For the roughly 20,000 young Americans who age out of the foster care system each year, that milestone is often defined by sudden, staggering isolation.

The institutional support that once provided shelter, food stipends, and assigned social workers often ends abruptly when a youth turns 18—or 21 in states offering extended care. Overnight, teenagers are expected to secure housing, open bank accounts, balance paychecks, and avoid financial predators entirely on their own. There is typically no co-signer for a security deposit, no emergency loan when hours get cut at work, and no experienced mentor to explain the difference between a W-2 and a credit line.

“Compared to when my brothers left the house, it’s incomparable,” says McLain Larson, a Los Angeles high school student. “They’re virtually just cast out. A lot of these people don’t have that one phone number where it’s like, ‘Hey, I’m going to the bank. How do I open a bank account? Can you help me open a bank account?’ They are way too young, they don’t have the knowledge, and they don’t have the support.”

Larson set out to change that dynamic. In 2024, while still a high school junior, he founded Foster Financials, a grassroots nonprofit designed to bridge the severe financial literacy gap confronting foster youth.

He didn’t begin by pitching angel investors or writing business school case studies. Instead, he spent hours sitting down directly with teenagers who were preparing to leave the foster system, asking them one core question: What scares you most about money?

The answers he heard were grounded in immediate, day-to-day survival. These young adults were not interested in Wall Street investing strategies or retirement accounts; they were terrified of falling into debt, terrified of overdraft fees eating their rent money, and terrified of navigating bureaucracy without guidance.

Those raw listening sessions became the foundational curriculum for Foster Financials, which rapidly grew from community workshops into one-on-one counseling, career panels, and micro-scholarships.

Yet Larson quickly realized that in-person seminars alone had structural limitations. Rigorous academic research, including randomized trials conducted in Los Angeles County, revealed that traditional lecture-based life skills classes had virtually no measurable impact on long-term earnings or stability for foster youth. Worse, foster youth frequently shift between placements, move across county lines, or lose touch with social agencies, making consistent attendance at scheduled physical workshops almost impossible.

What foster youth actually needed was round-the-clock accessibility, practical decision-making drills, and a trusted guide.

To deliver that at scale, Larson built and launched the Money Academy, a free web platform built for youth ages 14 to 26 nationwide. Designed to be completely frictionless, the course requires no app downloads, no account registrations, and no personal identifying information—ensuring privacy and total accessibility on any smartphone or library computer.

Adapted from the FDIC’s Money Smart for Young Adults curriculum, the 11-module program strips out every assumption of parental support. Rather than listening to passive video lectures, users work through real-world simulations: “It’s the 17th and you have $58 left. What’s your move?”

On every single page sits an embedded, conversational AI tutor. A student can highlight any term, sentence, or scenario and ask for an explanation in plain language. The point, Larson notes, is to eliminate the shame factor: letting a 16-year-old ask the basic financial questions they might be too embarrassed or self-conscious to bring to a caseworker or an employer.

Because misinformation can trigger financial catastrophe for someone without a safety net, Larson engineered four distinct safety layers to prevent hallucinations. The system uses fixed crisis filters, input screening, and a secondary review AI that checks every response before the student sees it. Whenever an inquiry touches upon state-specific regulations, tax brackets, or benefit cutoffs, the AI refuses to speculate, immediately steering the student toward 211, certified tax volunteers, or professional legal aid.

The platform’s culminating module, titled “Aging Out: Your Money Launch Plan,” addresses critical survival milestones that conventional finance courses overlook entirely. It walks youth step-by-step through their federal legal right to leave state care with physical possession of their Social Security card, birth certificate, and official state ID. From there, it provides actionable pathways to secure education and training vouchers, subsidized housing vouchers, and continued Medicaid coverage.

Remarkably, by utilizing optimized architecture, Larson runs the entire nationwide web platform for less than $100 per month.

Yet for Larson, software is only half the battle. The emotional core of Foster Financials remains human mentorship.

“Building a connection—it’s more of a partnership for us,” Larson says. “That is what our peer mentorship program is. It’s more about building a pure connection and just having someone to fall back on. Every single person deserves to have that fallback, that community, that person that they can just go to.”

