Americans are worried about a return to ’70s vibes, the most recent University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment shows—and unfortunately, we’re not talking disco.

Consumers are anxious about both unemployment and inflation, researchers found, or the one-two economic punch known as “stagflation.”

Around 60% of consumers expect unemployment to increase in the next 12 months, Survey of Consumers Director Joanne Hsu said in a report, “a reading last seen in the Great Recession.”

Inflation fears are also elevated. Consumers predict inflation will rise by 4.9% over the next 12 months, up from 4.5% last month. That’s moderated somewhat from April and May, when consumers anticipated a rise in inflation upward of 6%.

“Overall, consumers are no longer bracing for the worst-case scenario for the economy feared in April, when reciprocal tariffs were announced and then paused,” Hsu said about this month’s results.

Job fears worse than ’22: There are even some signs that consumers may be more anxious about the economy now than they were during peak inflation in 2022.

How worried are consumers?—CV

With all the volatility and uncertainty going on right now, CFOs might feel badly in need of a win somewhere. They may be surprised to find that small victory when they renew their organizations’ property insurance policies.

After several years of what’s known in the insurance industry as a “hard” market—think all the bad stuff, like higher premiums, more restrictive coverage terms, shrinking coverage availability—things have finally turned in the insurance buyer’s favor. That’s right: Rates are finally coming down for many, by as much as double-digit percentages.

Prudent buyers can take advantage of this by shopping around, insurance brokers told CFO Brew.

In its 2025 midyear report, HUB International estimated rate changes on commercial property policies ranged from 15% decreases to 5% increases, based on factors like whether a policy had multiple insurers or a single one, organizations’ risk profile, and geographic exposures to risks like wildfires or flooding.

“The property market has quickly reversed course from needed rate increases over the past several years,” the insurance broker noted in the report.

Organizations with shared and layered programs—meaning more than one company is insuring their property risks—are seeing greater rate reductions than those with just a single insurer, according to Blake Giannisis, North American property practice leader at HUB.

Will CFOs see insurance costs fall?—AZ

Digital fraud is on the rise, in part because of generative AI fakery. Can AI also guard against these threats?

That’s what businesses seem to be betting on, according to a new report from Experian. It found that 37% of more than 200 companies surveyed are using generative AI to detect and protect against fraud. Meanwhile, nearly three-quarters (72%) of them expect that deepfakes and other AI-generated scams will be among their top challenges by next year.

“AI has emerged as both a savior and a saboteur in the fraud ecosystem,” the authors wrote.

Through GenAI-powered capabilities like deepfakes and voice cloning, the technology has supercharged certain types of impersonation scams. But AI can also help businesses better flag anomalies and suspicious behavior to get ahead of potential threats, the report said. Major credit card companies, for instance, have been using various forms of machine learning and AI to combat fraud activity for years—since the 1990s, in Visa’s case.

And yet fraud remains an increasingly costly problem, according to the report. Nearly three in five businesses said they lost more to fraud than they had the previous year.

Click here to continue reading Tech Brew’s story on using AI to fight fraud.—PK

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