Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
A California community hospital that borrowed heavily to expand has now landed in federal court, with a judge ordering the financially strained facility to be sold after it accumulated roughly $193 million in municipal bond debt. The bankruptcy of this 63-year-old nonprofit, which serves a wide swath of patients in the northern part of the…
US employers are pivoting from a long stretch of stability to a far more volatile playbook, with job cuts suddenly surging after years of cautious, “no hire, no fire” behavior. The spike in October layoffs, capped by a record 153,000 cuts and a 183% jump from the prior year, signals that executives are no longer…
McKinsey & Company is preparing one of the most sweeping staff reductions in its history, planning thousands of layoffs as the consulting boom that followed the pandemic gives way to a more cautious corporate spending cycle. The cuts will fall heavily on internal and support roles, even as the firm signals it still wants to…
The United States is living through an economy that defies the usual labels. Growth is neither roaring ahead nor collapsing, yet households and investors are wrestling with a mix of resilience, strain, and uncertainty that feels unfamiliar. Instead of a classic boom or bust, the data and daily experience point to something more uneven and,…
Gift cards were supposed to be the safest, simplest present in the holiday arsenal. Instead, criminals have quietly turned them into a billion‑dollar pipeline, draining balances before many buyers or recipients ever get a chance to swipe. I want to walk through how this “gift card draining” wave works, why Americans have already lost roughly…
California’s unemployment bureaucracy has managed to do something that still shocks even after years of scandal: spend millions on technology that barely touched a worker’s hand. An official audit found that the state’s Employment Development Department burned through roughly $4.6 million on cell phones, data plans, and related gear that sat idle while jobless residents…
Foreign holidays to New York or Los Angeles now come with a new kind of packing list: passport, return ticket, and five years of social media history. Under President Donald Trump, the United States is knitting together expanded online screening of visitors with a broader system of “continuous vetting,” turning once-routine tourism into an ongoing…
Donald Trump came into office promising to slash Americans’ energy costs, vowing that prices for power and fuel would fall dramatically within a year. Twelve months on, the picture is more complicated: some benchmarks have eased from recent peaks, but household bills remain high and nowhere near half of what families were paying before. Energy…
Starbucks has agreed to a sweeping labor settlement in New York that will cost the company $38.9M and expose years of scheduling abuses affecting baristas across the city. The deal, tied to more than 500,000 alleged violations of local worker protection rules, signals that predictable hours and fair pay are no longer optional line items…
When a government-backed finance giant decides to abandon San Francisco’s storied financial district for a rising Southern city, it signals more than a simple change of address. The decision by one of the country’s most important housing finance institutions to decamp from California to Alabama captures a broader realignment of where white-collar power, capital and…
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