The financial news that actually matters
A military conflict with Iran that shut down the Strait of Hormuz tomorrow would not raise the price of bread or ground beef next week. It probably would not raise them this year. The shock would have to travel too far first: from tanker lanes in the Persian Gulf, through global natural gas markets, into…
Duke Energy has committed to spending $103 billion over the next five years on new power generation, transmission lines, and grid upgrades across its six-state territory, making it the largest capital plan in the company’s history. The company first announced the updated figure in its February 2025 fourth-quarter earnings release, covering planned capital deployment through…
Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci is not sugarcoating it: the airline has raised fares, and it has no intention of rolling them back. During Alaska Air Group’s first-quarter 2026 earnings call in April, Minicucci told investors that recent price increases have stuck, even as a spike in jet fuel costs squeezed margins across the industry….
A gallon of milk in Baltimore could soon cost you more than it costs your neighbor, not because of a sale or a coupon, but because an algorithm decided you’d pay it. Maryland Governor Wes Moore wants to make sure that never happens. In April 2026, Moore announced legislation that would ban grocery retailers, including…
A lawsuit filed against JetBlue in late April 2026 alleges the airline uses customers’ personal data to set ticket prices, turning a viral social media moment into a legal fight over a practice federal regulators have called “surveillance pricing.” The trouble started when a JetBlue customer posted about a $230 fare spike that appeared while…
More than 330,000 U.S. importers are now eligible to reclaim a share of roughly $166 billion in tariff payments, following the Supreme Court’s April 2026 decision in Cent. Grocers Retail Co. v. United States, which struck down duties imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. The refund operation is already underway. But the families…
A year ago, roughly one in five Americans said they would consider buying an electric vehicle. Now the number is closer to one in four, and the reason is showing up on gas station price signs across the country. Consumer interest in EVs has climbed to 24 percent, according to Cox Automotive’s Q1 2026 Consumer…
Amazon Web Services has been here before. Heavy spending on data centers, a surge in demand tied to a new technology wave, and then years of expanding profits as customers fill the capacity. The pattern played out during the enterprise cloud migration of the mid-2010s and again during the pandemic-era digital rush. Now, with artificial…
Filling up the car keeps getting more expensive, and the White House just signaled it doesn’t expect relief anytime soon. On April 24, 2026, President Trump extended an emergency waiver of the Jones Act for another 90 days, allowing foreign-flagged tankers to haul oil and natural gas between U.S. ports. The move is a tacit…
When Nvidia’s share price ticked past $203 on October 29, 2025, the numbers on trading terminals spelled out something that had never happened before: a single chipmaker was worth $5 trillion. Six months later, the figure still defies easy comprehension. One company, headquartered in a glass-walled campus in Santa Clara, California, now carries a valuation…