The financial news that actually matters
A firearms dealer in Georgia loses his business checking account. A cryptocurrency startup in Wyoming gets dropped by three banks in six months. A faith-based foster care agency in Texas is told its views on marriage make it too risky to bank. None of them broke the law. All of them were swept up in…
On May 1, 2026, a round-trip flight from Las Vegas to Dallas on Spirit Airlines cost $39. By May 3, Spirit no longer existed, and the cheapest seat on that same route had jumped to $124. That 218% spike, captured through fare checks on Kayak and Google Flights, is the sharpest documented price swing on…
The U.S. Treasury on May 1, 2026, set the new Series I bond composite rate at 4.26% for all bonds purchased between May 1 and October 31, 2026. That marks a notable jump from the previous cycle and pairs with a 0.90% fixed rate that locks in for the bond’s full 30-year life. A saver…
When Marcus Ellington closed on his three-bedroom in suburban Denver in September 2023, his 30-year fixed rate came in at 7.12%. “I knew it was ugly,” he told himself at the time, “but the house wasn’t going to wait.” Two and a half years later, Ellington is one of a growing wave of homeowners rushing…
A homeowner in Cape Coral, Florida, who locked in a 3.25% mortgage rate in 2021 expected a stable monthly payment for the next 30 years. The loan has performed exactly as promised. What nobody underwrote was the insurance bill: her annual premium jumped from $1,800 to nearly $5,400 over three years, and when the increase…
In 2009, roughly one in every 45 American households received a foreclosure notice. In 2024, that figure was closer to one in 370. The gap between those two numbers is the single most important thing to understand about today’s foreclosure headlines. Foreclosure filings across the United States have climbed about 26% from the historic lows…
The first round of Social Security deposits for May 2026 landed in bank accounts on Wednesday, May 14, and for millions of retirees the numbers on screen tell a story they have seen before: a cost-of-living raise that looked decent on paper but shrank considerably after Medicare took its cut. The 2.8 percent COLA that…
The U.S. Treasury just gave savers a reason to log into TreasuryDirect. As of May 1, 2026, newly purchased Series I savings bonds earn a composite annual rate of 4.26%, the highest yield the government has offered on I bonds since the 5.27% rate set in November 2023. That rate applies to any bond bought…
Smoke was still rising over the port of Fujairah on the morning of May 28, 2026, when tanker captains in the Gulf of Oman began rerouting. Hours earlier, a coordinated Iranian barrage of cruise missiles and armed drones had slammed into one of the UAE’s largest oil export terminals, igniting fires visible from commercial shipping…
A round-trip flight from Fort Lauderdale to Detroit on Spirit Airlines used to run about $120 in the off-season. That fare no longer exists. Neither does the airline that offered it, at least not in any form most travelers would recognize. Spirit’s financial collapse across 2024 and 2025 ripped more than 200 routes and roughly…