Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Whataburger’s familiar orange-and-white stripes are disappearing from parts of the South, as the Texas-born chain shutters all of its restaurants in three states even while it prepares a fresh wave of openings elsewhere. The closures mark a sharp turn for a brand that has spent the past few years racing to plant its flag far…
Tiny firms that once chased down cheating spouses or missing relatives are now landing lucrative federal deals to help track undocumented immigrants. Under President Donald Trump, immigration enforcement has quietly opened the door to a new class of contractors, turning small private investigators and data brokers into key players in a national hunt for people…
Wall Street is treating the latest tariff threats as background noise, but the policy risk hanging over markets is anything but trivial. Equity indexes are still grinding higher, even as analysts warn that investors, especially smaller savers, may be walking straight into a trap created by complacency about trade and geopolitics. The danger is not…
The United Kingdom is preparing to surrender sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean that has long symbolised the afterlife of empire and the hard edge of Western power projection. As London steps back, the United States is moving to lock in its military footprint and, in the process, to…
Volkswagen has turned a routine investment review into a high stakes warning shot at Washington, signalling it could walk away from a new United States factory after President Donald Trump’s latest tariff moves. The clash pits one of Europe’s biggest industrial employers against a White House that has made aggressive trade policy central to its…
Gold and silver have ripped through psychological ceilings, dragging the wider commodities complex into what looks like a fresh supercycle just as natural gas and copper swing violently on supply and weather shocks. Prices that once sounded like marketing slogans are now on trading screens, and the speed of the move is forcing investors, policymakers,…
Winter storm Fern is not just another bout of bad weather. It is a historic system engulfing more than half of the United States, shutting down travel, severing power and threatening to erase over one hundred billion dollars in economic activity in a matter of days. As the damage tally climbs, the storm is emerging…
Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban has spent decades investing in companies that live or die with the business cycle, and he is now warning that the next downturn will not hit all sectors equally. In his view, four big slices of the economy are so fragile that a recession could do more than dent profits, it…
Billionaire hedge fund manager David Tepper is reshaping his tech portfolio, cashing out of legacy winners like Oracle, Micron, and Intel to double down on a high‑octane artificial intelligence name that has already surged 31,000% since its market debut. The shift signals that, in his view, the AI trade is moving from broad infrastructure exposure…
Microsoft is trying to convince investors and employees that cutting tens of thousands of jobs is a rational price for staying ahead in artificial intelligence after committing roughly $80 billion to new infrastructure and tools. The company is pitching the layoffs as a hard reset that frees cash for data centers, custom chips, and enterprise…