BUSINESS

Day 1 of Men’s Singles and Women’s Singles action at the 2026 U.S. Open got underway on Sunday at Flushing Meadows, N.Y, with plenty of notable celebrities in attendance.

For two decades new ballpark initiatives have been on the docket for the A’s and Rays. The matter now seems solved in Vegas and Tampa.

The aurora has a low chance to be visible from some states along the U.S.-Canadian border on Sunday night.

Bestselling personal finance author and radio host Dave Ramsey has a blunt warning for Americans saving for retirement about Social Security and 401(k)s.

“Don’t rely on Social Security as your sole source of income in retirement — it won’t be enough,” Ramsey wrote on Ramsey Solutions. “Investing only up to the match on a 401(k) isn’t really enough for retirement either. Set yourself up for success by putting away 15% of your income each year.”

People concerned about the future of Social Security and lucrative investment ideas for retirement money often ask questions about what the best investment choices are for their 401(k) plans.

“If you’re leaning on your 401(k) as a big part of your retirement plan, it’s important to get these questions answered,” Ramsey wrote. “Why? Because your quality of life in your golden years partially depends on the investment choices you make today.”

When it comes to Social Security, what future retirees think they’ll get and what will actually show up in their bank accounts can be two very different numbers.

Social Security Administration explains monthly payments

On average, current retirees collect $2,071 each month from Social Security, totaling around $24,800 annually, according to the Social Security Administration (SSA).

“That’s barely enough to keep the lights on and put food on the table, let alone actually enjoy a comfortable retirement,” Ramsey wrote. “And yet, a recent poll found that almost 40% of Americans don’t expect to need any source of retirement income beyond Social Security.”

And Social Security faces future financing challenges.

“If the OASI Trust Fund (Old-Age and Survivors Insurance) and the DI Trust Fund (Disability Insurance) projections were combined, the resulting projected fund (designated OASDI) would be able to pay 100 percent of total scheduled benefits until the third quarter of 2034, unchanged from last year’s report,” the SSA reported.

“At that time, the projected fund’s reserves would become depleted and continuing combined fund income would be sufficient to pay 83 percent of scheduled benefits,” continued the SSA.

“The two funds could not actually be combined unless there were a change in the law, but the combined projection of the two funds is frequently used to indicate the overall status of the Social Security program.”

Dave Ramsey clarifies 401(k) savings

When employees enroll in a 401(k), they choose their contribution amount and select their investments from the options provided by their plan administrator.

“Then, that money will be deducted automatically from your paycheck to invest in the options you chose,” Ramsey wrote. “If you’re already enrolled in your company’s 401(k) plan, check your pay stubs to find out exactly how much you and your employer (if they offer a company match) are contributing to your 401(k).”

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Once employees opt into a 401(k), they get to pick their own contribution levels and choose where to put their money from the administrator’s list of options.

“You see, your 401(k) is like a warm, fuzzy sweater that shelters your investments from the harsh, bitter elements — which, in this case, are taxes,” Ramsey wrote.

“But how it protects your investments from taxes depends on whether you have a traditional 401(k) or a Roth 401(k).”

Dave Ramsey warns Americans about Social Security’s future and 401(k) options.Shutterstock

Fidelity outlines pros, cons of Roth 401(k)

Even though most large companies offer a Roth 401(k) option, surprisingly few employees actually sign up for one, according to Fidelity Investments.

Because both traditional and Roth accounts carry clear pros and cons, the best path for any given worker ultimately comes down to their current finances and long-term plans.

“There’s no right or wrong answer,” said Fidelity’s Aaron Korthas. “The best option depends on an individual’s unique situation.”

Combining elements of both accounts, a Roth 401(k) functions as a hybrid retirement plan.

Like a Roth IRA, contributions are made with after-tax dollars, allowing potential earnings to accumulate tax-deferred and qualify for tax-free withdrawals in retirement.

However, contributions are handled directly via payroll deductions and are bound by standard 401(k) contribution limits, which are significantly higher than traditional IRA caps.

“If you expect your marginal tax rate to be at least as high in retirement as it is currently—which would apply to many younger participants who anticipate growing incomes over time — the Roth option could work in your favor over the long term,” said Andrew Bachman from Fidelity.

