The financial news that actually matters
Gas prices have climbed past $4.50 a gallon in much of the country, and for the 66 million Americans who depend on Social Security, that pain at the pump is now showing up somewhere unexpected: next year’s raise. The latest projections from The Senior Citizens League, a nonpartisan advocacy group that tracks the cost-of-living adjustment…
The clock is ticking for millions of federal student loan borrowers, and the math is unforgiving. If you are among the estimated 8 million people who enrolled in the SAVE repayment plan, that plan is being shut down. Starting July 1, 2025, loan servicers will begin sending notices giving each borrower 90 days to choose…
The U.S. economy added 115,000 jobs in April 2026, nearly doubling the roughly 65,000 that forecasters in the Reuters consensus survey as reported by the Associated Press had expected. The unemployment rate held at 4.3 percent. On the surface, that looks like resilience. But zoom out five months and a very different picture comes into…
Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company that routes and protects roughly 20% of all web traffic, told about 1,100 employees this week that their jobs are being eliminated. The cuts amount to roughly one-fifth of the company’s workforce. Leadership pointed to a single driving force: artificial intelligence tools adopted internally have made that many positions unnecessary….
On June 30, 2026, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency issued a preemption determination that stopped Illinois’ Interchange Fee Prohibition Act from ever touching a single transaction processed by a nationally chartered bank. The state law was set to take effect the very next day, July 1. That one-day gap between the federal…
For the second month in a row, artificial intelligence was the single most cited reason American companies gave for eliminating jobs. In April alone, employers announced 21,490 AI-driven cuts, roughly 26% of every layoff disclosed nationwide, according to the latest monthly report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the outplacement firm that has tracked corporate layoff…
Every month, tens of millions of American households make their credit card payments and watch most of the money vanish into interest charges. On a balance of $6,600, which is close to the national average for households carrying revolving debt, a 21% APR generates roughly $1,386 in interest over a year. That money never reduces…
Starting July 1, federal loan servicers will begin notifying the roughly 8 million borrowers still enrolled in the frozen SAVE repayment plan that they must choose a new way to pay back their student debt. Each borrower will have 90 days from the date of their individual notice to pick a plan. Those who don’t…
Somewhere in the IRS’s systems, a penalty is sitting on your 2022 tax account that may never have been legally valid. If you filed your federal return late that year and paid a late-filing or late-payment penalty, the agency’s own pandemic relief rules may entitle you to a full refund of that charge. But the…
PayPal is preparing to shed roughly 4,760 jobs over the next two to three years. Upwork, the freelance-work marketplace, already eliminated about 24% of its workforce in what the company’s SEC filing describes as a restructuring plan adopted in May 2026. Both companies pointed to artificial intelligence as a driving force, and both made their…