Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Credit card interest has quietly become one of the most punishing household expenses in America, with typical annual percentage rates hovering in the low 20s even for borrowers with solid histories. Now President Donald Trump’s push to cap card rates at 10 percent for a year has jolted the industry, and Bank of America is…
Debanking, once an obscure industry term, is suddenly at the center of a high-stakes political and legal fight. President Donald Trump has filed a multibillion-dollar lawsuit accusing one of the world’s largest banks of using account closures as a weapon against him. The case turns a technical question about risk management into a test of…
Verizon has quietly rewritten the rules that once made it relatively painless to take your phone to another carrier. A long standing promise to unlock devices after a short period has been replaced with a far tougher standard that keeps new phones tied to Verizon for most of a year. The change arrives just as…
New York City’s latest attempt to shore up delivery worker pay has set off a fierce clash between regulators, gig platforms, workers, and customers. A new tipping rule, paired with an aggressive minimum pay regime, is forcing apps to change how they nudge users to reward couriers and how they structure fees. The result is…
Tesla is stripping key highway automation from new cars in the United States and Canada and shifting those capabilities behind a monthly subscription, turning what used to be a built-in selling point into an ongoing bill. The change affects familiar Autopilot behaviors on multi-lane roads and folds them into the company’s paid Full Self-Driving (Supervised)…
Once a savings account crosses $250,000, the number on the screen stops being just a milestone and starts to determine how much of that money is actually protected. The federal insurance system, bank compliance rules, and even your long term returns all change once you move past that line. I want to unpack what really…
Student-loan borrowers are being yanked between promises of relief and threats of harsher collection under President Donald Trump, creating a policy roller coaster that makes long-term planning nearly impossible. One month, the White House is pausing collections on defaulted loans; the next, it is moving to shut down repayment plans and forgiveness programs that millions…
Shoppers who rely on plastic for their weekly runs at Walmart and Target are about to feel a new kind of sticker shock. A long running fight over credit card “swipe fees” is reaching a turning point, and the fallout is expected to land directly at the checkout counter. Instead of quietly absorbing rising processing…
Millions of federal student loan borrowers who enrolled in President Joe Biden’s Saving on a Valuable Education plan have enjoyed an unusually long break from payments. For 7.6 million Americans, that pause is about to give way to a very different repayment landscape, shaped by court rulings, a new presidential administration, and sweeping policy changes…
President Donald Trump told Americans that by Jan. 20, credit card companies would be breaking the law if they charged more than 10 percent interest. Yet as that deadline passed, card statements still showed rates in the high teens and twenties, and banks kept business as usual. The gap between the promise and reality lies…