bought one. It is partly why his cart now brings in between $10,000 and $15,000 each month. The third and perhaps most important explanation relates to AI. Chatbots have made it easier to get a business going by allowing even the tech-shy to build a website and navigate local regulations. The share of founders who used AI to help launch their business doubled to 60% between 2023 and 2025, according to a survey by Gusto, a payroll platform. New cohorts of small businesses are adopting AI earlier and at higher rates, found JPMorgan Chase, a bank. The technology has allowed people who already wanted to strike out on their own to do so much more easily. “It’s like chemical reactions that have an activation potential,” says Miquel Llobet, who launched an AI-powered commercial-insurance broker last year. AI lowers the bar for those reactions to occur. Politicians on the campaign trail love to speak of small businesses as “job creators”. Yet the share of new-business applications that the Census Bureau deems “high-propensity” (meaning they are likely to employ at least one person other than the founder in the near future) was only 30% last year, down from 38% in 2019. “AI is filling the capability gaps that once made hiring necessary”, ushering in “the age of the solopreneur”, argued a team of economists at Stripe, a payments platform, in a recent blog post. Kelly Loeffler, head of the Small Business Administration, a government agency, disagrees. She expects that small businesses powered by AI will eventually hire at similar or higher rates to their predecessors. Mr Shaw, the Tennessean coffee entrepreneur, has automated much of his back-office work but has hired five baristas as his business expands into weddings and corporate events. It has been a similar story for Jake Levine, who last year founded a business that helps pharmaceutical companies manage clinical trials. “We always had the intention of scaling,” he says. Economic and technological shifts have created fertile ground for a nation already enamoured with entrepreneurship, reducing the capital and brain- power it takes to grow a business. Aaron Terrazas, an economist at Gusto, reckons that much of the value generated by AI could end up accruing not to corporate giants, but to Etsy-sellers and small-town accountants. That would reverse a century-long shift toward working for The Man. ■
This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/27/america-has-become-an-entrepreneurs- paradise
There’s never been a better time to commit financial fraud American enforcement has collapsed and conditions are ripe for skulduggery Jul 30th 2026 In 1955 the economist John Kenneth Galbraith wrote of the “inventory of undiscovered embezzlement” that tends to grow during periods of market euphoria. The “bezzle”, as Galbraith called it, is exposed when the good times end and “commercial morality is enormously improved”. Past bubbles and crashes have indeed led to a bumper crop of white-collar prosecutions (think Enron and WorldCom after the dotcom boom). If Galbraith was right, today’s frothy valuations suggest bezzlers may be lurking in the shadows. But what if their mischief is never discovered? That is the grand experiment on which America has lately embarked.
In the six months to the end of March federal prosecutors brought 2,008 white-collar crime cases, putting them on course for a little over 4,000 by the end of the government’s fiscal year in September, according to figures from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data repository. That would be a drop of a sixth from five years ago and half from 20 years ago (see chart). It is tempting to lay such figures at the feet of Donald Trump, whose dismantling of the Department of Justice has not helped. But the decline precedes him—and may continue well after. Aside from a brief spike after the financial crisis of 2007-09, white-collar prosecutions in America have trended down for nearly three decades. There is little reason to believe the country’s financiers and executives have become more virtuous during that time. Instead, the answer lies in a shift in focus towards prosecuting other criminal activity. After the September 11th attacks bevies of federal investigators and lawyers moved into counter- terrorism work, notes a 2021 paper by economist Trung Nguyen, then of Harvard Business School. More recently immigration and drug enforcement have taken priority in voters’ and politicians’ minds. Even a small budget cut can have a big impact on white-collar-crime prosecutions. Financial frauds often require dozens of lawyers to work for years on a single investigation, notes Sam Buell, a former federal prosector
