The financial news that actually matters
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…
Roughly one in every eight credit card accounts in the United States was at least 90 days past due during the first quarter of 2025. The serious delinquency rate held at 13.1%, according to the New York Fed’s Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit, matching the recent peak and sitting at a level the…
As of the week ending June 6, 2026, the S&P 500 is up approximately 4% for the year. Remove five stocks and the gain disappears entirely. NVIDIA, Broadcom, Amazon, Alphabet, and Intel have generated every point of the index’s advance, according to contribution-to-return data from S&P Dow Jones Indices. Collectively, those five names account for…
Last Memorial Day, filling up the tank felt almost like a bargain. Gas prices had sunk to their lowest inflation-adjusted level since 2003, and some stations were flirting with sub-$3.00 gallons. Twelve months later, the pump tells a very different story. With an estimated 45 million drivers set to hit U.S. highways over the long…
Firing up the grill this Memorial Day weekend will cost more than it ever has, and the price tag starts with the meat. A backyard cookout for 10 people runs about $103 in 2026, according to Rabobank’s annual BBQ Index, which prices out a typical summer spread using Bureau of Labor Statistics retail data. The…
The benchmark 10-year Treasury yield surged to roughly 4.60% on Wednesday, its highest closing level in about a year, after a hotter-than-expected inflation report forced bond traders to confront a scenario most had written off: the Federal Reserve raising interest rates again. Futures markets tied to the fed funds rate now imply an estimated 30%…
Jerome Powell may have already cast his final consequential vote as Federal Reserve chair. Whether he used it to break ranks will become public knowledge on Wednesday afternoon. The Fed held its benchmark interest rate steady at the April 28-29 meeting, keeping the federal funds rate in the 4.25%-4.50% range where it has sat since…
Turn 67 this month, file for Social Security, and the check that lands in your bank account will average about $2,071. That figure comes straight from the Social Security Administration’s 2026 COLA fact sheet. Now set it next to what a typical American in their late 60s actually spends: the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer…