The financial news that actually matters
If you bank at Wells Fargo and overdraw your checking account by $6 buying coffee, you’ll pay a $35 fee for the privilege. That was supposed to change. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau finalized a rule in December 2024 that would have capped overdraft charges at the nation’s largest banks at as little as $5….
In 2014, a licensed firearms dealer in Wisconsin opened a letter from his bank and learned his account was being shut down. No fraud allegation. No overdraft. No explanation beyond a form paragraph about a “business decision.” He was one of dozens of gun retailers, payday lenders, and tobacco sellers who reported identical treatment during…
You paid $4.43 a gallon for regular gasoline last week, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly retail tracker for the week ending April 28, 2026. Exxon Mobil, the largest publicly traded oil company in the country, just reported that its own profits got cut nearly in half. Those two facts sound like they…
Jerome Powell will walk out of the Federal Reserve chair’s office for the last time on May 15, 2026, closing a tenure that included the fastest rate-hiking cycle in four decades and a pandemic-era housing market that still has not fully normalized. His likely successor, Kevin Warsh, cleared the Senate Banking Committee on April 29,…
A child born in the United States today will soon have something no previous generation of American newborns has had: a federally funded investment account with their name on it. While some city and state governments have created children’s savings programs in the past, this is the first such program established and funded at the…
At 3 a.m. Eastern on Monday, June 23, 2025, Spirit Airlines canceled every remaining flight on its schedule, shut down its operations, and told passengers not to come to the airport. The airline that built its identity on $9 base fares and a bright yellow fleet was finished. More than 100 aircraft sat grounded. Roughly…
Three of the biggest names in online savings just trimmed what they pay depositors, and none of them sent a press release about it. Capital One, Synchrony, and Marcus by Goldman Sachs each lowered their posted annual percentage yields over the past several weeks, according to updated rate tables on their websites. The reductions were…
At midnight on May 1, 2026, the 60-day countdown that the War Powers Resolution imposes on unauthorized military operations expired. The clock had started around March 2, 2026, when U.S. forces first entered hostilities with Iran. President Trump’s answer to Congress was not a request for authorization or an order to withdraw. It was a…
More than 700 Oracle employees in California learned this week that their jobs are gone. State layoff notices, obtained through a public records request, show the cuts hitting workers in Redwood City and Santa Clara, the Silicon Valley corridor where Oracle built its database empire before moving its headquarters to Austin, Texas, in 2020. The…
Exxon Mobil reported first-quarter profit of $4.2 billion on May 1, 2026, a 45% drop from the $7.7 billion it earned during the same stretch last year. The company disclosed the results in an 8-K filing with the SEC, and the numbers rattled investors. But for the millions of Americans paying a national average of…