From looking at the stock market this week, you wouldn’t think that the United States intervened in a military conflict in the Middle East over the weekend. Monday saw some dips and slight drops, but the market rebounded and closed up almost 1%. So far on Tuesday, markets are surging, with the S&P 500 hitting a four-month high. The ceasefire agreement announced between Israel and Iran may be putting the conflict on hold for now, but analysts are holding their breath that there will not be a larger impact in the oil-rich region.

On Monday, Goldman Sachs warned oil prices may rise up to 30% and hit multiyear highs if Iran decides to close the Strait of Hormuz—a vital global shipping lane—in retaliation for the U.S. attacks. There’s been no closure of the waterway just yet, though CNBC reports that Iran’s Parliament supported the move, and Reuters reported that oil tankers passing through the area have abruptly changed course in the last few days. Forbes senior contributor Erik Sherman writes that closing the Strait is probably not a possibility since it would require significant naval defenses. Iran could still take action to drive up the world’s oil prices in retaliation, like bombing oil pipelines.

However, the lack of broader action is a major reason that the markets aren’t trending downward. Forbes senior contributor Robert Rapier writes that Iran’s retaliation against the U.S. on Monday, a calculated missile strike on a U.S. military base in Qatar, bore the hallmarks of a symbolic attack, not escalation. Right after it happened, oil prices actually dropped.

But just because the week has started off relatively calm in the markets doesn’t mean it will stay that way. The ceasefire agreed to by Iran and Israel overnight on Monday appears to have already been broken, renewing fears of more escalation. But there are also other market-moving conflicts still pending. Russia’s continuing war with Ukraine has been recently ramping up. And so have economic threats at home, such as President Donald Trump’s pending tariffs and federal deficit-growing policy bill. It seems we’re a long way from a stable economic status quo.

As the world changes quickly, companies are waking up to the fact that AI can significantly improve the finance department. Nowadays, says Siqi Chen, CEO and CFO of AI-powered financial software company Runway, executives are essentially saying that any financial software purchase needs to incorporate AI. I spoke with Chen about how AI is changing corporate finance departments and how to make wise decisions. An excerpt from our conversation appears later in this newsletter.

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ECONOMIC INDICATORS

Hu Yousong/Xinhua via Getty Images

At the conclusion of last week’s meeting of the Federal Reserve’s Open Market Committee, Chairman Jerome Powell said the looming uncertainty from Trump’s tariffs led them to hold baseline interest rates at the 4.25% to 4.5% they’ve been at since December. This decision was widely anticipated, though Trump continued to bash Powell as a “stupid person” for not cutting rates. And while Federal Reserve staff downgraded its economic projections—increasing projected unemployment in December to 4.5%, inflation moving up to 3.1%, and decreasing GDP growth to 1.4%—it maintained its projection of two quarter-point rate cuts this year.

Consumers are feeling the economic malaise. Retail spending dropped for a second straight month in May, down 0.9% month-over-month, according to Census Bureau figures. Analysts say part of this decline may be due to purchases surging at the beginning of the year as consumers feared the impact of impending tariffs. However, some of it—including a 0.9% decrease in spending at bars and restaurants—likely indicates that consumers are being more cautious. Forbes senior contributor Erik Sherman writes other measures of consumer behavior show attitudes and outlooks are retrenching, with historically high use of credit cards and other forms of revolving credit.

NOTABLE NEWS

Illustration by Philip Smith for Forbes; CSA Images/Getty Images

More public companies are acquiring more digital assets, becoming what’s known as crypto treasury companies. Forbes’ Nina Bambysheva wrote about the trend, which was pioneered by Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy. It’s growing quickly. More than 70 public companies worldwide currently hold over $67 billion in bitcoin, and more than 30 public companies have announced plans to adopt similar strategies since April, targeting about $19 billion in capital raises. Most of these firms are raising money, merging with public shell companies and buying crypto tokens, allowing investors to participate in digital asset investing in a familiar forum.

It’s a good time for companies to add cryptocurrency to their portfolios. The Trump Administration is boosting cryptocurrency, both through its policies and through the president’s own holdings and business interests. Forbes’ Zach Everson writes that Trump earned $57.4 million in 2024 from his family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. Last Tuesday, the Senate passed a bill to regulate stablecoins known as the GENIUS Act. The bill, which was approved on a bipartisan vote, now moves to the House of Representatives for their consideration. Some opponents complained that while the bill does establish a needed regulatory framework for cryptocurrency, it doesn’t prohibit the president and his family from profiting from stablecoins. (It does, however, prohibit members of Congress and their families from the same kind of profit.)

OFF THE LEDGER

Since AI Is ‘The Greatest Thing Since Fire,’ Here’s How To Make Sure It Enlightens Your Finances (And No One Gets Burned)

Runway

AI is just starting to make its presence felt in the finance department. Siqi Chen, CEO and CFO of AI-enabled financial software company Runway, said that nowadays every company is pushing for their finance department to upgrade with anything that uses AI. I spoke with Chen about how AI is changing where the finance department sits in a company, the impact AI can have on telling its financial story, and how to determine where AI will come in handy. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.

What kind of skills does today’s CFO need to have?

Chen: Number one, technical skills. I’m not talking about engineering skills, I’m talking about data. Over the past 30 to 40 years, you’re seeing the slow evolution of data being a more and more important component of the finance department. Finance started as mostly accounting, and spreadsheets are what empowered the finance function to be more forward looking. With the introduction of data warehouses and ERPs around the ‘90s, that became an even more important source of data. That trend has only accelerated, particularly over the last 10-plus years or so, where companies are just becoming more data driven in general.

Increasingly, finance is not just about finance. It’s about everything else that happens in a company, from HR to sales to marketing. They have been historically the owners of financial data, but there’s a realization that all data eventually falls down to the bottom line somewhere.

