Better late than never.

The Social Security Trustees report emerged this week more than two months beyond its Congressionally mandated April 1 deadline. It projects the Old-Age and Survivors Insurance trust fund will be able to pay 100% of total scheduled benefits until the fourth quarter of 2032. If combined with the Disability Insurance fund, full benefits will be payable until the third quarter of 2034. That’s unchanged from last year’s report, but the long-term actuarial deficit has deteriorated. In plain English, the math got worse, and that fact has sparked a significant (if predictable) wave of commentary from retirement experts and advocates. The consensus? There’s plenty to worry about in the 2026 Social Security Trustees Report, but it’s important for advisors to bring clients a balanced perspective that also highlights well-understood paths to stability, likely through a combination of benefit adjustments and tax increases.

“The unchanged 2034 date is not a reason to celebrate,” said Ray Harris, president at Social Security Claiming Experts. “It’s more like the steady idiot light on your car dashboard than a loud smoke alarm in your house. For financial advisors, the key message is this: Do not let clients make claiming decisions based on panic.”

Key Findings

While the depletion date for the combined retirement and disability trust funds remained the same, with 83% of scheduled benefits payable at that point, the longer-term financing gap worsened. The 75-year actuarial deficit increased from 3.82% to 4.42% of taxable payroll. That particular fact somewhat surprised Harris. Martha Shedden, president of the National Association of Registered Social Security Analysts, agreed.

“The acceleration of the shortfall amount indicates an even greater urgency for action to be taken as soon as possible,” Shedden said. Even so, for advisors, the main takeaway from the 2026 Trustees Report is not “Social Security is going away.” The better message is: Social Security remains foundational, but the margin for error in retirement planning has narrowed. “Advisors should be helping clients plan with realism, not panic,” Shedden said, offering a checklist of considerations:

• Do not assume Social Security disappears, as payroll taxes would still be coming in even if reserves are depleted.
• Model multiple scenarios such as full scheduled benefits, a 10% reduction, a 17% reduction and a 22% reduction beginning in the early-to-mid 2030s.
• Younger workers should probably save more now, but the message should not be that Social Security will be worthless.

A Word to the Youth. Shedden and Harris agreed that younger clients should avoid building a plan around today’s projected benefit statements alone. “Keep Social Security in the plan, but do not make it the plan,” Shedden advised. Social Security will likely remain a core retirement income source, especially because it is inflation-adjusted and lifetime-based. “But younger clients should aim for a retirement plan that can withstand lower-than-expected benefits.”

No pain, no gain, apparently.

Crypto’s recent price swings have been hard to ignore. Bitcoin has fallen more than 40% over the past year, and since mid-May, spot bitcoin ETFs have lost more than $4.3 billion in assets. Volatility isn’t a flaw, though. It’s the entire appeal, according to industry experts at the ETP Forum in New York City last week. When allocated in small amounts, typically 1% to 5% of a portfolio, crypto can offer diversification benefits without exposing clients to outsized risk, panelists said. And if it underperforms, the damage is contained.

“Volatility is a feature; it’s not a bug,” said Blue Macellari, head of digital assets at T. Rowe Price. “If volatility is low, you sort of have to back the truck up to the asset in order to get an allocation that moves the needle.”

Adoption Plan

Over roughly the past decade, crypto has gone from a “what the heck is this” asset class to a, well, still kind of “what the heck is this” asset class, but one that many more people want to actually own. The global crypto market now exceeds $2 trillion, the White House and SEC have championed digital assets and major issuers have rolled out crypto ETFs. Plenty of advisors are onboard, too:

• Roughly one-third of advisors invested in crypto for client accounts last year, up from 22% in 2024, according to a Bitwise survey.
• More than half report owning crypto personally, marking the highest level of ownership since the survey began in 2018.

