Analysis

Isme Tells Government to Redirect FDI Funding Towards Irish Entrepreneurs

Published

2 months ago

June 12, 2026

Three companies. Forty-six per cent of Ireland’s corporation tax. That’s the sentence Neil McDonnell wants every TD to read before Budget 2027 negotiations begin.

On Wednesday, Isme — the Irish SME Association — published a pre-budget submission that does something most lobbying documents avoid: it names the problem rather than dancing around it. The group representing small and medium-sized companies said that 0.1 per cent of the total number of companies in Ireland — just 297 firms — accounted for 84 per cent of total corporation tax receipts last year. Isme’s ask isn’t subtle either. Stop chasing every multinational that lands on Ireland’s shores, and start building an enterprise policy where Irish-owned businesses actually grow. The Irish Times

Why Ireland’s Foreign Direct Investment Model Is Under Scrutiny

For three decades, Ireland’s economic story has had one author: foreign direct investment. It’s estimated that 20 per cent of all private sector employment in the State is directly or indirectly attributable to FDI, and the tax dividend has been extraordinary. The Government collected €34.7 billion in corporation tax in 2025, with corporate tax now representing close to a third of total state revenue. Around 970 US subsidiaries operate in Ireland, drawn partly by a tax regime that, until the OECD’s global minimum tax kicked in, offered one of the lowest headline rates in the developed world. Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment + 2

That success has bought Ireland sovereign wealth funds, infrastructure spending, and a budget surplus most eurozone finance ministers would envy. It’s also bought Ireland a single point of failure — and Isme’s submission argues that point of failure is getting sharper, not safer.

The Core Development: What Isme Is Actually Proposing

Isme’s pre-budget submission for Budget 2027 sets out seven policy goals, and the throughline connecting all of them is rebalancing — shifting the centre of gravity in Irish enterprise policy away from multinationals and towards indigenous firms. The submission addresses business costs, skills and training, public finances, and housing as interlocking pressures on small business, but the headline ask is structural: redirect the supports, tax architecture, and capital flows currently weighted towards foreign-owned firms so that Irish-owned companies can scale. ISME

Neil McDonnell, Isme’s chief executive, didn’t soften the framing. “Our tax base is built on a very small number of companies, and this is simply not sustainable,” he said, according to reporting from The Irish Times. “For many years, our enterprise policy has [favoured] overseas multinationals at the expense of local business, particularly in the areas of R&D supports and key employee engagement.”

On the fiscal side, Isme wants capital gains tax restructured: a standard rate of 25 per cent, a reduced 20 per cent rate specifically for intellectual property, and dividends taxed under the CGT regime rather than income tax. The logic is straightforward — Irish founders who build and eventually sell a company are taxed more punitively on the upside than the multinational structures around them, which discourages the kind of scale-up activity Ireland says it wants.

Then there’s the FDI twist that gives this story its sharpest edge. Isme isn’t calling for FDI to be abandoned. It’s calling for FDI to be redirected — towards what the group describes as “symbiotic” investment. Rather than foreign capital sitting inside self-contained global supply chains with minimal local linkage, Isme wants FDI that plugs directly into Irish suppliers, Irish subcontractors, and Irish talent pipelines. Money that currently flows to attracting another data centre or another European headquarters would instead be steered, at least in part, towards co-investment structures that benefit home-grown firms.

It’s a quiet but consequential reframe. Ireland’s industrial development agencies have spent decades measuring success by inward investment announcements. Isme’s submission asks what happens if the scoreboard changes.

The Concentration Problem: Why Isme’s Timing Matters

How concentrated is Ireland’s corporation tax base?

In 2024, the top three highest-paying corporate groups accounted for 46 per cent of all corporation tax revenues — roughly €13 billion. More broadly, 84 per cent of corporation tax receipts come from foreign-owned multinationals, with over half paid by just ten companies. That’s the concentration risk in a single paragraph, and it’s the statistic Isme is leaning on hardest. Fiscalcouncil deloitte

What makes this submission different from previous years isn’t the diagnosis — Isme has flagged overreliance on multinationals before. It’s the timing. Ireland’s corporation tax windfall isn’t shrinking; if anything, it’s accelerating as the new 15 per cent minimum effective rate phases in from 2026. That creates a strange political problem: the more successful the FDI-driven tax model looks on paper, the harder it becomes to argue for structural change, even as the underlying fragility — three firms, 46 per cent, two of them in a single sector — gets worse, not better.

