The financial news that actually matters
Gas is $4.52 a gallon, the most expensive Memorial Day fill-up in four years. And Americans are hitting the road anyway, in record numbers. AAA projects that 45 million people will travel between Thursday, May 22, and Monday, May 26, 2026, the highest Memorial Day total the organization has ever recorded. The forecast, released as…
Cerebras Systems, the AI chipmaker behind the world’s largest computer chip, saw its stock drop roughly 10% on its second day of public trading, closing near $280 on May 15, 2026. The pullback followed a first-day surge that carried shares to an intraday high of approximately $385, according to market data, before they settled around…
Roughly 1 in 8 credit card accounts in the United States is now past due, a level of financial stress the country has not seen since the wreckage of the 2008 recession. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s latest reporting on credit card market trends puts the delinquency rate at 13.1%, surpassing pre-pandemic levels and reversing…
The price of a new refrigerator has climbed roughly 8% since last spring. A standard residential construction bid in the Midwest now includes a steel surcharge that did not exist 18 months ago. And a bottle of imported European wine that once cleared U.S. Customs for a few cents in duty briefly carried a tariff…
Somewhere in Meta’s first-quarter 2026 earnings exhibit, filed with the SEC in late April, two numbers sit within pages of each other. The first: Meta expects to spend between $125 billion and $145 billion on capital expenditures this year, nearly all of it flowing toward data centers and AI compute hardware. The second, visible not…
When Iranian officials floated the idea of charging tolls on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz in early 2025, the backlash was immediate. Trading partners called it a provocation. Maritime lawyers called it illegal. But the proposal did something Tehran may have intended all along: it established a principle. If Iran can assert the…
Wall Street did not wait for Kevin Warsh to take the oath. On May 15, 2026, the day Jerome Powell’s four-year term as Federal Reserve chairman formally expired, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 537 points, the S&P 500 dropped nearly 93 points, and the 10-year Treasury yield climbed to 4.5 percent. The dollar index…
Iran’s judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangir declared in late May 2026 that Tehran holds the “legal and judicial right” to seize oil tankers connected to the United States in the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and Oman that carries roughly one-fifth of the world’s traded oil each day, according to a 2019 U.S….
Taipei is celebrating. The White House is hedging. And nearly $14 billion worth of American weapons are stuck somewhere in between. President Trump told reporters in late May 2026 that he has not decided whether to go through with a massive arms sale to Taiwan, saying he would “make a determination over the next fairly…
Wall Street had spent the days before the Beijing summit pricing in at least a handshake on tariffs. What it got instead was a five-word denial from President Donald Trump: “It wasn’t brought up.” Speaking to reporters after stepping off Air Force One in late May 2026, Trump said he and Chinese President Xi Jinping…