ageing systems and technology obsolescence (24%). Another 23% now see intellectual property (IP) risk emerging as a major concern as businesses digitise operations and deploy more AI-driven systems.

“Around 30% of companies said they plan to increase spending on cybersecurity and resilience measures over the next year,” Beazley stated.

The survey also highlights the increasing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in shaping both opportunity and exposure. Some 80% of the respondents expect AI to improve financial performance, while 72% believe it will replace jobs within the next 18 months, up from 66% in 2025. Beazley points out that as AI adoption accelerates, organisations must scale governance and oversight alongside technological capability, as both success and failure can move more quickly.

Alessandro Lezzi, Group Head of Cyber Risks at Beazley, said, “What stands out in this year’s Risk & Resilience survey findings is a growing misalignment between cyber and tech risk concerns and perceived perception of resilience to these risks. While cyber risk is widely recognised as the number one threat facing businesses globally, 78% believe they could fully recover financially from a cyber-attack, demonstrating many organisations are overestimating their preparedness to withstand the full impact of an attack across all corners of their operations.”

“That gap matters because cyber risk is becoming more systemic – the high-profile incidences in 2025 only prove this. As businesses become more interconnected and adopt technologies such as AI, disruption can spread faster across organisations and supply chains, making incidents harder to contain. It’s encouraging to see, however, that a third of businesses plan to invest in stronger cybersecurity, including access to specialist expertise to help them better understand their exposure, strengthen incident response and plan for realistic disruption scenarios across the organisation,” he concluded.

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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.

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First Quantum Minerals is engaged in the production of copper, nickel and gold, and related activities, including exploration and development. Its Cobre Panamá mine was placed in a phase of Preservation and Safe Management in November 2023.

The total stockpile is estimated at approximately 38 million tonnes of mineralised ore at varying grades, containing about 70,000 tonnes of recoverable copper.

The decision does not mean the mine is being reopened, but it has raised new questions about environmental protection, economic ramifications, and the viability of the project in the long term.

James Devas, who manages Corporate Affairs for Toronto-headquartered First Quantum Minerals, told International Finance that the approval is only for processing existing stockpiles. A full restart would require meeting additional technical, environmental, and regulatory criteria that have not yet been defined within a broader government framework.

Not A Restart, But Controlled Processing
First Quantum Minerals stressed that the approval does not mark a return to full-scale mining operations. The work being done now is part of a Preservation and Safe Management Plan to deal with material that had already been mined. The government of Panama is undertaking the processing of stockpiled ore under its control. It states the decision was based on environmental concerns, such as acid rock drainage and long-term site stability, after technical assessments found the material posed an environmental risk if not properly managed.

Government Decision Driven By Technical And Environmental Assessments
Government statements indicate that the resolution was based on technical reports and environmental assessments that were conducted after audits and recommendations from the Ministry of Environment (MiAmbiente).

Officials have emphasised that the removal and processing of stockpiled concentrate will decrease the environmental risk rather than lead to full-scale resumption of mining operations. The government characterised the decision as a responsible act of environmental stewardship and regulatory compliance.

Environmental Safeguards And Oversight Mechanisms
One of the central concerns raised by International Finance was how environmental standards would be maintained during processing, to which First Quantum Minerals responded that all operations will be conducted in accordance with the approved Preservation and Safe Management Plan and in consultation with government authorities. Ongoing environmental management includes water treatment to control pH levels, maintenance of sediment ponds, control of surface water and erosion within the tailings management facility, and compliance with the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) commitments remains in effect during this period.

Jobs For Locals, Benefits For Local Community
Local community involvement was addressed by commitments to prioritise employment and economic participation. First Quantum Minerals stated that it would try to re-employ former workers and local community members previously employed at Cobre Panamá, and that the processing programme will create more than 1,000 additional jobs for a total of around 3,000 jobs, with indirect jobs created in logistics, equipment supply, transportation, catering, and other supporting industries, helping to stabilise local economies in areas that have been affected by the closure of the mine since 2023.

Operational Scale, Logistics, And Investment Requirements
Logistics will still be a challenge, as there is an estimated 38 million tonnes of stockpiled ore to process, but the existing infrastructure (crushers, conveyors and flotation circuits) will be used, and only minor repairs are needed after the extended shutdown.

The company expects preparation and pre-commissioning work to take up to three months before stockpile processing commences.

First Quantum Minerals expects about $250 million in capital investment for plant recommissioning, inventory replenishment, and sustaining capital. It anticipates operating costs of between $12.00 and $12.50 per tonne milled, with higher unit costs expected during the early ramp-up. Systems will be brought back online and tested. The facility will likely operate at about one-third of capacity during start-up.

Economic Significance And Export Implications
The company did not respond when asked whether this phase could offset Panama’s economic losses from the 2023 shutdown, but noted that copper exports from stockpiles have been a significant part of Panama’s export performance while the mine was suspended and that the restart of processing would bring a significant revenue stream back to the country as well as back into global copper supply as demand tightens.

