The financial news that actually matters
When Sarah Kline started apartment hunting in Austin this past February, she expected the same bruising experience she had in 2022: bidding wars, application fees stacked on top of each other, and landlords who wouldn’t return calls. Instead, the property manager at the first complex she toured offered two months free on a 14-month lease…
JetBlue Airways spent roughly $2.7 billion on jet fuel in fiscal 2024, making it the airline’s single largest operating expense. That same year, the carrier wrote a $69 million check to Spirit Airlines just to walk away from a merger a federal judge killed. Now, as JetBlue tries to convince Wall Street that its JetForward…
North Carolina’s State Health Plan covers roughly 740,000 people, from first-year teachers to retired correctional officers, and it is burning through money faster than the state can replenish it. Actuarial projections shared with the plan’s Board of Trustees show cumulative net losses on track to exceed $1 billion by 2027, driven by hospital and specialty-care…
Gasoline prices have climbed for nine straight weeks. Airline fuel surcharges are back. And Goldman Sachs now says the pain has further to run: the bank raised its fourth-quarter Brent crude forecast to roughly $90 per barrel, up from about $80, warning that “extreme inventory draws” caused by the near-total shutdown of shipping through the…
A small appliance company in Ohio pays 25% more for the Chinese-made motors inside its bestselling product line than it did in 2017. A Texas auto-parts distributor has rerouted half its sourcing to Vietnam and Mexico, spending millions on new supplier relationships. A family in suburban Atlanta is paying noticeably more for washing machines, power…
OTTAWA – Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before Parliament on April 27 and made an announcement decades in the making: Canada is getting its first federal sovereign wealth fund. Called the Canada Strong Fund, the vehicle launches with CAD $25 billion, approximately $18.4 billion USD, earmarked for large-scale infrastructure, energy, and housing projects that private…
Microsoft is offering buyout packages to thousands of its most seasoned U.S. employees, marking the first time the software giant has turned to voluntary retirement as it reshapes its workforce around artificial intelligence. Workers whose age and years of service add up to at least 70 are eligible, according to The Wall Street Journal, which…
Qualcomm shares surged roughly 13% in premarket trading on Monday, April 28, 2026, after supply-chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported that OpenAI is working with the San Diego chipmaker on AI-focused smartphone processors. Qualcomm, which closed the prior Friday near $168 per share with a market capitalization of roughly $188 billion, saw billions of dollars in…
North Carolina restored Medicaid provider payments in December 2025 after courts blocked steep rate cuts, but the $319 million budget shortfall that triggered those reductions has not been resolved. As of spring 2026, the state’s roughly 3 million Medicaid enrollees and the rural hospitals that serve them face the same funding cliff, with no public…
A gallon of milk costs roughly 25% more than it did in early 2020. A basic auto insurance policy costs over 50% more. Rent, electricity, even a tube of toothpaste – nearly everything in a household budget has reset to a permanently higher price. And for most Americans, paychecks have not caught up. That gap…