British small businesses are being approved for bank loans at less than half the rate they enjoyed before the financial crisis, and one of Donald Trump’s former economic advisers says the fault lies not with the 2008 crash but with the rules written in its aftermath.

Tyler Goodspeed, who chaired the White House’s council of economic advisers from 2020 to 2021 and is now chief economist at Exxon Mobil, argues that post-crisis regulation forcing banks to hold more capital, rather than the depth of the recession, is the main reason Britain’s recovery has trailed the United States.

“For 15 years, British policymakers have told themselves that a slow recovery was simply the price of a deep recession. It isn’t,” Goodspeed says in a paper for the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs.

“History shows deep recessions are usually followed by strong rebounds. Britain’s experience after 2009 departed from this pattern because regulators, with the best of intentions, made it structurally harder for banks to lend to British businesses. That was a choice, and it is still being made today.”

His central figure will sting any owner who has pitched a bank for growth capital. Credit to smaller companies in the United States clawed its way back to 2008 levels by 2013; in the UK it remains 15 per cent below pre-crisis volumes. British lenders, he says, have pulled back from the real economy and switched instead to “low-risk lending to governments”.

The consequences land hardest on the youngest, most ambitious firms, the ones the government keeps saying it wants more of.

“This matters because smaller, younger enterprises looking to expand may struggle to access credit through conventional bank loans because they lack credit history and physical assets that they might pledge as collateral,” Goodspeed says. “To illustrate this point, one might consider tech companies, whose primary assets are intangible, namely, their ideas. Without non-bank sources of credit, many such firms may be unable to access external financing, and instead be forced to rely on cash flow and retained earnings.”

That reliance is sharper here than across the Atlantic. UK firms lean far more heavily on bank funding than American peers, who can tap deeper capital markets and pools of private credit, private equity and venture capital. When the bank says no, many British SMEs have nowhere else to turn.

The picture Goodspeed paints is one Business Matters readers will recognise. Ministers have already hauled the big bank chiefs in for talks over shrinking access to credit, and the government has run a review into the supply of SME debt finance. The retreat of the high street has left challenger banks holding 60 per cent of the SME lending market, a share that was unthinkable before the crisis.

Goodspeed’s verdict is blunt. The decline in bank lending to firms is a “searing indictment of UK financial policy over the past 15 years. Before 2008, approval rates for new bank loan applications by small and medium-sized UK businesses were often 80-90 per cent. By 2024, that had dropped to fewer than half,” he says.

Some of the post-crisis architecture is now being dismantled. The Bank of England has loosened rules on banker bonuses and signalled it will ease capital requirements for lenders, the buffers of cash and assets banks must hold against their lending. The previous Labour government, under Sir Keir Starmer, said it would also relax the post-2008 “ringfencing” rules that forced banks to separate retail banking from riskier investment activity, a change the industry has long wanted.

Whether looser rules translate into more loans for the corner-shop expansion or the software start-up remains the open question. For Goodspeed, the direction of travel matters less than the admission underneath it: that Britain’s credit drought was made in Whitehall, and can be unmade there too.

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A black bear that climbed a utility pole in rural northeastern New Mexico died of electrocution this week after becoming stranded among high-voltage power lines, despite officials’ efforts to keep bystanders away in hopes the animal would climb down on its own.

The incident occurred Monday, July 20, along Highway 56 near Gladstone, a sparsely populated area of Union County. Passing motorists spotted the bear perched near the top of the pole and stopped along the roadside, some believing at first that the animal was already dead before realizing it was still alive and struggling to maintain its balance.

How the sighting unfolded

Shannon Mullens, who was traveling with her family from Red River, New Mexico, toward Oklahoma, said she and her relatives initially could not believe what they were seeing. “We really didn’t believe what we saw at first, so we turned around to get another look,” Mullens told Storyful. After getting closer, the group realized the animal was alive. “At first, we thought that the bear was dead, until we got closer to it and then we realized that he was still alive,” Mullens said.

Another motorist, Robin Dawson, also stopped to record the animal and contacted emergency services after finding other drivers already gathered near the base of the pole. Audio captured during one of the 911 calls placed that day reflected the unusual nature of the report. “I’m calling to report a bear on top of a light pole,” the caller told the dispatcher.