Isme’s read is that Ireland is mistaking a sugar high for health. The 2025 jump in pharmaceutical exports, partly driven by US firms frontloading shipments ahead of anticipated tariffs, flattered the headline numbers. Strip out the one-offs and the structural exposure is unchanged: a handful of American technology and pharma groups effectively underwrite a third of the Irish state’s tax intake. Isme’s argument is that every euro of enterprise spending that doesn’t go towards building a second engine — an indigenous one — is a euro spent widening the gap between Ireland’s fiscal health and Ireland’s fiscal resilience.

There’s also a generational dimension Isme leans into. Skillnet Ireland, the state’s employer-led training network, currently disburses a modest amount in co-funded training relative to the National Training Fund’s reserves. Isme wants that figure roughly doubled, on the basis that Irish SMEs — who employ the majority of the private workforce — get a fraction of the training and R&D supports that flow, often automatically, to multinational subsidiaries with dedicated grants teams and in-house tax advisers.

Implications: What Happens If Dublin Listens — Or Doesn’t

If Budget 2027 absorbs even part of Isme’s agenda, the most visible early change would likely be on the capital gains side. A 20 per cent CGT rate for intellectual property would put Ireland closer to regimes that already compete for founder-retention — countries that have built “patent box” style incentives precisely to stop their best entrepreneurs from selling early or relocating IP offshore. For Irish tech and life sciences founders weighing whether to headquarter a growing company in Dublin or Delaware, that’s not a marginal consideration.

The redirection of FDI towards “symbiotic” investment carries a longer timeline but potentially a bigger structural payoff. Ireland already has an evidence base for what targeted, talent-focused investment regimes can do. A report commissioned by Stripe co-founder John Collison and authored by economist Alan Ahearne pointed to Israel and Portugal as examples of countries that built tax incentive regimes specifically to pull skilled professionals into domestic firms rather than simply hosting foreign subsidiaries, as covered by The Irish Times. If Ireland adapted that model — incentivising the kind of talent that strengthens Irish-owned companies, not just multinational payrolls — the effect on regional employment could be significant, since indigenous SMEs are far more geographically distributed than the multinational cluster around Dublin and Cork.

There’s a risk dimension too, and it cuts both ways. If the Government does nothing and corporation tax receipts eventually normalise — through reshoring pressure from US policy, through the bite of the 15 per cent minimum rate reshaping where multinationals book profits, or simply through the cyclical nature of pharma and tech earnings — Ireland would be absorbing a fiscal shock with an indigenous sector that was never given the tools to absorb the slack. That’s the scenario Isme is explicitly trying to pre-empt. The two sovereign wealth funds the State has built — the Future Ireland Fund and the Infrastructure, Climate and Nature Fund — are designed for exactly this kind of shock, but a savings buffer doesn’t create jobs in Mullingar or Mayo. Only a functioning indigenous enterprise base does that.

The Counterargument: Why Ireland Might Not Rebalance Quickly

Not everyone agrees the FDI model needs a structural pivot, and the case against rapid rebalancing isn’t trivial. Ireland’s industrial strategy has, by most conventional measures, worked. The Government strongly encourages and incentivises foreign R&D investment as part of a national strategy to build a more knowledge-intensive economy, and the multinational presence has helped fund an education and research infrastructure that, in theory, indigenous firms also benefit from. U.S. Department of State

The counterargument, often heard from industrial development officials, runs roughly like this: FDI and indigenous enterprise aren’t actually competing for the same pool of resources in the way Isme’s framing implies. Multinational investment brings its own capital, its own R&D budgets, and its own export markets — it doesn’t, in this reading, crowd out domestic firms so much as create the high-wage economy, skilled labour pool, and infrastructure spending that indigenous companies then draw on. Redirecting FDI incentives towards “symbiotic” structures, sceptics argue, risks making Ireland less attractive at precisely the moment global competition for mobile investment is intensifying — Ireland already faces real headwinds in labour costs, energy prices, and a planning system widely described as too slow.

