The financial news that actually matters
Out of every dollar the average American household brought home after taxes in April 2024, just 3.6 cents went into savings. The rest vanished into rent, groceries, gas, and debt payments. That rate, reported by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, was the lowest the country had seen since the months leading up to the 2008…
The national average price of regular gasoline slipped to $4.51 per gallon in the most recent Energy Information Administration weekly survey, a small reprieve for drivers who have watched pump prices grind higher for much of the past year. But the relief may be short-lived. The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Producer Price Index report, released…
More than one in eight dollars of credit card debt in the United States is now seriously past due, a threshold the banking system has not crossed since it was still absorbing losses from the Great Recession. The Federal Reserve’s latest charge-off and delinquency report, compiled from regulatory filings submitted by commercial banks, puts the…
A federal gas tax holiday introduced in Congress on April 29, 2026, would put roughly $35 back in the average family’s pocket over five months. That works out to about $7 a month, less than a fast-food combo meal, and it has trucking companies and road builders warning that the trade-off is not worth it:…
If you were hoping cheaper borrowing was around the corner, the Senate just made that a lot less likely. On a 54 to 45 vote in late May 2026, senators confirmed Kevin Warsh as chair of the Federal Reserve, handing President Trump’s pick the power to set the pace on interest rates at a moment…
Wall Street got two punches in two days, and neither pulled back. On May 12, 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Consumer Price Index rose 3.8% year-over-year in April, nearly double the Federal Reserve’s 2% target and above the 3.5% consensus forecast. The next morning, the BLS followed with a Producer Price…
On the morning of March 3, 2026, three days after fighting broke out across the Persian Gulf, a London-based tanker broker told clients on a conference call that his firm could not quote a rate for a single vessel willing to transit the Strait of Hormuz. “There is no price,” he said. “The market is…
A taxpayer who owed $50,000 on a late 2021 return and paid the bill 12 months later would have been hit with roughly $3,000 in failure-to-pay penalties alone. The IRS announced relief for exactly that kind of charge back in January 2024, and millions of people got automatic refunds. But not everyone did. If you…
If you run a gun shop, donate to controversial political causes, or operate a legal cannabis dispensary, you may have experienced something that thousands of Americans have reported over the past decade: your bank closed your account, offered little or no explanation, and left you scrambling to find another institution willing to take your money….
President Donald Trump touched down in Beijing on May 13, 2026, flanked by three of the most powerful executives in American technology: Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. No sitting U.S. president had visited China in nearly nine years, a period defined by a spiraling trade…