Keir Starmer announced Monday that he is resigning as prime minister of the United Kingdom and as leader of the Labour Party. In a statement to Parliament, Starmer said: “I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace.” He will remain in office until Labour chooses a replacement. Nominations open July 9, close July 16, and a new leader is to be selected by September 1, according to NBC News.
Andy Burnham, the former mayor of Greater Manchester who won a by-election to return to Parliament last week, confirmed Monday he will seek the leadership. Starmer won a large parliamentary majority in the July 2024 general election after more than a decade of Conservative government, promising stability. He lasted twenty-three months. The pressure campaign that ended his tenure built through the spring after Labour lost more than 1,000 council seats in May local elections, which Labour parliamentarians attributed to the accelerating rise of Reform UK, the right-leaning party drawing working-class voters away from Labour across England’s Midlands and the North.
Britain has had five prime ministers since David Cameron resigned in July 2016 following the Brexit referendum result. Tony Blair served ten consecutive years, from 1997 to 2007. Gordon Brown served three. Cameron served six. Since 2016, no prime minister has lasted more than three years, and one, Liz Truss, lasted forty-five days in the autumn of 2022. The Conservative governments of May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak covered eight years without achieving stability. Starmer’s Labour government repeated the pattern faster than most observers expected. Whoever becomes Labour’s next leader will enter office as the United Kingdom’s seventh prime minister in a decade and will face the same underlying conditions that ended Starmer’s tenure, including a fragmented center-left vote, a Reform UK party whose support has continued to grow, and an economy that has not performed as well as the 2024 election mandate required.
Vice President JD Vance concluded the first round of United States-Iran nuclear talks in Switzerland on Sunday saying the session produced a “very, very good” foundation for a final deal and that Iran had agreed to allow International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors to return to the country, with inspectors expected “at the minimum of this week.” Mediators from Qatar and Pakistan released a joint statement saying both sides agreed to a road map to reach a final deal within the 60-day window established by the Versailles Memorandum signed June 17, according to CBS News.
Vance described four outcomes from the day’s session: Iran’s agreement to IAEA access, a mechanism for opening the Strait of Hormuz to commercial shipping, a deconfliction cell to maintain the Lebanon ceasefire, and a process for future formal negotiations. Iran’s foreign ministry responded that real negotiations on the nuclear issue haven’t started yet, a direct public disagreement with Vance’s characterization of what Sunday’s session accomplished.
The 60-day window created by the Versailles Memorandum doesn’t pause for interpretive disputes. The memorandum’s framework outlines that Iran dilutes its highly enriched uranium stockpile, the United States waives sanctions, and the Strait of Hormuz reopens. What it didn’t resolve are the technical specifics: verified counts of Iran’s enrichment facilities, stockpile thresholds, inspection protocols, and compliance timelines. The Switzerland talks were supposed to start producing answers on those questions. Sunday’s session appears to have produced a procedural agreement on IAEA access, which is meaningful but not the same thing as substantive progress on the harder work. The closest American precedent in the diplomatic record is the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea, negotiated by the Clinton administration. It froze plutonium production at Yongbyon and created a structure for addressing the permanent closure of the weapons program. North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in January 2003, nearly nine years after signing. What ended the Agreed Framework wasn’t the signing ceremony; it was the implementation work that followed, and the failure to resolve the verification and inspection questions before they became grounds for withdrawal. The United States and Iran are nine days into sixty.
Alan Greenspan, who served as chairman of the Federal Reserve from August 1987 to January 2006, died Monday from complications of Parkinson’s disease. He was 100 years old. His death was confirmed by his wife, NBC News correspondent Andrea Mitchell, according to CNBC.
Greenspan was appointed the 13th chairman of the Federal Reserve by President Ronald Reagan and was reappointed by Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, completing five terms and nearly nineteen years at the most consequential economic post in American government. He was the second-longest-serving Fed chairman in history, behind only William McChesney Martin, who held the position from 1951 to 1970. Greenspan presided over one of the longest peacetime economic expansions in American history, the decade-long run from 1991 to 2001.
