The financial news that actually matters
More than one in eight dollars of credit card debt in the United States is now seriously past due, a threshold the banking system has not crossed since it was still absorbing losses from the Great Recession. The Federal Reserve’s latest charge-off and delinquency report, compiled from regulatory filings submitted by commercial banks, puts the…
A federal gas tax holiday introduced in Congress on April 29, 2026, would put roughly $35 back in the average family’s pocket over five months. That works out to about $7 a month, less than a fast-food combo meal, and it has trucking companies and road builders warning that the trade-off is not worth it:…
The math keeps getting worse for anyone trying to buy a home. The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose to 6.46% in the week ending May 15, 2026, according to Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey. That is the highest level in nearly seven months, and it arrived after back-to-back inflation reports that caught Wall…
Last spring, a round-trip ticket from New York to Los Angeles ran about $280 on most booking platforms. This May, the same seat on the same route costs closer to $370. The jump is not unique to that corridor. Across hundreds of domestic city pairs, airfares have climbed sharply, and the single biggest driver is…
A pound of steak has never cost this much. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded the average retail price of uncooked beef steaks at $12.74 per pound in its latest reading, the highest value in more than 60 years of federal grocery tracking. For a household picking up two pounds for a weeknight dinner, that…
A 3.6% raise sounds decent until the price tags move faster. That is exactly what happened in April 2026: average hourly earnings on private nonfarm payrolls rose to $37.41, up 3.6% from a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the Consumer Price Index climbed 3.8% over the same period, and the…
The cost of producing and distributing goods in the United States shot higher in April at a pace not seen since the worst of the post-pandemic supply crunch, a jolt that caught Wall Street off guard and raised pointed questions about where consumer prices are headed this summer. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that…
NEW YORK – Wall Street delivered a split-screen session on May 13, 2026. The S&P 500 climbed roughly 0.6% to close at a fresh record, and the Nasdaq Composite surged about 1.2% to its own all-time high. But the rally ran headlong into a pair of troubling data points: wholesale inflation reportedly running near 6%…
If you were hoping cheaper borrowing was around the corner, the Senate just made that a lot less likely. On a 54 to 45 vote in late May 2026, senators confirmed Kevin Warsh as chair of the Federal Reserve, handing President Trump’s pick the power to set the pace on interest rates at a moment…
Wall Street got two punches in two days, and neither pulled back. On May 12, 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Consumer Price Index rose 3.8% year-over-year in April, nearly double the Federal Reserve’s 2% target and above the 3.5% consensus forecast. The next morning, the BLS followed with a Producer Price…