“This also sometimes applies to those who plan to move in retirement from a low-tax state to a high-tax state, say Texas to California.”

Regarding Roth 401(k) cons, Fidelity offers its perspective.

“The list of cons may be short for Roth 401(k)s, but missing tax deferral is a big one,” Fidelity wrote. “When faced with a choice of paying more tax now or later, most people choose to pay later, hence the low participation rates for Roth 401(k)s.”

Related: AARP warns Americans on 401(k), IRA costly mistakes

Oil prices surged above $120 a barrel in April as the Iran conflict choked the Strait of Hormuz and traders feared the worst.

Since then, something unexpected has happened. Prices have been falling. Not because the conflict ended, but because the market found a way around it.

Goldman Sachs analysts Daan Struyven and Yulia Zhestkova Grigsby published a note this week laying out why the energy market’s recovery matters, what it means for different parts of the energy sector, and why crude oil faces less upside risk than many investors might expect, Bloomberg reported.

Why Goldman says Hormuz oil flows are recovering faster than expected

The Strait of Hormuz is the single most important oil chokepoint in the world. About a third of the globe’s seaborne oil passes through it on the way from Persian Gulf exporters to global buyers.

When the Iran conflict escalated earlier this year, flows collapsed. Goldman estimates total crude and oil-product exports through the Strait fell to roughly 5 to 6 million barrels per day in March, down from about 22 to 24 million barrels per day before the conflict, Bloomberg reported.

Since March, that recovery has been steady. Flows now sit at approximately 15 to 16 million barrels per day. Still 7 to 8 million barrels short of prewar levels, but well above the March low. About 6 to 8 million barrels per day of crude specifically is transiting the Strait, according to traders who spoke with Bloomberg.

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“The rise in dark crossings by specialized shippers, and in ship-to-ship transfers shows that producers and shippers are adapting to the Mideast conflict,” Goldman wrote. “Higher dark flows could moderate the upside to crude oil prices even if Mideast disruptions last longer.”

A dark crossing is when a tanker turns off its satellite transponder to avoid tracking. Ship-to-ship transfers move cargo between vessels mid-journey instead of following a standard route. Neither practice is new. Both are being used more heavily now. The oil is moving. It is just harder to see where it is going.

The result is that crude prices have fallen sharply from the April peak above $120. At the time of Goldman’s note, oil traded around $89 a barrel. It has since slid further toward $83. The recovery in Hormuz flows is the primary reason.

Why European gas and refined fuels face more risk than crude

Goldman’s more cautious crude outlook does not apply equally to every part of the energy market.

Flows of liquefied natural gas and refined fuels through the Strait remain lower than crude oil flows. That creates a different risk profile. “We continue to see greater price upside to European natural gas prices and deferred oil product prices in persistent disruption scenarios than for crude,” Goldman wrote.

European natural gas is particularly exposed because the region depends heavily on imported LNG and has limited capacity to absorb sustained shortfalls. If Hormuz disruptions persist, European gas buyers face a tighter market than crude-oil traders do.

Refined fuels, including diesel, jet fuel, and gasoline, face a similar dynamic. Crude can flow through workarounds that refined products cannot always use. Refineries and fuel distribution networks are less adaptable to ship-to-ship transfers and dark routing than raw crude cargoes.

For consumers and businesses, that distinction matters. Gasoline and diesel prices can move differently from crude when refinery capacity, shipping routes, or fuel-specific supply chains are disrupted. The current disruption is showing that split in real time.

Goldman’s note is not a declaration that the crisis is over. It is a call for more precision about which parts of the energy complex carry the most risk.Cho/Getty Images

What Goldman’s oil call means for the U.S. economy

The pullback in crude from $120 to $89 has direct economic consequences that go beyond energy sector earnings.

Energy prices drove the bulk of the spike in headline inflation earlier this year. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston found that the personal consumption expenditure price index jumped from 2.9% in February to 3.8% in April, the bank noted, and attributed the move primarily to the energy price surge.

A sustained pullback in oil reverses much of that inflationary pressure.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago modeled the GDP impact of the 2026 oil shock and found it could shave between 81 and 166 basis points off economic growth this year, the Chicago Fed reported. A sustained drop back toward prewar price levels would partially restore that lost growth.

