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Good morning. How dire is America’s fiscal outlook? When I met with MassMutual CEO Roger Crandall yesterday, he framed the problem with a startling statistic: “Ten dollars a day. That’s how much your share of the U.S. debt is going up every day,” he said. “For tax‑paying Americans, it’s more than $25 a day.”
Escalating public debt can affect everything from currency valuations to corporate borrowing costs, not to mention the harm it can do to workers, consumers, and growth. Crandall brings a unique perspective: he not only leads a 175-year-old mutual insurance company that serves more than 4 million customers with over $1 trillion in coverage, but he also chaired the Boston Fed through the end of last year. “Everything we have today was built for a 40‑hour-a-week, full‑time job with a lot of benefits provided, which made sense for a world where people lived to 70 or 80,” he noted. “We’re heading to a society where people live for 100 years, and we haven’t really prepared for that. It doesn’t take much to create a new normal that’s not a good normal for the country.”
And how should we address all this? One thing he and I discussed was the power of compounding—the reality that early investing is a powerful tool that more Americans need to deploy. The Trump saving accounts for children, whatever the drawbacks in design, are a powerful step in that direction. Employers could be doing more to fund the accounts and encourage young people to invest in their 401(k)s. (The Trump Administration is now reportedly looking at Australia’s mandated retirement-savings system as a model for revamping our system.)
Crandall benefits from a business model in which his company is owned by its members and participating policyholders, which makes it inherently multigenerational and focused on investing in the future. Like other life insurers, he now offers a wellness component at no cost. “It’s basically three things: a mental‑health app, a blood test for cancer, and a blood test around genetic predisposition,” he said, noting that giving policyholders more tools to invest in their own health boosts engagement and the bottom line. “The benefits we saw from the wellness rider were so big it made sense for us to pay for it.”
As for the resilience and health of the U.S. economy, Crandall believes the solution will likely come from Congress—if not in 2028, then by 2032. In the meantime, leaders can be doing more to create the conditions for their workers to invest in their own financial health, whether it’s actively promoting retirement savings to younger employees or creating more flexible work arrangements for those who might otherwise retire. With the U.S. Treasury now paying $24 billion a week in interest on its debt, Americans have to prepare for a long life that they may have to increasingly fund themselves.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
Top leadership news
Inside Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI
Apple’s lawsuit accuses former employees Tang Yew Tan and Chang Liu of stealing hardware trade secrets to help build OpenAI’s forthcoming AI-powered consumer device. The lawsuit claims that Liu exploited an authentication bug to download “dozens” of confidential files, and that Tan mined current Apple employees for proprietary information during job interviews. Apple says the case is “the tip of the iceberg” and claims such misconduct is “normalized and exemplified by leadership” at OpenAI, which has denied any interest in “other companies’ trade secrets.”
Elon Musk vs. Sam Altman reignites
Elon Musk called Altman “Scam Altman” on X after Apple’s lawsuit became public, and Altman fired back that Musk is “the one selling public market investors on short-term space data centers.” Their exchange revived a rivalry dating back to Musk’s failed 2018 bid to take control of OpenAI.
Trump’s 20% toll
U.S. President Donald Trump announced the U.S. will reimpose a naval blockade on Iran and demand reimbursement at “the rate of 20% on all cargo shipped” through the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices jumped 6% on the news as traffic through the alternate Omani corridor dwindled and ships increasingly used “dark” routes to avoid Iranian attacks.
The markets
S&P 500 futures are down 0.07% this morning. The last session closed down 0.79%. The STOXX Europe 600 was down 0.73% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.66% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 0.74%. South Korea’s KOSPI was up 0.73%. China’s CSI 300 was up 2.15%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 0.52%. India’s NIFTY 50 was down 0.67%. Bitcoin was at $64K.
Around the watercooler
How Adobe’s CMO is preparing for the AI-powered era of brand discovery by Ruth Umoh
Meta’s AI data center cost went from $10 billion to $50 billion in under 2 years—and split the town in two by Sydney Lake
‘We are driving in the fog’: Hundreds of economists admit they’re flying blind on AI by Nick Lichtenberg
CEO Daily is curated and edited by Joseph Abrams, Jason Ma, Claire Zillman, and Lee Clifford.
