MassMutual CEO says Americans’ share of the U.S. debt is going up $10 a day

In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady interviews MassMutual CEO Roger Crandall.

The big leadership story: Inside Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI

The markets: Mixed globally as investors digest news of a fresh U.S. blockade.

Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.

Good morning. How dire is America’s fiscal outlook? When I met with MassMutual CEO Roger Crandall yesterday, he framed the problem with a startling statistic: “Ten dollars a day. That’s how much your share of the U.S. debt is going up every day,” he said. “For tax‑paying Americans, it’s more than $25 a day.”

Escalating public debt can affect everything from currency valuations to corporate borrowing costs, not to mention the harm it can do to workers, consumers, and growth. Crandall brings a unique perspective: he not only leads a 175-year-old mutual insurance company that serves more than 4 million customers with over $1 trillion in coverage, but he also chaired the Boston Fed through the end of last year. “Everything we have today was built for a 40‑hour-a-week, full‑time job with a lot of benefits provided, which made sense for a world where people lived to 70 or 80,” he noted. “We’re heading to a society where people live for 100 years, and we haven’t really prepared for that. It doesn’t take much to create a new normal that’s not a good normal for the country.”

And how should we address all this? One thing he and I discussed was the power of compounding—the reality that early investing is a powerful tool that more Americans need to deploy. The........

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