The financial news that actually matters
The number on the pump keeps climbing, and the ceiling is getting close. The national average price of regular gasoline reached $4.53 a gallon in late May 2026, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, leaving American drivers just 49 cents below the all-time record of roughly $5.02 set during the week of June 13,…
On May 14, 2025, the benchmark 10-year Treasury note settled at 4.53 percent, its highest close in roughly a year, according to the Treasury Department’s daily par yield curve. Within hours, federal-funds futures repriced sharply: the CME FedWatch tool showed an estimated 30 percent probability that the Federal Reserve would raise its policy rate at…
Memorial Day is 10 days out, and the centerpiece of millions of backyard cookouts just hit a price never seen before. The national average for uncooked beef steak reached $12.74 per pound in the most recent reading from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest figure in the agency’s decades-long tracking history. Pair that with…
Two commercial ships were attacked near the Strait of Hormuz on a single day in June 2026, one seized by armed men near the United Arab Emirates and the other sunk in Omani waters, while Iran’s vice president declared on state television that the waterway “belongs to Iran” and that Tehran would not give it…
Fourteen sailors were treading water off the coast of Oman on May 14 when the Omani Coast Guard reached them. Their cargo ship, the Indian-flagged Haji Ali, had gone down in the Gulf of Oman during a routine transit from Somalia to Sharjah. Hours earlier and roughly 200 miles to the northwest, a separate commercial…
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…
A family that bought a new set of tires in 2025 paid more because of tariffs. So did anyone who picked up a laptop, a winter coat, or a plastic toy for a birthday party. Those tariffs have now been declared illegal. The money is being returned. But it is not going back to the…
Sixty days. That is all it took for the world to burn through its oil safety net faster than at any point in recorded history. Between March and April 2026, global observed inventories fell by roughly 246 million barrels, according to the International Energy Agency’s May Oil Market Report. The agency called the pace unprecedented….
Jerome Powell handed the Federal Reserve chairmanship to Kevin Warsh on May 15, 2026, closing an eight-year tenure that steered the U.S. economy through a pandemic shutdown, the worst inflation spike since the early 1980s, and a bruising cycle of interest-rate increases that reshaped the cost of borrowing for millions of Americans. Powell is not…
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…