The financial news that actually matters
Americans checking their brokerage accounts on Monday, May 19, saw the S&P 500 close at an all-time high of 7,412.84, according to market data from S&P Global. Americans filling their gas tanks saw something very different: a national average of $4.52 per gallon, the highest pump price since fuel briefly topped $5 in the summer…
President Donald Trump blew up what remained of U.S.-Iran ceasefire talks in early May 2026, posting on Truth Social that Tehran’s latest counter-proposal was “TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE!” Oil markets reacted within hours. Brent crude, the global benchmark, surged roughly 4% to around $105 a barrel, and the national average price of regular gasoline climbed above $4.52…
Gasoline did nearly all the work in March’s inflation report. The Bureau of Labor Statistics confirmed that the Consumer Price Index rose 0.9% on a seasonally adjusted basis for the month, lifting the annual rate to 3.3%. The critical detail buried in the release: the gasoline index jumped 21.2% year over year, and the BLS…
Cognizant Technology Solutions has set aside up to $320 million to restructure its workforce under a program called Project Leap, a move that industry analysts estimate could eliminate as many as 15,000 jobs from the company’s roughly 350,000-person payroll. The 350,000 figure is derived from Cognizant’s most recent public filings, including its 8-K filed on…
The S&P 500 closed at a record 7,398.93 on Friday, May 8, 2026, capping a six-week winning streak that sent champagne-emoji tweets flying across Wall Street. The fuel: a Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report showing the economy added 177,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in April, comfortably above the roughly 140,000 economists had expected. But buried…
A pound of steak now costs more than it ever has in the 40 years the federal government has been tracking the price. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in its most recent monthly release that the average retail price for steak (cuts other than round or sirloin, a category covering ribeyes, T-bones, and porterhouses)…
Consider a home health aide in Columbus, Ohio, who picked up a second weekend shift this spring to keep pace with a rent increase and a car-insurance bill that jumped 18% at renewal. Her hourly wage is higher than it was a year ago, yet her checking-account balance at the end of each month is…
When a mid-level QA engineer at a large SaaS company opens a company-wide email in May 2026 and reads that her entire team is being “restructured around AI-driven testing tools,” she joins a rapidly growing count. By early June 2026, the Layoffs.fyi tracker showed 128,270 tech workers cut from 286 companies since January. For the…
A pound of ground beef averaged $5.63 in March 2026, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics average price data, up 12.1% from a year earlier. A dozen large Grade A eggs, meanwhile, averaged roughly $3.10, down 44.7% from the record highs that rattled shoppers in early 2025. And the government’s official measure of grocery inflation?…
Consumer confidence just hit an all-time low at 48.2 — worse than 2008, worse than COVID — and a third of Americans point to gas prices as the top reason Americans have not felt this pessimistic about the economy in at least 74 years. The University of Michigan’s preliminary Index of Consumer Sentiment for May…