G7's 100M-barrel diesel stocks release looks mostly priced in, analyst says
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S&P 500 hits a record; These $20B stocks still need 200% to break even
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Lattice Semiconductor (LSCC) was in focus on Tuesday as William Blair initiated coverage on the semiconductor firm with an Overweight rating and a fair value of $160 per share.
“Lattice is benefiting from a product re- fresh cycle, replacing legacy small footprint
Deeper integration could attract more nearshoring, but governments will have to step up, too.
This article appears in the October issue of Global Finance Magazine.
With Panama joining Mercosur and Costa Rica wrapping up negotiations to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the rest of Spanish-speaking Central America risks being left behind.
Regional integration efforts have hitherto focused on custom unions, stock market interoperability, the Central American Integration System (SICA), the Central American Parliament, and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (FAUCA).
“Panama’s accession to Mercosur as an associate state creates competitive pressure on the rest of Central America,” said Costa Rica-based financial analyst Daniel Suchar. “This could divert foreign direct investment that traditionally viewed Central America as a gateway to the Americas, forcing the other countries in the region to accelerate their own trade agreements to avoid falling behind.”
As a Mercosur member, Panama gains access to a market of 260 million people as well as value chains in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, notably in logistics, financial services, and agribusiness. This opens the door to negotiations for a Central American bloc to join Mercosur, using Panama as a bridge.
“From a business perspective, the more connected, competitive, and open to trade Central America is, the greater the possibilities for developing regional value chains and attracting investment,” said Rosmer Jurado, president of the Union of Panamanian Industrialists.
Since last year, talk of a renegotiation of the Dominican Republic-Central America-United States Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR) has been circulating among governments in the region. Should talks begin—the Dominican Republic is pushing hard for a trade deal—they would likely include proposals for further integration and increased rules and regulations.
“A new agreement would be expected to include chapters on the digital economy, SMEs, resilient supply chains, and more stringent labor and environmental standards,” said Suchar. “A modernized CAFTA-DR should also address trade facilitation and regional cumulation of origin so that Central America can sell as a bloc and not as six separate countries.”
Central America remains a diverse region, however, both politically and economically, which makes further integration challenging. Nicaragua is in danger of being frozen out of US trade after effectively banning elections, and Costa Rica has historically prioritized market diversification over Central American integration. Forging closer ties with the U.K. is part of its strategy to insert itself into high-value global production chains, particularly in medical devices, services, and technology.
The future of the Northern Triangle states—Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador—is likely to be conditioned by their capacity to attract nearshoring and reduce non-trade costs. If they improve legal security, infrastructure, and energy, Suchar said, they can position themselves as alternatives for light manufacturing and textiles for companies leaving Asia.
Nearshoring has been hailed as the region’s magic bullet; a 2024 report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies suggested that U.S. nearshoring alone could add at least $3.3 billion a year to Central American exports. But this is where governments will have to step up, Jurado noted. “Central America can take advantage of nearshoring,” he said, “but the opportunity will not automatically arise simply because of our location. The region must transform its proximity to the U.S. and its strategic position into concrete advantages: better infrastructure, lower logistics costs, specialized talent, competitive energy, trade facilitation, and clear rules for investment.”
Trade agreements, supply chain conditions, and geopolitical risk will all play a role. “Trade agreements are no longer just about tariffs,” said Suchar. “They focus on supply chain resilience, ESG standards, and geopolitics.”
Nic Wirtz is a contributing writer based in Guatemala.
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Layering AI migration on top of their day jobs has tired workers worried about thier jobs.
Artificial intelligence has not only transformed the financial services industry but has also created massive change fatigue among its workforce.
According to the authors of PwC’s 2026 Global Workforce Hopes and Fears Survey, published on the second day of Sibos, 40% of respondents reported feeling were overwhelmed by the pace of change.
“They have been through a lot over the past six or seven years,” said Bhushan Sethi, a partner at PwC, who moderated a Sibos panel on AI-led workforce strategy. “We’ve gone from the Great Recession to quiet quitting. We’re now in the ‘no hire, no fire’ job market in the US and beyond.”