There’s also a fairness argument buried in the CGT debate. A reduced rate for intellectual property income could be characterised, by critics, as simply creating a new tax shelter — one that, ironically, might be most easily exploited by larger firms with sophisticated structuring capacity rather than the small, owner-operated businesses Isme represents. Whether a 20 per cent IP rate primarily benefits a Cork software founder or a multinational’s Irish holding entity would depend entirely on how narrowly the legislation defines eligibility — and Irish tax legislation has a long history of definitions drifting wider than intended.

The Unresolved Tension

What Isme’s submission really exposes is a contradiction Ireland has lived with comfortably for years and can no longer fully ignore. The country has built one of Europe’s healthiest public balance sheets on the back of a tax base so concentrated that three corporate groups could, in theory, reshape the State’s fiscal position through decisions made in boardrooms thousands of miles away. Isme isn’t arguing that this model failed — it’s arguing that success on this scale was never meant to be permanent, and that the window to build a genuine second pillar is open precisely because the multinational sector is currently strong enough to absorb a few years of redirected attention without collapsing.

Whether Budget 2027 reflects any of this will say less about Isme’s lobbying than about how seriously Dublin takes a warning it has, in various forms, been hearing for a decade.

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Analysis

Global Central Banks 2026: Fed, BoE and BoJ Decisions Could Reshape Markets

Published

10 hours ago

July 27, 2026

Abdul Rahman

Analysis of how the Federal Reserve, Bank of England and Bank of Japan could reshape global markets, inflation, currencies and economic growth in 2026.
Executive Summary
The world’s most influential central banks are entering one of the most consequential policy weeks of 2026. Investors are watching closely as the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan weigh the competing pressures of easing inflation, geopolitical uncertainty, elevated energy prices, and slowing global growth. Financial markets are also preparing for major corporate earnings and fresh GDP data from several advanced economies. �
Financial Times +1
Unlike the synchronized tightening cycle that dominated recent years, policymakers are increasingly responding to country-specific economic conditions. This divergence is expected to influence capital flows, exchange rates, bond yields, and investment decisions across both developed and emerging markets. �
McKinsey & Company +1
A New Monetary Landscape
Global inflation has moderated from its post-pandemic peaks, yet central banks remain cautious. Recent movements in energy markets and ongoing geopolitical tensions continue to threaten price stability, even as labor markets show signs of cooling. �
McKinsey & Company +1
For investors, the question is no longer whether interest rates have peaked, but how long they will remain elevated.
United States: The Federal Reserve Faces a Delicate Balance
Attention is centered on the Federal Reserve, where policymakers are expected to keep rates steady while evaluating the effects of inflation, consumer demand, and accelerating investment in artificial intelligence infrastructure. Markets are also monitoring whether AI-driven capital spending could contribute to future inflationary pressures. �
Investopedia +1
Bond investors remain sensitive to any shift in the Fed’s language, as Treasury yields continue to reflect expectations about future policy and inflation risks. �
MarketWatch
United Kingdom: Stability Before Growth
The Bank of England is expected to maintain a cautious stance amid moderating wage growth and relatively stable unemployment. However, policymakers continue to weigh external risks, including energy market volatility and global geopolitical developments. �
Financial Times
Businesses remain particularly attentive to borrowing costs, which continue to influence investment decisions across the UK economy.
Japan Ends an Era of Ultra-Loose Money
Japan is undergoing one of its most significant monetary transitions in decades. Rising wages and gradually strengthening inflation have encouraged the Bank of Japan to continue moving away from the ultra-accommodative policies that defined much of the past generation. �
Financial Times
This normalization has implications far beyond Japan, affecting global capital markets and currency dynamics.
Why Emerging Markets Are Watching Closely
Emerging economies including Pakistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and others remain particularly exposed to decisions made by advanced economy central banks.
Higher U.S. interest rates typically strengthen the dollar, increase external financing costs, and place pressure on countries with significant foreign currency debt.
Conversely, a more stable interest rate environment could improve capital flows into emerging markets while easing exchange rate volatility.
AI Is Becoming a Monetary Policy Variable
One of the most important structural developments in 2026 is the rapid expansion of artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Major technology companies continue investing heavily in data centers, semiconductors, cloud computing, and digital infrastructure. These investments are supporting economic growth but are also creating new questions about inflation, productivity, and long-term financing needs. �
Investopedia +1
Investment Implications
Several themes are emerging:
Higher-for-longer interest rates remain possible.
Government bond markets are likely to remain volatile.
The U.S. dollar could remain relatively strong.
AI-related investment continues attracting capital.
Emerging markets may benefit if inflation continues to moderate.
Competitor Keyword Gap Analysis
Leading publications such as the Financial Times, Reuters, Bloomberg, and CNBC primarily emphasize immediate policy decisions. An opportunity exists to capture additional search traffic by targeting broader intent-based queries.