The other one is storytelling. One of the things that finance people feel pretty deeply is what I call the Cassandra Effect. Cassandra is a Greek mythological figure who can foretell the future, but is cursed to have no one ever believe her. That is the experience of many finance people. They are the owners of the numbers. The numbers are accurate. They have these conversations where they make recommendations to the executive team and leadership team, and the frustration is they don’t get listened to. A lot of that is about understanding the difference between a story and something that compels emotionally, and broad numbers. Bridging that gap is one of the other opportunities I see as they own more of the data.

How do you see AI continuing to change how the finance department works?

We’re going to climb the capability ladder. We’re going to start with the low leverage work, but increasingly it’ll be more and more human augmented or AI augmented.

There’s two ways to think about this. The first path is the agentic path, where you’re having a conversation with this creature on the other side of the screen, and this creature is doing things. That’s sort of like, ‘I have this junior employee doing things.’ As it becomes more and more capable, what’s going to increase in value in the marketplace of skills is going to be experience, intuition and judgment. The bet there is that at some point you are going to have to review or approve some course of action, some plan, some suggestion from an AI tool. The quality of what you approve really depends on your understanding of it: your experience, your intuition and judgment. How do you develop this intuition, experience and judgment? You have to still go in and deeply understand how the business works.

These tools for thinking and understanding—in the form of spreadsheets, or whatever other tool that you choose to use—cannot really be replaced. Even in the AI driven world, the AGI [artificial general intelligence] type of world, humans are going to have to approve these decisions.

The other branch of this is how AI can help you clarify your understanding. If you think about the evolution of information technology, what the whiteboard did is allow you to think about more complicated thoughts you can’t hold all in your head. You can write it down. And then, because it’s a whiteboard, other people can also understand the context you have in your head, and you can collaborate together. A spreadsheet is a similar thing, where very complicated calculations that you can’t do in your head very quickly, now a computer will do for you. It makes sense of this complexity, that allows you to offload complexity.

AI also is increasingly allowing very complex business changes and structures to be understandable to finance people and people outside of finance. Making sense of complexity is the other area in which software tools are going to design around. It’s not just a conversation with a chatbot or an agent. It’s more like I’m looking at a spreadsheet, my model, a number I can instantly understand, and AI will tell me what the important variations are, how this works, what this page does. That’s the thing that helps us develop intuition.

What advice would you give a CFO trying to figure out how to go forward with using AI to make an impact in their department?

I would actually say don’t believe the hype yet. Simultaneously, AI is the most under-hyped of technologies and the most over-hyped of technologies.

Over the long run, it is the most under-hyped technology. It is the most transformative technology ever. It is the greatest thing since fire. The issue is that there is a lot of overpromising in finance today, based on what the capabilities of models are. But on the other hand, today is the worst it’ll ever be.

One of the most important things is just understanding and being curious about what these AIs can actually do. The wonderful thing about AI is it democratized learning a year or two ago. Now, it’s increasingly democratizing building. One of our sales people shipped 6,000 lines of code last week. You can vibe code things through AI and non-technical people contribute to the software product for the first time ever.

Now, it’s the rise of the “idea guy.” It used to be the idea guy wasn’t valuable and you had to find a technical founder. Now it is reversed. The idea guy can just build things now, which is remarkable. I think that understanding is still not deeply embedded today, because the mental model is that software is really hard.

The reason I’m bringing that up is if you just play with the raw models and try to build things with it, try to have it teach you things, you get an increasingly good intuitive understanding of what these models can or can’t do. That’s probably the most useful thing to evaluate the hype around vendors saying, we have this matchable thing. You can actually have a much better judgment around if that’s actually true or not.

COMINGS + GOINGS

Car rental parent company Avis Budget Group selected Daniel Cunha as its next chief financial officer, effective July 1. Cunha joins the firm after working in the same role for Orion Services Group, and will succeed Izzy Martins.

selected as its next chief financial officer, effective July 1. Cunha joins the firm after working in the same role for Orion Services Group, and will succeed Izzy Martins. Industrial and consumer packaging firm Sonoco appointed Paul Joachimczyk as chief financial officer, effective June 30. Joachimczyk previously worked as senior vice president, chief financial officer and corporate secretary of American Woodmark Corporation, and he will succeed interim CFO Jerry Cheatham who will remain in a senior finance role.

appointed as chief financial officer, effective June 30. Joachimczyk previously worked as senior vice president, chief financial officer and corporate secretary of American Woodmark Corporation, and he will succeed interim CFO Jerry Cheatham who will remain in a senior finance role. Enterprise data storage provider Pure Storage has appointed Tarek Robbiati as Chief Financial Officer, effective June 24. Robbiati has worked as CEO of RingCentral and CFO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and he succeeds Kevan Krysler.

STRATEGIES + ADVICE

If success is your aim, there are ways to manifest it. But it takes more than just hoping, wishing and trying magic—it’s all about figuring out what you want and doing what is needed to make it happen. Here’s a four-step approach to help you manifest your goals.

Burnout is more than just being tired; it means you’re frustrated by a lack of growth. And while self-care is always a good thing to do, you need to address the issues that are causing that feeling to overcome your burnout. Here are ways to identify what those are and figure out how to remedy them.

QUIZ

Tesla’s ever-mercurial stock shot up on Monday after something significant happened over the weekend. What was it?

A. President Trump posted a photo of himself and Elon Musk arm in arm on Truth Social, with the caption “TRUCE!”

B. A Tesla robot was demonstrated at a tech show in San Francisco

C. Cybercab robotaxis started operating in a limited test in Austin, Texas

D. Musk posted on X that it’s time for him to concentrate more on Tesla, hinting at new leadership for another one of his companies

See if you got the right answer here.