Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Two semiconductor giants are racing to shape the artificial intelligence chip market, but their strategies could not be more different. Broadcom Inc. has built its AI business around custom silicon designed for hyperscale cloud operators, while Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) sells general-purpose accelerators that compete head-to-head with Nvidia. With both companies reporting record revenue and…
The U.S. Department of Labor announced on February 18, 2026, that it is sending a specialized “strike team” to examine California’s unemployment insurance program, targeting roughly $21 billion in outstanding federal loan debt and persistent fraud concerns. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer framed the intervention as a direct response to years of insolvency in the state’s…
International arrivals to the United States fell nearly 5% in January compared with a year earlier, extending a downturn that made the country the only major destination to lose foreign visitors in 2025 even as global tourism grew. The decline, tracked through federal I-94 admission records covering overseas, Canadian, and Mexican travelers, signals that political…
Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, will cut roughly $2 million in executive bonuses tied to the company’s 2025 financial performance following the Eaton Fire that devastated parts of Altadena. The decision, announced by Edison’s top executive, comes as Los Angeles County pursues a lawsuit alleging the utility’s equipment sparked the blaze….
Frito-Lay, the snack division of PepsiCo, is closing a California warehouse and cutting 247 jobs, according to a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filed with the state in February 2026. The filing lands just weeks after California expanded its WARN Act requirements, raising questions about how the new rules will shape employer behavior during a…
Detroit’s biggest automakers asked the White House on February 20, 2026, to be exempted from a fresh round of trade penalties that threaten to add billions of dollars in costs to vehicles assembled with imported parts. The appeal, delivered while President Donald Trump was visiting Ford’s historic River Rouge Complex in Dearborn, Michigan, underscores mounting…
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on February 20, 2026, that President Donald Trump overstepped his authority when he imposed sweeping global tariffs on goods from all countries, striking down most of the levies. The decision landed like a relief for importers who had spent months absorbing steep duties, but for small businesses that already paid…
The American economy keeps splitting into two separate tracks, and the divide is growing harder to ignore. Low-wage workers who bore the brunt of pandemic-era job losses have, in several measures, struggled to recover lost ground, while wealthier households have ridden soaring stock portfolios and rising home values to gains in net worth documented in…
Oil prices held relatively flat on Friday as President Donald Trump publicly acknowledged that he is weighing a limited military strike on Iran, even as Tehran signaled it would soon present a nuclear proposal to Washington. The simultaneous threat of force and diplomatic outreach created a tug-of-war in energy markets, with crude benchmarks climbing modestly…
Precious metal futures were little changed to slightly higher on February 20, 2026, as traders weighed the fallout from a court ruling that curtailed President Trump’s global tariffs and his rapid pivot to a replacement levy. Gold’s modest moves reflected a market caught between two competing forces: relief that the broadest tariffs were curtailed, and…
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