The financial news that actually matters
Ford is cutting 1,600 jobs at its BlueOval SK battery plant in Kentucky as it unwinds its electric vehicle battery joint venture with SK On and shifts strategy. The layoffs are significant enough that the U.S. Department of Labor has stepped in with targeted aid for affected workers in the state. Federal filings show Ford…
Berkshire Hathaway ended the first quarter of 2026 holding roughly $397 billion in cash and short-term U.S. Treasury investments, the largest reserve in the company’s history. The figure, disclosed in a quarterly filing covering the period through March 31, 2026, arrived alongside a profit that more than doubled and a sharply smaller crowd at the…
More than 90,000 people handed money to a man who said he would trade crypto and foreign exchange on their behalf. Instead, Ramil Ventura Palafox, founder of PGI Global, funneled more than $57 million of investor funds into luxury purchases and personal spending, according to federal regulators. On February 12, 2026, a federal judge sentenced…
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan charged Ryan Wear and Jordan Chirico with operating a Ponzi scheme built around water-vending machines that, according to the government, took in more than $200 million from investors. The SEC filed parallel civil actions alleging the pair ran two Ponzi-like schemes through Water Station Management LLC and Creative Technologies, Inc., raising…
McDonald’s reported $6.517 billion in revenue and $1.983 billion in net income for the first quarter of 2026, yet the company’s own earnings materials described a “challenging environment” for its core customers. The tension between those headline numbers and management’s caution about consumer spending tells a pointed story about where lower-income Americans stand right now….
Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi has warned that the probability of a U.S. recession is “uncomfortably high and rising,” a phrase that carries extra weight given the softening signals in recent federal labor data. The March 2026 Employment Situation report showed payroll growth slowing and the unemployment rate ticking upward, feeding a debate over whether…
New-car buyers in the United States are now spending a record $773 every month on their auto loans, and one in five of those buyers has crossed the $1,000 threshold. Edmunds data for the first quarter of 2026 shows the average amount financed for a new vehicle climbed to $43,899, another all-time high. The figures…
Up to 14.2 million email login credentials tied to six Japanese internet service providers were exposed after attackers compromised a shared backend email system operated by KDDI, one of Japan’s largest telecommunications companies. The breach turned a single point of intrusion into a sprawling, multi-company security failure, putting millions of users at risk of account…
Federal regulators have charged five unregistered brokers and four companies for raising at least $528 million from more than 4,000 investors worldwide through a pre-IPO fraud scheme that operated between approximately March 2019 and July 2022. A parallel criminal indictment names Raymond John Pirrello Jr., the founder and executive of Prior2IPO, on three counts including…
Roughly one in five workers who earn enough to qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit walk away from the money every year. For Tax Year 2022, the national participation rate stood at 80.8%, meaning 19.2% of eligible taxpayers never filed a claim. That gap has persisted for more than two decades, and with the…