The financial news that actually matters
American retailers ended 2025 with roughly 3,000 fewer stores than they started with, the widest annual gap between openings and closures in recent years. Just 5,270 new locations opened during the calendar year, while 8,270 shut their doors, according to year-end data compiled by Coresight Research. The numbers land at a moment when mid-tier apparel…
Homeowners sitting on open home equity lines of credit are seeing their borrowing costs fall to levels not recorded since mid-2024, with average HELOC rates settling near 7.2 percent. The decline tracks directly to a lower bank prime rate, the benchmark that determines what most borrowers actually pay each month. For the millions of households…
The Securities and Exchange Commission ordered $17.9 billion in monetary relief across 456 enforcement actions during fiscal year 2025, more than doubling the prior year’s total even as the agency filed far fewer cases. That surge, driven in large part by a single legacy fraud case worth billions, raises a pointed question: does the headline…
Americans lost $3.5 billion to imposter scams in 2025, and the Federal Trade Commission received more than one million reports about the category, making it the single most-reported type of fraud for the third consecutive year. The sheer volume of complaints dwarfs every other fraud type the agency tracks, and the dollar figure keeps climbing…
Anyone handing cash or property to a family member, friend, or anyone else in 2026 can transfer up to $19,000 per recipient without triggering a federal gift-tax return. The Internal Revenue Service set that threshold after applying its annual inflation adjustment, and the figure applies on a per-person basis, meaning a donor who gives $19,000…
Consumers who bank at community institutions and credit unions will keep paying overdraft fees as high as $35 per transaction after Congress killed the only federal rule that would have capped those charges. The repealed rule applied exclusively to banks and credit unions holding more than $10 billion in assets, leaving thousands of smaller institutions…
At least 86 workers at a Pennsylvania logistics firm lost their jobs this month after the company shut down, and federal safety regulators issued a fresh batch of out-of-service orders against trucking carriers on the same timeline. The closures and enforcement actions, concentrated in a narrow 10-day window, are squeezing capacity out of the freight…
Edwin Brant Frost IV, the president of First Liberty Building & Loan in Georgia, faces federal wire‑fraud charges and SEC civil allegations for running a $140 million Ponzi scheme that pulled in roughly 300 investors over more than a decade. Frost marketed the investments as bridge loans, used new investor money to pay earlier participants…
Investors who lost money to securities fraud received $262 million back from the Securities and Exchange Commission during fiscal year 2025, while 48 people who reported wrongdoing collected $60 million in whistleblower awards. Those figures, released by the SEC, represent one of the clearest measures of whether enforcement activity translates into real money for real…
American homeowners have been tapping their property values at a steady clip, with home-equity lines of credit rising for 16 consecutive quarters to reach a $446 billion outstanding balance. That streak spans four full years of growth in a product that had been shrinking for most of the decade after the 2008 financial crisis. The…