On December 5, 1996, delivering remarks at the American Enterprise Institute, Greenspan asked whether “irrational exuberance” had unduly escalated asset values. Markets dropped briefly and then kept running for more than three years. The phrase entered the financial vocabulary and outlasted the circumstances that produced it. Greenspan didn’t raise rates to cool the equity bubble, a decision that became one of the more discussed questions in post-mortems of the dot-com bust that followed.
The more consequential question came later and from a different direction. In testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on October 23, 2008, with the financial system in crisis, Greenspan said: “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders’ equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.” He acknowledged finding a “flaw” in his operating ideology. He had spent decades as one of the most prominent advocates for deregulating financial markets, and the 2007-2008 financial crisis traced a direct line through the deregulated derivatives market that his tenure had allowed to grow from roughly $95 trillion in notional value in 2000 to more than $600 trillion by 2007. He was eighty-two years old when he said it. That kind of public accounting from someone who held the position he held is not common. It didn’t resolve what happened, but it distinguished him from colleagues who never got there.
Ben Bernanke succeeded him in 2006. Janet Yellen followed Bernanke in 2014. Jerome Powell has led the Federal Reserve since 2018.
Cuba’s National Assembly voted unanimously Thursday to approve 176 economic reforms that open the country’s socialist economy to private enterprise on a scale the island hasn’t attempted since Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, according to NBC News. Officials said the reforms were backed by the Communist Party and by former leader Raul Castro.
The package allows private real estate development, authorizes private banks, permits businesses to hire more than 100 employees for the first time, allows entrepreneurs to own multiple private businesses, converts some state enterprises into commercial ventures with shares and equity stakes, and removes the requirement that foreign investors partner with state-owned companies when entering the Cuban market.
Cuba has adopted partial economic liberalizations before without producing structural change. In 1993, during the economic crisis that followed the Soviet collapse, Cuba legalized small private businesses and self-employment but kept the state model’s fundamentals intact. In 2010, Raul Castro expanded the categories of permitted self-employment. Neither round went as far as what the National Assembly approved Thursday. The 2026 package represents a qualitatively different direction, explicitly opening ownership and equity structures that were previously off the table entirely. The reforms follow sustained pressure from the Trump administration, whose sanctions have contributed to shortages of food, fuel, drinking water, and medicine across the island, along with frequent power outages. Whether the reforms will be implemented as written, and at what pace, is not yet clear.
The United States Senate passed the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act 85-5 Monday afternoon and sent the bill to the House of Representatives. The legislation bans most large institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes, eases federal and local regulatory barriers to residential construction, and expands existing affordable housing programs. The final passage vote follows last week’s 84-8 cloture margin, according to the Senate Banking Committee.
An 85-5 Senate vote on a contested housing bill represents the kind of margin that will generate scrutiny from advocates on all sides who will want to understand what was traded to get there. The bill’s most debated provision prohibits most institutional investors from purchasing single-family homes in most circumstances. The argument for it is that corporate buyers have competed directly with individual buyers in certain markets since 2020, with capital advantages that individual buyers can’t match. The argument against it is that the same buyers have provided rental supply in markets where ownership wasn’t the right model for the available inventory. The debate doesn’t stop at the Senate doors. The House will produce its own version of both arguments.
In the Money section this morning, Glenn Suttner published “What Is a Power of Attorney (and Why You Probably Don’t Have One),” a piece that opens with a story that a lot of families will recognize in outline, if not in detail: a husband has a stroke at sixty-nine, survives, is expected to recover, and his wife of thirty-one years can’t touch his brokerage account, stop automatic payments from his individual bank account, or proceed with a property sale under his name, because he signed no durable power of attorney. The court process that followed took eight months and just under nine thousand dollars in legal fees.
Glenn’s piece explains what a power of attorney is, why the financial and healthcare documents are separate, the four main types and what distinguishes them, how to choose an agent, what happens when you don’t have one, and what specific mistakes cause documents that exist to fail when they’re actually needed. It’s practical and specific. It doesn’t reach for drama, because the real situation, which Glenn illustrates with that opening story, supplies its own case for doing the thing. A good piece to read on a Monday, when the week is still in front of you and there’s time to make a call.
