The financial news that actually matters
American drivers are paying sharply less at the pump than they were just weeks ago. The national average price for regular gasoline slipped to $3.84 a gallon, a drop of 45 cents from a month earlier, according to federal survey data. The reading, recorded as $3.831 for the week ending June 29, 2026, reflects the…
OpenAI is in early talks to hand the U.S. government a 5% equity stake in the company, a slice worth roughly $42.6 billion based on its most recent $852 billion valuation. The proposal, modeled on the Alaska Permanent Fund, arrives just as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., is pushing a far more aggressive plan that would…
Millions of Americans who use electronic toll roads received an unwelcome surprise over the past year: text messages claiming they owed unpaid tolls, complete with links designed to steal payment details and personal information. Reports of government-impersonation scams rose 40 percent, with fake toll notices identified as a key driver of the increase. Total reported…
Homeowners who file jointly stand to keep as much as $500,000 in capital gains out of the federal tax collector’s reach when they sell a principal residence, provided both spouses clear a set of ownership and use requirements written into federal law. The exclusion drops to $250,000 for single filers. With home values in many…
Tesla delivered a record 480,126 vehicles in the second quarter of 2026, yet shares dropped roughly 7.5 percent after the numbers hit the wire. The gap between a headline-grabbing delivery record and a punishing stock reaction tells a story about what investors now demand from the electric-vehicle maker and what a bare-bones regulatory filing cannot…
Credit-union members who lost a combined $95 million in a single fraud case now face a regulatory system that has no pending proposal to tighten how such losses are disclosed. The National Credit Union Administration, the federal agency that charters and supervises credit unions, is instead directing its rulemaking energy toward a different priority: clarifying…
Families sitting on unused 529 college savings now have a direct path to convert those dollars into retirement wealth. Section 126 of the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 allows a 529 beneficiary to roll over surplus funds into a Roth IRA, tax-free, up to a $35,000 lifetime cap. The rule applies to distributions made after…
Homeowners with FHA-backed mortgages are losing their properties at a sharply faster pace. Foreclosure starts on these loans climbed 26 percent over the past year, a rise concentrated among borrowers who exhausted forbearance options after recent servicing rule changes took effect. Because FHA loans represent a disproportionate share of first-time and lower-income buyers, the acceleration…
Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent, introduced legislation to create a $7 trillion AI sovereign wealth fund, financed by a one-time 50 percent equity tax on the largest artificial intelligence companies. The proposal would force firms like Google, Meta, and OpenAI to hand Washington an ownership stake in their operations, channeling future profits into direct…
Americans who need to move money fast still face a steep toll at many banks, where a single domestic wire transfer can run $35 to $50 per transaction. That cost stands in sharp contrast to two alternatives that charge nothing: Zelle, the bank-backed peer-to-peer network, and FedNow, the Federal Reserve’s instant payment rail. The gap…