Key Takeaways
Central bank decisions this week are expected to shape global financial markets.
AI investment is becoming an increasingly important economic driver.
Bond markets remain sensitive to inflation expectations.
Emerging economies face both risks and opportunities from policy divergence.
Investors should monitor GDP releases, corporate earnings, and inflation indicators alongside interest rate announcements.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are central bank meetings so important?
They influence borrowing costs, inflation expectations, currency values, and investment decisions worldwide.
How do interest rates affect stock markets?
Higher rates generally increase financing costs and can reduce company valuations, while lower rates often support economic activity and equity markets.
Why is AI influencing monetary policy discussions?
Large-scale investment in AI infrastructure is reshaping productivity, corporate spending, and long-term inflation expectations.

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Analysis

Gulf Capital Retreat From Pakistan 2026: UAE Loan Freeze & What It Means

Published

1 week ago

July 20, 2026

Abdul Rahman

What happened: In early 2026, the United Arab Emirates declined to roll over a $3 billion loan to Pakistan — the first such refusal in seven years. The repayment equalled roughly 18% of Pakistan’s foreign currency reserves, arriving as Islamabad also faced a $1.3 billion bond payment and was waiting on the next IMF tranche.

Why it matters: It’s the clearest sign yet that Gulf sovereign patience with Pakistan’s balance-of-payments cycle is thinning, even as Gulf states simultaneously court China, Saudi Arabia, and each other for capital in a tightening regional liquidity environment.

The Story Nobody’s Connecting

Most coverage of Pakistan’s 2026 external account stress treats the UAE’s loan decision as an isolated liquidity event — a “routine financial transaction,” in the words of Pakistan’s own Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That framing misses the bigger pattern. The same weeks that Abu Dhabi called in its $3 billion, unusual delays began appearing in bank transfers from Saudi Arabia to the UAE itself — friction between the Gulf’s two largest economies, at a moment when both are also managing their own post-war oil price adjustment. (Pakistan & Gulf Economist)

Put those two data points together and a different story emerges: this isn’t just about Pakistan’s creditworthiness. It’s about Gulf capital becoming more selective, more transactional, and less willing to extend informal grace periods across the board — with Pakistan simply the most exposed borrower in the queue.

The Numbers Behind the Pressure

Pakistan’s State Bank held $16.4 billion in reserves as of late March 2026 — enough to cover roughly three months of imports, a threshold economists generally treat as a comfort floor, not a cushion. (Mettis Global News) The UAE’s declined rollover landed at the same time as a looming $1.3 billion international bond payment and dependence on the next $1.2 billion IMF disbursement — a convergence of obligations that left the State Bank with limited room to maneuver beyond import restrictions, rate hikes, or fresh commercial borrowing.

The backdrop matters too. The rupee had been trading in a comparatively narrow 278–282 band before the escalation of the Iran conflict pushed global oil prices higher, squeezing Pakistan’s import bill precisely when its Gulf safety net began to wobble. The KSE-100 benchmark, meanwhile, had already shed around 15% amid the broader pressure. (Mettis Global News)

This is not Pakistan’s first Gulf-dependency cycle. The IMF’s own record shows a now-familiar pattern: staff-level agreements reached in Dubai, UAE pledges of multibillion-dollar investment arriving alongside IMF tranches, and Gulf bridge financing used to stave off sovereign default in periods when reserves cover shrinks toward zero. (Business Standard) What’s different in 2026 is that the bridge itself is showing cracks.

