AI Image By Gemma I want to tell you something embarrassing. Last Tuesday I sat down with a coffee, opened a 28-question financial literacy quiz developed by Stanford University and TIAA, and told myself it would take fifteen minutes. It took forty. And I got 47% right. Exactly the national average. Which sounds fine until you realize the national average just hit a 10-year low. I didn't beat the curve. I was the curve. I sat there for a minute staring at the results screen. Then I closed the laptop. Then I opened it again because I needed to understand what just happened. Here's what the quiz actually tests. Eight areas: earning, spending, saving, investing, borrowing, insuring, understanding risk, and finding reliable information. Stanford and TIAA have run this same test every year for a decade. The highest Americans ever scored was 52%, back in 2020. This year: 47%. The lowest ever. One in four Americans now falls into the "very low financial literacy...

  I was sitting in a coffee shop the other day, watching the ticker tape of the S&P 500 scroll across a muted TV screen in the corner. Green arrows. Record highs. The familiar narrative of wealth compounding upon wealth. It’s a story I know intimately; my portfolio hums along in the background, a silent engine powered by the greatest wealth-generating machines in history: the US stock market and prime real estate. But as I sipped my espresso, a statistic I’d read in a World Bank report kept nagging at me, disrupting my peace. It wasn't about inflation or interest rates. It was about people. There are approximately 4 billion adults on this planet who have absolutely zero access to high-quality investment assets. Let that sink in for a moment. I’m not talking about people who choose not to invest because they prefer cash or are risk-averse. I’m talking about half the global population—people with dreams, ambitions, and often, small amounts of disposable income—who are systemicall...