Through it all, companies continue to ask their employees to move faster, reimagine their businesses end-to-end, and standardize their documented processes globally, while their leadership eyes the performance of small AI-enabled startups unencumbered by technology debt, he added. “That’s a challenge.”
Especially when 80% of those polled expect their organization to reduce headcount by 20% in the next few years.
Nonetheless, AI use has left the station.
“We don’t have a choice of going back and saying ‘No, we are not going to move with the industry and trends that are leading the next generation of the financial services industry,’” said Anna Domino, global head of client services at BNY.
“BNY has more than 300 AI-enabled offerings currently in production,” she added. “We also have almost 150 digital employees deployed across the organization, including operations and other functions. Over half our employee population are AI super-users on a daily basis.”
In comparison, only 22% of respondents in PwC’s survey reported using generative AI daily for their jobs, up 8% from the previous year.
Allaying a workforce’s anxiety about AI won’t be easy, as 44% of respondents in a PwC survey said they did not trust their senior management.
“That’s a hard environment to bring your best self to work and to optimize and leverage the investments that many, many firms have made and will continue to make in AI-led transformation,” said PwC’s Sethi.
Applying human skills such as empathy and kindness would help leadership manage its workforce’s anxiety, he added. “Let’s face it, we could all do with a little more of that.”
When BNY deploys a new solution, Domino’s team works with the people who currently do the job and lets them lead the bank’s redesign of the process to create more value for the client.
“If you include people in the conversation and give them transparency about how their role will change because of the redesign and what skills they need to learn over time to support the new process, it makes buy-in much easier,” she said.
Another option for employers is to wait a few years and hire those born around 2010, who won’t remember a world without AI.
“We have people in their 20s, mid-20s, and late 20s who are digital natives, but [employers] want those people who came out of their cribs and started playing on tablets and iPhones,” said panelist Darmesh Sethi, a managing director at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. (SMBC), sharing his personal opinion.
They will enter entry-level jobs after working on their high school newspapers and using AI throughout college, he added. “They are comfortable; they’re confident, and that is what we need. We need a confident workforce that can actually harness the power and potential of what these technologies provide.”
However, the same technologies are eliminating the menial work that once taught entry-level employees the business.
“When we were hiring people out of college 20 years ago, they would be creating spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations,” said BNY’s Domino. “None of that is happening anymore. So, we have to focus on apprenticeships, coaching, shadowing, and bringing that talent in front of clients way sooner than it used to happen 20 or 30 years ago.”
The process would require an investment of time and energy from senior leaders who possess the business knowledge, she added.
SMBC’s Sethi sees entry-level employees moving from grunt work to decision-making. “That is where they are going to have to step up,” he said. “And that is what we are really seeing in our employee training and the intentional hiring of young talent.”
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Media Conferences and Events Bank of America’s Marcelo Mousalli at the 2026 Global Finance Awards
Marcelo Mousalli, Head of Product for Latin America at Bank of America, speaks with Global Finance editor Paul Curcio at the 2026 Global Finance Transaction Banking Awards, Fontainebleau, Miami Beach.
Major executive moves and leadership changes across the finance industry.
This article appears in the September 2026 issue of Global Finance Magazine.
The World Bank Group appointed Michael Kremer to be the organization’s chief economist and senior vice president for development economics.
Most recently, he served as director of the University of Chicago’s Development Innovation Lab, where he researched economic growth, technological change, and development economics. Kermer, Abhijit Banerjee, and Esther Duflo jointly won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 for their “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty.
Kremer “has spent his career not just identifying what works in development but proving it at scale,” said Ajay Banga, President of the World Bank Group. “That is exactly the kind of thinking we need.” —Rob Daly
After more than a decade at HSBC, Pam Kaur will step down as Group CFO, a position she has held since January 2025, before the bank’s 2027 annual meeting.
