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“The Devil Wears Prada 2,” starring Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci, arrives on Hulu on Disney+ this week, just after the film wrapped up its blockbuster run at the box office.

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung flew to San Francisco on July 24 for a summit with the most powerful names in artificial intelligence. Jensen Huang was there. Sam Altman was there. The heads of Samsung, SK Group, Hyundai Motor and Naver flew in. By the end of the day, roughly $950 billion in new AI agreements had been signed, and South Korea had positioned itself as the country most central to the next phase of the buildout.Nvidia (NVDA) is not slowing down its global hunt for AI infrastructure partners. The chipmaker has spent much of 2026 signing deals across Asia, the Middle East and Europe to secure the chips, memory and power it needs to keep building AI systems. On July 24, that hunt landed squarely on South Korea, with a cluster of new agreements announced within hours of each other.Nvidia, SK Hynix seal $500 billion memory dealNvidia said on July 24 that it has locked down AI memory supply from SK Hynix, South Korea’s second most valuable company, CNBC reported. The agreement, unveiled late that evening in San Francisco, could be worth $500 billion over a number of years, and it includes large-scale data centers expected to come online in 2027.SK Hynix affiliate SK Telecom will build a cloud business using Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems as part of the deal. Nvidia said it is targeting enough capacity to require 2 gigawatts of power, a figure that points to a buildout involving hundreds of thousands of graphics processing units working together.More Nvidia:Bank of America sees Nvidia’s next $20 billion businessMorgan Stanley says Nvidia stock remains top pick despite headwindCiti sends strong signal to Nvidia investors amid rumors”The expansion will include a co-develop opportunity for us on the next-generation SK Hynix AI memory, and this will help us secure a stable supply of HBM memory,” Raj Mirpuri, Nvidia’s enterprise vice president, told reporters on a call. High bandwidth memory, known as HBM, sits directly next to AI chips and feeds them data fast enough to keep expensive processors from sitting idle.SK Hynix (SKHY) has built its recent momentum on exactly that product. The company ranked first globally in HBM revenue with a 56.4% share in the first quarter of 2026. Its Nasdaq debut showed first-quarter revenue reaching 52.58 trillion won, roughly $34.5 billion, up 198% from a year earlier, with the stock now trading under the ticker SKHY, as TheStreet reported.Samsung, Broadcom ink separate $200 billion pactA second, unrelated deal landed the same day. Samsung Electronics said it signed a memorandum of understanding with chip designer Broadcom to expand their collaboration across memory and foundry technologies. The agreement, worth an estimated $200 billion, is meant to help support the next generation of AI infrastructure, Reuters reported.The timing is notable given Broadcom’s growing footprint inside the AI supply chain. The company already builds custom silicon for Google’s TPU program. Adding Samsung’s memory and foundry capacity gives Broadcom another lever to pull as demand for custom AI silicon keeps climbing.For Samsung, the deal is part of a broader push to close the gap with SK Hynix in HBM production while also rebuilding its contract manufacturing business. Samsung has also been courting AI labs directly, following a pattern in which memory makers are moving beyond simply supplying parts and into designing the systems that use them.

Nvidia is not slowing down its global hunt for AI infrastructure partnersPhilip/Getty Images

