Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Investors are heading into 2026 with one question dominating every strategy session: when will the Federal Reserve finally start cutting interest rates again, and how much will that reshape the stock market’s winners and losers. After two years of restrictive policy, the timing and pace of the next easing cycle will help determine whether the…
Economists are sounding the alarm that 2026 is shaping up as a year of slower hiring and stickier prices, even as headline growth numbers look respectable. The warning is not about an imminent crash, but about a grind: fewer new jobs each month, higher inflation than households have grown used to, and a recovery that…
Drivers heading into 2026 are staring at a rare bright spot in a stubbornly expensive economy: gasoline that could be cheaper than at any point since the early months of Covid. Even with political turmoil in Venezuela and uncertainty around global oil supplies, a mix of softer crude prices, improving vehicle efficiency, and cooling demand…
Artificial intelligence is already reshaping how work gets done, but the most credible evidence suggests it is not about to wipe out whole professions overnight. Instead of a sudden jobs apocalypse, the data points to a slower, messier transition in which tasks are reconfigured, skills are reprioritized and people who learn to work with AI,…
President Donald Trump is betting that sweeping new tariffs can revive U.S. manufacturing, shrink the trade deficit, and even tame inflation, all without inflicting serious damage on growth. A growing body of analysis suggests that is a very optimistic read of how trade taxes work in the real world. Instead of delivering a clean win,…
The Federal Reserve’s delicate balancing act is getting harder, not easier. Richmond Federal Reserve President Tom Barkin is warning that the United States now faces meaningful risks on both sides of the central bank’s mission, with inflation still not fully tamed and the labor market showing early signs of strain. His message is that the…
The United States has crossed a threshold that many economists once treated as a distant warning, not an imminent reality. With federal obligations now measured in the tens of trillions of dollars, Janet Yellen is arguing that the country is edging toward a line that earlier generations of policymakers hoped never to test. I see…
The claim that Joe Biden personally slapped a $25 million bounty on Nicolás Maduro has raced across social media, but the reality is more bureaucratic and more rooted in decisions that began before he took office. The reward on the Venezuelan leader grew out of long running U.S. narco terrorism charges and a standing State…
US copper futures have punched through to a fresh record, the first new peak since the summer’s tariff-driven spike jolted metals markets and forced manufacturers to rethink their cost assumptions. The latest leg higher reflects a powerful mix of tight supply, resurgent industrial demand and financial momentum that has turned the red metal into a…
New York City’s congestion pricing experiment has delivered the kind of numbers that usually live in planning textbooks, not on real streets. Traffic into the core has dropped by the tens of millions of trips, speeds are up, and the air is measurably cleaner, all while the city quietly banked hundreds of millions of dollars…