The financial news that actually matters
On May 8 at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will publish the April 2026 Employment Situation report, and the number economists are bracing for is not a comfortable one. The Reuters consensus survey of private-sector forecasters puts the estimate at roughly 55,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs. If that holds, it would represent…
On March 24, 2026, a barrel of Brent crude oil cost $108.42. Seven days later, it cost $126.69. By the second week of April, it had fallen back below $110. That kind of round-trip, roughly $18 up and then down again in the span of a single week, has only happened a handful of times…
You paid $4.43 a gallon for regular gasoline last week, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s weekly retail tracker for the week ending April 28, 2026. Exxon Mobil, the largest publicly traded oil company in the country, just reported that its own profits got cut nearly in half. Those two facts sound like they…
Jerome Powell will walk out of the Federal Reserve chair’s office for the last time on May 15, 2026, closing a tenure that included the fastest rate-hiking cycle in four decades and a pandemic-era housing market that still has not fully normalized. His likely successor, Kevin Warsh, cleared the Senate Banking Committee on April 29,…
At 3 a.m. Eastern on Monday, June 23, 2025, Spirit Airlines canceled every remaining flight on its schedule, shut down its operations, and told passengers not to come to the airport. The airline that built its identity on $9 base fares and a bright yellow fleet was finished. More than 100 aircraft sat grounded. Roughly…
At midnight on May 1, 2026, the 60-day countdown that the War Powers Resolution imposes on unauthorized military operations expired. The clock had started around March 2, 2026, when U.S. forces first entered hostilities with Iran. President Trump’s answer to Congress was not a request for authorization or an order to withdraw. It was a…
More than 700 Oracle employees in California learned this week that their jobs are gone. State layoff notices, obtained through a public records request, show the cuts hitting workers in Redwood City and Santa Clara, the Silicon Valley corridor where Oracle built its database empire before moving its headquarters to Austin, Texas, in 2020. The…
Exxon Mobil reported first-quarter profit of $4.2 billion on May 1, 2026, a 45% drop from the $7.7 billion it earned during the same stretch last year. The company disclosed the results in an 8-K filing with the SEC, and the numbers rattled investors. But for the millions of Americans paying a national average of…
Two of Wall Street’s most-watched indexes moved in opposite directions on May 1, 2026, and the split captured an economy that cannot decide whether it is thriving or bracing for trouble. The S&P 500 closed at a record 7,230.12, up 21.11 points on the session. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 152.87 points to 49,499.27…
At the grocery store, the sticker shock is hard to miss. A pound of ground beef that averaged around $5.50 last spring now costs closer to $6.17, based on Bureau of Labor Statistics average retail price data. Scale that up across a week of family dinners and the budget strain adds up quickly. BLS figures…