Franklin Templeton has published its 2025 Global Investment Management Survey with results from investment professionals across all asset classes, as well as predictions on inflation, recession and asset class performance. Download a copy here.

Gene Hackman was found dead inside his New Mexico home on Feb. 26, 2025, at the age of 95. The acclaimed actor’s wife, Betsy Arakawa, had also died of a rare virus — a week before his death from natural causes. Details about the couple’s plans for Hackman’s reportedly $80 million fortune are only starting to emerge, months after the discovery of their tragic demise. While their wills have not yet been made public, we have seen them through a reputable source.

Wood is, by far, the most common material used in the United States for single-family home construction. But wood construction isn’t engineered for long-term durability, and it often underperforms, particularly in the face of increasingly common extreme weather events. In response to these challenges ...

The human hand can be a powerful tool. It is uniquely designed for both strength and precision, with its opposable thumbs, its intricate network of muscles, tendons and nerves, and its remarkable range of motion. It can perform tasks as varied as lifting heavy objects, creating art and performing delicate surgeries. In business, it can be used to shake another’s hand to initiate a business deal, or, in the case of Mike Durbin, raised in the air to ...

These are heady days on the artificial intelligence (AI) frontier, when each day brings forth fresh headlines regarding better ChatGPTs, or massive buildouts of data centers to enable the instant crunching of galactic volumes of digitized data. Anyone interacting with even a free online large language model (LLM), such as Perplexity, can be astonished at the model’s ability to understand questions and smoothly provide answers or summaries. The rapidly ascending abilities and adoption of AI is prompting ...

In a bold, strategic move for the United States, acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy announced plans on Aug. 5, 2025, to build a nuclear fission reactor for deployment on the lunar surface in 2030. Doing so would allow the United States to gain a foothold on the moon by the time China plans to land the first taikonaut (what China calls its astronauts) there by 2030. Apart from the geopolitical importance, there are ...

The growth of passive investing has stimulated academic and policy interest in how it affects asset prices and the real economy. Hao Jiang, Dimitri Vayanos and Lu Zheng, authors of the March 2025 paper Passive Investing and the Rise of Mega-Firms, set out to understand how the increasing shift from active to passive investing influences asset prices, particularly the prices of the largest firms in the market.

In the alternative investments space, there’s often a tendency to lead with numbers. The fund facts, the asset structure, the targeted returns. After all, that’s what the end investor wants, right? Not quite. Read on to learn why you should lead with why. Advisers are not only looking to plug numbers into a spreadsheet to share with their clients. They’re looking to build ...

When former President Joe Biden unveiled his $1.9 trillion infrastructure plan in 2021, he found the perfect place to go public: Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station rail yard. Over the din of crackling wires and grumbling engines, the president made his case for revitalizing the country’s roads, ports, airports and rail lines. Behind Biden sat rows of gleaming Amtrak trains. Among them was a prototype of NextGen Acela, a sleek machine engineered to deliver ...

In today’s market, investors and investment managers are asking for more time — whether to stay invested or exit — and, with fundraising extensions becoming common and fewer new assets available, many are seeking alternative ways to meet their investment goals. The market has been characterized by a more difficult fundraising environment and limited distributions. A primary motivation ...

Between fleets of rental vehicles and ground support equipment, electricity demand at U.S. airports might quintuple in the next 20 years. Smaller regional and general aviation airports, which often have simple rural electric connections, are part of that overwhelming growth. Major airport electric investments are incoming, to say nothing of battery-powered electric aircraft that require substantial charging supplies on the ground.

Gold has been seemingly unstoppable since November 2022, when it hit its lowest level in the post-pandemic era. Since then, the yellow metal has more than doubled in price to more than $3,400 per ounce as of this writing, close to its all-time high of $3,500 per ounce. Surging gold prices have been driven by two main factors. First ...

I’m sure you’ve noticed that families are paying record or near-record amounts to keep cool this summer. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, electricity costs have climbed 5.5 percent in the past 12 months, while natural gas prices have jumped nearly 14 percent. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association says the average household will spend nearly $800 on summer cooling alone, the highest level in more than a decade.

Evolving shopper priorities, economic pressures and new competitors are reshaping how and where Americans buy everyday goods. And as value-focused players gain ground, legacy retail powerhouses are adapting their strategies in a bid to maintain their visit share. In this new consumer reality, shoppers no longer stick to one lane, creating a complex ecosystem where loyalty, geography and cross-visitation patterns — not just market share — define who is truly winning.

Martin Davies, global head of natural capital at Nuveen, makes his case for natural resources stabilizing an investment portfolio.

Around the world, energy security is becoming a policy priority. In large part, this new focus stems from a fear of energy weaponization. In a world marked by increasingly volatile geopolitical tensions, interconnected energy systems can be used as pawns in conflicts. In Europe’s very recent experience with Russia, they already have. However, there’s also a drive for broader resilience — the ability to ...

If you’ve been reading this column for a while, you’ll recall I’m not a big fan of the fund structures employed in the private wealth advisory marketplace regarding front-end loads. Every penny an investor has to pay to access one of these funds is a penny that isn’t going into real estate, infrastructure, energy, timber, commodity, maritime, aviation or agricultural investments. I also have difficulty understanding why investors should pay for distribution costs, including ...