The financial news that actually matters
Taxpayers who requested extra time to complete their 2025 federal returns gained a paperwork reprieve until Oct. 15, 2026, but the IRS did not move the payment clock by a single day. Any balance owed was still due by the original April filing deadline, and interest started running from that date for anyone who fell…
Three separate federal agencies, the SEC, the FTC, and the CFTC, all flag the same behavior as a top warning sign of fraud: being told you must invest immediately, before you have time to verify anything. That consensus across regulators is unusual, and it exists because urgency is not a side effect of scams but…
ServiceNow is among the tech companies that have filed layoff notices in 2026, part of a broader wave of job cuts across the industry that has now exceeded 157,000 positions eliminated this year alone. The reductions, tracked through federal and state labor filings, come as firms redirect spending toward artificial intelligence capabilities. For displaced workers,…
Anyone who has ever left a wallet behind at a restaurant or watched a credit card statement fill with charges they never made has a direct stake in one of the clearest consumer protections in federal law. The Truth in Lending Act caps a cardholder’s liability for unauthorized credit card use at $50, provided the…
Investors who hand money to a broker without first checking that person’s disciplinary and complaint history are flying blind, and the free tool that exists to prevent this sits underused. The SEC has repeatedly directed the public to FINRA’s BrokerCheck database as a required first step before doing business with any registered representative. Yet the…
An investor who stayed fully invested in the S&P 500 over the past two decades captured cumulative price gains north of 200 percent. Pull out just the ten strongest single-day rallies during that stretch and the total drops to roughly half that level. The gap is not a thought experiment reserved for textbooks. It is…
West Marine, the largest boating retailer in the United States, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and is shutting down 59 stores across 23 states. The closures, detailed in a court document filed in June, come as multi-state retail bankruptcies reach levels not seen in over a decade. With roughly $55 million in annual lease obligations…
Papa John’s is closing roughly 50 restaurants spread across 17 states and cutting about 7 percent of its corporate workforce, according to the pizza chain’s latest financial disclosures. The reductions, detailed in the company’s first-quarter 2026 and full-year 2025 earnings releases, mark the sharpest contraction in the chain’s domestic footprint in recent memory. For employees,…
Taxpayers who overlooked a deduction, credit, or filing status change on a prior-year return can still recover money from the IRS, but the clock is ticking. Federal law gives filers a window of three years from the date the original return was filed to submit an amended return and claim a refund. For anyone who…
Investors who held U.S. equities over the past century earned roughly 10 percent a year on average, a figure that includes reinvested dividends. That long-run average, however, conceals drawdowns severe enough to cut portfolios in half and test the resolve of even disciplined savers. With stock price records stretching back to the 1870s and academic…