Category: 3. Business

At the Fed’s press conference, Fed Chair Jerome Powell acknowledged that many consumers are struggling with higher inflation. “We hear loud and clear” the concerns about affordability, Powell said.

But what Powell and the Fed can do about affordability is a different story.

“There’s actually not much they can do about that,” Apollo chief economist Torsten Sløk told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday. (Disclosure: Yahoo Finance is owned by Apollo Global Management.)

Sløk noted that a greater share of consumer spending is going toward basic needs, such as healthcare, housing, and education, all of which have become more expensive in recent years. This has made the Fed’s job more difficult because, in the housing market, for instance, structural factors like low supply are keeping prices high — and somewhat impervious to monetary policy.

“If you begin to see the Fed lower interest rates, that’s probably going to increase home prices even more,” Sløk said. “So in that sense, the Fed doesn’t really have any tools to solve the affordability crisis.”

This sentiment was echoed by Powell, who noted that a quarter-point change in the federal funds rate is not “going to make much of a difference” in the housing market.

More broadly, Powell said, “A lot of [the affordability issue] is not the current rate of inflation. A lot of that is just embedded higher cost due to higher inflation in 2022 and ’23.”

• Heather Polinsky, 26-year veteran of the company and Global President for Resilience and Mobility, nominated as new Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
• Alan Brookes to step down as CEO on 1 March 2026

Amsterdam, 11 December 2025 – Arcadis (EURONEXT: ARCAD), the world’s leading company in delivering data-driven sustainable design, engineering, and consultancy solutions for natural and built assets, today announced that the Supervisory Board has nominated Heather Polinsky, currently Global President for Resilience and Mobility, as the next CEO and Chair of the Executive Board. This follows a succession planning process in line with international best practice.

Heather will assume the role on 1 March 2026 with her appointment submitted for shareholder approval at the Annual General Meeting on 20 May 2026. She will be based in Amsterdam. Alan Brookes will step down as CEO and Chair of the Executive Board on 1 March 2026.

Michiel Lap, Chair of the Supervisory Board, said:
“Arcadis is focused on reinvigorating growth and strengthening its market position, and this is the right moment for new leadership to take those priorities forward as we prepare for the next strategic cycle. As part of the Board’s long-term succession process, Heather has been actively preparing for expanded leadership responsibilities. With a 30-year career spanning senior US and global operational, client development and commercial roles, she brings deep experience and a strong track record of delivery. Since 2023, she has led our most profitable business area, Resilience driving sustained growth and margin improvement. The Board has full confidence in her operational expertise, commercial acumen, and proven ability to lead high performing teams.

“We are grateful to Alan for his leadership and for his outstanding contributions as CEO and throughout his 25-year career with us. Under his stewardship, Arcadis has grown stronger, accelerated investments in skills, digital innovation and AI, and is well-positioned for future success.”

Alan Brookes, outgoing CEO, said:
“It has been a privilege to lead Arcadis and to work alongside Arcadians around the world. I am
proud of all we have achieved and confident that Arcadis is well set for the future. Heather is an exceptional leader, and I look forward to supporting a smooth transition.”

Heather Polinsky, CEO nominee, said:
“I am honored to be nominated as CEO of Arcadis and to succeed Alan in leading the business. My priority is to drive growth, strengthen performance, and accelerate the actions needed to position Arcadis for its next phase of success. My experience across our water, energy, environment, and transport businesses has shown me the strength of our people and the impact we deliver globally. I look forward to working with colleagues worldwide to deliver on our ambitions with pace and focus.”

About Heather Polinsky
Heather Polinsky joined Arcadis in 1999 from the US Army Environmental Command and is an
accomplished executive with over 30 years of leadership experience across engineering, science and advisory disciplines. Since joining the Arcadis Executive Leadership Team in 2023 as President for the Resilience global business area, she has played a key role in shaping the company’s global strategy, transformation priorities and decisions across M&A, governance, innovation and investment. Her earlier career includes serving as Chief Operating Officer for North America and senior client development roles at Malcolm Pirnie, Inc., where she sat on the Board of Directors and helped with its merger and integration with Arcadis in 2009.

She is a certified Project Management Professional with an M.S. in Engineering Management from University of Maryland Global Campus and a B.S. in Environmental Science from the College of William and Mary, Virginia. She is a Fellow and past President of the Society of American Military Engineers and has held board and leadership positions with the National Association of Ordnance Contractors. Heather is also a recognized industry voice and has represented Arcadis at major global forums, including New York Climate Week and the UN Water Conference.

Moroney to scale Tines’ “customer zero” strategy and showcase how intelligent workflows at scale drive efficiency, security, and enterprise AI readiness.

DUBLIN and BOSTON, Dec. 11, 2025  /PRNewswire/ —Tines, the intelligent workflow platform used by the world’s most advanced security and IT teams, today announced the appointment of Martin Moroney as its Head of Intelligent Workflows, a newly created role responsible for scaling Tines’ internal use of its own technology. It is establishing a modern governance framework for AI, automation, and integration across the business.

The move comes as organizations accelerate AI adoption, but continue to struggle with operationalizing it at scale. While 70% of CEOs expect generative AI to reshape value creation within three years (PwC), 95% of AI pilots still fail to reach production (MIT). Tines believes software companies must offer practical, experience-based frameworks/blueprints, not just technology. This begins with demonstrating how intelligent workflows –workflows that apply AI, automation, and integration with human ingenuity– succeed inside their own walls.