She will assume an advisory role to support Group CEO Georges Elherdy and ensure a smooth transition for her successor.
Kaur began her career in 2013 as group head of internal audit before advancing to the head of wholesale market and credit risk, group chief risk officer, group chief risk and compliance officer, and eventually group CFO.
Brendan Nelson, HSBC Group Holding plc chairman, praised Kaur for her “strong judgment and integrity.” She will leave the Group CFO role with the firm’s “deepest thanks and best wishes,” he added. —Rob Daly
J.P. Morgan named Nelle Miller and William Sinclair as co-CEOs of its U.S. Private Bank in September.
The pair leads the firm’s $2.4 trillion U.S. private banking business, overseeing more than 5,500 professionals across 57 offices who serve the wealthiest individuals, family offices, and institutions nationwide.
The appointments follow the July 2025 naming of David Frame as global CEO of J.P. Morgan Private Bank. Miller and Sinclair joined in 2002 and 2007, respectively. Miller currently heads the firm’s New York market, while Sinclair leads the Financial Leaders Group.
“We have a fantastic franchise, with exceptional people and an unparalleled breadth of capabilities,” Sinclair said. —Anthony Noto
IA Global Capital, a technology-focused investment bank with offices in New York and London, announced that Jules Wurlod has joined the firm as managing director.
Wurlod has served as M&A director for circular businesses at Houlihan Lokey since 2020, focusing on circular technology services such as device-as-a-service, IT asset management, IT asset disposition, recommerce, and trade-in. He previously worked as a project leader at Boston Consulting Group, advising Fortune 500 companies and government officials across Europe and the Middle East on corporate strategy and sustainability. —Anthony Noto
Supreme Court takes up Exxon, Suncor challenge to climate lawsuits
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The first full week of October, though light, brings a diverse earnings slate spanning consumer staples, beverages, travel, apparel, and AI infrastructure, with companies offering fresh reads on both consumer demand and the capital-intensive technology buildout. PepsiCo (PEP), Constellation
quantic69
Middle East crude oil exports have rebounded to 17.5M bbl/day on a 10-day average, or 98% of pre-war levels, despite continued risks to shipping, J.P. Morgan analysts said this week, supported by restored flows through Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline and
The tech sector remained in the spotlight this week as investors assessed headlines from top companies including Micron, AMD and Accenture.
The tech-focused Nasdaq Composite Index (COMP:IND) closed in the green on Friday. The Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund (
Communication services sector rises in Q3; Meta Platforms leads gains
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When Maduro was taken and arrested on January 3rd, many Venezuelans brought out the good stuff. The old bottle of rum or whiskey they’d been saving for a special occasion, believing the incursion would inevitably lead to the return of liberty in Venezuela. Nine months later, the “transition” has not been what most Venezuelans wanted. Hundreds of political prisoners were released, but that is not enough. A few laws are being reformed, but not the institutions that carry them out. Delcy remains in power despite no lawful statute allowing it nor any sort of popular mandate for her to be the head of the Venezuelan State.
Many who brought out the good whiskey have soured on the transition, or at the very least lost their shiny optimism. But the mistake was not just to believe in a future that now seems a bit naive, but to yearn for the return of a past which was the precursor to our current tragic state.
Yes, we were better off before the 2000s, but we’ve never had a truly free society without clientelism or corruption. Chavismo may have perfected the art of corruption in Venezuela, but they certainly did not invent it. Venezuela, since its inception, has not been able to ameliorate the very Latin American issue of inequalities of power. We tend to forget about the problem during oil bonanzas. Everyone is doing better, right? Why worry? Then the oil price inevitably falls, the party stops, the lights turn on and we see the naked truth that we are in a horrible state of disrepair.
Many say that the Venezuelan problem is economic (lack of diversification or investment in non-oil industries), political (once high polarization and weak rule of law), or even cultural (a tendency towards el guiso). But within these lies a deeper philosophical issue: for a society that claims to love liberty and our libertadores as much as we do, we don’t actually understand what it takes to create a liberal society.
