Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Disney is dismantling one of its most popular streaming tie-ins, shutting down the option to bolt Disney+ onto a Hulu subscription at a discount and pushing customers toward new bundles or separate plans. The change arrives just as Hulu itself is being folded into Disney+, raising the stakes for tens of millions of viewers who…
Government investigators created bogus Affordable Care Act customers and watched the money roll in, collecting $2,350 a month in subsidies on fake Obamacare accounts that were never supposed to exist. The findings land in the middle of a long‑running fight over “waste, fraud and abuse” in health programs, and they confirm what many policy hands…
Wall Street is starting to sketch out a 2026 in which stocks climb sharply even as President Trump’s tariff regime reshapes global trade. The core of the bullish case is simple: a surprisingly resilient U.S. economy, strong profit growth and sector winners that can offset the damage from higher import costs. The tension between those…
Nomura is telling clients to brace for a rare combination in 2026: solid global growth paired with stubborn inflation pressures. The firm’s investment and macro teams see a powerful mix of artificial intelligence spending, fiscal expansion and a recovering trade cycle lifting output, even as central banks struggle to push price gains back to pre‑pandemic…
Nomura’s Gareth Nicholson is putting a precise number on how much risk investors should shift away from traditional markets, arguing that roughly a quarter of a portfolio belongs in alternatives. His case rests on a simple idea: in a world of choppy equity indices and unpredictable central banks, investors need more than just stocks and…
Lucasfilm’s decision to halt development on a fourth season of The Mandalorian and instead channel roughly 100 million dollars into a feature film marks a sharp turn in how the studio approaches streaming. Rather than treating Disney+ as the automatic home for every Star Wars chapter, the company is effectively rebalancing its bets between theatrical…
Netflix quietly spent blockbuster money on a science fiction epic and then watched it sink with barely a ripple in the wider culture. The Electric State cost roughly $320 million to make, drew brutal reviews, and yet slipped past most viewers as just another tile in an endless carousel. I want to unpack how a…
Corporate America is lining up behind Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller as President Donald Trump weighs whom to install as the next chair of the central bank. More than four out of five leading chief executives now say the White House would be making a serious mistake if Trump passed over Waller, a rare show…
The alleged diversion of roughly $250 million from a federal kids-meal program in Minnesota is more than a spectacular white-collar crime story. It is a case study in how emergency COVID money, weak oversight, and opportunistic middlemen can collide to leave real children hungry while adults cash in. As the “Feeding Our Future” scandal moves…
The idea that a family earning six figures could still feel poor sounds absurd until you start tallying rent, child care, health insurance, and the quiet cost of losing government help. A Wall Street investor has pushed that tension to an extreme, arguing that the real poverty line for a family of four is $136,500…