The financial news that actually matters
Roughly 330,000 U.S. importers are owed a combined $166 billion after the Supreme Court struck down tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. About $80 billion of that total has not yet been returned. Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, has pressed the Trump administration and Customs and Border Protection for detailed data…
Reinaldo Miralles Gonzalez of Doral, Florida, was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison for his role in a fraud ring that impersonated FBI agents to intimidate and steal from victims, many of them elderly. Gonzalez was also ordered to pay $123,000 in restitution after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit mail fraud. The case…
More than 2,000 elderly Americans lost a combined $27 million to a fraud ring that used fake tech-support calls, bank impersonation, and government impersonation scams to trick victims into mailing cash or wiring money. The man who ran the operation, a Chinese national named Zhao Wang, also known as “Oscar,” was sentenced to 151 months…
Fraud losses reported by Americans aged 60 and older reached $2.46 billion last year, according to the Federal Trade Commission’s annual report to Congress on protecting older consumers. That figure almost certainly understates the real toll because many victims never file a complaint. Impersonation scams, in which callers pose as government agents or bank officials,…
Workers who need fast cash for an emergency can now pull up to $1,000 from a 401(k) or IRA once per calendar year without paying the 10% early-withdrawal penalty that has long discouraged retirement savers from touching their accounts before age 59 and a half. The exception, created by Section 115 of the SECURE 2.0…
American car buyers financing a used vehicle now face a monthly bill that has reached roughly $531, a figure that reflects years of rising vehicle prices, elevated interest rates, and expanding loan balances. That number, drawn from Federal Reserve data tracking motor vehicle loan flows, signals a growing strain on household budgets at a time…
American car buyers now face the steepest affordability barrier on record: 42.2 weeks of median household income to cover the average new vehicle, which has climbed near $52,000. The figure comes from the Vehicle Affordability Index, a joint monthly series from Cox Automotive and Moody’s Analytics that tracks how many weeks of earnings a typical…
More than a million small stock trades executed by five of the country’s best-known brokerages carried commissions so high that regulators across dozens of states stepped in to force refunds. LPL Financial, Edward Jones, Raymond James, Ameriprise Financial, and Osaic (formerly known as Advisor Group) have agreed to return approximately $19 million to investors nationwide…
Savers keeping cash in a standard deposit account are earning roughly one-tenth of what the best certificates of deposit offer. The FDIC’s national rate for savings accounts sits at 0.38 percent as of May 2026, while top-tier one-year CDs advertise yields near 4.40 percent. That gap, more than four full percentage points, represents a quiet…
Roughly 31.9 million 401(k) accounts holding a combined $2.1 trillion in retirement savings have been left behind by American workers who changed jobs or lost track of old employer plans. The average forgotten balance sits at $66,691, a sum large enough to cover more than a year of median household expenses. Federal regulators are now…