Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Los Angeles has spent years promising to “solve” homelessness with record budgets, yet the tents and RVs keep multiplying along freeways and storefronts. The county has approved more than $840 million for its homelessness bureaucracy while unsheltered homelessness has still surged 10 percent over two years. The pattern is unmistakable: a fragmented system that fails…
President Donald Trump is trying to turn his long-running feud with federal tax authorities into a multibillion-dollar payday, arguing that the government owes him $10 billion for supposedly wrecking his finances and good name. At 79, he is not just seeking personal vindication, but attempting to shift the costs of his legal and political battles…
The Trump administration is turning the federal government into a direct shareholder in a growing list of U.S. companies, from rare earth miners and chipmakers to defense contractors and housing finance giants. The strategy is framed as a way to secure supply chains and outcompete rivals, but it also hands the White House new levers…
America’s once red-hot labor market is cooling fast. Job openings have fallen to 6.5 million, the lowest level since September 2020, while announced layoffs have surged to 108,400 in January, the highest start to a year since the aftermath of the financial crisis. Taken together, the data points to a decisive turn in the cycle,…
President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to cancel the 25 percent penalty tariff on Indian goods tied to Russian oil purchases marks a sharp turn in a dispute that had threatened to spill over into a broader trade rupture. The move, delivered through an executive order after an interim trade framework with New Delhi, recasts a…
Lowe’s is quietly turning one of retail’s most old-school formats into a test bed for AI, computer vision and spatial computing. After years of running stores on 1990s-era systems and early-2000s merchandising software, the chain has rebuilt its tech stack so that digital tools now shape everything from how shoppers find a box of screws…
President Donald Trump is promising that 2026 will be unlike anything the United States has ever experienced, pairing warnings about upheaval with confident predictions of a long economic “miracle.” His message is equal parts alarm and opportunity: brace for disruption, but also position yourself to ride what he casts as a generational boom. The real…
Tiny Quantum Computing Inc has just written a very large check. The Nasdaq-listed company agreed to pay 110,000,000 dollars for Luminar Semiconductor, a specialist in photonics and integrated optics, effectively betting that room-temperature quantum chips can leapfrog the cryogenic hardware that dominates the field today. The move turns a niche player with a sub 10…
The S&P 500’s communication services heavyweights just delivered the kind of quarter portfolio managers dream about: a perfect run of earnings beats across all seven index constituents. The sweep caps a broader reporting season in which profits are rising across most sectors, but the communications cohort stands out for pairing double digit growth with visible…
The Trump administration’s quiet attempt to uproot Mercedes-Benz from Stuttgart and replant its headquarters on American soil was more than a one-off sales pitch. It was a window into how far Washington is now willing to go to redirect industrial power, and how firmly some European champions intend to resist. At the center of the…
Retirement Shield
The money news that hits your wallet
The free Retirement Shield newsletter covers the benefits, tax, and cost-of-living changes that affect what you keep, a couple of times a week.