The financial news that actually matters
American shoppers are paying near-record prices for steak and ground beef, and the core reason is simple: the nation’s cattle herd has shrunk to its smallest size in roughly 75 years. With fewer animals moving through feedlots and into processing plants, domestic beef production has fallen short of demand, and federal forecasters see no quick…
U.S. equity valuations have reached a threshold crossed only once before, at the peak of the dot-com bubble in March 2000. The cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio, known as the CAPE ratio, has climbed to 41.6, matching the extreme recorded just before the technology stock collapse that wiped trillions from American portfolios. For investors holding index…
High earners who want to fund a Roth IRA for 2026 face a familiar barrier: the IRS has set income phase-out ranges that block direct contributions once modified adjusted gross income exceeds certain thresholds. But the backdoor Roth strategy, which routes money through a nondeductible traditional IRA before converting it, remains fully available to taxpayers…
More than 1,700 workers at General Motors battery plants in Ohio and Michigan lost their jobs in early 2026 after the automaker paused cell production at two Ultium facilities and recorded $7.6 billion in EV-related charges for fiscal year 2025. The idlings at Warren, Ohio, and Spring Hill, Tennessee, beginning in January 2026, mark the…
Low-wage workers in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, D.C., and Chicago woke up to bigger paychecks on July 1 as a new round of minimum wage increases took effect across multiple states and cities. Alaska jumped a full dollar to $14.00 per hour, D.C. climbed to $18.40, and Chicago reached $17.05, while Oregon recalibrated its regional tiers…
Taxpayers who filed electronically and chose direct deposit this season received refunds in fewer than 21 days in the vast majority of cases, while those who mailed paper returns faced waits of six weeks or longer. The IRS issues more than nine out of ten refunds in less than 21 days when both e-filing and…
Taxpayers who have not yet maxed out their 2026 IRA still have months of runway. The contribution deadline does not expire on December 31 but instead tracks the federal income tax return due date, which for calendar-year filers falls on April 15, 2027, or the next business day when weekends or legal holidays intervene. With…
Every person in the United States can now pull a credit report from Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion once a week, every week, at no cost. The three major bureaus made this access permanent through AnnualCreditReport.com, expanding on a federal law that originally guaranteed only one free report per bureau per year. For anyone applying for…
Tens of thousands of workers at some of the largest U.S. technology companies have lost their jobs in recent months, with employers increasingly pointing to artificial intelligence as the reason. Oracle attributed workforce reductions to AI adoption and deployment in its fiscal year 2026 annual filing. Meta slashed 8,000 jobs, equal to 10% of its…
Bitcoin slid back toward $62,000 on Tuesday as a broad selloff in technology stocks rippled across global markets. The decline came less than a week after the Federal Reserve released updated economic projections following its June 16–17 meeting, showing a higher expected path for interest rates and firmer inflation forecasts. Regulated futures positioning added to…