Legal And Strategic Outlook
In a legal and strategic development, First Quantum Minerals announced it suspended arbitration proceedings under both ICC and Canada–Panama FTA mechanisms. It did this to allow dialogue with the government of Panama while maintaining its legal rights. But there are larger questions about the long-term future of the asset, such as whether the site will move toward full reopening, continued maintenance, or eventually closure. It reaffirmed its commitment to dialogue to reach a sustainable solution with the government.

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This puts Africa in a particularly enviable position, as it holds over USD 30 trillion worth of rare earth minerals required for batteries and other equipment necessary for a complete green energy transition. The continent also has about 48% of the world’s manganese, 22% of natural graphite, 55% of the world’s cobalt deposits, and notable shares of nickel and lithium.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is responsible for 70% of global cobalt production. South Africa, Gabon, and Ghana produce 60% of global manganese.

But the arrangements from its colonial past still linger on in the African economy, as Western governments and corporations still view the continent as a mine to extract resources from rather than a genuine partner who can add value and create industrial products useful for the global economy.

No major international player is speaking about Africa using its wealth for internal economic transformation. Most just see it as an ore supplier. And though ore supplies will create a few jobs, it will continue to be an aftermath of colonialism. Africans desperately want to be a part of the refining, processing and manufacturing side of the supply chain.

Domestic plants could create thousands of jobs as opposed to the few hundred jobs offered through traditional resource extraction. Policymakers in Africa have long called for local beneficiation (value addition done on African soil). They want the critical minerals to be used for industrialisation at home and not just for global decarbonisation.

For example, Africa has $2.8 trillion worth of iron ore, which could be worth $25 trillion in steel if it adds value. The USD 834 billion in bauxite could be worth USD 15.4 trillion in aluminium with full processing.

Industrialisation is a matter of urgency for the continent as its population is exploding, with 30 million people born annually. Without manufacturing jobs, most of these young workers wouldn’t be able to land their first job. Building a mineral-to-manufacturing corridor will reduce Africa’s import bill by USD 16 billion annually.

Mining jobs in the DRC support over 100,000 people. In Namibia, there are 20,000 workers, and in Zambia, there are over 70,000. With value addition, millions more can enter the workforce.

The myriad nations of Africa cannot hope to bargain with the great European and American powers alone. It’s only through a grand union that they can even hope to negotiate a fair deal.

This is exactly why African Continent Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is an important part of this equation. Without the AfCFTA coordinated policies on taxes, prices and beneficiation will be impossible. The exploitative bilateral deals which have stolen wealth from African mines will no longer hold in front of a unified front.

Africa has over 1.4 billion people, and the vast continent with so many people can make value addition seamless as opposed to a single country taking this route. For example, cross-border power grids could supply energy to all plants and make African companies competitive and sustainable.

This grand ambition is constrained by persistent challenges, including governance risks, infrastructure deficits, global resistance to domestic processing, and regulatory inconsistencies. But there is hope left, as reforms in Ghana (bauxite), Zambia (copper), and Kenya (digital licensing) indicate policy progress. America and Europe prefer or even incentivise processing on their own turf. But Africans must negotiate fair inclusion in the value chains if they are going to remain relevant in the 21st century.

Energy and sustainability are also a big headache. No mineral-based industrialisation is possible without reliable and clean power. Africans can explore several options for sustainable power refining, including green hydrogen, hydropower, and geothermal energy. Clean energy can be combined with mineral processing, particularly in East Africa, for a competitive edge.

The IEA says that lithium demand would be fivefold in 2040, and demands for cobalt and rare earth may rise by 50%-60%, with copper by about 30%-50%.

A deal without technology transfer, skill development, and joint ventures is not in Africa’s interest. According to AfCFTA, if the strategy is effective, African nations could increase their bargaining power to a level comparable to the GCC’s bargaining power at the height of oil production in the 20th century.

The post IF Insights: Rare earths emerge as Africa’s new leverage point appeared first on International Finance.

International Finance can help you through this challenging transition by providing actionable steps on how to pivot, grow, and move forward into the next phase of your career with practical and inspiring insights on financial matters, personal growth, and job searching. Here are six key steps to take.

Take A Moment To Process And Reflect

Getting laid off is an emotional experience, and you may need some time to process your feelings before taking action. Think about why you were laid off and how it will impact your next steps. The truth is, it is rarely your fault. This is a time for self-care and to regain your emotional equilibrium. By taking the time to acknowledge your emotions, you can begin anew with clarity and resolve.

Assess Your Financial Situation

When you are laid off, you need to look at your finances to determine how much money you have available to live on during this time and how long you can support yourself. If you have no savings, you may want to get advice from a financial advisor to budget how you can live without a regular income.