What officials advised

According to the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish, the agency was notified of the situation around 10 a.m. and dispatched a Union County sheriff’s deputy, a representative from the local power company and conservation officers to the scene. In the meantime, dispatchers instructed onlookers to leave the bear alone in hopes it would descend from the pole on its own, cautioning that attempting to tranquilize the animal at that height risked causing it to fall and suffer potentially fatal injuries.

Despite that guidance, officials said, numerous members of the public continued to stop along the highway to photograph and film the bear rather than clearing the area. A department spokesperson suggested that the continued activity near the base of the pole may have discouraged the already frightened animal from attempting to climb down on its own. “The reporting party was instructed to leave the bear alone so it could come down on its own,” the spokesperson said in a statement provided to Storyful. “Unfortunately, the bear sustained fatal injuries before they arrived.”

A fatal outcome

By the time responders reached the scene, the bear had already been fatally electrocuted, according to the New York Post, which cited confirmation from the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. The department’s account indicates that despite the coordinated response involving local law enforcement, the utility company and wildlife officers, the animal died before any rescue effort could be attempted.

A federal agency weighs in

The video of the stranded bear circulated widely on social media in the days following the incident, eventually drawing a lighthearted response from the U.S. Department of the Interior, which shared the footage on social media with a wry comment about energy policy. “We appreciate the enthusiasm for American Energy Dominance, but this isn’t what we meant,” the department wrote in a post referencing the viral clip.

Why bears climb utility poles

Wildlife experts say the behavior, while unusual to witness, is not without precedent. Bears will sometimes climb utility poles after being startled by people, traffic, dogs or other perceived threats, treating the structures much like trees as an escape route from danger. Because utility poles differ significantly from trees in both structure and the presence of live electrical equipment, such incidents carry a serious risk of electrocution for the animal, in addition to the risk of triggering power outages for surrounding communities.

Not the first such incident

This is not the first time a bear has become stranded on a utility pole in the region. In a similar case in June 2021, a bear climbed a utility pole in Willcox, Arizona, roughly 80 miles east of Tucson, becoming tangled near live power lines carrying roughly 7,500 volts. In that instance, utility workers with Sulphur Springs Valley Electric Cooperative were able to disable the power in time and used a bucket lift to encourage the animal down safely. Lineman Werner Neubauer, who assisted in that rescue, described the danger the bear had faced at the time, telling reporters, “He was in a pretty dangerous spot. Could’ve very easily gotten himself electrocuted.” In that case, the bear ultimately climbed down unharmed and ran off into the desert.

A tragic contrast

Unlike the 2021 Arizona case, this week’s incident in New Mexico ended in the animal’s death, a contrast that has fueled an outpouring of sympathy online since news of the bear’s fate spread following the viral video. Many social media users expressed sadness that an encounter that initially seemed like a strange but harmless spectacle ultimately ended in tragedy for the animal.

Wildlife officials have not indicated whether any additional safety measures or utility infrastructure changes are being considered in response to the incident, though the case adds to a broader body of examples illustrating the risks utility poles can pose to wildlife that mistake them for natural climbing structures. For now, the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish has used the incident as an opportunity to remind the public of the importance of giving wild animals space and following official guidance during similar encounters, even when the instinct to observe or document such an unusual sighting is strong.

Nearly 1,500 ships have been sitting idle in the Persian Gulf for close to five months, trapped since fighting between the US and Iran shut down movement through the Strait of Hormuz on February 28, 2026. Marine scientists now say the real danger from this standoff may not be on these ships at all, it could be growing right beneath them.

A new study in the journal Biological Invasions warns that the hulls of these stranded vessels have turned into breeding grounds for barnacles, mussels, algae and other sea creatures. Led by 24 scientists from the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the research says this build-up could trigger what it calls a “bioinvasion super-spreader event” the moment the ships finally start moving again.

The World’s Busiest Bottleneck, Stuck

The Strait of Hormuz isn’t just any stretch of water. It’s the only open-sea exit for oil giants like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and the UAE, and it usually carries around $600 billion worth of energy trade every year. Since the war began, roughly 1,500 vessels have been stuck inside the Persian Gulf, with several hundred more waiting it out in the neighbouring Gulf of Oman.
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Gulf of Hormuz’s Underwater Army: A Slimy Situation Underwater

Ships that stay parked in one spot don’t stay clean for long. Scientists call the build-up “biofouling”, a process that starts with a thin film of slime and microorganisms, then thickens into algae, barnacles, mussels and small crustaceans clinging to the hull. The International Maritime Organization says any ship idle for more than 30 days needs urgent hull-cleaning attention. These ships have been sitting for nearly four months, right through the season when marine life grows and breeds the fastest.

