Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
The government’s preferred inflation gauge just hit a five‑year high, and that could show up in your wallet through higher shelter costs even as gas prices wobble. The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, or PCE, rose 2.8% year over year in November 2025, and December’s reading is scheduled for release on February 20, 2026 by…
New York City’s most prominent budget watchdog is publicly urging Mayor Zohran Mamdani to rein in spending and shelve talk of new taxes, escalating a fight over how to close a projected multibillion-dollar gap. The Citizens Budget Commission’s open letter landed just as Mamdani signed an executive order installing “Chief Savings Officers” in every agency,…
The labor market “is a lot more fragile than the headline numbers suggest,” Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi has warned, arguing that the apparent strength in hiring masks growing pockets of weakness. The latest evidence is the January payroll report, which showed employers adding 130,000 jobs while the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3…
Amazon has crossed a line that once looked out of reach for an online bookstore. In its latest annual filing, the company reported full-year 2025 net sales of $716.924 billion, a figure rounded in its earnings release to $716.9 billion, topping Walmart’s estimated $648 billion haul and making Amazon the world’s largest company by revenue….
On Detroit’s icy riverfront, the glass towers and sprawling plants that once symbolized the auto industry’s confident electric future are now the backdrop for a harsh financial reckoning. Ford, General Motors and Stellantis have together booked roughly $50 billion in impairments and related charges tied to electric vehicles, according to primary filings and company statements….
US inflation slowed to 2.4% in January, a milestone the Trump administration is touting as proof it is getting “everything [it] wants” on the economy. The latest Consumer Price Index report, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is being cast by the White House as validation that prices are cooling while paychecks pull ahead….
France’s public debt has climbed to about €3.3 trillion, and fresh official data for early 2025 suggest the pile is still growing rather than stabilising. The “time bomb” metaphor increasingly used in Paris is grounded in watchdog projections that interest costs alone could reach roughly €74 billion by 2026, even as the political system struggles…
When Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office to announce Project Vault, the headline number did much of the talking: a $12 billion financing blitz, anchored by a $10 billion federal loan and supplemented by private capital, to build a Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve. The initiative is framed as an emergency response to U.S. Geological…
The software sector has been rattled by a sharp selloff after new AI tools promised to automate white-collar work, from tax planning to legal research. Into that turmoil, JPMorgan strategist Dubravko Lakos-Bujas has circulated a client note arguing that investors have overreacted and highlighting a group of “AI-resilient” software names to buy on the dip….
Bitcoin’s sharp slide below 90,000 dollars on February 5, 2025, only days after President Donald Trump signed a sweeping pro-crypto executive order, has exposed a jarring gap between policy optimism and market reality. The coin’s retreat from a 108,000 dollar peak on January 20 to an intraday low near 85,000 dollars has collided with White…