The financial news that actually matters
The S&P 500 closed at a record 7,398.93 on Friday, May 8, 2026, capping a six-week winning streak that sent champagne-emoji tweets flying across Wall Street. The fuel: a Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report showing the economy added 177,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in April, comfortably above the roughly 140,000 economists had expected. But buried…
A pound of steak now costs more than it ever has in the 40 years the federal government has been tracking the price. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in its most recent monthly release that the average retail price for steak (cuts other than round or sirloin, a category covering ribeyes, T-bones, and porterhouses)…
Consider a home health aide in Columbus, Ohio, who picked up a second weekend shift this spring to keep pace with a rent increase and a car-insurance bill that jumped 18% at renewal. Her hourly wage is higher than it was a year ago, yet her checking-account balance at the end of each month is…
A pound of ground beef averaged $5.63 in March 2026, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics average price data, up 12.1% from a year earlier. A dozen large Grade A eggs, meanwhile, averaged roughly $3.10, down 44.7% from the record highs that rattled shoppers in early 2025. And the government’s official measure of grocery inflation?…
Consumer confidence just hit an all-time low at 48.2 — worse than 2008, worse than COVID — and a third of Americans point to gas prices as the top reason Americans have not felt this pessimistic about the economy in at least 74 years. The University of Michigan’s preliminary Index of Consumer Sentiment for May…
President Donald Trump killed Iran’s latest peace proposal with a single social media post on Sunday night, calling Tehran’s terms “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!” and shutting down weeks of quiet diplomacy in fewer than 30 characters. Hours later, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told reporters in Jerusalem that the war is “not over,” according to Channel 12…
The 30-year fixed mortgage rate rose to 6.37% for the week ending May 8, according to Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey. That marks the second consecutive weekly increase, erasing a month of modest declines that had briefly given spring buyers some breathing room. Meanwhile, fed-funds futures now price in zero Federal Reserve rate cuts…
Between early April and mid-May 2026, the S&P 500 climbed roughly 10%, a surge that in calmer times would have felt like vindication for the bulls. Instead it landed like a headline from a parallel universe. At the same moment, the national average price of gasoline sat at $4.52 a gallon according to AAA as…
The average American worker’s paycheck grew 3.6% over the past year. That sounds like progress until you look at what everything costs. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ April 2026 Employment Situation report, released May 8, average hourly earnings for private nonfarm workers hit $35.53, up from $34.30 a year earlier. But consumer prices…
The U.S. economy added 115,000 jobs in April 2026, nearly doubling the 60,000 that forecasters in the Bloomberg consensus survey had expected. On most Fridays, that headline would have carried the morning. But a second federal survey, published in the same Bureau of Labor Statistics employment situation report, told a sharply different story: 226,000 fewer…