Naver, Hyundai deals widen Korea’s AI reachNvidia’s South Korea push was not limited to memory chips. The company said on July 24 it would invest $1 billion into Naver, a Korean cloud company building data centers around Nvidia’s GPUs, with the project intended to triple the facility size and provide 200 megawatts of AI computing capacity.Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang told the gathering that the SK Group partnerships alone represented more than $500 billion in combined business, though he did not detail how that figure was calculated, according to the Korea Herald. “The SK Group and I are announcing today that our two companies will enter into business partnerships that will represent over $500 billion of business together,” Huang said during a meeting with President Lee in San Francisco.Huang also said Nvidia would work with Hyundai Motor Group on autonomous vehicles and robotic systems, extending the day’s announcements beyond data centers and semiconductors into transportation. The comments suggest Nvidia is treating South Korea as a testing ground for AI applications well outside its traditional chip business.The deals mark a shift in how AI infrastructure gets financed. What used to be the province of a handful of U.S. hyperscalers now involves foreign governments and industrial conglomerates writing checks at a similar scale.What the deals mean for chip investorsThe memory market that underpins all of these deals remains a three-way race. Samsung Electronics leads with a 38% share of the broader DRAM market, followed by SK Hynix at 29% and Micron at 22%, according to Counterpoint Research data cited in a recent fund manager interview, as TheStreet reported. Every one of those three now has direct exposure to Nvidia’s expanding supply chain.Analysts have been warning for months that memory demand is outpacing supply, and the announcements on July 24 only add to that pressure. BofA has pointed to the same dynamic as a reason memory prices could climb across DRAM, NAND and HBM products alike.For U.S. investors without direct access to Samsung shares, SK Hynix’s new Nasdaq listing and Micron remain the two clearest ways to track the trade. Both are now tied more tightly than ever to decisions being made inside Nvidia’s San Francisco headquarters.Related: Nvidia stock is doing something it hasn’t done in years

Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of the ancient Greek epic poem is now his biggest second-weekend hit at the box office.

You already know the rule: Buy low, sell high.Almost nobody follows it, and the reason is not ignorance. Low feels terrible while you are standing in it.When something you own falls by half, the number on your screen stops being a price. It turns into a verdict on your judgment. Most people sell right there, not because the math changed, but because the discomfort finally outran the conviction.

Robert Kiyosaki doubles down on gold and silver with Jim Rogers.matejmo / Getty Images

The metals market has been running that experiment on ordinary savers all year.Gold and silver spent January in the kind of rally that ends arguments, then spent six months handing most of it back. Silver took the worse beating, falling by more than half from its January record. Gold gave up roughly a quarter, which still stings if you bought near the high.That is the exact moment when confident advice usually goes quiet.Instead, one of the loudest voices in personal finance announced he was buying. Robert Kiyosaki, author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” told followers on X that he added to both metals during the drop.Why gold and silver fell so hard this yearMetals do not fall for mysterious reasons. They fall when the alternative starts paying.Gold and silver hand you nothing while you hold them. No dividend, no coupon, no interest.Their entire case rests on what is happening to the cash you would otherwise sit on. When inflation runs hot and real yields sink, that case is powerful. When the central bank turns hawkish and Treasury yields climb, it weakens fast.More Gold and Silver:Gold’s record run has dark side few investors seeGoldman Sachs revisits its gold price target after Fed decisionSilver price hits new low, here is what comes nextThe second version has defined 2026. Inflation is running at 3.7%, far above the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal, according to Forbes. The Fed under Chair Kevin Warsh has held its target range at 3.50% to 3.75% and quietly moved the conversation from cuts to hikes.Every month that story holds, the cost of owning something that pays you nothing goes up. That applies whether you own bullion, coins, or shares of SPDR Gold Shares (GLD) and iShares Silver Trust (SLV) in a brokerage account.Related: Robert Kiyosaki flips his gold stance after weeks of waitingSilver fell twice as far as gold for a reason worth understanding before you buy either one. Silver trades as money and as an industrial input, so it absorbs the rate story and the manufacturing story at once.When solar and electronics demand softens while rates rise, silver takes the hit from both directions. The war complicates all of it. U.S. strikes have continued for more than a week and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth requested an additional $67 billion in war funding, reported Yahoo Finance. Conflict lifts safe-haven demand, then lifts oil, then feeds the inflation that invites tighter policy.What Robert Kiyosaki says he boughtKiyosaki did not announce a target this time. He announced a transaction.”During this last ‘retracement’ or ‘crash’ I bought more gold and silver,” he wrote, according to BeInCrypto.He credited the broader call to veteran investor Jim Rogers, arguing both metals climb sharply from here though not without “severe retracements,” reported Bitcoin.com News. Gold and silver are “going to the moon,” Kiyosaki added in his post on X.The context makes it sharper. He spent June telling followers to wait for the chart to confirm a bottom before buying anything, as TheStreet highlighted; then bought into a decline that had not confirmed much of anythingStrip away the exclamation points and there is still a real argument underneath, and I have read enough of these posts to separate the two. The forecast is unfalsifiable. The behavior is not.In my analysis, the useful part is the sequencing. He bought after the drawdown, not during the January melt-up when coverage was loudest and coins were most expensive. That is the reverse of what most retail buyers did this year, and it is a habit you can copy without adopting a single one of his price targets.Whether that discipline is repeatable or simply well-timed is the open question. He has floated $35,000 gold and $200 silver before, and those numbers still read as marketing rather than modeling.The numbers behind the metals selloffHere is what this week actually looked like, and why the fundamentals and the price keep pointing in opposite directions.Gold traded at $4,131.10 an ounce on the morning of July 22, its third straight session higher, according to Yahoo Finance.Silver traded at $59.42 an ounce that same morning, more than $20 above its level a year earlier, according to Fortune.The global silver market is heading for a sixth consecutive annual deficit, projected at 46.3 million ounces, according to the Silver Institute.Central banks bought a net 244 tonnes of gold in the first quarter of 2026, led by Poland and Uzbekistan, according to the World Gold Council.Markets put roughly a one in three chance on a Fed rate hike at the July meeting, according to Forbes.Read that list again and the tension is obvious. Supply keeps tightening and sovereign buyers keep accumulating, while the price spent six months falling.What moved the price was policy, not scarcity. That distinction matters more to your account balance than any forecast, because policy can reverse in an afternoon and scarcity cannot.What the Fed meeting means for your metalsThe Federal Open Market Committee meets July 28 and 29. That is the next real test.A hike, or hawkish language without one, pushes real yields up and gives both metals another reason to slide. A softer tone does the reverse, and January’s highs stop looking like a ceiling.Neither outcome validates a $35,000 forecast. Both change what your position is worth by Christmas.What I would take from this week is smaller and more useful than a price target. The people who got hurt in metals this year were not wrong about inflation or federal debt. They were wrong about their own tolerance for a 50% drawdown, and they found that out at the bottom instead of before they bought.So decide now what share of your savings you can watch fall by half without touching it. Ten percent of a portfolio is a position. Half your net worth is a personality.Kiyosaki bought this dip and got a fast bounce for it. The next one may take years to pay, and that gap between conviction and patience is where most household portfolios actually break.Related: Robert Kiyosaki sends blunt stock market warning

