The financial news that actually matters
A parent who borrowed $60,000 in federal PLUS loans to cover four years at a state university is staring down monthly payments north of $700 under a standard repayment schedule this fall, with interest rates on new PLUS disbursements now sitting at 9.07%. That same parent, by consolidating into a federal Direct Consolidation Loan and…
Three ships were hit or seized in the world’s most important oil corridor on a single day, and the president said the truce was fine. On Friday, May 8, 2026, U.S. forces fired on and disabled two Iranian-flagged tankers near the Strait of Hormuz. Hours later, Iran’s navy boarded and seized a separate vessel, the…
For every $100 of after-tax income the average American household earned in March, just $3.60 went into savings. The Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that the personal savings rate held at 3.6% that month, with total personal saving at $857.3 billion. According to the agency’s historical tables, the rate has not been this low since…
The window of relative affordability that opened for homebuyers in early April has slammed shut. New 30-year fixed mortgages are pricing at 6.65% as of this morning, the highest daily rate since mid-March 2026, according to the Mortgage News Daily composite tracker. The trigger: the 30-year Treasury yield has crossed 5% and stayed there for…
In April, more than one in three homebuilders slashed base prices on new homes, the largest share to do so since the housing bust of 2009. Another 60% sweetened deals with free upgrades, closing-cost help, or mortgage-rate buydowns. The numbers, drawn from the National Association of Home Builders/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index, paint a picture…
Used cars and trucks jumped 1.5 percent in price during April, the steepest single-month increase the category has posted since at least mid-2022, according to Consumer Price Index figures the Bureau of Labor Statistics published in May 2026. In an inflation report that was otherwise quiet, the used-vehicle line stood out, and it arrived at…
Every container clearing U.S. customs right now carries a 10% surcharge that two federal courts have said the president had no legal authority to impose. The Court of International Trade ruled 2-1 against President Donald Trump’s global tariff in late May 2026, the second judicial rebuke of the administration’s trade powers in roughly ten days….
Somewhere in the United States, a 70-year-old retiree who earned top wages for 35 straight years is collecting a Social Security check north of $5,000 a month. That person exists, but statistically, you almost certainly are not that person. The average retiree deposits about $2,071 a month from Social Security, according to the Social Security…
The number ticked past 113,000 sometime around the last week of May 2026. That is how many technology workers in the United States have been laid off since January 1, according to the company-by-company database maintained by Layoffs.fyi, the independent tracker whose data is regularly cited by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times,…
Companies got $166 billion in tariff refunds after the Supreme Court ruling — consumers who paid higher prices aren’t getting a dime When the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s tariffs in February 2026, General Motors stood to get roughly $500 million back from the federal government. The family that paid an extra few hundred…