Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
The claim that Joe Biden personally slapped a $25 million bounty on Nicolás Maduro has raced across social media, but the reality is more bureaucratic and more rooted in decisions that began before he took office. The reward on the Venezuelan leader grew out of long running U.S. narco terrorism charges and a standing State…
Allegations that more than $100 million slipped out of Minnesota’s safety net programs are not about a single scam or a lone bad actor. They reveal a pattern of weak oversight, rapid program expansion, and opportunists who learned to treat public aid as a cash machine. I see a story that stretches from pandemic food…
Federal investigators say they were able to create fake Obamacare customers, sign them up for coverage, and quietly collect an average of $2,350 a month in taxpayer-funded subsidies, all without providing the documentation the law requires. The findings point to deep cracks in how the Affordable Care Act marketplace verifies identity and income, and they…
US copper futures have punched through to a fresh record, the first new peak since the summer’s tariff-driven spike jolted metals markets and forced manufacturers to rethink their cost assumptions. The latest leg higher reflects a powerful mix of tight supply, resurgent industrial demand and financial momentum that has turned the red metal into a…
New York City’s congestion pricing experiment has delivered the kind of numbers that usually live in planning textbooks, not on real streets. Traffic into the core has dropped by the tens of millions of trips, speeds are up, and the air is measurably cleaner, all while the city quietly banked hundreds of millions of dollars…
The White House is trying to convince voters it is “laser focused” on the cost of living at the very moment its own tariff strategy is being forced into a rethink. After months of escalating trade measures that helped push up prices on everyday goods, President Donald Trump is now pausing some increases and floating…
The United States is suddenly positioning itself not just as the world’s largest oil producer, but as a potential gatekeeper of the planet’s biggest reserves. By moving aggressively into Venezuela after the fall of Nicolás Maduro, Washington is trying to turn a onetime adversary’s buried wealth into long term leverage over global energy flows. I…
Extreme heat is no longer just a public health warning, it is quietly eroding American paychecks and the broader economy. New economic research points to multi-trillion dollar losses in global output from rising temperatures, and a growing body of U.S. data shows that heat is already cutting into wages, hours, and productivity. The headline figure…
Small business owners are stepping into 2026 with a mix of grit and guarded optimism, betting that customer demand will hold up even as costs and labor headaches intensify. Confidence surveys show many entrepreneurs planning to grow, hire, and invest, yet their balance sheets are still absorbing higher wages, financing costs, and insurance premiums. The…
General Motors is discovering that in the modern auto business, a recall is rarely just a technical fix. It is a financial event that can erase quarterly profits, strain supplier relationships, and reshape long term product strategy. The company’s recent waves of engine and battery problems show how a series of “free repairs” can snowball…
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