Islamabad’s Official Line vs. the Structural Reality

Pakistan’s government has leaned into a “stability to sustainable growth” narrative around its FY2026–27 federal budget, with the finance minister framing the transition as export-driven rather than reserve-dependent. Business groups have broadly welcomed the budget, and the current account posted a $459 million surplus in May 2026, an improvement attributed to strong remittance inflows. (Business Recorder) The Monetary Policy Committee has held rates steady rather than reaching for emergency tightening, which is itself a signal that the central bank does not yet see the UAE episode as a systemic trigger.

But a current account surplus built substantially on remittances is different from one built on export competitiveness or durable FDI. Pakistan’s trade structure still leans heavily on a narrow set of partners: China supplies over a quarter of its imports and a meaningful share of its exports, the UAE is both a top export destination and its second-largest import source, and Gulf states collectively remain the primary channel for both remittances and emergency liquidity. (Wikipedia — Economy of Pakistan) That concentration is precisely what makes a single Gulf lender’s changed appetite so consequential.

Why the Oil Backdrop Compounds the Risk

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The IMF’s own July 2026 commentary noted that global oil markets “absorbed the war shock” from the Iran conflict, but cautioned that buffers — spare production capacity, strategic reserves, shipping insurance capacity — are running low. (IMF Blog) For an oil-importing, reserve-constrained economy like Pakistan, a second energy price shock without deeper buffers would land directly on the same reserves the UAE loan was meant to protect.

What to Watch Next

Whether Saudi Arabia steps in as an alternative bridge lender, or whether the Riyadh–Abu Dhabi transfer friction signals a broader Gulf liquidity tightening that limits everyone’s appetite to backstop Pakistan.
The pace and size of the next IMF tranche, and whether Fund conditionality shifts to demand deeper reserve buffers given the UAE precedent.
Whether China increases its role as lender of last resort, deepening Pakistan’s dependency in exactly the direction Gulf financing was historically meant to offset.

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Asia

Down But Not Out: Inside the Slow Sinking of Russia’s War Economy

Published

1 week ago

July 20, 2026

Abdul Rahman

Introduction

The European Council formally extended its economic sanctions against Russia for another full year on 25 June 2026, keeping restrictive measures in place until 31 July 2027 (Council of the EU). More than four years into the war, the headline story of Russia’s economy has shifted from whether sanctions would work to a more nuanced question: how much longer can the Kremlin keep financing the war before the accumulated strain becomes impossible to hide behind favorable official statistics.

The Sanctions Architecture, Renewed Again

The EU’s economic measures against Russia, first introduced in 2014 and dramatically expanded after the February 2022 full-scale invasion, now span trade, finance, energy and dual-use technology restrictions, alongside asset freezes and travel bans on a broad range of individuals and entities (Council of the EU). Since February 2022, the EU has adopted 20 separate sanctions packages, and the European Council has explicitly stated it remains determined to keep weakening Russia’s war economy by further reducing its energy revenues, curbing shadow-fleet oil shipping operations and constraining its banking system (Council of the EU). Separately, on 3 July 2026 the EU sanctioned six individuals connected to the poisoning and death of opposition figure Alexei Navalny, underscoring that the sanctions regime continues to expand on human-rights grounds as well as economic ones (Council of the EU Sanctions Timeline).

The Headline Numbers Beijing-Style Optimism Can No Longer Explain Away

Russia’s GDP is now put at roughly $2.51 trillion, the world’s eleventh-largest economy — comparable in size to South Korea despite Russia’s vastly larger landmass and resource base — with 2026 growth projected at just 1.0% and inflation running at 5.2% (Statistics of the World). More pessimistic estimates put full-year 2026 growth even lower, at around 0.4%, which would be worse than 2025’s already-weak 1% expansion and would mark a sharp deceleration from the 4.1% growth Russia posted in 2023 as it forged new trading relationships to route around initial sanctions (Forbes).

Oil and gas revenues — historically around half of Russia’s state income — have fallen to roughly a quarter, a deliberate outcome of Western sanctions strategy that targets how much Russia earns from exports rather than blocking those exports outright (Stockholm School of Economics/SITE). Russia’s oil and gas budget revenues reportedly halved in January 2026 alone, with crude prices falling below $73 a barrel before the Middle East conflict briefly reversed the trend, sending Brent surging more than 55% to near $120 a barrel at its peak (Forbes).

