Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Regional soda brands that stay independent offer more than quirky flavors. They protect local jobs, preserve family recipes, and resist the kind of consolidation that has pulled labels like Moxie into giants such as Coca Cola Co. These six stubborn holdouts show how loyalty to place and people can matter as much as national shelf…
A growing number of state governments are attacking energy costs and permitting delays simultaneously, betting that faster approvals and price controls can deliver real relief to households squeezed by rising utility bills. California, New York, and Pennsylvania have each taken distinct but converging approaches, while federal lawmakers push parallel legislation that has drawn both praise…
Tech billionaires are directing millions of dollars into California’s state and local elections, with ballot measures, gubernatorial campaigns, and city races increasingly becoming high-stakes contests between concentrated wealth and organized labor, according to recent reporting and campaign-finance filings. The fight centers on a proposed one-time 5% wealth tax on billionaires, but the money flows far…
The January 2026 Consumer Price Index landed at 2.4% year-over-year, a number that has prompted fresh questions about how quickly tariffs show up in consumer prices. Modeling from early 2025 had projected that a sweeping reciprocal tariff policy could push the U.S. effective tariff rate up by 13 percentage points, the steepest jump since 1937,…
Jim Cramer, the outspoken CNBC host, recently praised General Motors CEO Mary Barra for what he called an absolutely nailed call on the automaker’s direction. The praise arrived alongside GM’s release of its 2025 financial results and 2026 forward guidance, a package that paired strong operating performance with aggressive shareholder returns. What makes the moment…
Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” stormed into theaters over Presidents Day weekend, collecting $34.8 million across its three-day North American opening and claiming the No. 1 spot at the box office. The result marks Fennell’s strongest debut as a director, outpacing her previous work and signaling that literary adaptations driven by a singular creative…
The Walt Disney Company is simultaneously suing one AI company for generating its characters without permission and signing a deal with another AI company to do exactly that, on Disney’s terms. This split strategy reveals a calculated approach to artificial intelligence that treats litigation and licensing as two sides of the same coin. The tension…
The Trump administration just pulled off what it calls the single largest deregulatory action in U.S. history, rescinding the 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding and repealing federal vehicle emission standards. The White House has framed the move as a blow against “job‑killing regulations,” asserting that American families will save over $2,400 per vehicle and that…
Two of the most prominent names in technology, Sam Altman and Bill Gates, are channeling significant capital into nuclear energy ventures that aim to produce carbon-free electricity at scale. Their bets span fission and fusion, including advanced sodium-cooled reactors and experimental plasma machines, and recent regulatory and financial milestones suggest these are no longer theoretical…
FedEx plans to shut down more than 475 stations by the end of 2027 as part of a sweeping network consolidation effort that ranks among the largest facility reductions in the shipping industry’s recent history. The closures sit at the center of the company’s Network 2.0 strategy, a restructuring program designed to merge overlapping ground…