The San Francisco Fed was more direct. When oil prices surged in April, the bank revised its near-term growth projections down, citing the impact of higher energy costs on real incomes and consumer spending.

Lower gas prices work the other way. They put more money in household budgets without requiring a wage increase.

Goldman’s view is that the Hormuz recovery limits the upside risk to crude. If that assessment holds, energy’s drag on the U.S. economy should ease through the rest of 2026. That in turn reduces pressure on the Federal Reserve to hike rates specifically because of energy-driven inflation.

What investors should watch in energy markets now

Goldman’s note is not a declaration that the crisis is over. It is a call for more precision about which parts of the energy complex carry the most risk.

The recovery in Hormuz flows can reverse quickly. A decline in tanker activity, infrastructure damage, or a broader escalation could push crude back toward the spring highs. The dark-shipping workarounds that have supported flows depend on a specific set of conditions that are not guaranteed to persist.

Physical oil flows matter more than daily price moves as a signal. Export volumes through the Strait, tanker tracking data, the volume of ship-to-ship transfers, and LNG shipment volumes are more informative than crude spot prices on any given day.

For investors watching the broader economy, the key question is whether Goldman’s assessment holds through the end of the year. If flows stabilize at current levels, the inflation and growth drag from the energy shock eases. If they deteriorate, the economic headwinds return alongside higher crude prices.

Related: Chevron stock turns heads as company strikes fresh oil

Retailers face economic uncertainty, shifting consumer behavior and rapid AI adoption. Three priorities can help them stay ahead this holiday season.

Indiana Pacers rookie Braden Smith has signed a two-way contract with the franchise. He must turn in-game growth to daily improvement.

A decade ago, a car recall meant a letter in the mail, a dealership appointment, and a vehicle sitting idle for a day or two.

For a growing share of new vehicles, it now means a notification the driver never has to act on.

That shift is the real story behind Lucid’s latest and largest safety action.

Lucid Group (LCID) is recalling 27,185 Air sedans built across the 2022 through 2026 model years. An exterior lighting circuit governed by software can let too much current pass through, raising the risk of overheating and fire, according to CNBC.

The flaw sits in what Lucid calls an eFuse, a software controlled substitute for a physical fuse.

Faulty logic failed to cut power at the right threshold, letting the circuit stay energized past its rated capacity, according to Lucid’s own filing with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Modern electric vehicles often rely on solid-state eFuses whose current limits are governed by code rather than physical melt-wires. Because the safety threshold is defined in software, engineers can recalibrate the system remotely to prevent overheating without replacing a single hardware component.

Related: Automakers keep quiet about a U.S. probe into their sensors

A fix preceding the paperwork

Lucid discovered a fire in a company owned Air back in June 2023, tracing it to the same front lighting area now under recall, CarBuzz reported.

The company’s Product Safety Executive Council formally classified the issue as a safety defect on August 13, this year, per the NHTSA filing.

That timeline matters because it shows the fix arrived before the recall did. Lucid released the corrected software in July, and by the time it filed with regulators, 20,719 of the 27,185 affected cars already had it installed.

The recall, in other words, was mostly paperwork catching up to an update already pushed.

Lucid recalled 27,185 Air sedans over a fire risk tied to a software controlled eFuse, its largest safety action to date.Volodymyr Semeniuk / Getty Images

Why Wall Street looked past the headline

Shares moved higher Friday even as Lucid disclosed its largest recall on record, TipRanks noted, a reaction GuruFocus attributed to the software fix limiting operational disruption. The stock traded between $4.95 and $5.17 during the session, according to market data.

That muted response tracks perfectly with broader Wall Street sentiment. Across a recent poll of 11 analysts by S&P Global, the consensus rating remains a steady ‘Hold’ with an average price target of $8.11, implying a roughly 62% upside from current trading levels.

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Cantor Fitzgerald’s Andres Sheppard perfectly encapsulates this grounded outlook, having recently reiterated a Neutral rating and an $8 price target heading into second-quarter earnings. His view is built on delivery pace and cash burn rather than one-off safety notices.

Ultimately, a recall that requires a swift software push, rather than a crowded service bay, barely moves the needle for these institutional forecasts.