Overcoming skepticism as a teenage founder was an early hurdle. “The hardest part of starting Foster Financials would probably be being taken seriously as a junior in high school,” Larson admits. “I’ve always believed in myself, but others haven’t.”

Those reservations vanished as organizations saw the curriculum in action. Scott A. Henderson, co-founder of the Irvine-based social enterprise Doing Good Works, initially harbored serious doubts when booking Foster Financials for a client workshop.

“Upon hearing that you were still in high school... I was VERY reluctant to have you lead the session with the customer,” Henderson later wrote to Larson. “I’ve never been so thankful to say, I was wrong! Our world needs more young people like you, who are willing to stand in the gap for those who need support.”

Today, Foster Financials is actively teaming up with organizations like Coco’s Angels, speaking at institutions like Los Angeles Harbor College, and preparing a financial seminar for students participating in Camila and Matthew McConaughey’s Just Keep Livin Foundation.

While the long-term data for the Money Academy is still developing, Larson’s north star remains centered on individual transformation rather than vanity metrics.

“The thing that surprised me the most about working with foster youth would have to be just honestly the passion,” Larson reflects. “You go into a classroom full of foster youth, every single person is so passionate about learning. They don’t want to stop. They just want the opportunity to grow.”

“If that can happen with two kids, that is just enough for me,” he adds. “And if it can happen for thousands of kids, that’s also perfect.”

The Money Academy is available free to the public at fosterfinancials.org.

Tech giants Oracle $ORCL ( ▼ 5.48% ) , Microsoft $MSFT ( ▼ 1.35% ) , Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 2.26% ) , Meta $META ( ▼ 0.06% ) , and Google $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.63% ) face a massive AI cash call, needing a combined $7.9 trillion in revenue by 2031 to break even on AI investments—four times their current combined revenue of $1.9 trillion. Highlighting the other-worldly stakes, SpaceX $SPCX ( ▼ 4.2% ) and Nvidia $NVDA ( ▼ 2.94% ) are reportedly arranging a $40 billion debt deal for AI data center chips, potentially for use in outer space. With some of SpaceX’s debt trading at junk prices and five-year credit default swaps rising to 194 basis points ($19,400 annually to insure $1 million in debt), concerns are growing over the risks of such huge chip deals. Peter Green spoke with Chan Anh, founder of AI investor Tessera PE and former Goldman Sachs $GS ( ▼ 0.52% ) banker, to break down the risks.

What is the core concern surrounding these massive AI financing deals?

First of all, artificial intelligence as a technology, I think everyone by now agrees that it is a transformative and disruptive technology that has great potential. And the circularity itself isn’t actually new. It exists not only in AI, but in every other industry. I think what is becoming concerning is an acceleration of those deals to a much bigger size. [Regarding] vendor financing, which essentially means the supplier of a product finances the purchase, SpaceX has a subsidiary called CTC, which already has vendor financing in place for around $10 billion of AI hardware. In itself, it’s not new, but the size of it [is concerning]. Talk of this $40 billion financing is problematic because the details are not there. In many of these vendor financing deals, there are a lot of footnotes, a lot of fine print, that in this specific situation, you can do this or that. The fact that you start to see more and more of this, and that investors have to dig deeper into the fine print, is a cause of concern.

So you’re saying it’s an information problem, at least in part?

Yes. What are the terms? Is anyone backstopping? Is this Nvidia guaranteeing its own product? What do you know about these things? The worry is that Nvidia has done this multiple times, for hundreds of billions of dollars.

Are the vendor financing and the circularity signs of a dot-com style bubble?

If you go back to the 2000 internet boom, all the cable owners, like Global Crossing and so on, didn’t have much revenue. Now, the top-tier AI companies all have very good revenue. The problem is more acute among the neoclouds, the CoreWeaves and so on. And that’s also why you tend to see more Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) trades. By and large, I think we are in much better shape [regarding information disclosure] compared to earlier episodes.

What is the “black box” risk in this ecosystem?

What is not being captured well is how much of the lending, in addition to what we see directly between the companies, involves private credit, for example, or non-bank. And then they get recycled back into the AI ecosystem, depending on how big the non-bank lending and the private credit are. But the question remains: What we are seeing could be the tip of the iceberg.

What red flags should investors watch for?

