The financial news that actually matters
Anyone handing cash or property to a family member, friend, or anyone else in 2026 can transfer up to $19,000 per recipient without triggering a federal gift-tax return. The Internal Revenue Service set that threshold after applying its annual inflation adjustment, and the figure applies on a per-person basis, meaning a donor who gives $19,000…
Consumers who bank at community institutions and credit unions will keep paying overdraft fees as high as $35 per transaction after Congress killed the only federal rule that would have capped those charges. The repealed rule applied exclusively to banks and credit unions holding more than $10 billion in assets, leaving thousands of smaller institutions…
At least 86 workers at a Pennsylvania logistics firm lost their jobs this month after the company shut down, and federal safety regulators issued a fresh batch of out-of-service orders against trucking carriers on the same timeline. The closures and enforcement actions, concentrated in a narrow 10-day window, are squeezing capacity out of the freight…
Edwin Brant Frost IV, the president of First Liberty Building & Loan in Georgia, faces federal wire‑fraud charges and SEC civil allegations for running a $140 million Ponzi scheme that pulled in roughly 300 investors over more than a decade. Frost marketed the investments as bridge loans, used new investor money to pay earlier participants…
Investors who lost money to securities fraud received $262 million back from the Securities and Exchange Commission during fiscal year 2025, while 48 people who reported wrongdoing collected $60 million in whistleblower awards. Those figures, released by the SEC, represent one of the clearest measures of whether enforcement activity translates into real money for real…
American homeowners have been tapping their property values at a steady clip, with home-equity lines of credit rising for 16 consecutive quarters to reach a $446 billion outstanding balance. That streak spans four full years of growth in a product that had been shrinking for most of the decade after the 2008 financial crisis. The…
Federal prosecutors say Edwin Brant Frost IV, president of Georgia-based First Liberty Building & Loan, funneled more than $230,000 of investor money into renting a waterfront vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, for his family. That spending line is one piece of a broader pattern of personal outlays allegedly drawn from a $140 million Ponzi scheme…
American households already stretched by rising costs at the pump and the grocery store now face the sharpest annual price increase in nearly three years. The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers rose 4.2 percent over the 12 months ending in May 2026, up from 3.8 percent in April, driven almost entirely by a…
Federal authorities have accused 21 people of participating in an insider-trading operation that stretched across years and drew on stolen merger details from some of the world’s top corporate law firms. At the center of the alleged scheme is Nicolo Nourafchan, a Los Angeles-based mergers-and-acquisitions attorney who, according to the SEC, orchestrated the ring and…
American homeowners now hold roughly $34.5 trillion in equity across their properties, an average of about $302,000 per owner-occupied home. That figure, drawn from the Federal Reserve’s Financial Accounts data, sits just below the record high reached several years ago and represents more than double the level from a decade earlier. Yet for tens of…