Carolyn Tepolt, a biologist at Woods Hole who studies how invasive sea life spreads, points out just how hard these hitchhikers are to get rid of once they settle down. As she put it, “Marine invasive species have profound ecological and economic impacts on coastlines across the globe”.

Burning More Fuel Just to Move

A dirty hull doesn’t just carry unwanted guests, it also drags. Research cited by the IMO shows that even a thin layer of slime can push up a ship’s emissions by 20 to 25 percent. Add a light coating of barnacles, and fuel use can jump by more than 50 percent. Across the shipping industry, roughly one-tenth of all fuel burned is simply spent fighting this drag.

The Mussel That Travelled the World

This isn’t a hypothetical worry. The Asian green mussel, native to the warm waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans and common in the Gulf, has already hitched rides on ship hulls to the Caribbean and the South Atlantic, pushing out local mussel species wherever it lands. Clam and worm species have made similar journeys before, damaging port infrastructure and displacing native life in the Atlantic and Pacific.

Divers Are Already Scrubbing Away

Ports across the Gulf aren’t waiting around. Divers are being sent underwater to scrape hulls and propellers clean before ships are allowed to sail out. It isn’t cheap, cleaning a single vessel now costs close to $8,000, a jump of nearly 60 percent, as shipping operators scramble to get their fleets moving again.

From Theory to Reality

The episode has also rattled the insurance world. Justus Heinrich, who heads marine underwriting at Allianz, says the industry always treated chokepoint disasters as something on paper. Now, in his words, “theoretical risks have turned into practical risks.”

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The study’s authors aren’t just sounding an alarm, they’re pushing for action. They want shipping companies, port authorities and regulators to tighten hull-cleaning rules, watch high-risk ports more closely, track vessel movements better and coordinate a rapid response once ships start sailing out. Their strongest recommendation: clean the hulls before departure, not after arrival. Once an invasive species sets up shop on a new coastline, the study notes, it is nearly impossible to remove.

For now, the world’s busiest oil route remains jammed, and somewhere beneath all those anchored hulls, an entirely different kind of traffic is quietly building up, waiting for its own chance to set sail.

Global fintech executive Henry Chen knows the conference circuit well. He has spent years meeting with leaders and blockchain professionals across the world, including in major financial and tech hubs like Hong Kong, New York and San Francisco.

“Each city is looking at the future of blockchain and digital assets through a slightly different lens,” Chen said.

What separates Chen from most of the crowd is what he does once the lights come up. He is on a mission to create long-term opportunities for founders, investors, developers and institutions. He believes the industry moves faster when those groups collaborate instead of operating in silos.

Henry Chen Kucoin is a 15-year veteran of investment banking and digital asset markets. He held senior roles at Goldman Sachs, UBS, Summer Capital and KU Holdings Group before founding Swiss Digital Labs, an advisory firm that helps crypto ventures, blockchain foundations and fintech companies build cross-border partnerships.

More recently, he took on a second role as chief business officer of SNZ Holding, where he helped stand up ETH Hong Kong Hub, Asia’s first permanent physical home for the Ethereum community. That dual vantage point – dealmaker and community builder – has put him inside dozens of events this year and sharpened his read on how differently each city approaches the same technology.

Hong Kong is building regulated, institutional-grade infrastructure and using policy to pull serious builders and capital into a long-term ecosystem, Chen said, while also pushing hard on smarter payment networks and inclusive finance as the region’s fintech hub. New York filters the same technology through global capital markets, compliance and product structuring. San Francisco remains the place where the most experimental ideas take shape first, shaped by Silicon Valley’s product culture and its current fixation on agentic and decentralized AI.

“What stands out across all three cities is that on-chain finance increasingly looks like the next generation of fintech,” said Chen, an ecosystem connector whose work extends well beyond conferences and speaking engagements.

“The infrastructure is still at an early stage, but the direction is clear.”

