Inflation data for July will be released Tuesday, and analysts expect a slight pickup as retailers raise prices in reaction to increasing tariffs. But if you’re looking for some good news for your household budget, Devika Krishna Kumar, who covers oil trading in the Americas, says you should check out gasoline prices. Plus: Klarna wants a spot in your wallet, Patagonia’s CEO pursues a legacy to be proud of, and Amanda Mull tries to make sense of today’s nonsensical trend machine.

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President Donald Trump’s seemingly ever-changing tariff policies have been a challenge for investors. He has been consistent about one thing, though: He wants lower oil prices. That’s good news for all of us consumers, at least on the surface.

Oil prices have been on a roller-coaster ride the past couple of months, with tariffs, the brief US military conflict with Iran, OPEC+ supply moves and growing US pressure on Russia and its oil buyers leading to twists and turns in the outlook for supply and demand.

One of the final factors propping up prices is fading as Russia and the US are working toward a deal to halt the war in Ukraine. European leaders and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy will hold a call with Trump on Wednesday ahead of the president’s meeting Friday in Alaska with Vladimir Putin. If the European Union is on board with the plan, that could mean looser sanctions and more readily available Russian oil supplies in a market that already may have too much of it.

Output from major producers like Saudi Arabia and smaller ones like Guyana is still growing, and demand can barely keep up. The US, the world’s largest producer, is pumping a near-record 13.3 million barrels a day of oil, though drilling activity is slowing because of weaker prices. Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia and its allies, which had curtailed their production for years, have ramped up to return vast volumes of crude in a bid to regain market share.

Pumpjacks in Willow Springs Park in Long Beach, California. Photographer: Apu Gomes/AFP

Both the International Energy Agency and the US Energy Information Administration last month bolstered their estimates for a surplus next year. The two widely followed forecasters expect supply to eclipse demand by the most since the pandemic, with the IEA’s projected surplus at 2 million barrels a day.

Brent crude, considered the global benchmark for oil prices, is trading near $66 a barrel. The US government expects prices to average about $58 a barrel in 2026.

This all means car owners can expect lower gasoline prices in coming months, offering some relief as they face higher costs on most other goods thanks to tariffs. Retail gasoline prices, now averaging $3.71, according to AAA, are expected to slide to about $3 a gallon next year, according to the US government, the lowest average since the Covid-19 pandemic.

How much you pay at the pump can vary significantly by state. California, where drivers are accustomed to paying some of the highest rates, is facing a local supply crunch that’s likely to worsen as refiners in the region announced closures after years of dealing with some of the strictest environmental rules in the US.

And drivers nationwide might want to hold the celebration—economic jitters and a cooling job market could put the brakes on their enjoying those cheaper gas prices.

RELATED: Small US companies, the source of more than half of the country’s job creation in recent years, are struggling to comply with new tariffs and cope with growing financial strains from higher import costs.

In Brief

• Trump announced he would take control of Washington’s police and deploy the National Guard as part of a push to reduce crime and homelessness in the nation’s capital—despite violent crime in DC being at a 30-year low.
• Colombian presidential hopeful Miguel Uribe has died two months after being gunned down while campaigning in Bogotá.
• Blue Apron is moving away from the weekly subscription model it pioneered to sell a la carte meal kits that require zero or little preparation.
• This is actually a good time to buy a house, according to a Zillow economist, because buyers have bargaining power.

Klarna Pushes Into Banking

Illustration: Nick Little for Bloomberg Businessweek

This was supposed to be the summer Sebastian Siemiatkowski hit the jackpot. The founder of Klarna Group Plc, a 20-year-old financial-technology company from Sweden, had planned an initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in the spring. Seeking to raise at least $1 billion, the listing would have cemented Siemiatkowski’s status as a billionaire, at least on paper. But as the clock ticked down to the debut, President Donald Trump announced his plans for stiff tariffs, sending global markets into a tailspin. Two days later, Siemiatkowski put his plans on hold. “The IPO is obviously an important event for our shareholders,” he says. “But to me it’s just one milestone.”