Still, hesitation remains, with complexity as a major barrier. When bitcoin dominated the market narrative, allocation decisions were relatively straightforward. Now, with assets like Ether, Solana and others competing for attention, crypto is increasingly viewed less as a single trade and more as a multi-asset ecosystem. Plus, crypto markets run 24/7, adding another layer of operational and behavioral complexity for wealth managers. “Advisors have moved beyond bitcoin and a couple of names,” Macellari said. “Now they’re going to need help figuring out how to put together a portfolio.”

One audience member at the forum simply asked why advisors should allocate to crypto if the price of bitcoin has fallen so far. “Do you know what the single best-returning asset across multiple time frames is over the last 15 years?” another executive responded. “Bitcoin.” There’s some nuance to that, though. While bitcoin has the potential to continue outperforming, its impressive returns are partly a result of its launching less than 20 years ago at effectively $0.

Token Talk: Beyond portfolio construction, panelists pointed to tokenization, the representation of real-world assets and securities on blockchain networks, as one of crypto’s most important innovations. Token transfers can happen almost instantly and cost a fraction of a cent, compared with traditional cross-border money transfers that can take days and cost up to $50, Macellari said. Over the next three to five years, many investors will likely hold tokenized assets even if they don’t realize it. “These are turning out to be the first killer apps for crypto,” she said.

Another week, another White House declaration that the US and Iran are ready to broker a truce. If your coffee tastes spiked with déjà vu this morning, it’s because you’ve drunk this exact vintage before.

President Donald Trump on Thursday claimed the US has “made a great settlement of the war with Iran” that will end the conflict that’s roiled energy markets and stoked inflation since February. The S&P 500, Nasdaq and Dow surged, closing up 1.7%, 2.5% and 1.8%, respectively. Brent crude, the international oil benchmark, fell 4.2% to $89.21 per barrel. Iran’s foreign ministry on Friday pushed back against the notion that a deal is imminent, but the country’s semi-official Mehr news agency said a memorandum that would suspend US sanctions on Iranian oil and reopen of the Strait of Hormuz, while giving both sides 60 days to hammer out a final agreement, is in the draft stages. Whether or not this latest purported deal comes to pass, new evidence suggests the future US role in global energy markets could be significantly transformed.

Main Street Hits a Wall

Brent remains well above its $70 price before the war in late February, as does the $4.12 per gallon price of gas in the US, up from $2.98. This has been miserable for Main Street, with consumers reporting unprecedented levels of pessimism and dealing with 4.2% inflation, according to the latest consumer price index (CPI). Fifth Third Commercial Bank chief US economist Bill Adams noted businesses may be feeling pressure, too, as they appear to be absorbing “higher input costs in narrower margins” because they may “think consumers are unwilling or unable to absorb further cost increases.”

Wall Street, on the other hand, has been comparatively sanguine, betting the Iran war will end without significant escalation. Adapting to the risk has unleashed a bullish equities run, bolstered by a strong earnings season, with the major indices setting new closing milestones earlier this month (jitters have emerged this week around the AI investment boom as SpaceX lists today).

Experts, officials, and executives have all warned that, even if the US and Iran patch things up, oil markets will take until next year to normalize, which could prolong the pain on Main Street. On the upside, there is evidence the US could exit the conflict in an emboldened position on energy markets:

• According to ship tracking data from Vortexa cited by Reuters, the US has led the world in crude and fuel exports for three months, most recently shipping 10.5 million barrels per day in May, compared to 7 million exported from Russia and 5.9 million from Saudi Arabia. Russian exports have declined because of sanctions over its invasion of Ukraine, while Saudi business has been disrupted by the US-Iran war.
• The US also saw liquefied natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas exports to India triple in May, making it the largest supplier of both to the world’s most populous country, according to Kpler data noted by CNBC.

Too Exposed? After seeing what’s happened to nations that were too reliant on one energy source in the wake of the Ukraine and Iran conflicts, policymakers may be averse to putting all their eggs in the US basket. For example, regulators for the import-reliant EU, writing about LNG imports in May, cautioned that the bloc’s “reliance on U.S. LNG [which makes up 58% of imports] may raise questions of dependency on a single supplying country.”