Spotting that pattern across three cities is the easy part for Chen. The harder work, he explains, starts after the panel ends and the room clears out.

Building the Room, Not Just Attending It

Henry Chen’s clearest example of that after-the-panel work sits in West Kowloon, where ETH Hong Kong Hub officially opened in April 2026.

The event was billed as Asia’s first permanent physical home for the Ethereum community. The hub is backed by the Ethereum Foundation’s Ethereum Everywhere team and co-operated by SNZ Holding and ETHTAO. Its grand opening drew more than 1,500 registrants, including Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum Foundation President Aya Miyaguchi and Hong Kong Legislative Council member Duncan Chiu.

However, Chen said the opening was never the point. It was proof of demand for something conferences cannot provide.

“In-person gatherings are where the most meaningful insights emerge unexpectedly,” Chen said. “Informal conversations reveal where capital is moving, where founders are adjusting their strategies, and where institutions are becoming more engaged. That cannot be replicated through online commentary alone.”

In an industry where attending panels and appearing at conferences often gets mistaken for contribution, Chen said he wanted to build something with more staying power than a single event.

The hub’s first major programming session was held in March 2026, a month before its official grand opening. The event brought together speakers from the Ethereum Foundation, Spark, Hubble AI, Unified Labs and Asseto Finance for sessions on artificial intelligence, real-world assets and decentralized finance. Its inaugural membership now spans more than 30 ecosystem participants, from protocol developers to institutional investors exploring on-chain markets for the first time.

“Online discussions are useful for speed and reach,” Chen said. “But in-person events provide a much clearer read on conviction, seriousness, and intent. Face-to-face conversations reveal whether people are genuinely building, whether an institution is truly committed, and whether a market theme has real depth behind it.”

Henry Chen Kucoin: ‘It Signals That The Industry Is Entering A More Structural Phase’

Henry Chen believes in substance over spectacle; in fact, it drives how he talks about real-world asset tokenization, a theme that has dominated recent RWA Day sessions and ETHConf discussions across the industry.

During his tenure overseeing capital markets and RWA business development at KU Holdings Group, Chen built a pipeline spanning money-market funds, private equity, commodities and yield-bearing stablecoins – designing paths from origination through private placement and exchange listing. That experience taught him where tokenization efforts tend to stall, and what it takes to push past the stall point.

“Early tokenization efforts often stopped at issuance,” Chen said. “Now the work is about making these assets tradeable, auditable, and usable as collateral across both CeFi and DeFi.”

He said the industry only crosses into practical implementation once institutions structure products that fit inside existing legal and risk frameworks, rather than treating compliance as an afterthought bolted on at the end.

“When large asset managers and banks commit real resources to these products, it changes the conversation from ‘if’ to ‘how’ and ‘when,’” Chen said.

That shift, Chen said, tends to surface in the same kind of unhurried, follow-up conversations that define his approach to events generally.

“When asset managers, banks, exchanges, and Web3 builders are discussing how to bring traditional assets on-chain, how to design sustainable yield and liquidity models, and how to make user experience and compliance work at scale, it signals that the industry is entering a more structural phase,” he said.

Where AI, Capital and Discipline Meet

Henry Chen Kucoin has also watched artificial intelligence move from a side conversation to a headline topic at nearly every gathering he attends, and he has resisted treating it as a separate track from blockchain.

“AI improves productivity, while blockchain upgrades how the economic system interacts and operates by making ownership, incentives, and coordination more transparent and programmable,” Chen said.

That framing carries over into how he evaluates the founders and projects he meets on the circuit. Chen said the market has grown less patient with narrative alone, and the projects that earn real attention from experienced investors share a common thread.

“The strongest opportunities usually emerge where strategy, timing, and real-world utility align,” Chen said. “The projects that stand out usually feel inevitable, not fashionable.”

He applies the same discipline to his own investment philosophy at SNZ, where he said the firm avoids chasing short-term trends in favor of backing harder, longer-term bets.

“The philosophy has always been to back the hard but right thing for the long term,” Chen shared. “We are not looking to trade around trends. We are most interested in real applications on-chain, whether in fintech, payments, AI, content, or other use cases that can create lasting value.”

