The financial news that actually matters
President Donald Trump stepped out of the Great Hall of the People on May 14, 2026, shook hands for the cameras, and boarded his motorcade without a single signed agreement on the three issues his administration had spent months weaponizing against China: tariffs, rare earth minerals, and fentanyl enforcement. No joint statement followed. No framework…
Stocks sold off hard on Friday, May 15, 2026, after the 10-year Treasury yield surged to roughly 4.65%, a level that would represent its highest in about a year based on U.S. Treasury Department records, and a rally in crude oil prices revived inflation fears that many investors had been eager to dismiss. The combination…
The number on the pump keeps climbing, and the ceiling is getting close. The national average price of regular gasoline reached $4.53 a gallon in late May 2026, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, leaving American drivers just 49 cents below the all-time record of roughly $5.02 set during the week of June 13,…
On May 14, 2025, the benchmark 10-year Treasury note settled at 4.53 percent, its highest close in roughly a year, according to the Treasury Department’s daily par yield curve. Within hours, federal-funds futures repriced sharply: the CME FedWatch tool showed an estimated 30 percent probability that the Federal Reserve would raise its policy rate at…
Memorial Day is 10 days out, and the centerpiece of millions of backyard cookouts just hit a price never seen before. The national average for uncooked beef steak reached $12.74 per pound in the most recent reading from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest figure in the agency’s decades-long tracking history. Pair that with…
Two commercial ships were attacked near the Strait of Hormuz on a single day in June 2026, one seized by armed men near the United Arab Emirates and the other sunk in Omani waters, while Iran’s vice president declared on state television that the waterway “belongs to Iran” and that Tehran would not give it…
Fourteen sailors were treading water off the coast of Oman on May 14 when the Omani Coast Guard reached them. Their cargo ship, the Indian-flagged Haji Ali, had gone down in the Gulf of Oman during a routine transit from Somalia to Sharjah. Hours earlier and roughly 200 miles to the northwest, a separate commercial…
More than one in eight credit card accounts in the United States is now past due. That is not a projection or a warning. It is the current state of American consumer credit, and the country has not seen anything like it since the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. The 30-plus-day credit card delinquency…
A grandmother in Texas picks up the phone and hears her grandson’s voice, panicked, saying he has been in a car accident and needs bail money wired immediately. The voice is his, down to the slight drawl and the way he rushes through sentences. Except it is not him. It is a synthetic replica generated…
132,000 tech workers have lost their jobs in 2026 – and the companies cutting them are spending $725 billion on AI this year In January, a Microsoft program manager in the Seattle area learned her role had been eliminated in what the company called a performance-based restructuring. By March, she had company. Thousands more cuts…