It might be funny, except it’s expensive. You run a business, a small theater maybe, and you need to air-condition it in warm weather. One warm day, you turn on the AC for your theater… and nothing happens.And then you discover no repairman can fix the problem. Because thieves climbed onto the roof of your building, opened up the AC system and tore out all the copper tubing. And you can’t just fix it because to get to the copper, the rest of the system was, well, trashed. So, you hope insurance will cover the costs to replace the entire system. That is exactly what happened to the 50-year-old Taproot Theatre in Seattle at the end of April as a production of Fats Waller’s “Ain’t Misbehavin'” was near the end of its run.The theater produces six shows a year and is an important piece of Seattle’s theater scene.The cost to replace the AC units: a cool $130,000.A national, even global problemTaproot isn’t alone. Vandalism to strip out copper happens regularly in the United States and around the world. It is a side effect of the fact that copper, at least as bought and traded in futures markets, is now selling for $6.40 a pound in New York, up 185% just since 2020, when it sold for $2.23 a pound.Thieves, seeing a way to make quick buck, break into a building and tear out the copper, whether tubing or wiring. They sell their booty to recyclers, probably small, probably not well known, who may choose not to inquire how the copper was obtained. The problem is growing. How much is a guess, but the Internet and Television Association (NCTA, because it was once the National Cable and Telecommunications Association) put its guess at $294 million to $1.47 billion, just in 2025.And the damage caused to get to the actual copper was multiple times bigger than the value of the copper itself. Many thieves don’t seem to worry much about law enforcement because they know the police will try to solve murders and, say, bank robberies first.

