The financial news that actually matters
Darnell Hughes used to fill his gas tank twice a week so he could make it to both his warehouse shifts in Memphis. Now he fills up once and skips the weekend job. “It is not that I paid anything off,” he said. “I just stopped driving.” Hughes’s tradeoff sits at the center of a…
Wall Street’s autumn rally hit a wall on November 13, 2024. Minutes after the Bureau of Labor Statistics published a hotter-than-expected consumer-price report for October, the S&P 500 slid 0.4% and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 1%, snapping a six-week winning streak that had carried the benchmark index more than 8% off its August lows. By…
The price of a raw steak in the United States has never been higher. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the national average for uncooked beef steaks hit $12.74 per pound in February 2026, then kept climbing to $13.02 in April, blowing past the previous record. The April 2026 Consumer Price Index, released this…
The Pentagon told Congress today the Iran war has cost $29 billion – up $4 billion in two weeks – and Harvard estimates the final bill will top $1 trillion Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee on May 12, 2026, that the U.S. war in Iran has now cost $29 billion….
Two cents off a gallon of gas is not the relief it sounds like. The national average price slipped to $4.50 this week, down from $4.52, according to the Energy Information Administration’s weekly retail survey. But the federal government’s latest inflation report paints a far harsher picture: gasoline prices have climbed 28.4% over the past…
At 8:30 a.m. Eastern on a Tuesday in May 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its April Consumer Price Index report. Within minutes, the benchmark 10-year Treasury yield had surged to 4.46%, its highest level in roughly a year, according to the Federal Reserve’s H.15 daily interest-rate data. The inflation numbers were far worse…
Kevin Warsh is now a sitting Federal Reserve governor, and he is one vote away from running the place. The Senate confirmed him to the Fed’s Board of Governors on Monday morning, 51 to 45, along strict party lines, then immediately moved to set up the bigger question: whether to hand him the chair of…
Energy costs did more to push consumer prices higher in April 2026 than every other category combined, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Consumer Price Index report released in May 2026. Gasoline prices surged 28.4% year over year. The broader energy index climbed 17.9%. And on a single-month basis, energy alone accounted for more…
The average American worker got a raise in April. It just wasn’t big enough. Consumer prices rose 3.8% over the 12 months ending in April 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on May 12, the sharpest annual increase since September 2023. Nominal wages ticked up, but inflation moved faster, and the BLS Real Earnings…
A round-trip flight from Fort Lauderdale to Detroit on Spirit Airlines used to run as low as $78 in the off-season. This spring, the same route on Frontier Airlines starts closer to $100. Multiply that shift across more than 100 city pairs, and you begin to see what Spirit’s disappearance actually costs the travelers who…