You need to really think about three things. The first is the relationship between the vendor and their customer: Is the customer independent? [In many cases] they’re not just the customer and vendor, but they have an investor relationship as well. The second is whether the funding is secure for the entire term of the contract. And if you’re borrowing for longer than your collateral is valuable, then you have an issue.

So if the chips used as collateral age out, they can lose their value, or are you also talking not just about hardware but, say, service contracts?

Yes. [For example], after an initial three months, [under some contracts] the end user can terminate the contract with a 90-day notice. So you’re not talking about an annuity, you’re not talking about long-term commitment. The more deals you see like that, the more the structure or relationship you see where there is a divergence between the debt financing maturity and underlying obligation, that’s something that you need to pay attention to. And then the third one is how much of the terms are disclosed? If a lot of it is a private deal, SPV deals that you cannot see, and we are starting to see more of those, then you need to be worried. You need to look at whether there’s vendor financing; on which side is the company you’re interested in; and if the deal goes sour, then is there a guarantor? Who’s acting as a guarantor? And if the guarantor fails, what happens?

That’s where it gets circular, right, if the chip buyer, SpaceX here, doesn’t have the revenue to pay the vendor enough to service the financing, everybody goes down?

That’s the fear, but we are not there now.

What is your advice for individual investors?

Everyone would agree the technology we’re talking about has value, long-term value. [But] the big question for the individual investor is what is your time horizon? As Warren Buffett did, you want to buy a good company and you want to hold it as long as you can. And you may be right in terms of betting on the technology, but that’s not the same as choosing the right security. So set your time horizon, first, and then decide what it is within the capital structure that you’re investing in. Are you an equity investor or a debt investor? And then assess the risk: Am I on the receiving side of a loss or not?

—Peter S. Green

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Big Businesses mentioned this week:

$ORCL ( ▼ 5.48% ) , $MSFT ( ▼ 1.35% ) , $AMZN ( ▼ 2.26% ) , $META ( ▼ 0.06% ) , $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.63% ) , $SPCX ( ▼ 4.2% ) , $NVDA ( ▼ 2.94% ) , $GS ( ▼ 0.52% ) , $WBD ( ▲ 0.03% ) , $SKYD ( ▲ 4.39% ) , $MAT ( ▲ 1.28% ) , $AAPL ( ▲ 1.11% ) , $RBGLY ( ▼ 0.15% ) , $UNH ( ▼ 1.34% ) , $NVO ( ▼ 0.21% ) , $LLY ( ▼ 1.61% )