Damage to air conditioning system at Seattle’s Taproot Theatre.Courtesy Taproot Theatre, Seattle

Low barrier to entryMost of the time, the thievery is simple.Consider: Very early on the morning of June 27, a man was stopped on the West Seattle bridge in Seattle with four coils of copper wire and some heavy wire cutters. He told a police officer he worked for Seattle City Light, the municipal utility, and was fixing a problem. There was, in fact, no problem on the bridge. The 47-year-old man didn’t work for the utility. The man was arrested and charged, then failed to appear for arraignment. So, there’s an arrest warrant out for him, said Douglas Wagoner, legislative director for the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office. Related: The ultimate AI proxy trade isn’t a tech stock—It’s something more humbleThe bridge and its wiring, however, are exposed and hit repeatedly, The Seattle Times noted.So are old street lights in downtown Los Angeles. In early 2024, Wired reported, a country radio station in Oklahoma saw the height of its 499-foot transmission tower cut by more than half so thieves could remove the copper wire. Two young men were arrested and sentenced to jail terms. Value of their haul: $100.Telecommunications giant AT&T (T) says it suffered some 10,400 copper theft incidents in 2025 alone — about 200 a week, most of it inCalifornia. But only 3% of its phone customers use copper phone lines. AT&T would like to get rid of all copper wiring to all its California customers, but local opposition is thwarting the idea. So, AT&T is doing the American thing. It’s suing. A crime committed by young menMost of the vandalism is done by men 25 or younger. Most are underemployed or unemployed. Many have criminal records. Drugs are involved in most Seattle-area copper theft, says Wagoner of the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s office. Sometimes, however, a theft goes horribly awry. Two men were killed in April 2023 trying to steal copper wiring from an electric power substation in Gainesville, Ga., CBS News reported.Is organized crime involved?AT&T believes organized crime increasingly is involved. “In many major metropolitan areas and small towns, copper theft has escalated to levels that can only be described as systemic,” Rahdeese Calcutt, lead investigator at AT&T Global Security, wrote in an April blog post. In March, Portland, Ore., law enforcement charged five people with copper theft, according to KPTV. One of the five was a woman who allegedly acted as a broker. She would take in stolen copper and sell it to legitimate recyclers.More Natural resources:The ultimate AI proxy trade isn’t a tech stock—It’s something more humbleJefferies joins Barclays in backing major gold minerAfter the bubble: Why UBS is still a gold-and-silver fanIn June, Illinois authorities found a trailer loaded with $300,000 in copper wire. The trailer had been stolen in Alabama.Is there a fix to the problem? Stiffer penalties would help, businesses say. But a bill supported by the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office went nowhere in the 2026 Washington State Legislative Session. The bill would boost jail time and require all recyclers to photograph copper they take in and upload the photos to a database. There will be a new effort in the 2027 session, Wagoner told theStreet. For Taproot, the show could go onIn the case of the Taproot Theatre, sadly, there have been no arrests in the case. But there is a happy ending. An insurance claim is pending for the damages to its air-conditioning system. Meanwhile, an emergency fund drive raised $450,000, and the theatre was able to replace the two destroyed units.The entire system is now encased in a metal cage, the Puget Sound Business Journal noted.The 226-seat theatre was able to produce “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat” as scheduled and announced it would extend the run by two weeks.Related: White House’s sweeping Canada tariffs put US prices at risk

