Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
UnitedHealth Group shocked Wall Street by warning that its revenue will fall in 2026, triggering a nearly 20% collapse in the stock and wiping out tens of billions of dollars in market value. The health insurance giant, long treated as a defensive stalwart, is now confronting its first top-line decline in decades as it braces…
The United States has now fully severed its formal ties with the World Health Organization, ending nearly eight decades of membership just as global health threats continue to multiply. Within a day of that exit taking legal effect, California moved in the opposite direction, becoming the first U.S. state to plug directly into a WHO‑coordinated…
On paper, the United States is enjoying a powerful rebound, with headline growth, solid hiring and confident forecasts all pointing to a “booming” economy. Yet for millions of households, the lived reality is a grinding affordability crisis that makes that boom feel like a mirage. The gap between the glossy numbers and everyday life is…
California is racing toward a high-stakes showdown over whether to slap a new levy on its richest residents just as some of those fortunes are already heading for the exits. A proposed wealth tax aimed squarely at billionaires has split Democrats, rattled Silicon Valley and drawn in some of the country’s most powerful unions. At…
The Federal Reserve has chosen to hold its benchmark interest rate in a range of 3.5 to 3.75 percent, resisting direct pressure from President Donald Trump to ease more aggressively even as major stock indexes flirt with or surpass record highs. The move underscores a widening gap between a White House eager for cheaper money…
New York City’s new mayor is betting that the way out of a deep fiscal hole runs straight through the bank accounts of its wealthiest residents. Facing a projected $12 billion deficit and a fragile recovery in public services, Zohran Mamdani is pushing a steep tax increase on high earners as the centerpiece of his…
Investors entered 2026 riding a powerful bull market and a wave of optimism about earnings, but that confidence is colliding with a stark warning from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. After a year in which major indexes surged and valuations stretched, Powell has signaled that equity prices look expensive and that policy makers are in…
The race to build the infrastructure behind artificial intelligence has turned a handful of chip specialists into market barometers, and Nvidia sits squarely at the center of that storm. As demand for AI training and inference explodes, one of Nvidia’s closest partners has suddenly become a focal point for investors trying to gauge how far…
Africa’s financial relationship with China has flipped. Instead of fresh capital flowing into roads, ports and power plants, African treasuries are now sending more cash back to Beijing in repayments than they receive in new loans. The shift marks a turning point for a continent that spent the past two decades betting heavily on Chinese…
Prices have been rising for years, and the political debate around inflation has turned into a constant alarm bell about looming hyperinflation. The word itself evokes images of wheelbarrows of cash and empty supermarket shelves, but the gap between that nightmare and current U.S. conditions is wide. To understand whether it is time to panic,…