The financial news that actually matters
Covers broad economic trends including inflation, interest rates, GDP, employment data, and central bank decisions. It explains how macroeconomic factors influence markets and everyday finances.
The price of nursing home care and adult day programs climbed 4.6 percent in the twelve months ending in August 2026, a pace that outstripped the overall cost of living even before accounting for the private-pay share of long-term care that Medicare rarely covers. For a family weighing a parent’s move into a nursing facility,…
The cost of hiring help with bathing, mobility, wound care or other home-based medical support rose faster over the past year than any other category of medical care tracked by the federal government’s inflation gauge, according to Consumer Price Index data covering August 2026. For an older reader paying privately for an aide because Medicare’s…
Gasoline did more than fill up drivers’ tanks last month; it did most of the work behind the entire August increase in the cost of living. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on September 11, 2026, that its broadest inflation gauge rose 0.4 percent for the month, and that gasoline alone accounted for more than…
Federal regulators barred 11 medical equipment suppliers from billing Medicare Advantage and Part D plans this month after tracing more than $3.4 billion in suspected fraudulent claims back to their operations across 2025 and 2026. One of the eleven, a New Jersey-based firm, was flagged for billing a Medicare Advantage plan for 38 separate encounters…
President Trump signed five proclamations under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930 on September 8, 2026, and the White House’s own fact sheet leaves no ambiguity about one detail that matters to anyone shopping for Canadian goods this fall: the 33-year-old North American trade agreement provides no shelter from what happens next. Starting…
Indiana drivers are paying the lowest average gas price in the country at $3.5623 a gallon, one of fourteen states still averaging under $4 for regular gasoline as of September 10, 2026. The list stretches from the Midwest through the Gulf Coast and into the Southeast, even as six states on the opposite coast and…
Federal prosecutors laid out, in unusual detail, how a sweepstakes fraud ring squeezed more than $9 million out of over 200 elderly Americans: six different payment channels, each one chosen because it moved money in a direction victims could not easily pull back. The ring’s sentencing this week, built around Jamaican national Jordan Trought, doubles…
A Hawaii couple who built a decade-long tax refund scheme around a single fabricated form were sentenced to federal prison this week, closing out a case that started with one document and ended with years of legal maneuvering to keep money they were never entitled to. Beverly Braumuller-Hawver and Scott Hawver of Ewa Beach falsified…
The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged a New Jersey financial promoter and his two companies with running what regulators describe as a Ponzi scheme that took in roughly $16 million from more than 200 investors, many with little or no prior investing experience. The civil complaint, filed September 10, 2026 in federal court in…
Two Southern California men have been indicted in Manhattan federal court on charges that they ran a mortgage-modification business that collected more than $15 million in fees from financially distressed homeowners, many of whom were told to stop paying their mortgage lenders directly. Armando Solis Barron, 63, of La Habra Heights, California, and Dominic Ahiga,…
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