So instead of taking victory laps and plotting what to do with his riches, Siemiatkowski, 43, has spent the summer on conference stages, podcasts and TV news shows skirting the IPO question. But now he’s back, planning to complete the listing as soon as September, and he’s got a new pitch: building a global digital bank. Over the past two decades, Klarna has evolved from a European clone of PayPal Holdings Inc. to the biggest provider of short-term “buy now, pay later” consumer loans. It has more than 100 million active customers, mostly in the US and Europe, who use it to search for products, track deliveries, manage purchases and, in some places, maintain savings accounts.

With the IPO on ice for the past few months, Klarna has focused on the banking push to boost revenue while shedding its image as a pandemic-era e-commerce phenom. The company plans to offer more customers debit cards—starting in the US this summer and across Europe this fall—and ultimately provide a full suite of banking services. Siemiatkowski has about 1 million cardholders today and predicts he’ll reach 10 million within a year. But his real goal is to create a worldwide lender, with every Klarna user carrying a card. “I’m here to disrupt the banks,” he says in an interview in June.

The average American already has four credit cards, though. Aisha S Gani writes about the challenges ahead for Siemiatkowski: Klarna Cashed In on ‘Buy Now, Pay Later.’ Now It Wants to Be a Bank

Illustration: Cheng Peng

For all its contributions to environmental causes, outdoor clothing brand Patagonia Inc. can’t escape its own extractiveness. Every parka it produces is a drain on the planet’s resources. Each adventurer it outfits to climb, ski or paddle is a stress on the natural world.

Founder Yvon Chouinard’s personal struggle with these unavoidable facts has driven him to bear any cost in the name of doing less harm, as long as quality isn’t compromised. Horrified by the environmental hazards of conventional cotton farming, he ordered the company to make the expensive switch to organic. But he quickly halted the use of polished tagua nuts harvested from rainforest palms after the eco-friendly substitutes for plastic buttons started cracking.

Along with cleaning up Patagonia, Chouinard began financing conservation efforts early on. And in 2022, when Patagonia was worth a reported $3 billion, he gave away the company to a trust and nonprofit set up to ensure the clothing brand’s earnings would always go toward supporting the planet.

Is it penance enough to earn the unabashed capitalist the legacy he’s hoped for? Heather Landy writes about a new biography of Chouinard, Dirtbag Billionaire, coming in September, that tackles that question: The One Feat of Leadership Patagonia’s Founder Couldn’t Pull Off

You’re Not Alone in Wondering, Why Labubu?

Photographer: Bobby Doherty for Bloomberg Businessweek

Every Next Big Trend that has popped up on my phone for the past year has made me feel like I’m losing my mind, even the innocuous stuff. What the hell is a Labubu? Is Dubai chocolate a brand or, I don’t know, just a genre of candy bar? Who is Benson Boone, and what does he want from us?

At first, I thought this might just be another worrisome sign of aging: I no longer understand kids these days. But kids these days seem just as baffled as their elders by many of the things that they—and to a significant extent, we—are expected to latch on to. On social media, the confusion of teens and twentysomethings has become a meme unto itself, with users across platforms posting lists of trend nonsense: Labubu Dubai chocolate Sonny Angel matcha latte Love Island Crumbl cookie Pretty Little Baby moonbeam ice cream.

If you didn’t recognize anything on that list, well, don’t worry about it, because knowing won’t help you understand. That’s one of the things that makes the current trend environment so disorienting: The backstory of most of this stuff—both why the products exist and how so many people came to be aware of them—doesn’t seem all that material to its popularity. In fact, some of these things seem not to have much of a backstory at all.

In her latest Buying Power column, Amanda Mull tries to explain the unexplainable: The Social Media Trend Machine Is Spitting Out Weirder and Weirder Results

Chips Payout

Ford’s New EV Push

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