Apply For Unemployment Benefits

After being laid off, you should take one of the first practical steps to apply for unemployment benefits, which can be a financial bridge to search for a new job or upskill, and filing for benefits varies by state.

Update Your Resume And LinkedIn Profile

The time has come to update your LinkedIn profile and resume to reflect your most recent work. Highlight your abilities, accomplishments, and contributions from your prior position, and customise your resume to fit the kinds of jobs you’re looking for. A well-maintained LinkedIn profile can make you stand out to recruiters and employers.

Network And Reach Out To Contacts

One of the best methods for discovering new opportunities is to network, reaching out to former colleagues, mentors, and other professional contacts to let them know you are seeking new roles. Referrals fill many jobs, and having a strong network can lead to more hidden opportunities.

Consider Freelancing Or Consulting

Freelancing or consulting can help you maintain productivity while you look for a new full-time job. Think about sharing your knowledge in fields where you excel.

The post Key things to do after being laid off appeared first on International Finance.

Green finance has become a toolkit for funding real assets that cut emissions, protect natural resources and harden economies against climate shocks, from solar parks and efficient factories to cleaner transport, water systems that waste less and infrastructure that withstands heat and floods.

Investors who once chased stories now demand numbers, asking how many megawatt hours will be saved, how many tonnes of carbon will be avoided and whether those claims will stand up to independent verification over time.

Green finance ties the use of proceeds or the performance of a borrower to quantifiable environmental outcomes that can be audited and priced, which is exactly what long-term capital wants in an era defined by risk, scrutiny and accountability.

For Oman, the alignment is straightforward, since the vision set by “Oman Vision 2040” calls for a more diversified economy built on innovation, skilled jobs and sustainability that preserves natural beauty while boosting global competitiveness and signalling seriousness to partners and markets.

The point is not to tick boxes for an external audience, it is to finance an economic transition that creates value locally, lowers costs of capital and strengthens the national balance sheet against volatility in a world already pricing climate risks.

Capital will not come because green is fashionable. It will come because projects can demonstrate clear benefits, present bankable documentation and deliver verified outcomes that de-risk investor decisions and justify better pricing and longer maturities.

The instruments are already proven, accessible and flexible enough to fit Omani priorities, which means the bottleneck is not novelty but execution with integrity. Green bonds and green loans direct money to labelled uses like solar generation, industrial retrofits or energy efficient desalination, where eligibility is clear, and the impacts can be tracked across the life of the asset.

Sustainability-linked loans and bonds go a step further by rewarding borrowers with lower coupons if they hit agreed performance targets, such as measurable reductions in energy use or increases in recycled water, which aligns incentives without restricting proceeds to a narrow list of assets.

Carbon markets can add a complementary revenue stream when projects produce verified emissions reductions, improving project economics and attracting international finance that wants both returns and impact.

When these tools are backed by honest data and credible reporting, the benefits compound, from access to new investor pools and longer duration money to a stronger national brand and more jobs across engineering, project finance, digital monitoring, maritime services, logistics and the circular economy that ties waste to opportunity.

Oman’s starting position is stronger than its critics concede, which is why urgency can coexist with confidence. Abundant solar and wind resources offer a comparative advantage for clean power and energy-intensive industries that want to decarbonise, while a strategic location and reliable institutions simplify supply chains and deal execution for investors who hate surprises more than anything else.

A growing base of industrial and logistics expertise means capability is not being built from zero, it is being upgraded for the next wave of investment in green hydrogen, power grids, storage and cleaner manufacturing, where scale, credibility and coordination determine winners.

Local banks are building the right teams and tools, while policymakers are giving explicit signals, with the Central Bank of Oman encouraging sustainable finance practices and transparent disclosures and capital market rules now enabling green and sustainability bonds and sukuk to be issued with confidence inside a clear framework.

Early movers matter in any market shift, and within banking, Sohar International has stepped out front by engaging clients, developing internal capacity and exploring climate-aligned lending so that more Omani projects qualify for green finance on terms that are fair, competitive and repeatable. This is how markets are built, by combining policy clarity with private capability and project-level data that turns goals into signed term sheets.

Proof beats promises

Green finance rewards clarity, and in Oman, clarity is beginning to deliver funding for real economy use cases, not just glossy brochures. In shipping and logistics, an Omani company secured a green loan from international lenders by presenting an energy efficiency business case grounded in data with a credible plan to cut fuel use and emissions that third parties could verify, which is the difference between a marketing deck and a financing package.

On rooftops and in small businesses, local retail programmes for solar and efficiency have already helped households and SMEs (small and medium businesses) lower bills, a reminder that the energy transition is not only about giga projects but about the cumulative effect of thousands of small decisions supported by accessible finance.

In heavy industry and energy, a coordinated push around green hydrogen has started to attract global developers who bring capital and technology, which is precisely the blend needed to derisk first movers and get steel in the ground.

