The financial news that actually matters
Taxpayers who owe pandemic-era penalties tied to the Kwong decision face a hard deadline: paper Form 843 claims must be mailed on or before July 10, 2026, and the IRS does not accept the form electronically. With fewer than six weeks left, the requirement to print, sign, and physically mail a document creates a bottleneck…
American homeowners are sitting on roughly $11 trillion in tappable home equity, a record-level reserve of household wealth that remains almost entirely unborrowed. Federal Reserve data show that revolving home equity loan balances at commercial banks have grown only modestly in recent quarters, even as residential property values climbed. The gap between what owners could…
The Federal Reserve, FDIC, and OCC on March 19, 2026, formally replaced the stricter bank-capital rules they had proposed in July 2023 with a scaled-back package of three coordinated proposals. The original plan would have imposed tougher capital requirements on banks with more than $100 billion in assets, covering credit risk, operational risk, market risk,…
Oracle Corporation has booked up to $1.6 billion in restructuring costs under its Fiscal 2026 plan, with the bulk of that spending going to employee severance. That figure represents a dramatic escalation from the company’s prior-year restructuring activity under its Fiscal 2024 plan, arriving at a moment when Oracle is aggressively redirecting resources toward cloud…
More than 4,000 investors handed over roughly $528 million to funds that marketed themselves as a way to buy shares in private companies before they went public. The pitch was simple: no upfront fees, direct access to hot pre-IPO stock. But federal regulators say the operators were quietly adding markups as high as 150 percent…
American companies are filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection at a pace not seen in years, with commercial reorganization cases climbing roughly 67 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. January 2026 alone recorded 956 commercial Chapter 11 filings, a 76 percent increase over the 544 cases filed in January 2025. The acceleration…
Roughly 26 million adults in the United States have no credit file at all, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. For those people, renting an apartment, financing a car, or even signing up for a basic phone plan can mean hitting a wall. A secured credit card, which requires a cash deposit equal to…
Devin Ward Elder, founder and CEO of DJE Texas Management Group, pleaded guilty to wire fraud after raising approximately $69.5 million from roughly 345 investors through 17 separate offerings between January 2023 and March 2025. Federal prosecutors described the operation as a scheme that recycled new investor money into Ponzi-like payments to earlier participants, masking…
Consumers carrying high-interest credit card debt can stop interest charges from piling up for 12 to 21 months by moving balances to a card with a promotional 0% APR. But the transfer itself is not free. Issuers can legally charge a one-time balance-transfer fee even when the promotional rate is 0%, and that upfront cost,…
Investors in states with high income tax rates stand to keep significantly more of their Treasury interest earnings than they would from comparable bank deposits or corporate bonds, thanks to a federal statute that bars states and their subdivisions from taxing interest on U.S. government obligations. The rule, codified in 31 U.S. Code Section 3124,…