The financial news that actually matters
Covers broad economic trends including inflation, interest rates, GDP, employment data, and central bank decisions. It explains how macroeconomic factors influence markets and everyday finances.
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…
Freshworks Inc. is eliminating roughly 500 jobs, about 11 percent of its workforce, as the company accelerates a shift toward artificial intelligence that its leadership says will redefine how it builds and sells software. The San Mateo, California-based maker of customer service and IT tools disclosed the restructuring in a regulatory filing in May 2026,…
Spirit Airlines flew its last flight on May 2, 2026. By that evening, roughly 17,000 employees, including pilots, flight attendants, mechanics, and gate agents, had lost their paychecks and their employer-sponsored health insurance, according to company wind-down documents distributed that day. Hours later, bankruptcy court filings in the Southern District of New York (Case No….
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…
The number on Layoffs.fyi ticked past 128,270 in late May 2026, each digit representing a person who opened a calendar invite or a Slack message and learned their job no longer existed. Engineers at Microsoft, which confirmed a performance-focused reduction spanning thousands of roles across divisions. Product managers at SAP, where leadership tied a sweeping…
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…
Cloudflare was not struggling when it eliminated roughly 1,100 jobs in May 2026. The company had just posted record quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, a 34% jump from the same period a year earlier. But according to CEO Matthew Prince and co-founder Michelle Zatlyn, the internet security giant’s own AI tools had become so capable,…
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…
Retirement Shield
Free retirement updates
Social Security and Medicare change every year, and nobody sends you a memo. The free Retirement Shield newsletter breaks down what changed and what to do.