Latest news with #uncertainty
Reuters
19 hours ago
- Business
- Reuters
Gold gains over 1% as dollar, yields ease; spotlight on trade
July 21 (Reuters) - Gold prices gained over 1% on Monday as the dollar and U.S. bond yields weakened amid uncertainty over trade talks ahead of a U.S. deadline of August 1 for countries to strike deals or face more tariffs. Spot gold was up 1.2% at $3,390.79 per ounce at 9:52 ET (1352 GMT). U.S. gold futures were up 1.3% to $3,402.40. The U.S. dollar index (.DXY), opens new tab was down 0.4%, making dollar-denominated gold more affordable for buyers using other currencies, while benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yields hit a more than one-week low. "With the August 1st deadline looming, it brings a level of uncertainty to the market and that certainly is supportive," said David Meger, director of metals trading at High Ridge Futures. The European Union is exploring a broader set of possible counter-measures against the U.S. as prospects for an acceptable trade agreement with Washington fade, according to EU diplomats. On the interest rate front, traders are pricing about a 63% chance of a rate cut in September, according to the CME FedWatch Tool, opens new tab. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the entire Federal Reserve needed to be examined as an institution and whether it had been successful. Talk of earlier than expected U.S. rate cuts is building, with speculation around a possible replacement of Fed Chair Jerome Powell and reshaping of the Fed adding to market jitters, Meger said. Gold is considered a hedge against uncertainty and tends to perform well in a low interest rate environment. Data showed that the world's leading gold consumer, China, brought in 63 metric tons of the precious metal last month, the lowest amount since January. Its imports of platinum in June fell 6.1% from the prior month. Spot silver gained 1.8% to $38.86 per ounce, platinum rose 2.2% to $1,453.17 and palladium was 3.5% higher at $1,284.46.
BBC News
20 hours ago
- Business
- BBC News
Jobs still at risk after John Lewis depot in Theale closes
Several John Lewis workers at a delivery site are still facing uncertainty after it closed last company confirmed in March the hub in Theale, Berkshire, would shut.A spokesperson said more than half of the site's 75 workers - who are employed through a trust and known as partners - had found new roles or chosen to retire, but the others were "still going through internal interview processes"."Regardless of their next steps, all partners have been given our full support throughout," the spokesperson said. They said the Theale site had closed because it no longer met the company's needs."This wasn't a decision we took lightly, and we've since worked hard to find new roles for those impacted," they repeated requests from the BBC, John Lewis would not confirm how many people were being made redundant as a result of the company said there would be no noticeable impact for the start of 2024, John Lewis said it was planning workforce cuts over the next five years to save money. You can follow BBC Berkshire on Facebook, X, or Instagram.
Forbes
2 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Building The Anti-Fragile Startup In 2025
Most startups are built for one thing: rapid scale. Raise capital, hire fast, grow revenue, repeat. This playbook has a better shot at working in stable markets with predictable growth trajectories. But when uncertainty hits – economic downturns, supply chain disruptions, AI transformation – these growth-optimized organizations often shatter. A different breed of start-ups is emerging, one that builds what philosopher Nassim Taleb calls "anti-fragile" organizations. Unlike resilient systems that merely withstand stress, anti-fragile systems actually improve under pressure. They use volatility as fuel rather than viewing it as an obstacle to overcome. How start-ups operate when they are anti-fragile resembles how nature looks amidst storms. After interviewing executives who've scaled companies through multiple crises, five core principles separate anti-fragile organizations from their fragile counterparts. 1. Make Vulnerability Part of How You Operate Traditional startup culture worships the myth of the infallible founder. But leaders building anti-fragile organizations do something counterintuitive: they systematically embed vulnerability into their operational DNA. Antonio Silveira, CTO of Attentive, learned this principle while navigating economic turbulence across multiple companies. "When I make mistakes, I address them in my all-hands. I say, 'Hey, I heard the feedback. This was my intent. This is what I learned. This is what we're going to change.' You need to emulate that so others feel like they can keep giving me feedback." This isn't performative – it's strategic infrastructure. When leaders model fallibility during stable periods, they create organizational antibodies against the blame culture that paralyzes decision-making during actual emergencies. Teams that regularly practice acknowledging mistakes develop what scientists call "error recovery systems" – the ability to learn from failure faster than competitors can avoid it. Curtis Anderson, CEO of Nursa, took this to its logical conclusion by requiring childhood photos for internal profiles. "You could scroll through the Slack directory and it was just everybody as a third grader," he explains. "There's something about that visual that makes everyone totally approachable." When people aren't spending mental energy protecting their image, they redirect that bandwidth toward solving problems. 2. Treat Recovery Like Training, Not Time Off Most startups treat recovery as what happens after burnout. Anti-fragile organizations flip this equation, building recovery into their operating system as a performance enhancer rather than a performance penalty. Lorraine Buhannic, Chief People Officer at Headway, knows this firsthand as the mental health platform has scaled from zero to 700 employees in four years. "We have what we call our Olympic performance standard," she explains. "We expect people to do the best work of their careers here, and we want that to feel motivating and galvanizing and not overwhelming and lead to burnout." The Olympic analogy is precise: elite athletes understand that recovery isn't the absence of training—it's training for the nervous system. "One explicit point in that principle is around the importance of recovery. Olympic athletes need to have recovery in order to perform at the highest level," Buhannic notes. At Headway, this translates into structural expectations: flexible PTO policies, therapy sessions openly blocked on calendars, and what Buhannic calls "transparent mental health infrastructure." The sophistication lies in framing recovery as performance optimization rather than accommodation for weakness. Organizations that normalize recovery as operational necessity build sustainable competitive advantages over those that optimize for short-term intensity. 