The financial news that actually matters
Borrowers juggling multiple debts are measurably more likely to eliminate all of them when they start by paying off the smallest balance first, according to peer-reviewed research built on real client records from a debt-settlement firm. The finding, published in the Journal of Marketing Research, traced the effect to a simple mechanism: closing even one…
The S&P 500 set a fresh all-time high on June 2, 2026, only to lose 2.6 percent in a single session three days later. By June 22, the index sat about 1.8 percent below that early-month peak, and the Federal Reserve’s latest economic projections offered little reason to expect rate relief soon. For investors who…
Citigroup is preparing to eliminate roughly 20,000 positions, a workforce reduction that ranks among the most aggressive in the U.S. banking sector in recent years. The bank disclosed its fourth-quarter and full-year 2023 financial results on January 12, 2024, a reporting period shaped by one-time charges including the FDIC special assessment tied to last year’s…
Investors who sold stocks, bonds, or other assets at a loss during 2025 face a hard ceiling when they file their federal returns: net capital losses can reduce ordinary income by no more than $3,000 in a single tax year, or $1,500 for those married filing separately. That cap, set by federal statute decades ago,…
Investors who sell appreciated stock, real estate, or other assets face a tax bill that can swing dramatically based on a single calendar detail: whether they held the asset for more than one year. The IRS treats gains on assets held longer than 12 months as long-term, capping the tax rate well below ordinary income…
Federal and state authorities have charged Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, businessman Daryl F. Heller with orchestrating a fraud that collected roughly $402 million from about 2,700 investors over nearly eight years. The scheme allegedly promised fixed monthly returns from ATM machine investments but instead used new investor money to pay earlier participants. Both the Securities and…
More than 1,500 retail store closures have been announced across the United States this year, with Walgreens alone accounting for 1,200 of those shuttered locations. Saks Global, the luxury group that emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy, has added to the total by closing eight Saks Fifth Avenue stores, one Neiman Marcus location, and 15 additional…
Edwin Brant Frost IV, the president of First Liberty Building & Loan LLC, faces both civil and criminal charges after federal authorities accused him of running a Ponzi scheme that collected at least $140 million from roughly 300 investors. The SEC filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia,…
Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, has warned that U.S. equity valuations are approaching the speculative extremes that preceded the crashes of 1929 and 2000. His comparison draws on a long academic record showing that both episodes featured prices far above what corporate earnings could justify. For tens of millions of Americans holding index…
Credit-card holders who pick up the phone and ask their issuer for relief are far more likely to succeed than they assume. A nationally representative survey of 983 major credit cardholders found that late fees were waived 86 percent of the time when customers simply requested it. Yet most cardholders never make the call, leaving…