The through line in each example is simple and repeatable, because clarity plus data equals money, and lenders will improve pricing and extend maturities when they can quantify savings or avoided emissions and see that those numbers have been independently checked.

This is how to turn climate objectives into competitive financing: by answering the two questions lenders always ask, how will this project perform under stress, and who will verify that it is doing what it claims as conditions change. When the answers are precise, prices improve, and when the answers are weak or vague, projects stall and costs rise, which is why internal discipline inside firms will be as important as external signalling by regulators.

Preparedness at the enterprise level is the fastest way to convert interest into funding, because the cheapest loan is the one that does not get delayed by missing documents and shifting targets. Start with a simple sustainability plan that explains the project, defines the expected environmental benefits and sets out how results will be measured, because lenders finance what they can underwrite, and underwriters need a plan they can file and revisit.

Build a baseline for emissions that covers Scope 1 and Scope 2 and the most material parts of Scope 3 where relevant, because credibility flows from showing where you stand before you promise how far you will go.

Choose the right instrument for the job. A green loan or bond, when the use of proceeds is clearly green and a sustainability-linked structure, when the goal is to improve performance over time across a broader corporate platform. Collect facts early, from feasibility studies and permits to signed contracts and a one-page summary that states impact per rial invested, because the summary focuses attention and the appendices carry the evidence.

Secure an external review to build trust and engage the bank at the start by asking what documentation, KPIs (key performance indicators) and reports it needs so that both sides are aligned on definitions, measurement and timing with no surprises later. This is about predictability, and predictable borrowers get better terms, more options and faster credit approvals from lenders trained to reward process discipline.

The system moves faster when everyone shares the same language and templates, which is why a “Green Finance Starter Programme” would pay for itself in velocity and volume. Many Omani SMEs want to participate but are unsure where to begin, so a national programme delivered through chambers and industry groups can teach teams to calculate a basic emissions baseline, select the right financing tool, prepare a short sustainability report and understand what assurance really means in practice.

Training must also target bankers, credit officers and FDI professionals, because deals close when borrowers and lenders align on eligibility, KPIs, verification and reporting, and that alignment comes from repeated conversations across a shared technical vocabulary.

Here, regulators can lean in with light but catalytic touch, as the Central Bank and investment authorities can back standard templates, share anonymised examples and celebrate early successes to create demonstration effects that pull others into the pipeline.

The outcome is not bureaucracy, it is speed, because standardisation reduces ambiguity, reduces legal opinions and reduces time to funds disbursement for projects that meet the criteria. The more predictable the process, the lower the risk premium investors will demand, which is how a policy choice about templates becomes a macro lever for lowering national financing costs.

Sovereign first, global ready

The fastest way to lose credibility is to appear to chase external agendas, which is why Omani green finance is rooted in national priorities and financial independence that serve domestic objectives first.

The goal is neither to mimic another country’s taxonomy nor to accept conditionality that undermines sovereignty. The goal is to channel capital to projects that strengthen the economic base, build industrial competitiveness and enhance environmental resilience under rules set and enforced at home.

Policy leadership by the Central Bank of Oman, the Capital Market Authority and the Ministry of Finance provides the backbone for this approach, ensuring that all green financing instruments are governed by clear disclosure and accountability standards that protect national interests while welcoming credible partners.

That is how to be globally ready without being globally dependent, by building a system that matches international best practice where it adds value while tailoring thresholds, definitions and reporting to Omani realities and sectoral priorities.

Sovereignty is not a slogan in this context. It is a series of design choices that keep governance, verification and enforcement aligned with national strategy so that the shift to sustainability remains strategic and durable, not transient and reactive. Markets can smell incoherence, and when frameworks wobble, capital retreats, which is why a sovereign-led, transparent and practical architecture is a competitive advantage in a crowded field of issuers and borrowers.

A credible framework requires practical rules that are stable enough for companies and banks to plan around, because nothing kills a pipeline faster than moving goalposts. It also requires capability, which comes from short, targeted training that equips lenders and borrowers to measure and verify impact with confidence, so that KPIs are not just acronyms on a slide but metrics embedded in operations and covenants.

Finally, it requires a visible pipeline of priority projects, from renewables and storage to industrial efficiency, low carbon logistics and green hydrogen, because capital prefers to shop from a shelf where the products are labelled, documented and ready for due diligence. Publish the shelf and refresh it, then watch how swiftly roadshows turn into mandates when investors see a line of creditworthy projects under a consistent policy umbrella.

Sovereign support should be targeted, not distorting, which is why a sustainable finance framework or a credit enhancement facility for early projects can attract private capital without crowding it out, especially in the first wave, where demonstration effects matter more than marginal costs.

The payoff is direct and measurable: lower financing costs, more international investment, stronger Omani enterprises and a stream of sustainable, high-quality jobs that anchor communities and expand the tax base.

