The financial news that actually matters
A week ago, filling a 15-gallon tank cost the average American driver about $61. Today it costs roughly $67. The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline surged to $4.48 as of late May 2026, according to AAA, a 38-cent jump in just seven days. The automobile association’s warning was blunt: the summer…
A borrower earning $40,000 a year with $50,000 in federal student loans could go from paying nothing each month to owing more than $500, practically overnight, if they miss a fast-approaching deadline. That is the reality facing roughly 8 million people who were enrolled in the SAVE repayment plan before the U.S. Department of Education…
Somewhere in the IRS’s systems, there are penalty charges attached to millions of taxpayer accounts from the pandemic years. Late-filing penalties. Late-payment penalties. Interest stacked on top of both. A federal court ruled last year that many of those charges should never have been assessed. And the independent office inside the IRS that advocates for…
Missiles and drones launched by Iran struck civilian targets inside the United Arab Emirates on May 4, 2026, injuring three people and drawing a sharp condemnation from Abu Dhabi. Wall Street barely flinched. The S&P 500 slipped 29.37 points to close at 7,200.75, a decline of roughly 0.41%, according to market data reported by the…
One sector is carrying American manufacturing on its back, and it runs on GPUs. U.S. factories booked $630.4 billion in new orders during March 2026, a $9.1 billion jump that represents the strongest single-month gain since November 2025, according to the Census Bureau’s latest M3 survey (release CB26-68). Nearly all of that growth was concentrated…
The Senate Banking Committee voted 13-11 on May 1, 2026, to advance Kevin Warsh’s nomination as chair of the Federal Reserve, with every Republican voting in favor and every Democrat opposed. It was the first purely partisan committee vote for a Fed chair in the institution’s 113-year history, and it sets up a full Senate…
For years, licensed gun dealers, crypto startups, and faith-based nonprofits have shared a common frustration: banks closing their accounts not because of fraud or unpaid debts, but because regulators quietly flagged their industries as reputational liabilities. On June 9, 2026, a new federal rule is supposed to end that practice for good. The Federal Deposit…
The next time you overdraw your checking account at one of the country’s largest banks, the fee will almost certainly be $29 to $35, the same range it has been for years. A federal rule that would have capped that charge at $5 for big banks was permanently killed before it ever took effect, and…
Three Indian nationals were near the Fujairah oil terminal complex on the Gulf of Oman when Iranian missiles struck on May 4, 2026. Debris injured all three. A separate armed drone ignited a fire at a storage tank in the sprawling facility, which handles what industry sources estimate to be roughly 42 million barrels of…
The April jobs report drops Thursday and economists expect the weakest hiring since the pandemic — 50,000 jobs vs. 178,000 in March Somewhere around 50,000. That is the number economists at major banks and research firms are penciling in for April’s nonfarm payroll gain, according to consensus surveys compiled by Bloomberg and Reuters. If the…