The financial news that actually matters
A pound of steak has never cost this much. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recorded the average retail price of uncooked beef steaks at $12.74 per pound in its latest reading, the highest value in more than 60 years of federal grocery tracking. For a household picking up two pounds for a weeknight dinner, that…
By the time most Americans had finished their morning coffee on May 10, 2026, roughly 38,000 of their neighbors had already received layoff notices that month. The running tally, compiled by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas from public company announcements, marks the third consecutive month in which employers cited artificial intelligence as the single…
A 3.6% raise sounds decent until the price tags move faster. That is exactly what happened in April 2026: average hourly earnings on private nonfarm payrolls rose to $37.41, up 3.6% from a year earlier, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the Consumer Price Index climbed 3.8% over the same period, and the…
The cost of producing and distributing goods in the United States shot higher in April at a pace not seen since the worst of the post-pandemic supply crunch, a jolt that caught Wall Street off guard and raised pointed questions about where consumer prices are headed this summer. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that…
NEW YORK – Wall Street delivered a split-screen session on May 13, 2026. The S&P 500 climbed roughly 0.6% to close at a fresh record, and the Nasdaq Composite surged about 1.2% to its own all-time high. But the rally ran headlong into a pair of troubling data points: wholesale inflation reportedly running near 6%…
If you were hoping cheaper borrowing was around the corner, the Senate just made that a lot less likely. On a 54 to 45 vote in late May 2026, senators confirmed Kevin Warsh as chair of the Federal Reserve, handing President Trump’s pick the power to set the pace on interest rates at a moment…
Wall Street got two punches in two days, and neither pulled back. On May 12, 2026, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Consumer Price Index rose 3.8% year-over-year in April, nearly double the Federal Reserve’s 2% target and above the 3.5% consensus forecast. The next morning, the BLS followed with a Producer Price…
On the morning of March 3, 2026, three days after fighting broke out across the Persian Gulf, a London-based tanker broker told clients on a conference call that his firm could not quote a rate for a single vessel willing to transit the Strait of Hormuz. “There is no price,” he said. “The market is…
President Donald Trump touched down in Beijing on May 13, 2026, flanked by three of the most powerful executives in American technology: Apple CEO Tim Cook, Tesla and SpaceX chief Elon Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. No sitting U.S. president had visited China in nearly nine years, a period defined by a spiraling trade…
The monthly payment on a $400,000 mortgage just crossed another threshold that most first-time buyers cannot comfortably afford. Freddie Mac’s Primary Mortgage Market Survey for the week ending May 15, 2026, puts the average 30-year fixed rate at 6.37%, up for the second consecutive week and roughly a quarter-point higher than where it sat in…