Evidence from within Oman already shows the logic working in microcosm, which should embolden a scale-up in the next budget cycle. The shipping example proves that when a borrower presents a credible plan with independently checkable metrics, international lenders will line up to price efficiency gains and share the upside in tighter spreads or better tenors.

The household and SME programmes for rooftop solar and efficiency show that retail finance can be green, practical and popular when lower bills are visible within months, and repayment structures are simple, which builds a culture of demand that supports larger grid and storage investments.

The early momentum in green hydrogen shows how policy focus can draw global developers with both capital and technology, and it underlines the need to connect upstream ambitions to midstream infrastructure and downstream offtake with contracts that allocate risk fairly across the chain.

Stitch these strands together inside a coherent disclosure and assurance regime, and Oman will not have to persuade the market with slogans. It will persuade the market with term sheets and performance reports that speak for themselves.

Playbook for projects

Every firm that wants to tap green finance in Oman can follow a playbook that is short, disciplined and designed to survive sceptical due diligence, because scepticism is the default stance of any serious lender. First, define the project and its environmental logic in plain terms, then state the KPIs that will prove success and the methods for measuring them over time, which stops debates about purpose from consuming meetings that should be about terms and timelines.

Following these, establish a baseline for emissions that covers direct and indirect energy and the most material value chain components, because a baseline makes future claims legible and comparable across reporting periods and market cycles. Third, match the instrument to the reality, using green loans or bonds for defined green uses of proceeds and sustainability-linked structures when the value lies in performance improvement against credible targets rather than in a single pool of assets.

Fourth, pull together feasibility studies, permits and contracts, then condense the numbers into a one-page summary of impact per rial invested that lets decision makers grasp the economics and the environmental case at a glance without flipping through appendices in a marathon session.

Fifth, seek an external review early to build trust and surface any weaknesses before they are handed to a lender, which prevents avoidable delays and demonstrates professionalism to counterparties who value preparedness.

Finally, sit with the bank on day one and ask for its documentation, KPI and reporting expectations, then build your data room to that specification so there are no last-minute scrambles that raise doubts about execution capacity. This sequence is not glamorous, but it wins mandates because it respects how credit committees think and how risk is priced in competitive markets that reward certainty.

For SMEs, the path can be made even clearer through a national starter programme that demystifies the basics and lowers the cost of entry into green finance, which is where leverage per rial spent on training is highest. A programme delivered with chambers and industry groups can teach teams to calculate a basic baseline, choose a financing instrument, draft a short sustainability report and understand assurance, so that first-time borrowers arrive at banks with documents that are good enough to be taken seriously.

Training should be reciprocal, with bankers, credit officers and FDI professionals learning the same technical language so that meetings become exercises in alignment rather than translation, a shift that accelerates closings and reduces leakage in the pipeline.

Regulators can help by standardising templates, sharing anonymised case studies and publicly celebrating early deals that went right, which normalises the process and signals to the market that this is not a fad but a policy-backed shift with institutional energy behind it.

The net effect is compounding velocity, because the second wave of deals is always easier when the first wave created precedents that lawyers and lenders can reference without reinventing every clause.

The road to leadership

The reasons to act now are practical, not rhetorical, because global capital is already reweighting toward clean assets and credible frameworks, and the penalty for hesitation is opportunity lost to neighbours who move faster and offer better documentation.

Oman has the resources, the institutions and the policy direction to compete for that capital at scale, but the deciding factor will be the boring excellence of documents, baselines, KPIs and third-party checks that earn trust across borders and credit cycles.

Even the best solar resource does not finance itself. It needs a borrower who can prove savings, a regulator who can guarantee standards and a lender who can price risk with confidence, which is why the blocking and tackling described above will matter more than slogans on conference stages.

The good news is that the building blocks exist, from local banks assembling green finance capabilities to authorities enabling green and sustainability bonds and sukuk and early projects showing that money follows numbers when the numbers are honest.

The next chapter will be written by teams that execute the playbook and by policymakers who protect national interests while opening the door to credible partners under rules that elevate trust over hype, process over improvisation and performance over promises. If that discipline holds, Oman can turn vision into velocity and make green finance not just a headline, but a competitive advantage that compounds across a generation.

The post Oman turns vision into green power appeared first on International Finance.

Franchising offers grassroots entrepreneurs a chance to get into business for themselves. The business model combines a potent mix of capital, brand, and initiative. On the other hand, the cost of getting into a franchise business has risen steeply in recent years.

“A new concept, which started in less developed countries where it has helped to lift millions out of poverty, is microfranchising. Microfranchising is a business model that applies traditional franchising to very small businesses. It is a systemised approach to replicating micro-enterprises like drive-in coffee kiosks, mall products and services, food stands, and just about any other type of business that sells low-cost products or services, primarily in high-traffic areas,” mentions Levi King, CEO, co-founder, and chairman of Nav.com.