What Comes Next For Global Executive Henry Chen

Henry Chen’s next chapter looks less like a speaking tour and more like a construction project. He wants to spend the coming years working directly alongside founders rather than advising them from a distance, helping translate technical ideas into products people actually use and helping institutions move past curiosity into active participation.

“The goal is not simply to invest in founders from a distance, but to work with them as a true partner and co-builder,” Chen shared. “Founders often need more than capital. They need confidence that their ideas can actually materialize without unnecessary trial and error.”

That mindset is already visible in West Kowloon, where ETH HK Hub’s success will not be measured by its opening-night guest list but by what happens on an ordinary Tuesday months from now.

Chen said the real test is whether founders keep coming back, whether developers find collaborators and whether institutions grow more comfortable engaging with on-chain finance because they now have a consistent place to do it.

The panels will keep happening in Hong Kong, New York and San Francisco. The badges will keep coming off at the end of the night. For Chen, that has never been where the story ends.

It is where his part of it begins.

“Having everyone together also accelerates decision-making,” Chen explained. “Instead of ideas bouncing around in isolation for months, stakeholders can test assumptions in real time, build trust more quickly, and identify where collaboration is actually feasible. It is also increasingly important to bring the right people together not for pure social interaction, but for business collaboration. The market is becoming much more result-driven, so the value of the room lies in whether it helps create real partnerships, real execution, and real outcomes.”

Serving as an unpaid caregiver for a child, partner, or older relative can exact a financial toll that can hinder retirement readiness, according to a new survey from the Employee Benefit Research Institute and Greenwald Research.

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Elon Musk has told the world to prepare for machines that out-think it, predicting that artificial intelligence “may exceed the sum of human intelligence in about and around five years”.

The forecast, made in a wide-ranging interview with The Economist, lands as a pointed challenge to every UK firm still weighing whether AI is worth the bother. If Musk is even roughly right, the tools now trickling into SME back offices are on a five-year path to eclipsing the people using them.

Musk, who last month became the world’s first trillionaire after the float of SpaceX in the US, framed the shift as an opportunity rather than a threat. The most likely outcome, he said, was an “age of amazing abundance”, and he intended to “enjoy the ride”.

For owner-managers, the practical question is timing. Roughly a quarter of UK businesses now use some form of AI, according to the Office for National Statistics, a figure that has climbed sharply in two years. Musk’s timeline suggests the cost of sitting it out is rising just as fast.

He was candid about the risks. “I still think there’s risk associated with AI and robots. It’s not zero,” he said, having previously warned of a 10-20 per cent chance the technology could wipe out humanity. His conclusion, though, was to “look on the bright side”.

“I can’t see any way to really stop this incredible momentum of AI and robots,” he added. “At times I think, ‘Well, even if there was a stop button, we probably shouldn’t press it because the most likely outcome is incredible abundance for all’.”

That optimism will read differently to firms bracing for upheaval. The Tony Blair Institute has warned that AI could displace up to three million UK jobs, even as it creates new ones, a reshaping likely to fall unevenly across sectors and regions.

Musk’s prescription for keeping the technology in check should interest any business worried about who is minding the shop. Rather than government oversight, he backed the AI labs policing each other, arguing that regulators lack the technical grip to judge what is safe to release.

“That’s where I think the competitors can keep each other honest,” he said. “I think it’s quite difficult for someone in the government who doesn’t have a deep technical understanding and isn’t driving the frontier of AI to know whether something should be released or not. However, the competitors I think can, if given a week or two to review a new model, highlight issues.”

The interview was not confined to technology. Pressed on earlier claims that the UK was heading for “civil war”, Musk said: “If you have a large and growing, rapidly growing, group of people whose beliefs are antithetical to western beliefs, at some point there will be a reckoning.” He conceded he had not visited the country for “a few years”, despite having been “literally a hundred times”.

The comments touch a live commercial nerve. Immigration sits at the heart of the government’s Restoring Control immigration white paper, and business groups have warned that tighter skilled-worker rules could undermine growth without faster domestic training.

Musk also expressed regret over his stint leading President Trump’s cost-cutting Doge unit. “I think I got a little too involved in politics, got carried away, frankly,” he said. It is a rare admission from a man whose fortune has since slipped back below the trillion mark. For the businesses in his slipstream, the more consequential forecast is the one with a five-year clock on it.

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