The financial news that actually matters
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…
The call came from Chase. At least, that is what the screen said. The number matched the one printed on the back of the customer’s debit card. The voice on the line sounded like every fraud-department representative who had ever asked to “verify recent activity.” Within minutes, $40,000 was gone. That case, reported in consumer…
Between November 2025 and April 2026, roughly 1.55 million American men stopped working or looking for work, according to seasonally adjusted data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employment Situation report published May 8, 2026. That five-month exodus pushed the male labor force participation rate to 61.8 percent, the lowest level in records that stretch…
The price tag on a pound of uncooked steak at the average American grocery store now reads $12.74, the highest the Bureau of Labor Statistics has ever recorded in its decades of monitoring beef costs. That figure reflects the March 2026 monthly reading from the agency’s consumer price tracking, and it has held at that…
The U.S. economy added 115,000 jobs in April 2026, nearly doubling the roughly 65,000 that forecasters in the Reuters consensus survey as reported by the Associated Press had expected. The unemployment rate held at 4.3 percent. On the surface, that looks like resilience. But zoom out five months and a very different picture comes into…
Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure company that routes and protects roughly 20% of all web traffic, told about 1,100 employees this week that their jobs are being eliminated. The cuts amount to roughly one-fifth of the company’s workforce. Leadership pointed to a single driving force: artificial intelligence tools adopted internally have made that many positions unnecessary….
For the second month in a row, artificial intelligence was the single most cited reason American companies gave for eliminating jobs. In April alone, employers announced 21,490 AI-driven cuts, roughly 26% of every layoff disclosed nationwide, according to the latest monthly report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the outplacement firm that has tracked corporate layoff…
Filling up a sedan in Los Angeles now costs north of $75. In Honolulu, it is closer to $80. Across the country, the national average price of regular gasoline climbed 25 cents in a single week to $4.55 a gallon, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly retail price survey. Six states are now…
The pound of ground beef in your cart costs $6.70. The gas you burned driving to the store ran about $4.55 a gallon. And if you’re one of the millions of Americans carrying a 30-year fixed mortgage, or trying to get one, the rate on that loan just climbed back to 6.37%. Each of those…
The U.S. economy added 115,000 jobs in April 2026, enough to beat most Wall Street forecasts and keep the unemployment rate pinned at 4.3%. By the simplest measure, the labor market is still holding together. But the paychecks attached to those jobs are telling a less reassuring story. Average hourly earnings for private-sector workers rose…