How Microfranchising Works
Microfranchising follows the same general idea as traditional franchising, but is intentionally smaller and easier to manage. Instead of opening a full storefront or hiring a big team, owners typically handle compact operations, like mobile services, small retail setups, or simplified service models. The franchisor provides the essentials: training, branding, operational systems, and guidance. The relationship is straightforward and built around a model that’s already been tested in the real world.

Advantages Of Franchising
What draws many people to microfranchising is the comfort of structure. You’re not forced to guess your way through marketing or operations because most of the decisions are already mapped out. You step into a brand that has a track record instead of trying to get a new concept off the ground.

Low Barrier To Entry
Traditional franchises often require heavy capital, which can shut out a lot of capable people. Microfranchises remove that barrier. The startup cost is significantly lower, and the operating model is lean. This allows people with limited funds to take their first step into business ownership without putting themselves under enormous financial strain.

Financing Your Franchise
Because microfranchises are smaller and based on proven systems, financing is often more accessible, and some franchisors offer internal financing or connect franchisees with microloan programmes or small-business lenders.

Social And Community Impact
Beyond individual success stories, microfranchising can serve a social and community impact, helping local economies, providing jobs, and offering necessary services in areas where there are few other choices. The model offers a balance of personal development and community benefit for those interested in running a business that also benefits the community around them.

The post Five reasons why businesses should consider microfranchise model 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.

That evening at Gaga’s, Akkaraju found himself sitting next to an investor in Stability AI, the company that launched the wildly popular text-to-image generator “Stable Diffusion” in 2022. Despite its early success, Stability AI came precariously close to the situation of being shut down. The unnamed investor told Akkaraju: ‘You should take Stability and make it into the Hollywood-friendly AI model.’

In 2022, Hollywood was facing headwinds: the number of films and TV shows produced in the United States had dropped by about 40%, due to ballooning production costs, competition from overseas, and widespread labour disputes.

AI promised to bring the numbers back up by speeding production and slashing costs, while letting computers automate the grunt work of translating dialogue, adding visual effects frame by frame, and editing boom microphones out of a zillion shots.

But then came another fear: What if AI starts writing scripts and maybe ends up acting as well? And this “what if” led to two of the industry’s biggest unions conducting strikes to obtain assurances that generative AI wouldn’t replace union jobs in the near term.

In May 2023, the Hollywood writers’ strike over pay broke out, but the bigger issue was the refusal of studios like Netflix and Disney to rule out AI replacing human scribes in the future. The Writers Guild of America (WGA) asked for binding agreements to regulate AI’s use.

The association’s proposal was as follows: nothing written by AI could be considered “literary” or “source” material, which are industry terms that decide who gets royalties, and scripts written by WGA members cannot “be used to train AI.”

However, studios rejected it and allegedly countered with an offer merely to meet once a year to “discuss advancements in technology.”

WGA members further felt that Hollywood executives, where Silicon Valley companies have upended many traditional practices such as long-term contracts for writers, may seek to cut costs further by getting computers to write their next hit shows.

OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT 3.5 at the end of 2022 not only disrupted the tech sector and the broader economy but also captured the public’s attention by excelling at precisely the kinds of non-routine skills (including creative tasks) long considered quintessentially “human.”

And Hollywood writers became the first and most visible face of the resistance to generative AI, speaking volumes about the nature of the new technology and the kinds of livelihoods that it will impact most.

Their victory in 2024, in securing first-of-their-kind protections, now offers important lessons for other unions and professional organisations, policymakers, and workers across a range of occupations who may face similar disruptions to their careers.

After the writers, it was the turn of the Hollywood actors, whose union SAG-AFTRA in August 2024 signed a deal with online talent marketplace Narrativ that enables actors to sell advertisers’ rights to replicate their voices with AI.

The concern arose from the fear that AI could commonly misuse artists’ likenesses. The new agreement now seeks to ensure actors derive income from the technology and have control over how and when their voice replicas are used.

Narrativ is known for connecting advertisers and ad agencies with actors to create audio ads using AI.

As of 2025, AI is becoming the new normal in Hollywood, with Stability AI, once in a precarious position, rewriting the industry’s “creativity rulebook” through its innovative solutions.

Stability AI almost floundered

Major studios and streaming services are currently competing to develop their own “AI Strategies.” Since 2022, several startups, including Luma, Runway, and Asteria, have begun creating tools to support these efforts. Akkaraju, back in 2024, saw the opportunity in front of him. Stability AI had the technology. It just needed a Hollywood finish. As far as he could tell, there was only one problem. Didn’t the company already have a CEO?

When Emad Mostaque, a former hedge fund manager, founded Stability AI in 2020, the company’s mission was to “build systems that make a real difference” in solving society’s toughest problems. By 2022, the system Mostaque felt he needed to build was a cloud supercomputer powerful enough to run a generative AI model. OpenAI was gaining traction with its closed-source models, and as per the American tech journalist Zoe Schiffer, Mostaque wanted to make an open-source alternative—“like Linux to Windows.”

