The financial news that actually matters
The University of Michigan has been asking Americans how they feel about the economy since 1952. In all that time, they have never felt this bad. The university’s Index of Consumer Sentiment fell to 48.2 in its preliminary May 2026 reading, the lowest mark in the survey’s 74-year history. It undercuts the worst months of…
Three pounds of ground beef for taco night, weeknight burgers, and a pot of pasta sauce. That weekly shopping list now runs about $20, up from roughly $15 two years ago, because a pound of regular ground beef has hit a price never recorded in more than four decades of federal tracking. The Bureau of…
Between November 2025 and April 2026, roughly 1.55 million American men stopped working or looking for work, according to seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Situation report published May 8, 2026. That five-month exodus pushed the male labor force participation rate to 61.8 percent, the lowest level in records that stretch…
The price tag on a pound of uncooked steak at the average American grocery store now reads $12.74, the highest the Bureau of Labor Statistics has ever recorded in its decades of monitoring beef costs. That figure reflects the March 2026 monthly reading from the agency’s consumer price tracking, and it has held at that…
The U.S. economy added 115,000 jobs in April 2026, nearly doubling the roughly 65,000 that forecasters in the Reuters consensus survey as reported by the Associated Press had expected. The unemployment rate held at 4.3 percent. On the surface, that looks like resilience. But zoom out five months and a very different picture comes into…
Filling up a sedan in Los Angeles now costs north of $75. In Honolulu, it is closer to $80. Across the country, the national average price of regular gasoline climbed 25 cents in a single week to $4.55 a gallon, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly retail price survey. Six states are now…
The pound of ground beef in your cart costs $6.70. The gas you burned driving to the store ran about $4.55 a gallon. And if you’re one of the millions of Americans carrying a 30-year fixed mortgage, or trying to get one, the rate on that loan just climbed back to 6.37%. Each of those…
The U.S. economy added 115,000 jobs in April 2026, enough to beat most Wall Street forecasts and keep the unemployment rate pinned at 4.3%. By the simplest measure, the labor market is still holding together. But the paychecks attached to those jobs are telling a less reassuring story. Average hourly earnings for private-sector workers rose…
The Senate returns on May 11 with a vote that has no precedent in the Federal Reserve’s 113-year history: confirming a chair over the unified opposition of the minority party. Kevin Warsh, the former Fed governor and longtime critic of the central bank’s communication playbook, is expected to clear both of his nominations, one for…
Employers hired at nearly twice the pace economists expected in April 2026. Yet the share of Americans who are actually working or looking for work just fell to a level the country has not seen in half a century, outside the brief pandemic shutdown. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that nonfarm payrolls grew by…