The Federal Reserve’s July 28-29 policymaking meeting on interest rates was, frankly, expected to be a snooze fest just a few weeks ago. Now, it’s going to be a humdinger.Economists, traders, and other Fed watchers were forecasting that the Federal Open Market Committee would vote to hold the benchmark Federal Funds Rate steady. This was due to a stabilizing labor market, a huge slide in oil prices, and a refreshing dip in the June Consumer Price Index, indicating a resilient U.S. economy that could take a beat from hawkish concerns that a tightening of policy was needed ASAP.Today, we’re looking at a coin toss, folks. Don’t be surprised if there’s a rate hike coming down the pike.“I can make a good case for either raising rates or not,” William English, a former senior Fed economist now at Yale University, told The Wall Street Journal. “They’re just kind of stuck.”The recent Iran war military escalation saw energy prices surge once again, along with concerns that the so-called peace accord between the United States and Iran had broken down. Prices rose at gas pumps across the country, while Treasury yields hit new highs.And the Trump administration on July 24 released new tariffs of between 10% and 12.5% against 60 countries for alleged forced labor practices — a workaround from the Supreme Court ruling earlier this year squashing the “Liberation Day” tariffs.As Eric Diton, president of The Wealth Alliance, told TheStreet in an email: “Given that the Iran War continues to drag on, and oil prices have spiked once again, combined with a resilient labor market and a shortage of resources due to the AI buildout, plus the tariff uncertainty, the Fed target of 2% inflation seems unattainable in the near-term. “The 30-year Treasury rate sits around 5.18%, the highest in nearly two decades. The markets now give a 30-40% probability that the Fed will need to hike rates at least once before year-end. I agree that the Fed may have to hike rates given this unusual set of circumstances.”Warsh commits FOMC rate policy to “price stability”“While monthly price fluctuations are inevitable — especially in an unsettled world — underlying inflation over longer time horizons is determined largely by monetary policy,’’ Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh said in prepared remarks while delivering the Fed’s twice-yearly Monetary Policy Report to Congress July 14-15.The report, issued July 10, said the outlook of the future path of interest rates “is subject to considerable uncertainty.” It also described the U.S. economy as overall “expanding at a solid pace despite elevated uncertainty that owes, in part, to the conflict in the Middle East.’’  Warsh repeatedly reminded members of both chambers that the Fed is committed to its dual Congressional mandate: Use interest rates and balance-sheet policy to keep prices stable and the labor market at full employment.That’s tricky.Lower interest rates support hiring but can fuel inflation. This risks fueling further inflation, potentially leading to an inflationary spiral.Higher rates cool prices but can weaken the job market. This increases the cost of borrowing and further stifles economic activity.As I reported, Warsh consistently repeated his pledge that the central bank would work on its “resolute commitment” to restore price stability.

FOMC holds interest rates steady thus far  The rate-setting FOMC voted unanimously in June to hold its benchmark Federal Funds Rate target in a range of 3.5% to 3.75%. But the minutes of the June FOMC meeting showed policymakers splitting their views on inflation risk and the impact on interest rates with a rising hawkish tinge to the “dot plot.”Shortly before the cooling June CPI came out, I reported that Fed Governor Christopher Waller issued a stark warning on inflation and its long-term impact on prices.“No matter how you cut it, or what measure you want to use, inflation is up this year,” Waller said in a July 13 speech. “At this point, I am concerned about the elevated pace of core inflation.”   How the Federal Funds Rate impacts youThe funds rate is the interest rate at which banks lend balances at the Federal Reserve to other banks overnight. A change in the funds rate triggers moves in borrowing costs ranging from credit cards to auto loans to even longer-term mortgage rates.Policymakers cut rates by a quarter point at each of its last three meetings of 2025 to shore up the softening labor market. These “insurance” cuts stopped after the majority of policymakers decided the risk from higher prices was outweighing signs that the jobs market was stabilizing.Traders shift Fed interest-rate betsAs of July 24, the widely watched CME Group FedWatch Tool shows financial markets are pricing in higher probabilities of interest-rate hikes for the final months of this year, while expecting a 64.2% probability that rates will remain steady and a 35.8% chance of a quarter-point rate hike in July. This is a marked change from the week before, which saw a near 90% chance of July rates remaining steady.Related: Goldman Sachs pitches eye-opening view on Fed interest-rate betsSeptember shift: Traders now price in a nearly 79% cumulative chance of at least one 25 basis-point rate hike happening by or during the September FOMC meeting.December tightening: By the end of the year, the CME Group FedWatch Tool leans heavily toward a half-point hike, reflecting sustained inflation concerns.Inflation risks spark markets’ interest-rate jittersWarsh, as promised, dropped forward guidance language to markets and consumers in the June statement following his first FOMC meeting as chairman. He and other proponents of Fed reform advocate that the central bank should follow the market, not the other way around.Forward guidance is when a central bank communicates its future economic outlook and interest-rate plans in advance, instead of surprising markets, in signaling whether rates are likely to rise, fall, or hold. Advocates of forward guidance say it helps businesses, investors, and consumers make informed financial decisions.Right now, the Fed’s credibility is at risk, former New York Fed President Bill Dudley said in a Bloomberg Opinion piece. He recommended that the Fed tighten monetary policy to achieve price stability and preserve its independence, as the risks of not doing so exceed the costs of a somewhat tighter policy.“Inflation has exceeded the central bank’s 2% objective for more than five years. If the Fed dawdles, the risk is that market participants will judge Warsh’s tough talk as “all hat, no cattle,” Dudley wrote.  Related: Bank of America CEO warns inflation will back Fed into a corner