“He offered up the supercomputer to a group of academic researchers working on an open-source system where you could type words to generate an image. The researchers weren’t going to say no. In August of that year, they launched Stable Diffusion in partnership with Mostaque’s company,” the scribe recollected.

The text-to-image generator was a breakout hit, garnering 10 million users in two months.

“It was fairly close to state-of-the-art. It allowed researchers to essentially extend the model, fine-tune it, and it spurred a whole community into action in terms of creating enhancements and add-ons,” said Maneesh Agrawala, a computer science professor at Stanford University, while noting that openness was core to the model’s success.

By October 2022, Stability AI had only 77 employees, but with thousands of times that many people in the wider Stable Diffusion community, it could compete with its bigger rivals. Mostaque raised $101 million in a seed round from venture capital firms and hedge funds, including Coatue and Lightspeed (the final million, he tells me, was for good luck). The company became a unicorn.

Former Stability AI employees describe Mostaque as a visionary. He spoke eloquently about the need for a democratic AI. In the not-too-distant future, Mostaque told employees, the company would solve complex biomedical problems and generate season eight of Game of Thrones.

However, Mostaque was way over his head. “I was brand-new to this. With my Aspergers and ADHD, I was like, what’s going on? Mostaque talks fast, his tone matter-of-fact: On the research side, we did really good things. The other side I was not so good at, which was the management side,” said a former employee. Mostaque didn’t think deeply about building a marketable product. His fascination was with building AI models.

“The company’s success brought heightened scrutiny—particularly around how the models were built. Like many text-to-image models, Stable Diffusion 1.5 was trained on LAION-5B, an open-source dataset linked to 5.8 billion images scraped from the web, including child sexual exploitation material and copyrighted work. In January 2023, Getty Images sued Stability AI in London’s High Court for allegedly training its models on 12 million proprietary photographs. The company filed a similar suit in the US weeks later. In the stateside complaint, Getty accused the AI firm of brazen theft and freeriding,” Schiffer said.

In June 2023, Forbes published a story alleging that Mostaque had inflated his credentials and misrepresented the business in pitch decks to his investors. The article also claimed that Mostaque had received only a bachelor’s degree from Oxford, not a master’s. What’s more, Stability AI reportedly owed millions of dollars to Amazon Web Services, which provided the computing power for its model. Though Mostaque had spoken of a partnership, Stability AI’s spokesperson acknowledged to Forbes that it was, in fact, a run-of-the-mill cloud services agreement with a standard discount.

And the article resulted in investors losing confidence. VCs from both Coatue and Lightspeed left the board of directors, followed by the departures of the company’s head of research, chief operating officer, general counsel, head of human resources and the prominent researchers. Mostaque finally left the company on March 22, 2024, just a few weeks after Lady Gaga’s greenhouse soiree.

Akkaraju and Parker saw opportunity

Akkaraju and Parker joined Stability AI, taking over as CEO and chairman of the company’s board. However, industry competition was fiercer, with another startup, Runway, signing the AI industry’s first big deal with a movie studio. Runway would get access to Lionsgate’s proprietary catalogue of movies as training data and develop tools for the studio.

Early on in his tenure, Akkaraju decided that Stability AI would no longer compete with OpenAI and Google on building frontier models. Instead, it would create apps that sat on top of those models, thereby freeing the company from enormous computing costs.

Akkaraju negotiated a new deal with Stability AI’s cloud computing vendors, wiping away the company’s massive debt. Asked for specifics on how this came about, Akkaraju, through a spokesperson, demurred. Investors, however, came flocking back.

Whereas Mostaque painted a picture of AI solving the world’s most difficult problems, Akkaraju is building Stability AI as a software-as-a-service company for Hollywood. The goal is not to generate films, but to use AI to augment the tools that filmmakers already use.

“I really do think that our differentiation is having the creator in the centre. I don’t see any other AI company that has James Cameron on its board,” Akkaraju said.

Yes, the same legendary director, who was leading Hollywood’s charge against the technology. He didn’t appreciate the premise of the streaming platform, the “Screening Room,” which let people watch new releases at home for $50 on the same day they came out in theatres.

Cameron reportedly told a crowd at CinemaCon that he was “committed to the theatre experience.” In the years that followed, none of the major studios publicly announced deals with the Screening Room, and in 2020, the company rebranded as SR Labs.

That same year, Akkaraju and Parker took over Weta Digital, the visual effects studio behind blockbusters such as The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, and Cameron’s Avatar movies. Weta developed virtual cameras that let Cameron see a real-time rendering of the artificial environment through a viewfinder, as if he were filming on location in the fictional world of Pandora.

Then came the meeting between Cameron, Akkaraju, and Parker over dinner, where they discussed how technology was changing the film industry. “The tequila was flowing. A friendship formed. Any tension that had existed over the Screening Room melted away,” Cameron recalled.