now at Duke University. A study by TRAC found that white-collar referrals in the 12 months to September 2022 that resulted in charges took federal prosecutors 452 days on average to review, more than three-and-a-half times the average for all case types. Even amid the long-term decline, the drop in enforcement during the Trump administrations has been eyebrow-raising. Ten years ago nearly half of white-collar-crime referrals to federal prosecutors resulted in a case; that figure fell to a third in 2025. Contrast that with immigration prosecutions, for which nearly all referrals still lead to charges. The number of lawyers in the Department of Justice has shrunk by a fifth under Mr Trump, with many of the remaining bunch reassigned away from crypto or tax inquiries to immigration. The government has also slashed headcount at the investigative and regulatory agencies on which prosecutors rely for tips. Experienced investigators at the FBI or the US Postal Service— a surprisingly significant source of referrals—used to stay for much of their career. No longer. Civil enforcement has also waned. Take audit checks, an unsexy-yet-vital corner of the regulatory world built up after the collapse of Enron, a fraudulent energy company, in 2001. The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2025 brought a mere ten enforcement actions against accountants and auditors, one fifth of the annual average in the preceding eight years, according to Cornerstone Research, a consultancy. At the same time, the commission has slashed staff pay at the main audit oversight board, which for years offered high salaries to lure expert accountants. It has also suggested it might shift from sniffing out errors in individual audits towards examining the processes followed by the auditors. Officials say the new approach is more efficient. But it may make balance-sheet shenanigans easier to hide. All this will come at a cost. A paper from 2023 by Alexander Dyck of the University of Toronto and his co-authors suggests only about a third of corporate frauds are ever detected, let alone prosecuted. Extrapolating from the cost of detected frauds, they estimate that actual hijinks destroy some 1.6% of shareholder value in America each year, a figure that would have amounted to $1.1trn in 2025. “Losses to America from white-collar crime
dwarf every other crime category,” notes Julie O’Sullivan of Georgetown University, another former prosecutor. Even if a future administration reprioritises rooting out white-collar crime, it will be hard to pin down today’s fraudsters. Many white-collar crimes carry a five-year statute of limitations, points out Daniel Richman of Columbia University, a criminal-law expert. America’s bezzlers are rejoicing. Everyone else should worry. ■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com/business/2026/07/29/theres-never-been-a-better-time-to- commit-financial-fraud
Selling stakes in the beautiful game. What could go wrong? FIFA’s plan to tap private investors is causing outrage Jul 30th 2026 Football stirs heated passions. But Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, pushes them to boiling point. On July 28th football’s governing body unveiled plans to raise $4.2bn by selling stakes in the running of future tournaments to private investors. UEFA, which oversees European football, protested that the game “is not FIFA’s to sell”. A source close to UEFA says that if the plan goes ahead, it may boycott future World Cups. Hot on the heels of a tournament that generated up to $15bn in revenue (and one especially contentious red card), FIFA said it intends to set up a subsidiary that would consolidate its commercial operations. Those include broadcasting, sponsorship, ticketing and licensing, as well as the staging of
men’s and women’s World Cups. Called FIFA Forward Enterprise (FFE), it would be valued at $20bn. The sale of a roughly 20% stake would boost funding for FIFA’s 211 national member associations, a majority of which must approve the plan. Joshua Kushner, founder of Thrive Capital, an investment firm, is in talks to lead the funding round. He is the brother of Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law. Jared reportedly would have no investment in FFE, but the family connection has given fresh ammunition to Mr Infantino’s critics, who bristle at his close relationship with Mr Trump. On X, a social-media platform, a group of Democrats described FIFA as Mr Trump’s “favourite corrupt racketeering enterprise in world sports”, and accused it of going “directly into business with the Trump family”. UEFA is understood to be holding talks with other football bodies, as well as concerned governments, to plot its counter-attack. Andy Burnham, Britain’s new prime minister, weighed in, declaring that “Football does not belong to investors” (though his favourite team, Everton FC, is owned by an American billionaire). The introduction of private investment into the governing bodies of sports is not new. One of the architects of the deal is Greg Maffei, former chief executive of Liberty Media, who led its $4.4bn acquisition of Formula One in 2017 and helped turn a fading motorsports franchise into an entertainment juggernaut. Another example is PGA Tour, golf’s most important event organiser, which set up a commercial arm in 2024 backed by private investors. FIFA says it will retain full authority over competitions, match calendars and other decisions. But the experience of PGA Tour suggests that private investors may end up putting their thumbs on the scale, reckons Sam Nursall of Ampere Analysis, a media-research firm. He notes that outside money may help FIFA spend more in poorer places, but that the quest for profit may also push it towards locating future World Cups in the most lucrative countries, having more frequent tournaments and possibly raising ticket prices.