This is hardly a Venezuela-specific issue, but we are a unique case in that so much of our self-perception is based on the idea of a people who achieved freedom from the yoke of Spanish tyranny, only to then continue to liberate other countries in South America, making Simón Bolívar the most famous person in the history of the continent.
What room is there to become “more liberal” once all citizens are recognized by the law and there is universal suffrage?
To understand what it means to be a liberal society, perhaps it would be best to understand what it means to be a more liberal society. When the classical liberal revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries took place, it was the divine right of kings that fell. The power was taken from an individual and shared amongst parliaments, which were at the time controlled almost exclusively by rich landowners (including our own first few republics). Still, this was unquestionably a redistribution of power from the individual to the few. It took a long time, but eventually this distribution of power from the one to the few became a distribution of power from the few to the many. Nowadays, democratic societies are expected to allow every single citizen to vote, but this is a reality that is younger than the oldest person alive today. When English supercentenarian Ethel Caterham in the UK was born in 1909, her mother would not have been allowed to vote.
Liberal societies today hardly even question the idea that all people should be equal in respect to the law and that we ought to have a voice in the decisions of our country through voting. So what room is there to become “more liberal” once all citizens are recognized by the law and there is universal suffrage?
It’s true that the distribution of power in liberal countries these days is much improved when compared to 100 years ago, but is it better than 50 years ago? The laws may say that all people are equal, but systems don’t seem to provide that result. Even in societies where they have nominally distributed power amongst all citizens, the power has not been really distributed amongst them nearly as well. Throughout the current Trump presidency, there have been a string of pardons for white-collar criminals who have paid patronage to Trump and his family, including the former president of Honduras convicted of drug trafficking, or a Venezuelan oligarch indicted for allegedly bribing a Puerto Rico governor.
This is a clear example of a two-tiered justice system in which if you put the right money in the right pockets, you get preferential treatment.
I use these examples to show that although there is nothing ontologically wrong with wealth inequality, especially if the rich earned that money honestly, in practice inequality in resources leads to inequality in power and inevitably abuse of that power. This is the state of Venezuela now, but it was also the state of Venezuela long before Chávez caught a whiff of power and what ultimately led a majority of voters to choose a murderer and traitor over the “democracy” that was in place.
The issue, after nearly three decades of chavismo, is that although they entered power on the basis of railing against resource and power inequalities, in the time since they’ve been in charge they’ve done nothing to ameliorate those same inequalities. The people in government have simply taken the seats of the previously corrupt politicians and become even more clientelist, leading to greater inequalities in power and resources than ever before (on top of just a generally poorer country).
The vast majority of Venezuelans can clearly see what chavismo is now, even many who used to vote for it. And though we are still not through with it, we ought to give serious consideration to what we want to replace it with. Do we want a return to bipartidismo and clientelism with high inequality? Just hoping that the price of oil rises so we can keep our population happy whilst oligarchs accrue more and more power? Or do we actually want to achieve the liberty we say we value so much?
We can imitate post-WWII States who decreased inequalities by taxing the incomes of extremely wealthy people at extremely high rates whilst maintaining a belief in free markets, property and the rule of law.
When we get rid of chavismo, we will have an even greater challenge ahead. We’ll have the challenge of rebuilding a country destroyed by decades of mismanagement, a country filled with people who have gotten their wealth by enchufándose into a corrupt system that has oppressed the voice of its people. And we’ll have to decide how we want to go about bringing back liberty. I suggest we act like the previous liberal revolutions we venerate, and distribute more power from the few to the many.
So what is the solution to power inequalities and resource inequalities?
Thankfully, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. We can copy the policies of post-WWII countries (US, Japan, France, UK, Germany, etc) who decreased inequalities in their countries by taxing the incomes of extremely wealthy people at extremely high rates whilst maintaining a belief in free markets, property and the rule of law. This has the added benefit of diversifying government incomes away from just oil revenue or sales taxes, which are regressive and hurt consumers and small businesses (I could go on and on about the economic benefits, but I’ll stick to the institutional ones here). I specify the post-WWII liberal societies here and not the communist ones, because although communist countries seek to ameliorate resource inequalities they end up increasing power inequalities which lead to just as much abuse, if not even more than hyper-capitalistic oligarchic societies.
