Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
China’s growth model is colliding with a new kind of resistance: households and private firms that would rather hoard cash than spend or borrow. The result is a powerful, bottom-up squeeze on policymakers in Beijing, who are discovering that even the most muscular central bank cannot force wary savers to open their wallets. As the…
President Donald Trump is again insisting that his sweeping tariffs will not land on American shoppers, casting them instead as a painless way to squeeze foreign governments and fund domestic priorities. Retailers, economists and even some of his own allies are signaling a different reality, warning that the costs are already creeping into grocery aisles,…
Kroger is confronting the most intense backlash over its pricing in years just as federal regulators scrutinize a $24.6 billion future that was supposed to be secured through a transformative merger. The company’s pandemic-era profit strategy, its stalled tie-up with Albertsons, and a new political appetite for antitrust crackdowns are converging into a single test…
Warren Buffett is quietly preparing for a tougher market environment as 2026 approaches, and the signals coming out of Omaha are hard to ignore. Valuations have stretched, pockets of speculation have reappeared, and the world’s most famous value investor is acting as if a meaningful correction is not a remote risk but a realistic scenario….
The sudden halt of paychecks for hundreds of auto workers is not an isolated shock, it is the latest flashpoint in a year when tariffs, shifting demand and production pauses have repeatedly thrown factory jobs into limbo. As one automaker’s $148 million operation unravels, roughly 900 people are discovering how quickly a stable paycheck can…
Retail theft has become one of the defining headaches of modern shopping, yet one major player has quietly reframed the problem as a data and design challenge instead of a security crisis. While rivals lean on locked cases and visible guards, Amazon has spent years building a system that treats every item and every shopper…
Starbucks has agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars to New York City baristas and shift supervisors after admitting to hundreds of thousands of violations of the city’s scheduling protections. The settlement, which follows a sweeping investigation into how the coffee chain handled work hours and predictability pay, turns a local labor law into…
Inflation did not pause when Washington did. Price pressures were already edging higher before the federal shutdown froze key data, and the delayed Consumer Price Index release now threatens to reveal that the cost of living kept grinding upward out of public view. As the government restarts its economic calendar, I see a risk that…
The White House is mounting an unusually direct appeal to the richest Americans, urging them to pour private money into new “Trump accounts” that are meant to seed investment portfolios for children. The push effectively turns a flagship policy of President Trump into a philanthropic challenge for billionaires and high net worth families, blending public…
Jared Kushner’s private equity vehicle has abruptly stepped away from one of the most contentious media takeover fights in years, leaving Paramount’s pursuit of Warner Bros Discovery looking far more fragile. The withdrawal removes a politically connected source of capital from an already polarizing bid and sharpens the contrast with Warner Bros Discovery’s preferred path,…
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