3. Build for Learning Speed, Not Just Performance Traditional performance management was designed for industrial environments where roles were stable and best practices were known. Anti-fragile organizations require performance systems optimized for learning velocity rather than measurement accuracy. Doug Dennerline, CEO of Betterworks, learned this lesson painfully during his tenure managing 6,000 people at Cisco. "We used to do bell curve ratings where you were forced to have a top 15% and a middle 75%," he recalls. "They've updated it since, but I still remember how horrific those processes were. You're telling 75% of the population that you're just mediocre?" His solution wasn't to abandon measurement but to reconstruct it around adaptive capacity. "We've tried to create lightweight, in-the-moment points in which managers can give relevant feedback to employees. Schedule feedback along the way, one-on-ones on a weekly basis." Frequency transforms feedback from judgment into coaching. When feedback becomes continuous rather than episodic, it shifts from performance evaluation to performance development. Buhannic at Headway operationalized this through what she calls "contextual competence" – embedding management development within the specific cultural framework of the organization rather than teaching generic leadership skills. In volatile environments, learning velocity matters more than any specific knowledge or skill set. 4. Stop Trying to Resolve Every Contradiction Most strategic frameworks seek consistency and clarity. Anti-fragile leaders have learned to embrace paradox – holding apparently contradictory truths simultaneously and using that tension as competitive fuel. Rajat Bhageria, founder of Chef Robotics, embodies this principle. His path from venture capital to robotics entrepreneurship taught him a crucial lesson: "As an entrepreneur, you have to be irrational. You just keep going even though you're beat up literally every single day. Whereas as an investor, you have to think about what are all the risks and be very risk averse." Rather than choosing one mindset, Bhageria learned to toggle between them strategically. "You have to have the irrationality of a founder, but at the same time you should try to de-risk the business. If you find some fundamental reasons why the business is not going to work, then you should be real about this." This meta-cognitive ability – thinking about thinking – becomes crucial during uncertainty. While competitors get paralyzed trying to resolve contradictions, anti-fragile leaders use them as navigation tools. Lucia Huang, co-founder of Osmind, applies this to technology adoption. Rather than either rejecting or blindly embracing AI, she holds the contradiction: "We have to remember that a lot of our end users are actually quite skeptical about AI and it has a lot of potential to do harm in our space too. So we're trying to approach it with a really cautious, clinician-first approach." While others are stuck in either/or thinking, leaders who master both/and thinking can navigate complexity with nuance. 5. Make Everyone an Experimenter, Not Just a User The AI revolution is creating a fundamental split: organizations treating technology as tools to be deployed versus those developing technology as cultural capabilities to be evolved. The second approach builds sustainable advantages. Huang at Osmind demonstrates the sophisticated approach: ""We've done an AI sprint internally to upskill and up-level our team. We supplied budgets for everyone to experiment with AI. This internal experimentation allows us to thoroughly test and refine AI capabilities before integrating them into our platform, ensuring we deliver proven, reliable tools rather than experimental features." This isn't just individual development—it's building organizational learning systems. When every team member becomes an experimenter rather than just a user, the organization develops distributed intelligence about technological possibilities and limitations. Dennerline at BetterWorks takes this further: "I have been pushing this pretty hard. I let people experiment with it. I pay people bonuses to come up with ways that produce increases in productivity. We had a woman on our India team implement a thing that uses AI to do QA that used to take us four weeks, but now takes us four hours." The crucial insight comes from recognizing that technology adoption is ultimately about human psychology. As Buhannic observes: "People's expectations of work has changed a lot. Managers need to be more than just a person directing work. They're really setting culture." Successful technology integration requires maintaining human agency while augmenting human capability. It's about creating hybrid intelligence that's more powerful than either humans or machines alone. Building for What's Coming Anti-fragile organizations don't just survive disruption; they use disruption as raw material for competitive advantage. They understand something their fragile counterparts miss: in a world of accelerating change, the ability to improve under stress becomes more valuable than the ability to avoid stress altogether. As Anderson puts it: "The future is for the faithful. That's not for everybody. But then you show incremental progress, and you help people understand that each of these points on the line is directionally moving the way that we need it to." This isn't blind optimism. It's earned confidence that comes from building systems designed to get stronger when the world gets stranger. I write about the intersection of AI and performance management for Forbes. I'm the founder of Mandala, an AI Coaching Platform for Managers.
