The financial news that actually matters
The taxes the United States charges on imported goods have quietly risen to a level the country has not seen in roughly eight decades. The average effective tariff now sits in the low double digits, the steepest since the 1940s, and another round of increases is scheduled to take hold in August. For households already…
A South Korean memory-chip maker has pulled off the largest American stock-market debut ever staged by a company based outside the United States. SK Hynix, one of the world’s biggest producers of the memory chips that sit inside laptops, phones and the data centers running artificial intelligence, listed shares on Wall Street and raised a…
Stanley Druckenmiller has spent decades earning a reputation as one of the sharpest macro investors alive, and his current wager is a pointed one: he is betting that U.S. government bonds have further to fall. The billionaire, who ran money for George Soros before building his own storied record, has positioned against Treasuries on the…
Federal authorities have pulled one of the most-wanted names in American health-care fraud off the run, arresting a fugitive in the Philippines who prosecutors say masterminded a telemedicine operation that billed roughly $1.2 billion to federal health programs. The capture closed a lengthy international manhunt for a defendant who had slipped overseas as investigators tightened…
Intel, once the largest and most profitable chipmaker in the world, is taking a scalpel to the part of the company that actually builds its products. The latest round of cuts targets up to 20% of the manufacturing workforce — the technicians, engineers and operators who run the fabrication plants that turn silicon wafers into…
Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia secured a guilty plea from the chief executive of Praetorian Group International, who admitted operating a bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme that pulled in roughly $200 million from thousands of investors before it collapsed. The case is one of the larger cryptocurrency fraud prosecutions to reach a plea this…
Google and its parent company, Alphabet, have agreed to a $68 million settlement to resolve claims that the company’s voice Assistant recorded private conversations when nobody meant to switch it on. Cash is available to a broad group of people who bought Google devices or used the Assistant over the past decade, and the window…
New guardrails on the debt no one plans for A wave of state medical-debt protection laws took effect around July 1, 2026, and together they redraw what hospitals and collectors can do to patients who fall behind on a bill. The strongest versions block interest and late fees from piling onto a medical debt before…
Evictions in New York City have risen to their highest level in years, a stark measure of how far the city’s affordability crisis has spread as rents hover near record highs. The pace has quickened enough that housing advocates now warn the recovery from the pandemic-era eviction pause has tipped into something harsher for the…
Homeowners across California are staring down the steepest home-insurance increase of any state in the country this year, a fresh signal of how sharply the cost of protecting a house has climbed in the most disaster-exposed corners of the United States. Industry forecasters put the average 2026 increase in California at roughly 16%, a bigger…