The recall pattern is becoming Lucid’s playbook

This is not Lucid’s first brush with NHTSA this year. The company recalled more than 10,000 vehicles in January over a rearview camera display issue and another 2,039 in May over a loss of drive power, both resolved through over the air updates rather than dealer visits, according to Reuters reporting.

For a legacy automaker, that recall frequency would read as a reliability crisis. For a software defined one, it increasingly reads as routine maintenance that regulators happen to require public disclosure for.

The real test isn’t whether Lucid’s fix works. It’s whether regulators and investors keep weighing an over the air recall the same way they weigh one that pulls cars off the road entirely.

As software-defined vehicles become the industry standard, routine over-the-air updates will lose their ability to shock the market.

Wall Street has already looked past this notice, keeping its focus on Lucid’s upcoming earnings and the critical production ramp of the Gravity SUV.

Related: Honda keeps skipping the hybrid its buyers are asking for

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There is a clear repeating trend in agent deployments: The gateway is the first control teams reach for, but it is the one they are least ready to run. This is because gateways sit on top of identity and attribution layers that are mostly not there.The first layer of risk is not hypothetical. In June, CISA added a LiteLLM flaw to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after attackers were caught abusing it in the wild. The bug ran commands on the host through the gateway itself, and chained with a second flaw it required no credentials. It was one of seven common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) disclosed in that single AI gateway in a month. This is the layer many enterprises reach for first to secure their AI agents.When considering secure agent architecture, gateway controls should not be the first control. They should be the fifth.Most models on the maturity of agent security describe the controls a company will need in the future. They tend to miss, from my experience, the more difficult problem of describing the brownfield scenario: In what order should these controls be layered in conjunction with an identity and access management system that is already in place?If the control plane is unaware of which agent is acting, who delegated the work, what task the agent is to perform, and what credentials are being used, then the context is incomplete. A gateway may block clear policy violations, but will struggle to distinguish a justified action from one that is technically permissible but operationally inappropriate.The pattern of failure is clear when sequencing these controls for agent production deployments: Enforcement is taken early, while the identity and attribution context it depends on has yet to be developed. Agent security functions as a dependency chain, with each control depending on context generated upstream.The wrong starting pointThink about routing agent traffic via a new runtime gateway. A finance-reconciliation agent tries to alter a record in production. The gateway authenticates the user token and checks the API call. What it can’t observe is that the request is agent-initiated, that the agent is executing a more limited function, or that the request is part of a tool chain invoked by an untrusted artifact.The credential is valid. The API call is permissible. The action contradicts the purpose of the delegation. The gateway is there, but its set of supports seems absent, so a costly control is applied to a very small part of the whole picture.Limiting an agent’s privileges to those of the human principal is useful so the agent does not exceed the person it serves. However, having a privilege ceiling does not create separate attribution. Twenty agents might operate under a single person’s permissions and still need unique identities, audit logs, behavior profiles, and revocation paths.Dependency-gated deploymentI call this process dependency-gated deployment. Upstream exit tests must be satisfied before any downstream control is considered operationally complete. Concurrent development of downstream controls is permissible. Here are the six gates, and the proof that they work:GateControlOperational proof it works1Agent inventory and accountable ownershipEvery production agent has a named owner, purpose, approved tools, and lifecycle state2Distinct agent identity plus delegation contextThe system can identify the agent, its owner, and the principal it is acting for3Task-scoped, short-lived credentialsA compromised agent cannot reach resources unrelated to its assigned task4Attributable telemetryA completed task can be reconstructed from initiation to downstream effect5Runtime action enforcementPolicy decisions incorporate agent, principal, task, and action context, not just token validity6Behavioral baselines and cross-system kill pathThe agent’s effective authority can be stopped everywhere it reachesThe six dependency gates for the agent security controls. Each control is contextualized by the gates above it. From the author’s analysis of production agent deployments.Start with the agents you can actually nameTo begin, recognize the production agents in open-source frameworks, cloud offerings, SaaS services, and developer tools. For each, record the owner, responsibility, lifecycle stage, allowed tools, data domains, and sources of credentials.Bypass this step, and the organization will lose the first hour of incident response while they figure out what should have been obvious. The inventory identifies the asset that every