CBC
3 days ago
- Business
- CBC
N.B. premier looking for 'elimination' of tariff uncertainty in meeting with PM
Ahead of a premiers' meeting with Prime Minister Mark Carney next week, New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt tells Power & Politics she's looking for an 'elimination of uncertainty' when it comes to U.S. tariffs.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
US firms' cash conversion cycle improved in 2024: Hackett
This story was originally published on To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily newsletter. 'Uncertainty' may well be on track to become the most uttered word in business circles this year. Between ongoing trade tensions and geopolitical crises, there are certainly many volatile moving parts for finance chiefs and businesses to contend with in 2025. Still, if 'past is prologue,' then a look backward may offer some potentially hopeful hints for how the rest of this year could turn out. Annual working capital research by The Hackett Group, provided exclusively to called out a few promising trends in 2024. The firm found that, among the 1,000 largest nonfinancial publicly traded companies in the U.S., there was a 4% improvement in cash conversion cycle in 2024. Last year, the time it took to convert investments to cash averaged 37 days, down from 38.3 days in 2023. The improvement came after what Hackett researchers described as a 'turbulent' year in 2023. 'After a turbulent 2023 characterized as the 'triple down' year when all working capital metrics trended negatively, 2024 was marked by a positive course correction of the aggregate working capital performance of the top 1,000 U.S. publicly traded companies,' they wrote in the report. By the numbers -1.3 days Change in cash conversion cycle in 2024, a decrease to 37 days from 38.3 days in the prior year +0.3 days Change in days sales outstanding +0.2 days Change in days inventory outstanding +1.8 days Change in days payable outstanding Hackett researchers found a notable improvement in days payable outstanding, which clocked in at 59 days compared to 57.2 days in 2023. 'The historic DPO deterioration ended in 2024 as the metric improved by 3% or 1.8 days compared to 2023,' researchers wrote in the report. In an interview, Hackett Group Senior Director Istvan Bodo highlighted the importance of DPO recovery in a post-pandemic world. He noted that it's metric of working capital that had been considered the 'low-hanging fruit for many years, before and even shortly after COVID.' 'But then in 2020, we saw that the DPO performance started to deteriorate,' he said. 'Now 2024 is really the first year we see this start to turn around, but it's still not close to the best performance achieved in the past 10 years, so there's still a way to go.' Meanwhile, revenue across the companies ticked up 4% in 2024. That came after a 'year of stalling' in 2023, Hackett researchers said. At the same time, not every working capital metric improved. In fact, days sales outstanding and days inventory outstanding both deteriorated. What's more, Hackett researchers found a decline in overall excess working capital, which slid $32 billion in 2024 to $1.73 trillion, marking a 2% year-over-year decline. 'This was actually one of the first times in the past five years we've seen a decline in the working capital opportunity overall,' Bodo said. The report also showed an increasing divide between middle-performing companies and the highest achievers. Bodo noted median companies 'continue to lag while top-performing, upper quartile organizations continue to improve their working capital opportunity.' 'Unfortunately, the gap between the median and the top-performing organizations is increasing,' he added. Mileage may vary Metrics didn't trend positively for every industry, either. The computer hardware and peripherals sector, for instance, endured a staggering 182% deterioration in CCC, driven in part by companies stocking up on inventory to prepare for AI-related demands. The beverage industry, which encompasses both soft drink makers like Keurig Dr Pepper and alcohol producers like Molson Coors, came in second worst, with a 159% degradation in CCC. The airline industry saw a 52% worsening. Though the AI boom may have created a few bumps in the road for hardware, it had the opposite effect on software. Hackett researchers found an 80% improvement in CCC for the internet software and services sector. 'AI has been the dominant market narrative for some time, so it's no surprise that the industries responsible for running, hosting and powering the technology have benefited from the unprecedented surge in demand,' Hackett researchers explained in the report. The firm found one particularly strong-performing industry: the household and personal care sector, which saw its CCC improve by a whopping 330%. There was also a notable CCC improvement in food and staples retail (119%). What were some commonalities among companies with CCC improvements? Organizations with better cash conversion cycles had a strong 'understanding of the importance of cash,' Bodo said. 'That was well understood across the organization, not just in the finance department.' Hackett's report was based on the latest publicly available annual filings for 2024, so it predates President Donald Trump's official return to the White House and the aggressive tariffs he's introduced since. However, the report's findings showed that businesses were already preparing for the prospect of tariffs at the end of last year. 'In an economic environment where the only certainty is uncertainty, businesses must take a proactive approach to mitigate the unpredictable impact of tariffs and supply chain disruptions on working capital,' Hackett researchers said in the report. In the meantime, how can CFOs get a piece of that $1.7 trillion working capital opportunity? Bodo said it will likely involve a mix of technological improvements and better governance. But, he cautioned, it's not 'just a tech question.' 'If you do not have the right processes in place and do not have the right governance in place, you might not get maximum benefits,' Bodo said. Recommended Reading Hackett Working Capital Survey: All cash conversion cycle elements degraded last year Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