The Usual Suspects

• SKYD’s skid: Th-th-th-that’s all, Folks! After completing the acquisition of legendary Hollywood studio Warner Bros. Discovery $WBD ( ▲ 0.03% ) , and adding it to the carcass of Paramount, nepo-mogul David Ellison announced he will rename his empire Skydance $SKYD ( ▲ 4.39% ) , for the small studio that his father, Oracle $ORCL ( ▼ 5.48% ) founder Larry, built for him. David, now 43, and, by proxy or puppet strings, his father Larry now control one of the most important and influential sets of media properties in the U.S., from HBO and Warner Bros studio to CNN, CBS and Paramount Pictures, alongside Oracle’s 15% stake in TikTok’s U.S. operation. But all that power does not rest easily on the Ellisons’ shoulders. They have to pay down $87.5 billion in debt, according to Fitch, while tied to a host of legacy businesses that may or may not still have buzz in five years, all the while competing with cash-rich tech powerhouses, Google $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.63% ) , Apple $AAPL ( ▲ 1.11% ) , and Amazon $AMZN ( ▼ 2.26% ) that have built their own studios without the legacy overhead of Skydance. The Ellisons have poached Mattel $MAT ( ▲ 1.28% ) CEO Ynon Kreiz as co-CEO of the new shebang (he pushed the 2023 Barbie movie, which was co-produced by Warner). The tough question facing the younger Ellison is what to cut and what to invest in to keep enough cash flowing that debt holders and large shareholders, like Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, stay happy. “You don’t want debt to become the thing that defines strategy,” Integrated media founder Jon Miller told the Financial Times. “And that’s the danger here.” For some shareholders, it’s time to jump ship. Ellison junior adopted the ticker SKYD for the new company, and its shares have taken the hint: Shares fell 2.7% Tuesday when the new entity was launched on the New York Stock Exchange, and another 6.7% on Wednesday. By Thursday morning, $SKYD had slid 14% in five days.
• Mickey and Brendan go to Court: The House of Mouse is fighting back. Disney $DIS ( ▲ 2.17% ) is suing the Federal Communications Commission and its chief, Trump appointee Brendan Carr over the FCC’s early review of Disney’s eight local broadcast licenses for ABC TV stations, claiming that its alleged DEI practices are discriminatory. Disney says the Trump Administration is unlawfully trampling on its free speech rights. The FCC sidestepped Disney’s argument, saying it can’t sue because it hasn’t suffered any “irreparable harm.” Yet. But Disney says it’s really about Jimmy Kimmel, The View and other programs that have questioned or mocked Trump and his policies. What’s at stake here, they say, is whether the Trump Administration can use its regulatory powers to shut down speech it doesn’t like, and effectively shut down companies that say things it doesn’t like. In 2002, Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Reagan appointee wrote, “the right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought.” Kennedy also wrote the Citizens United decision that put corporate speech (and campaign spending) on a par with individual speech. 
• Cough it up: Mucinex maker Reckitt Beckiser $RBGLY ( ▼ 0.15% ) says it’s spending $400 million to boost its U.S.-based supply chain. The U.K.-based company gets about a fourth of its revenue from the U.S., and nearly half from emerging markets, including China, India and Brazil. A stronger U.S. supply chain will let it react faster to the next outbreak of colds, flu or other diseases, and avoid import tariffs. That’s nothing to sneeze at. Shares are down about 13.5% in the past five years. 
• Cold Wheels? As Mattel $MAT ( ▲ 1.28% ) CEO Ynon Kreiz skives off to Skydance, activist investor Ariel Investments is calling for the company to sell itself, and Authentic Brands Group has approached Mattel with a potential offer above $20 a share. It’s now trading at $16.50. Shares in Mattel are down 13% in the past five years, despite the 2023 Barbie movie’s breakout success, while the Nasdaq 100 is up 109%.
• Emmys on a train to Streamland: Et tu, Emmy? In another blow to linear network TV, the industry’s own award show is leaving the networks and moving to Amazon Prime Video $AMZN ( ▼ 2.26% ) next year, in a six-year deal with the Television Academy, which runs the national awards show and owns the ceremony. Previously, the show rotated among the big four networks (ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox) for about $9.5 million a year. Network TV has already lost the Oscars (for movies) to YouTube, starting in 2029.
• Ill health:  Ken Paxton, the scandal-plagued Republican and Texas attorney general whose senate bid is flailing against newcomer James Talarico, is taking aim at a favorite target of the left. Paxton says he’s investigating UnitedHealth Group $UNH ( ▼ 1.34% ) , whose senior executive Brian Thompson was killed by Luigi Mangione in 2024. Paxton cited press reports alleging that United bribed nursing homes to delay hospitalizations, overruled doctors to deny patients care, and retroactively withdrew its approval of a prior-authorization request for one Texas patient. “No Texan should be denied medically necessary care, dragged through endless appeals, or stuck with devastating bills after trusting their insurer’s word,” Paxton said. 
• Blind trust: Meanwhile patients who say they went blind from taking GLP-1 diabetes and weight loss meds are suing Wegovy and Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk $NVO ( ▼ 0.21% ) and Zepbound maker Eli Lilly $LLY ( ▼ 1.61% ) , saying they developed a rare optic neuropathy called NAION, that leads to sudden, and often permanent blindness. The companies say there’s no evidence of a causal connection.
• War Story: More oil is getting out of the Gulf, on tankers whose sailors are being paid as much as $25,000 a month (Captains can get $100,000), and on pipelines across Saudi Arabia to the Red Sea and — on smaller tankers — out through the Suez Canal. But it’s crude oil, and refined diesel is not making the trip, after Iran blasted Gulf refineries to smithereens following the U.S and Israeli air war. Oil is still expensive. Brent Crude was at $105 a barrel on Thursday up from its pre-War price of around $65, and gasoline prices have moderated by a few pennies, averaging $4.36 a gallon in the U.S. on  Thursday. Diesel, though, was stuck at $6.28, up from $3.68 a year ago. That’s caused a slowdown in Detroit, where even as President Trump recently ordered fuel economy standards to be eased, sales of big pickups and SUVs are plummeting. Jeep Grand Cherokee sales fell 30% in the third quarter, while sales of Hyundai’s fuel-efficient Elantra sedan rose 18%. Plans to restrict diesel exports won’t help, because the real problem is refining capacity. Despite bringing all of the U.S. diesel refining capacity oline, the U.S, still can’t make up for the missing truck fuel. While the energy shock may moderate as users move to alternative fuels and greater efficiency, the lack of fertilizer and natural gas flowing through the strait could cause a global food crisis. “People see this fundamentally through the prism of the battle between the U.S. and Iran which is in a way theatrical, it is so overpowering,” John Denton, secretary-general of the International Chamber Commerce told the Wall Street Journal. “The story which is the killer…is the fertilizer story.” And while Saudi Aramco’s CEO says it will take up to two years from the war’s end to rebuild backup stocks of oil and gas, there does seem to be one bright side to the story: The steep rise in energy prices could reduce demand in Europe, keeping interest rates lower and helping the economy grow in new ways, according to European Central Bank Chief Economist Philip Lane. Or in banker-speak: “All else being equal, these ‘demand destruction’ channels can limit the required adjustment in the monetary stance to ensure the timely return of inflation to the target.”

