The financial news that actually matters
For the first time in more than two years, the U.S. economy may have created fewer jobs in a single month than it takes to keep pace with population growth. Economists polled by Reuters and Bloomberg expect that employers added roughly 55,000 nonfarm jobs in April 2026, a steep decline from the 178,000 positions created…
Until now, a Medicare enrollee who wanted Wegovy had two options: pay roughly $1,350 a month out of pocket or go without. On July 1, 2026, a third option arrives. Under a new federal demonstration called the Medicare GLP-1 Bridge, eligible Part D beneficiaries will be able to fill prescriptions for covered weight-loss GLP-1 medications…
If you filed your 2025 federal tax return without direct deposit information and you’ve been waiting weeks for a refund check that never arrived, there is a reason: the check is not coming. Starting with the 2026 filing season, the IRS no longer mails paper refund checks to most individual taxpayers. Instead, filers without bank…
In late May 2026, Spirit Airlines flight 402 from Fort Lauderdale to San Juan flipped from “On Time” to “Canceled” on the departure board. The following account is drawn from passenger descriptions posted on social media and has not been independently verified: roughly 180 travelers at the gate reportedly received no rebooking, no vouchers, and…
A driver topping off a 50-gallon pickup truck in mid-February 2026 paid roughly $155 at the pump. That same fill-up now costs about $222, a difference of roughly $67, after the national average price of regular unleaded gasoline surged 30 cents in a single week to $4.45 a gallon as of the second week of…
Ray Dalio built Bridgewater Associates into the world’s largest hedge fund by studying how debt cycles break. Now the billionaire investor is turning that lens on a policy fight in his own backyard: a California ballot initiative that would impose a one-time 5% wealth tax on the state’s billionaires, with the first payments due in…
A family of four grilling burgers this Memorial Day weekend will spend roughly $6.70 for every pound of ground beef they toss on the grate. Driving to the store to buy it costs $4.43 a gallon. And the house they pull into afterward? If they bought it recently with a 30-year fixed mortgage, they’re likely…
Lenders filed foreclosure notices on 118,727 U.S. properties during the first quarter of 2026, according to ATTOM’s Q1 2026 Foreclosure Market Report. That is a 26% jump from the same period last year and a 6% increase over the final quarter of 2025, marking the highest quarterly total since pandemic-era protections started expiring. The numbers…
Somewhere in the United States, roughly 665,000 workers opened their 401(k) statements in early 2025 and saw a seven-figure balance staring back at them. Fidelity Investments, which administers more than 48 million retirement accounts, reported the milestone after the S&P 500 delivered back-to-back annual gains exceeding 20% for the first time since the late 1990s….
Social Security’s annual raise is starting to feel like a ritual of disappointment. For the third consecutive year, the cost-of-living adjustment is tracking at a level that sounds reasonable in a press release but will likely shrink considerably once Medicare premiums take their cut. The early projection for the 2027 COLA sits at 2.8 percent,…