The financial news that actually matters
The pump at a Wawa station outside Philadelphia read $4.51 on a Tuesday morning in late May 2026. Cars idled in a line that stretched past the lot and onto the access road, drivers checking phones, doing math, deciding whether to fill the tank or stop at half. Across the country, the same number glared…
Starting in July 2026, parents of roughly 5.4 million children will be eligible to open a new kind of federally funded investment account. Under a provision in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law in 2025, the U.S. government deposits $1,000 into an account for every American baby born between January 1, 2025,…
A graduate student borrowing $50,000 in federal loans this fall will pay roughly $8,000 more in interest over a standard 10-year repayment than a classmate who borrowed the same amount in 2023-24. That gap is the direct result of a rate reset taking effect July 1, 2026: new Direct Unsubsidized loans for graduate and professional…
Somewhere in the stack of proposals Congress is weighing to keep Social Security solvent, one idea keeps surfacing in budget discussions on Capitol Hill: put a hard ceiling on benefits so that no retiree collects more than $50,000 a year, no matter how much they paid into the system over a career. The cap would…
Millions of taxpayers who paid failure-to-pay penalties on their 2020 or 2021 federal returns may be owed refunds they have never collected. In late 2023, the IRS announced it would automatically reverse those penalties for filers whose assessed balance was under $100,000, a direct response to the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. But more…
Meta eliminated roughly 8,000 positions this week in its largest single round of layoffs since early 2023. About 7,000 employees who survived the cuts received new assignments: build the artificial intelligence systems that rendered their former colleagues unnecessary. Another 6,000 open positions will go unfilled, pushing the total headcount reduction to roughly 14,000. The layoffs…
A server at a Chicago restaurant earns a $20 tip on a credit card. Before that money reaches her, the bank that issued the customer’s card skims a percentage off the top as an interchange fee. Starting July 1, 2026, Illinois law was supposed to stop banks from collecting that cut on tips and sales…
Put a number on it: a family closing on a $400,000 home this month at 6.6 percent will write a check for roughly $2,509 in principal and interest every month for the next 30 years. The same loan in early 2021, when 30-year fixed rates briefly dipped below 3 percent, would have cost about $1,686….
Fill up a midsize SUV once a week this summer, and the proposed federal gas-tax holiday would save you about $1.60 each trip. Over five months, that adds up to roughly $35, less than what most families spend on a single weeknight takeout order. The bill behind those numbers landed in the Senate in May…
The sales pitch was simple: bring in artificial intelligence, streamline operations, do more with fewer people. A growing body of research now suggests the “fewer people” part happened on schedule while the “do more” part has not. Two working papers from the National Bureau of Economic Research, drawing on U.S. Census Bureau survey data and…