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Trumplandia

• Just a minute: Newly released minutes of September’s Fed open market Committee meeting show the committee’s 12 members may not be rushing to raise rates again soon. The September rate hike was unanimous, but the notes make clear the next increase may not come this month and is more likely in December. “Most participants assessed that another increase in the target range for the federal-funds rate would likely be appropriate by year end,” the minutes said. The Fed still doesn’t have a solution for serving its dual mandate of keeping inflation low and employment high, but the policymakers see the two in a cautious equilibrium for now. A look at call options on ETFs suggest that traders are betting on a quick drop in interest rates. Watch what happens if rates don’t fall, and they have to pay up. In more good news for the Fed, the bank’s inspector general said the $2.5 billion renovation of the Fed’s century-old headquarters in Washington was over budget and poorly managed, but there was no evidence of illegal behavior or administrative misconduct. In his long running battle with former Fed chair Jerome Powell (whom he’d appointed) President Trump suggested Powell should be removed for mismanaging the project or committing fraud.
• The Trade Deficit Follies: All that data-center construction, which may be one of the few things supporting GDP growth in the U.S., pushed the U.S. trade deficit to its highest point in more than a year, with trade in goods and services widening by 14% in August from July. That’s because a lot of the chips, computers and other tech needed to build data centers are imported, and those imports rose $234 billion through August from the same period in 2025. And then there are musical instruments: A proposed 25% tariff on trumpets, trombones and other brass instruments could kill school music programs around the country. Instruments wear out, and the New York Times reports that fewer schools can afford to replace them. Imports of orchestral string instruments, including violins, violas and cellos, dropped 50% in the second quarter from two years ago, and brass imports fell 43%.
• Iced Out: When Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents launch large-scale blitzes into American neighborhoods, they can knock the local economy off its feet. A University of Pennsylvania study found that ICE raids in 2025 collectively resulted in around 8 billion fewer visits to the affected areas, and $13-$14 billion in lost spending there. Cities where immigration raids took place in 2025 experienced a nearly 3% decline in weekly foot traffic and a more than 6% drawdown in spending. “You are creating recession-like conditions in targeted neighborhoods,” said Prof. Zeke Hernandez. “It’s like a localized recession.”
• Ka-Ching: The cash registers just keep ringing. Rising prices, inflation, and economic uncertainty can’t keep American consumers from spending. U.S. households spent 6.1% more in the 12 months through August, up from a 4.3% increase for all of 2025, and last month’s annualized GDP was revised upward to 2.2% from 1.5% at the end of last year, the Commerce Department reported. Prime Day sales, when Amazon and other retailers slash prices to get people in a spending fever, was a huge success this year, with $9.86 billion in online sales on Oct 6-7, up 8.5% from 2025, according to Adobe. “For all the talk about AI data centers, the main engine of growth for GDP in the United States has been broad-based consumer-spending growth, which I think is tied to a broad-based, stable labor market,” Chicago Fed chief Austan Goolsbee told journalists last week.

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