But before we can consider which policies we ought to copy from which societies, we must adopt the attitudes and political beliefs which made those policies implementable in the first place.
The world, not just Venezuela, is at a crossroads between greater authoritarianism or greater liberalism. If we are leaders of liberalism in our continent, as we have historically perceived ourselves to be, then we ought to understand the nature of liberalism and how we ought to achieve it. If we do not have a vision of how to recreate our institutions and our general idea of what a liberal society even is, then we will surely return to the sad state we are in right now, even after we get rid of the kleptocrats sitting in Miraflores.
The solution is simple, but it’s not easy. Entrenched interests are just that; entrenched. But if the people of the country yearn for liberty and we manage to understand what it takes to attain it, then it can be done through hard work and dedication, as ultimately all worthwhile goals are achieved.
Downward revisions and finance and insurance job losses paint a pessimistic picture for the U.S. labor market.
In the last jobs numbers report before a contentious U.S. mid-term election, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that seasonally adjusted nonfarm payrolls added 29,000 jobs in September, while the unemployment rate remained stable at 4.2%
The BLS also revised its July numbers for a second time, now showing a loss of 10,000 jobs compared to its first revision, which upped the number of jobs created to 21,000 from a loss of 23,000 jobs. It also revised August’s number down to 132,000 from 162,000.
The report may have underwhelmed market expectations, but economists at RBC say that doesn’t mean the labor market is weak.
“The 29,000 payroll gain is quite healthy in the context of our breakeven estimate of 20,000 jobs per month,” they wrote in an RBC Economics note. Gains were broad-based, and the declines more likely reflect retirements than layoffs, especially in sectors with an older workforce (e.g., the median worker age in financial services is 44.2 years compared to 42.1 years overall). Despite a slowdown in health care hiring, strength was driven by the goods sector, which continued to recover from the post–Liberation Day layoffs earlier in 2025.”
Despite the overall positive number, the finance and insurance sector lost 7,000 jobs, with credit intermediation and related activities accounting for 4,600 fewer jobs, followed by insurance carrier and related activities, which lost 2,300 positions.
Employment in the capital markets remained unchanged, with no job gains or losses compared to August.
The information industry took a harder hit than the finance and insurance sector, losing 10,000 jobs. Publishing lost 4,000 jobs, while broadcast and content providers lost 3,000 jobs, and computing infrastructure providers, data processing, and web hosting and related services eliminated 1,600 jobs.
Using a proprietary methodology developed with the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, ADP is far sunnier in its view, estimating that U.S. private employers added 90,000 jobs over the same period, according to its ADP National Employment Report for September.
“It’s a strong report. After a three-month slowdown, job creation rebounded, and pay growth remained solid,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP, in a prepared statement.
However, the report’s authors have no good news for those working in financial activities, which lost the most jobs (-16,000) of any sector, while professional and business services lost the second-largest amount (-11,000).
The information sector managed to eke out growth, adding 3,000 new positions.
Mid-sized companies (50 to 499 employees) created more than half of the new jobs (54,000). Small companies (1 to 49 employees) added 23,000 new positions, while large companies (more than 500 employees) added the fewest jobs (14,000).
However, not everyone shares the optimism.
The BLS report reflects an economy that has not set itself up for growth, Michele Evermore, a senior fellow at the National Employment Law Project, told Global Finance.
“Nobody was planning to build a manufacturing economy in the United States again,” she said. “Growth was going to come from innovation. If we get rid of the core government research, that is what was going to build jobs of the future, I’m afraid this is par for the course for the foreseeable future until either the AI bubble crashes or AI turns out to be amazing and starts taking over jobs.”
Rob Daly covers fintech and the economy. Contact him at rdaly@gfmag.com.