control thereafter governs.An agent needs its own identity, but it cannot lose the human behind it An agent should not be buried in a developer token, a shared service account, or a human session. Simply knowing the caller is an agent is not sufficient. The control plane requires additional delegation context: Who delegated the work, what specific task the agent was instructed to execute, and which resources the agent needs the authority to access. Identity specifies which actor placed the call. Delegation is the answer to whose authority it acts, and for what reason.Once that connection is cut off, the downstream logs attribute the reconciliation agent to the employee whose token it borrowed, and every action it takes is attributed to someone who did not start it.Shrink authority before you inspect behavior Once an agent can be identified, capabilities should be limited. Access restrictions should be time-bound to the task and limited to the tools and resources required to perform the task. This can be implemented using identity access management (IAM) features such as workload identity, token exchange, conditional access, and time-bound entitlements which the organization already possesses.With regard to the 2026 Teleport study involving 205 security leaders, the access scope surpasses the predictive capacity of industry, maturity, or self-assurance concerning predicting AI-related incidents. For example, organizations with over-privileged AI reported a 76% incident rate, whereas AI incidents occurred in 17% of organizations under the least privilege. This indicates that access scope in the dependency chain is more important than context-aware runtime enforcement.The primary principle is monotonic delegation. Every transfer of responsibility must preserve or diminish authority; under no circumstances should it increase authority. For the reconciliation agent, this means an agent who can view one ledger as opposed to one who inherits the employee’s access to all systems the employee can access.Fix attribution before automating enforcement Most audit stacks can capture what resource was accessed and which credential allowed access. In the agent deployments I have reviewed, this is the most commonly missed gate. Prior to utilizing an adaptive runtime policy, link any relevant tool invocation to the agent identity, initiating principal, task id, parent action, and outcome. After doing so, examine the telemetry: For one completed task, see if you can track down the initiator, the agent who executed it, the authority under which the action was taken, the tools utilized, and the outcome. In regulated environments, oversight that is not attributed cannot be justified.Now the gateway earns its keepThe gateway can use registered identities, explicit delegation, scoped credentials, and attributable telemetry to question if this agent is authorized to perform this action, for this principal, within this task, involving this resource. Although the user’s credentials may provision write access to the finance-reconciliation agent, the gateway has situational context and so determines that it is out of scope. This is control’s point of greatest value. The most stringent controls should be applied at irreversible boundaries — payments, access policy changes, deletions, modifications of the production environment, and data exports.Detection and the kill path come lastBehavioral baselines are developed last because distinguishable and attributable agent activity must be established to set a standard. Then, security teams are able to identify anomalous patterns of tool usage, unexpected cross-domain access, and deviations from their assigned tasks. Containment is more than just the disabling of a single directory object: A proper kill path entails disabling the agent’s identity, invalidation of active and derived credentials, blockage of tool activation, termination of active tasks, and isolation of the workload that contains the agent.Start without replacing your IAMDesigning a whole new identity program is unnecessary. If the existing identity provider doesn’t treat agents as native object types, begin with an authoritative registry linked to the existing workload identities. Following this, extend agent and task identifiers as trusted execution contexts, implement short-lived credentials to mitigate inherited privileges, and include those identifiers in tool-call logs for subsequent gateway ingestion. The dependency model remains unchanged as vendor support matures.Control gaps are measurable. In Okta’s 2026 survey, only 34% of executives said their organization always applies the same level of security rigor to its agentic workforce as to its human workforce. The last control from the chain cannot be applied first to close that gap.What to do in the next 30 daysBegin with 10 production agents. For each one, identify the owner, purpose, approved tools, and credentials. By now, you should have the beginnings of an agent registry and perhaps your first insights on governance.Test attribution. Find out if IAM and logging can tell each agent apart from the human or service that delegated the task. If this kind of differentiation is not possible, a gateway would be operating without any visibility.Reconstruct one completed agent task within an action chain, from start to finish, including downstream effects. Wherever the chain breaks is where your deployment falls short.Adding downstream enforcement ahead of required context breaks agent security. Maturity models describe the destination. A build order gets you there without breaking production along the way. Nik Kale is a principal engineer specializing in enterprise AI platforms and security.