Drake’s “Janice STFU” refuses to slip from No. 1 on several of Billboard’s streaming charts, keeping Future’s “California Girls” from launching at the summit.

Following the World Cup, where “Wonderwall” became an anthem for the English team, Oasis earns its first No. 1 on a Billboard chart.

Peter McCrory spent 18 months reviewing Bureau of Labor Statistics data, occupation-level unemployment figures, and Anthropic’s own internal research on how workers actually use Claude. On July 24, he published what he found. It wasn’t what his boss had been predicting.McCrory is Anthropic’s head of economics. In a lengthy essay on X (the former Twitter), he laid out the data and concluded the U.S. labor market has not yet taken a visible hit from AI. His CEO, Dario Amodei, has spent the past year repeatedly warning that a white-collar jobs crisis is coming fast and coming hard, Fortune reported. The data McCrory found tell a different story.What Peter McCrory found when he looked at U.S. labor market dataMcCrory started with the basics. The U.S. unemployment rate sat at 4.2% in June. The Federal Reserve considers that full employment. Job openings roughly matched the number of unemployed workers. Prime-age employment was near multi-decade highs.He also ran a more specific test. McCrory looked at unemployment rates among workers whose jobs have the highest concentration of tasks that Claude is used to automate. He compared those workers to people in roles with less AI exposure. He found no relative deterioration in the more-exposed group.”I don’t expect unemployment to be noticeably higher a year from now — at least not because of AI,” he wrote.McCrory traces that finding to what he calls AI’s “stubbornly jagged” capability profile, a term borrowed from Wharton professor Ethan Mollick. No occupation in the Labor Department’s taxonomy has all of its tasks handled by Claude. When McCrory looked at how people actually use Claude at work, the pattern was workers bringing it into their process to iterate and refine, not handing entire tasks over to it.Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei made very different prediction on AI jobs impactAmodei has not been quiet about where he thinks this is heading. In May 2025, he told Axios AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to somewhere between 10% and 20% within one to five years. He said companies and policymakers were sugarcoating the risk and needed to stop.In January 2026, he published an essay calling AI a “general labor substitute.” He said it would push work from lower-skill roles up toward upper ones, potentially leaving workers without jobs or stuck on very low wages for good. By June 2026, he was calling for universal basic income and wage insurance. He said significant job loss might be “an intrinsic property of the technology.”McCrory’s data don’t prove that wrong. What they show is that the crisis scenario Amodei has described hasn’t arrived yet, at least not in the aggregate labor statistics. Both men point to the same vulnerable group: early-career workers in AI-exposed roles. The disagreement is over how bad it will get, and how fast.

