The financial news that actually matters
A new washing machine costs more this spring. So does a car, a laptop, and the copper wiring inside a house under construction. The reason traces back to a series of tariff actions that, taken together, now represent the largest effective tax increase on American households since President Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act…
More than one in eight credit card accounts in the United States is now past due. That is not a projection or a warning. It is the current state of American consumer credit, and the country has not seen anything like it since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The 30-plus-day credit card delinquency…
In January 2022, a borrower closing on a $400,000 house with 10% down could lock a 30-year fixed mortgage near 3.2% and walk away with a principal-and-interest payment of roughly $1,560 a month. That same borrower purchasing that same house in June 2026, now priced closer to $440,000 after cumulative appreciation, would face a rate…
The typical American home has never cost more, and the market has rarely moved this slowly. In April 2026, the median existing-home sales price, a non-seasonally-adjusted nominal figure reported by the National Association of Realtors, reached $417,700, surpassing every previous month on record, according to data tracked through the Federal Reserve’s FRED database. Yet the…
A grandmother in Texas picks up the phone and hears her grandson’s voice, panicked, saying he has been in a car accident and needs bail money wired immediately. The voice is his, down to the slight drawl and the way he rushes through sentences. Except it is not him. It is a synthetic replica generated…
Roughly 8 million federal student loan borrowers are about to lose the repayment plan they signed up for, and the clock to pick a replacement is already running. The U.S. Department of Education has declared the SAVE plan unlawful and is winding it down. Loan servicers have begun sending notices to affected borrowers, each triggering…
American consumers kept swiping their cards in April 2026, but the receipt tells a split story. Total retail and food service sales rose 0.5% from March to a seasonally adjusted $757.1 billion, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s advance monthly report. That is a sharp cooldown from March’s revised 1.6% surge, a gain initially pegged…
If you were hoping cheaper borrowing was around the corner, Kevin Warsh just closed that door. The incoming Federal Reserve chairman, who takes the gavel in June 2026, told the Senate Banking Committee during his April 14 nomination hearing that interest rate cuts this year are not happening. Republican senators on the panel cheered the…
For the roughly 70 million Americans who depend on Social Security, the size of next January’s cost-of-living adjustment just became a lot harder to predict. Two consecutive months of stronger-than-expected inflation have jolted early 2027 COLA estimates upward, with projections now stretching from 2.8% to as high as 4.5%, a range that could mean the…
If you run a firearms shop, a cryptocurrency exchange, or a religious nonprofit, you may already know what it feels like to open a letter from your bank informing you that your account is being closed, with no meaningful explanation attached. For years, businesses and individuals operating in legal but politically sensitive spaces have reported…