The financial news that actually matters
American shoppers spent a record $964.4 billion during the 2023 holiday season, a 3.8% increase from the year before, cementing one of the clearest signs that consumer spending remained surprisingly durable even as higher interest rates and inflation continued to pressure household budgets. The number quickly became a benchmark for retailers because it showed that…
New applications for unemployment benefits moved lower in mid-December, offering another sign that the U.S. labor market was ending 2025 on relatively steady ground. The latest weekly reading does not point to a hiring boom, and it does not erase signs of slower demand for workers, but it does suggest employers are still avoiding the…
The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank roughly 1,100 points after the Federal Reserve delivered a quarter-point rate cut but paired it with a message Wall Street did not want to hear: borrowing costs may not come down nearly as fast as investors had hoped.That disconnect is what turned an expected rate cut into a market…
America’s banking industry finished 2025 with a split-screen result. On one side of the ledger, banks remained profitable. On the other, the roster of FDIC-insured institutions kept getting smaller, underscoring how consolidation continues to reshape the sector even in periods that look stable on the surface. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s fourth-quarter banking profile shows…
U.S. Treasury yields have been moving higher even as the Federal Reserve has begun trimming short-term interest rates, a combination that has forced investors to rethink the idea that lower policy rates automatically lead to cheaper long-term borrowing. By mid-December, the message from the bond market had become harder to ignore. Traders were no longer…
The S&P 500 closed at 6,118.71 on January 23, 2025, finishing above 6,100 for the first time in the index’s history. The move gave Wall Street another clean milestone in a market that had already spent months grinding to fresh highs, and it did so with a familiar cast at the center of the action:…
American consumers appear to have carried solid spending momentum into November as the holiday shopping season moved into full swing, with early retail signals pointing to another healthy month for household demand. The official government reading on personal spending had not yet been released, but the available evidence suggested shoppers were still spending at a…