The financial news that actually matters
Anyone with a Roth IRA can pull out the money they personally contributed at any age, for any reason, without owing federal income tax or an early withdrawal penalty. That single rule, rooted in the ordering framework of 26 U.S. Code Section 408A and its companion regulation, separates the Roth from nearly every other retirement…
Families adding a teenager to their car-insurance policy faced an average premium increase of 17 percent over the past year, even as the broader U.S. motor vehicle insurance market showed little price movement. The split hit hardest in households already stretched by rising costs elsewhere, turning what should be a routine milestone into a significant…
The U.S. government has filed its largest civil forfeiture action ever against cryptocurrency confidence scams, targeting more than $225.3 million in digital assets stolen from over 430 suspected victims worldwide. The complaint, docketed as Civil Action No. 25-cv-1907 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, names approximately 225,364,961 USDT as the defendant…
Millions of married couples filing joint tax returns will see their standard deduction rise to $32,200 for tax year 2026, a figure the IRS locked in after Congress passed the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act. The increase reshapes the math that determines whether joint filers benefit more from claiming the standard deduction or itemizing, and…
Fraud cost Americans roughly $16 billion in 2025, a record sum that jumped about 25% from the prior year even as the total number of reports rose more modestly. The Federal Trade Commission logged about 3 million fraud complaints for the year, up from 2.6 million in 2024, with imposter scams alone draining $3.5 billion…
Factory owners across the United States are watching their raw-material bills shrink at the fastest pace in months, offering a concrete signal that the inflation pipeline feeding consumer prices may be losing pressure. The Bureau of Labor Statistics published its latest Producer Price Index results covering May 2026, and the data on intermediate demand and…
People who send money across borders through stablecoins now face a new federal compliance test after Congress enacted the first U.S. law dedicated to regulating these digital dollar tokens. A stablecoin called Open USD has entered the market with a pitch aimed squarely at cross-border payments, arriving just as the legal ground rules for reserve…
James Wellesley, a British national who operated under the aliases “Andrew Fuller” and “Andrew Templar,” was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison for running a Ponzi-like wine fraud that extracted over $97 million from more than 140 investors across multiple countries. The sentence, handed down in Brooklyn federal court, caps a case that took…
Families who finalize an adoption in 2025 can claim up to $17,280 per eligible child from the IRS, and for the first time, up to $5,000 of that credit will be paid out as a cash refund even if the household owes zero federal income tax. The change took effect after Public Law 119-21, signed…
New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office has been sitting on roughly $10 billion in unclaimed funds, and a program launched in January 2025 now sends checks directly to verified owners of small accounts without requiring them to file a claim. Through April 2026, the Expedited Payment Program had issued more than 210,000 checks totaling…