McCrory points to a growing gap between workers who use AI as a core part of how they work and those who don’t.Eric/Getty Images

Where early warning signs already appear in U.S. employmentMcCrory isn’t saying everything is fine. Hiring has softened for young workers in roles with high AI exposure over the past year. Stanford researchers studying the same trend have called those workers “canaries in the coal mine.”The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects slower employment growth through 2034 for technical writers, data entry workers, and customer support roles. Those are exactly the categories McCrory’s analysis flags as most exposed to AI automation.McCrory also points to a growing gap between workers who use AI as a core part of how they work and those who don’t. Power users are getting more productive. Everyone else is mostly staying the same. That shows up first in hiring and wages, before it ever reaches unemployment data.What a delayed AI labor shock means for U.S. economyMcCrory’s data raises a specific question. If AI is lifting productivity among a subset of workers without causing broad job losses yet, where are the economic gains going?Companies with AI-fluent workers are producing more without hiring more. That runs straight to the earnings line. But that gain is sitting inside a relatively small group of companies and workers. The broader consumer economy isn’t seeing the same lift.Most of the productivity gain is concentrated among high-skill, high-income workers. If that stays true, the income gap between AI-fluent workers and everyone else keeps widening. Spending by lower and middle-income households tends to be more consumption-driven, so a widening wage gap at the bottom eventually shows up in slower consumer spending growth, which is an economic problem that compounds over time.McCrory’s essay points to one more practical implication. If the job disruption is real but still building, companies and policymakers have more time to respond than Amodei’s timeline suggests. Retraining, education, and safety net adjustments are all easier to build before unemployment rises than after. That window is open right now. Nothing in McCrory’s data says it stays open forever.Related: Mark Cuban has strong words on AI companies and job losses

Last year, the IRS finalized rules outlined in the SECURE 2.0 Act that change how some workers can make catch-up contributions to their employer retirement plans such as 401(k)s. While many plans are preparing for the change, plans must be fully compliant by Jan. 1, 2027.
Now is a good time to revisit your retirement strategy and assess if and how your contribution strategy will change. Here’s what to know about the new rule.

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What is changing in 2027?
Catch-up contributions allow anyone who is 50 or older to contribute extra money to their 401(k), 403(b), individual retirement account (IRA) and similar retirement plans than the typical contribution limits allowed. However, the new rule says that some high earners must put catch-up contributions in a Roth plan moving forward. That means you must pay taxes on those contributions now, but qualified withdrawals are tax-free in retirement.
The rule takes full effect in 2027 and applies to workers whose prior-year Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) wages from that employer exceeded a certain threshold. SECURE 2.0 set that threshold at $145,000, with annual inflation adjustments beginning after 2025. For 2026, the IRS increased the threshold to $150,000.
Anyone who is 60 to 63 years old can make a “super” catch-up contribution. For tax year 2026, workers ages 60 to 63 can make catch-up contributions of up to $11,250, compared with the standard catch-up limit of $8,000. High earners must designate the super catch-up contributions as Roth contributions.
These changes do not impact your regular contributions. You can designate those as traditional or Roth, depending on your plan.

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Why planning matters
Plans have to be fully in compliance by the beginning of 2027, which means you may still have time to plan for it before the tax change becomes official, if this affects you. Since your contributions are not tax-deferred, you may end up with a higher tax bill. You can assess your prior-year FICA wages to assess if you will cross the threshold and be required to make catch-up contributions in a Roth account.
A raise, bonus or job change can impact who is required to contribute to a Roth plan. While you may end up with a higher tax bill now, being forced to put catch-up contributions in a Roth account can offer more tax diversification in retirement. You can then pull from a Roth retirement plan with tax-free qualified withdrawals for part of your living expenses instead of only leaning into a retirement plan where distributions are treated as ordinary income.
How high earners should adjust their retirement strategy
It’s better to prepare now than scramble at the end of the year. Be sure to review contribution elections before the start of 2027 and give yourself time to ask your HR department questions regarding your retirement plan if you don’t understand how the change will affect you. You can also ask them or the plan provider how your employer will implement the Roth catch-up requirement. Keep in mind that if they don’t offer a Roth option, you generally won’t be able to make catch-up contributions (unless the plan is amended).
You should also assess how your taxes will be different moving forward. High earners who are 50 years or older may need to budget for higher current-year taxes. If you intend to max out catch-up contributions, more of your retirement contributions will be taxed today instead of when you withdraw them in retirement.
Roth contributions aren’t automatically better or worse. It depends on your financial situation, but you must pay closer attention to how your earnings are taxed.

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