The financial news that actually matters
In April, more than one in three homebuilders slashed base prices on new homes, the largest share to do so since the housing bust of 2009. Another 60% sweetened deals with free upgrades, closing-cost help, or mortgage-rate buydowns. The numbers, drawn from the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, paint a picture…
Used cars and trucks jumped 1.5 percent in price during April, the steepest single-month increase the category has posted since at least mid-2022, according to Consumer Price Index figures the Bureau of Labor Statistics published in May 2026. In an inflation report that was otherwise quiet, the used-vehicle line stood out, and it arrived at…
Every container clearing U.S. customs right now carries a 10% surcharge that two federal courts have said the president had no legal authority to impose. The Court of International Trade ruled 2-1 against President Donald Trump’s global tariff in late May 2026, the second judicial rebuke of the administration’s trade powers in roughly ten days….
Somewhere in the United States, a 70-year-old retiree who earned top wages for 35 straight years is collecting a Social Security check north of $5,000 a month. That person exists, but statistically, you almost certainly are not that person. The average retiree deposits about $2,071 a month from Social Security, according to the Social Security…
The number ticked past 113,000 sometime around the last week of May 2026. That is how many technology workers in the United States have been laid off since January 1, according to the company-by-company database maintained by Layoffs.fyi, the independent tracker whose data is regularly cited by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times,…
Companies got $166 billion in tariff refunds after the Supreme Court ruling — consumers who paid higher prices aren’t getting a dime When the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s tariffs in February 2026, General Motors stood to get roughly $500 million back from the federal government. The family that paid an extra few hundred…
Roughly one in every eight credit card accounts in the United States was at least 90 days past due during the first quarter of 2025. The serious delinquency rate held at 13.1%, according to the New York Fed’s Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, matching the recent peak and sitting at a level the…
Last Memorial Day, filling up the tank felt almost like a bargain. Gas prices had sunk to their lowest inflation-adjusted level since 2003, and some stations were flirting with sub-$3.00 gallons. Twelve months later, the pump tells a very different story. With an estimated 45 million drivers set to hit U.S. highways over the long…
The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield surged to roughly 4.60% on Wednesday, its highest closing level in about a year, after a hotter-than-expected inflation report forced bond traders to confront a scenario most had written off: the Federal Reserve raising interest rates again. Futures markets tied to the fed funds rate now imply an estimated 30%…
Jerome Powell may have already cast his final consequential vote as Federal Reserve chair. Whether he used it to break ranks will become public knowledge on Wednesday afternoon. The Fed held its benchmark interest rate steady at the April 28-29 meeting, keeping the federal funds rate in the 4.25%-4.50% range where it has sat since…