The financial news that actually matters
In April 2026, American employers told 21,490 workers that artificial intelligence was the reason their jobs no longer existed. That single-month figure, compiled by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas from publicly announced layoffs, pushed AI past traditional cost-cutting as the most-cited cause of job loss for the first time in the firm’s 30-plus years…
The Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s tariff authority under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act in February 2026. Within weeks, American importers began filing for refunds on duties they should never have owed. By June 2026, roughly 330,000 companies, according to court filings in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, had submitted claims to U.S….
Somewhere in the stack of 132,000 severance notices that technology companies have issued so far in 2026, there is a recruiting coordinator, a program manager, and a QA engineer who all got the same calendar invite on the same Monday morning. Their roles were “eliminated as part of an organizational realignment.” Down the hall, or…
Kevin Warsh has not publicly said what he plans to do with interest rates. In roughly 30 days, he will sit at the head of the table when the Federal Open Market Committee meets on June 17-18 and makes its first rate decision under his leadership. Fed funds futures tracked by the CME FedWatch tool…
Roughly 830,000 federal tax refunds are sitting in limbo this filing season, held by the IRS because the banking information on those returns was missing, wrong, or rejected by a financial institution. If yours is one of them, you probably already have a letter in hand: a CP53E notice telling you the agency approved your…
A restaurant owner running a busy dinner service in Chicago collects, say, $100 on a credit card. Roughly $8 of that is sales tax headed to the state. Another $18 is a tip headed to the server. The merchant never keeps either dollar, yet the card-processing fee, typically around 2% to 3%, is calculated on…
A federal gas-tax holiday sounds like relief. For the average American family, it would amount to about $35 over five months, roughly what it costs to fill half a tank. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, introduced the Gas Tax Suspension Act (S. 4485) during the 119th Congress. In May 2026, Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly…
Twenty-four months. That is how long the majority of America’s homebuilders have described their market as poor, and the streak just became the longest on record. The National Association of Home Builders’ Housing Market Index registered 40 in April 2026, extending an unbroken run below the 50-point line that divides optimism from pessimism. No previous…
When Nvidia reports fiscal first-quarter results after the closing bell on Wednesday, the number at the top of the page will be difficult to process on first read: Wall Street analysts tracked by LSEG expect roughly $78.8 billion in revenue for a single three-month period ending in late April 2026. That $78.8 billion figure represents…
The price of a backyard steak dinner keeps setting records, and the timing could not be worse for anyone planning a Memorial Day cookout. The national average for uncooked beef steaks reached $13.02 per pound in April 2026, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. That…