The financial news that actually matters
At 4 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, May 14, the S&P 500 settled at 7,501.24, slipping past the 7,500 threshold for the first time in the index’s nearly seven-decade history. The close was confirmed by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis FRED database, which typically publishes daily closing values with a one-day lag sourced from…
Nvidia added roughly $900 billion to its market capitalization in just seven trading sessions, a gain of about 20% that has pushed the chipmaker to the brink of a milestone no publicly traded company has ever reached: a $6 trillion valuation. Shares rose as much as 4.7% on Wednesday, May 14, hitting an intraday high…
President Donald Trump left a two-day summit in Beijing in June 2026 claiming a major win: an agreement by Chinese President Xi Jinping to purchase 200 Boeing commercial jets. But on the three issues that will shape the U.S.-China rivalry for years, the summit produced nothing. No deal on Chinese rare earth exports. No new…
Students taking out federal loans for the 2026-27 academic year are on track to pay 6.52% interest, a rate that would be the steepest for new undergraduate borrowers since 2024-25, when the rate hit 6.53%. The increase reverses a brief dip during the 2025-26 cycle, when the rate fell to 6.53%’s predecessor of 6.53%. Once…
The checks are going out. After the Supreme Court struck down tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, U.S. Customs and Border Protection began processing refunds to the companies that originally paid the duties. More than 330,000 importers are now in line to recover a share of roughly $166 billion collected across more…
Somewhere in America, a 70-year-old who earned top-tier wages for decades just filed for Social Security and will collect more than $5,000 every month. A few miles away, another retiree opened the same kind of envelope and found a check for about $2,071. For roughly half of older households, that smaller number is not a…
Social Security deposits hit bank accounts today carrying a 2.8 percent cost-of-living adjustment that adds roughly $56 to the average retiree’s monthly check. That sounds like a raise until you compare it to the price of everything retirees actually buy. Consumer prices climbed 3.8 percent over the 12 months through April 2026, according to the…
Two months ago, the 2027 Social Security cost-of-living adjustment looked like it would land around 2%, a raise so thin it would barely cover a modest bump in grocery spending. That forecast is already outdated. Inflation reports for March and April 2026 showed the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, known…
The world burned through more oil stockpiles in two months than most analysts thought possible. Global observed inventories fell by 246 million barrels across March and April 2026, the fastest two-month drawdown the International Energy Agency has ever recorded, according to its May Oil Market Report. That collapse unfolded even as governments were pumping emergency…
For the first time since the Federal Reserve’s bruising tightening campaign ended in mid-2023, the word “hike” is back on the board. As of late May 2026, federal funds futures tracked by the CME FedWatch tool imply a 27% probability that the Fed will raise its benchmark rate by the conclusion of the December 15-16…