“I never really talked with him about it. He knew, and I knew. It was very funny,” Akkaraju told WIRED, while continuing, “So Cameron is on the board, but is the creator in the centre? When I spoke with Parker, he emphasised the importance of using open-source models and spoke of respect for creators and respect for IP. That sounds potentially kind of rich, coming from me, given my past association with Napster and early social media. But it is a lesson learnt.”

Challenges lie ahead

In June 2025, the company scored a major win when Getty dropped its copyright infringement claims from a broader lawsuit as the trial neared a close in the United Kingdom. The US trial is ongoing.

Akkaraju said the company “sources data from publicly available and licensed datasets for training and fine-tuning,” and that when “creating solutions for a client”, it “fine-tunes using the dataset provided by the client.”

When Schiffer asked Akkaraju if the company trained exclusively on licensed data, he responded, “Well, that’s the majority of what we’re using, for sure.”

Even those who are bullish on AI admit that, for the most part, the technology isn’t ready for the big screen. Text-to-image generators might work for marketing agencies, but they often lack the quality required for a feature film.

“I worked on one film for Netflix and tried to use a single shot. The AI-generated footage got bounced back from quality control because it wasn’t 4K resolution,” said an anonymous filmmaker, not wanting to discuss the use of AI publicly.

Another problem with Stability AI’s solution is the issue with consistency. Filmmakers need to be able to tweak a scene in minute ways, but that’s not possible with most of the image and video generators on the market. Enter the same prompt into a chatbot 10 times, and you will likely get 10 different responses.

“That doesn’t work at all in a VFX workflow. We need higher resolution; we need higher repeatability. We need controllability at levels that aren’t quite there yet,” Cameron noted.

“That hasn’t stopped filmmakers from experimenting. Almost every person I spoke with for this story said that AI is already a core part of the previz process, where scenes are mapped out before a shoot. The process can create new inefficiencies,” Schiffer remarked.

“The inefficiency in the old system was really the information gap between what I see and what I imagine I want moving forward. With AI, the inefficiency becomes ‘Here’s a version, here’s another version, here’s another version,” said Luisa Huang, cofounder of Toonstar, a tech-forward animation company.

One of the first people in Hollywood to admit to using generative AI in the final frame is Jon Irwin, the director and producer of Amazon’s biblical epic House of David. He became interested in the technology while shooting the first season of the show in Greece.

“I noticed that my production designer was able to visualise ideas almost in real time. I was like, tell me exactly how you’re doing what you’re doing. What are you using, magician?” he recalled.

Irwin started playing around with the tools himself and ended up making a presentation for Amazon outlining how he wanted to use generative AI in his production. The company was supportive.

“We film everything we can for real—it still takes hundreds of people. But we’re able to do it at about a third of the budget of some of these bigger shows in our same genre, and we’re able to do it twice as fast,” he told WIRED.

A burning-forest scene in “House of David” (historical web series depicting the rise of the biblical figure David) would have been too expensive to do with practical effects. So, AI stepped in.

Despite Irwin showing interest in Stability AI’s tools, he has not been able to use the solutions successfully on a show at scale. Schiffer believes that Stability AI’s text-to-image generators need to cross a few hard yards before Hollywood starts using them professionally.

However, Stability AI can take solace in the fact that the taboo on studios acknowledging their embrace of AI seems to be softening. In July 2025, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told investors the company had allowed “gen AI final footage” to appear in one of its original series for the first time. He said the decision sped up production tenfold and dramatically cut costs.

Hanno Basse, Stability AI’s chief technology officer, showed Schiffer an image of his backyard in Los Angeles: a grassy lawn surrounded by high hedges, rose bushes crowding a bay window, and a tree in the far left-hand corner. Suddenly, the 2D image unfurled into 3D.

A generative AI model has filled in the gaps, estimating depth (how far away the hedge is from the rose bush, the tree from the window) and other missing elements to make the scene feel immersive. Basse can replicate camera moves by selecting from a drop-down menu: zoom in or out, pan up or pan down, or spiral.

“Instead of spending hours or days or weeks building a virtual environment and rehearsing your shots, the idea here is actually that you can just take a single image and generate a concept,” Basse says.

However, the company admits that its offerings are still in their early days and need perfection.

“I hear artists at VFX companies say, Hey, I don’t want to get replaced. Of course, you don’t want to get replaced! If you guys are going to lose your jobs, you’re going to lose your jobs over the work drying up versus getting bumped aside by these GenAI models,” Cameron said.

Akkaraju and Parker, too, believe that as movies become cheaper to produce, more films will get made and overall employment will rise.

The AI revolution is here and already transforming Hollywood. That collapsing building, that burning forest, that crowd of people the audience sees when streaming a show or going to the movie theatre will be created using a keyboard. Technology will be a creator’s ally to give a project the “larger than life” elevation it deserves, without hurting the purse much.

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