The Middle East War: A Temporary Lifeline With Long-Term Costs

The spike in oil prices tied to the Iran conflict, combined with a period of eased US sanctions enforcement on Russian oil under President Trump, offered Moscow unexpected fiscal breathing room in mid-2026 (Forbes). But that same conflict has undermined Russia’s longer-term energy diversification ambitions in the region: two Russian-backed power plant projects in Iran have been put on hold, along with oil and gas exploration work and plans to build new transit routes linking Russia to India via Iran (Forbes).

The Gap Between Official Statistics and Underlying Reality

Perhaps the most important analytical point from recent research is not about any single data point but about the reliability of Russian statistics themselves. Torbjörn Becker of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics has argued the real test of sanctions is not whether they end the war overnight, but how much they erode the Kremlin’s capacity to finance it — and by that measure, the evidence points to deeper strain than headline GDP figures suggest (Stockholm School of Economics/SITE). Becker notes that Russia’s economy grew only modestly in 2022 despite oil prices rising sharply that year — a gap between expected and actual performance that implies a considerably larger hidden economic hit than the official contraction figures showed (Stockholm School of Economics/SITE). Compounding the problem, Russian authorities have stopped publishing several key statistics since 2022, making independent assessment of inflation, consumption and real economic conditions increasingly difficult — leading Becker to conclude that “statistics have become part of the narrative” rather than a neutral measure of economic reality (Stockholm School of Economics/SITE).

The Military-Civilian Economic Split

A recurring theme across recent analysis is the growing bifurcation between Russia’s overheating military-industrial sector and a stagnating civilian economy. This imbalance has pushed interest rates higher and forced the liquidation of a striking 71% of Russia’s gold reserves to help fund continued war spending (Forbes). Russia’s total fossil fuel export revenue is estimated at roughly €734 million per day, underscoring just how central hydrocarbon income remains to the entire war financing model even as that revenue stream shrinks (Forbes).

The Counter-Narrative: Wages Still Rising

It would be inaccurate to describe Russia’s economy as in freefall. CSIS research notes that Russian salaries rose 17.8% in nominal terms and 8.7% in real terms in 2024 compared to 2023, with disposable incomes up 6.1% in 2023 and 7.3% in 2024 — growth rates not seen in Russia in almost two decades (CSIS). Government budget projections still expect real salaries to rise, albeit at a decelerating pace: 7% in 2025, 5.7% in 2026 and 4.1% in 2027 — a marked slowdown from the 2024 peak but still roughly double the pre-invasion decade average (CSIS). This wage growth, driven substantially by wartime labor shortages and military-adjacent spending, is precisely the kind of headline-stabilizing data point that has allowed Putin to argue publicly that sanctions have failed to cripple his economy (Fortune) — even as think tanks describe the broader trajectory as pushing Russia toward what one report calls an “economic, political, and military abyss” (Fortune).

What Comes Next

Renewed legislative pressure in Washington — including the Sanctioning Russia Act introduced with strong bipartisan support — signals appetite in the US for tightening the screws further, even as the loss of a key congressional champion for that effort has complicated the political path forward (TIME). Whether the EU’s renewed sanctions regime, continued oil price pressure, and constrained reserves ultimately force a shift in Kremlin calculus toward negotiation remains the central open question for 2027.

Key Takeaways

The EU has extended Russia sanctions for a further year, through 31 July 2027, continuing a regime built from 20 separate packages since 2022.
Russia’s 2026 GDP growth is forecast between 0.4% and 1.0%, a sharp deceleration from 2023’s 4.1% post-shock rebound.
Oil and gas revenue’s share of Russian state income has fallen from roughly half to about a quarter as Western sanctions target export earnings specifically.
Russia has liquidated a large share of its gold reserves to sustain war financing amid a widening split between an overheating military sector and a stagnating civilian economy.
Official Russian statistics likely understate the true economic strain, according to independent economists who cite a widening gap between reported and expected performance.

Sources: Council of the EU, Council of the EU Sanctions Timeline, Stockholm School of Economics/SITE, Forbes, Statistics of the World, CSIS, Fortune, TIME