In this role, Moroney will lead Tines x Tines, the company’s internal intelligent workflow Center of Enablement (CoE) program. The program is responsible for establishing enterprise-grade workflow governance and creating structure/scale between company-wide high-impact workflows including security, IT, finance, operations, and go-to-market functions. The program also enables Tines to operate as “customer zero,” giving customers a real blueprint for secure, scalable intelligent workflow adoption. 

“As AI reshapes how great companies operate, it’s essential that we lead from the front so we can give our customers and the market clear guidance on how to do this right,” said Thomas Kinsella, co-founder at Tines. “We chose Martin for this role because as a founding employee he understands our organization, our culture, and how we operate at every level like few others. He also deeply understands our customers and the unique ways they’ve operationalized intelligent workflows organization-wide. That vast knowledge uniquely positions him to drive intelligent workflow development that actually moves the needle for the company.”

Having joined Tines in 2019 when the company had only three employees, Moroney has been instrumental in scaling the business. He built the customer success engineering function, guided major enterprise onboardings, and brings deep institutional knowledge and hands-on workflow experience that uniquely positioned him to define Tines’ internal intelligent workflow strategy.

“Tines was built for teams that want to eliminate muckwork and focus on high-impact work,” said Moroney. “This role is about embodying that philosophy internally and proving what thoughtful, secure, scaled intelligent workflows look like in practice.”

Moroney’s appointment follows Tines’ $125 million Series C round, which valued the company at $1.125 billion, and builds on recent recognition including Tines’ placement on the Fast Company Next Big Thing in Tech list and the Fortune Cyber 60. Based in Ireland, he will work closely with teams across the U.S., Ireland, Europe and Australia.

About Tines
Tines is the intelligent workflow platform trusted by the world’s most advanced organizations. Companies like Canva, Coinbase, Databricks, Gitlab, Mars, and Reddit use Tines to power their most important workflows. With Tines, they’ve built a secure, flexible foundation to operationalize AI agents and intelligent workflows, unlocking productivity, moving faster, and future-proofing how work gets done. Co-headquartered in Dublin and Boston, Tines has raised $272M from investors including Goldman Sachs, SoftBank, Felicis, Addition, Accel, Blossom Capital, and Lux Capital.

Media Contacts:
Jason Fidler
Tines
[email protected] 

Bateman Agency for Tines
[email protected]

Logo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2503502/5663239/Tines_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Tines

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Oracle’s shares tumbled 15% on Thursday in response to the company’s quarterly financial results, disclosed the day before.

The business software company, co-founded by Donald Trump ally Larry Ellison, saw roughly $80bn vanish from its value, falling from $630bn to $550bn in market capitalization and fuelling fears of a bubble in artificial intelligence-related stocks. Shares of chipmaker Nvidia, seen as a bellwether for the AI boom, fell after Oracle’s.

The drop extended a 11.5% fall during after-hours trading that followed results showing a lower-than-expected 14% rise in revenues to $16bn (£12bn) in the latest quarter.

Investors were also spooked by Oracle raising forecasts for its already-enormous investment in AI. It expects capital expenditure to jump by 40% to $50bn, with the bulk of the increase aimed at building datacentres.

The company is managing a growing debt pile, with Oracle’s long-term debt having surged 25% over the past 12 months to $99.9bn. Even the cost of insuring its debt rose Thursday as investor confidence in the company waned.

The business posted weaker-than-expected quarterly revenues for the three months to the end of November, as sales at its cloud computing business grew at a slower pace than forecast at 34%.

Investors were also disappointed by a slower than expected 68% growth in revenues from its infrastructure business.

“Frankly, the report was not dramatically bad, but it came to confirm concerns around heavy AI spending, financed by debt, with an unknown timeline for revenue generation,” Ipek Ozkardeskaya, a senior analyst at Swissquote, said.

Continued optimism about the potential for AI technology has led to a leap in company valuations in recent months, but there has been a growing spate of warnings from policymakers and business leaders who say stock market valuations could tumble if investors ended up being disappointed by the progress or adoption of AI technology.

Oracle became an important tech player creating software for Fortune 500 firms around the world, but more recently found strength in cloud computing, having become the fastest-growing competitor to Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The surge in AI has also been a boon to the company, which has entered lucrative deals with the likes of OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

However, there are also growing concerns about how reliant companies are becoming on each other’s financing within the AI ecosystem. Oracle said overnight that its measure of revenue from customer contracts rose by 440% over the past year, but analysts were wary when it emerged that the contracts were driven by new commitments from Meta and Amazon.

“Although these are two solid customers, it will not placate fears that big tech’s AI investments are becoming circular, which leaves it vulnerable to a loss of investor confidence,” Kathleen Brooks, a research director at XTB, said.

“Overall, strong contract growth was not enough to placate fears about AI and the huge amount of [capital expenditure] spending required by companies to build AI infrastructure.”

Other AI and tech-related stocks also slid in after-hours trading after the Oracle results. Nvidia’s share price fell by 1.3%, while Google owner Alphabet fell by 0.3%. In Japan, AI investor SoftBank’s shares fell by 7.7% on Thursday.

Debevoise & Plimpton LLP has advised Manulife Financial Corporation (TSX/NYSE/PSE: MFC) in its U.S. offering of $1 billion aggregate principal amount of 4.986% Senior Notes due 2035. For more information, please see the company’s press release.

The Debevoise team was led by capital markets partners Peter Loughran and Benjamin Pedersen and included associates Brett Edelblum, Paul Lowry and Cindy Tu and law clerk Samantha Hui, and tax partner Daniel Priest and associate Martin Connor.