Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
House investigators and federal authorities are now circling one of the most prominent progressive figures in Congress, zeroing in on how Rep. Ilhan Omar’s family wealth appears to have ballooned in just a few years. The scrutiny follows financial disclosures that suggest a dramatic jump in assets, turning a onetime insurgent outsider into a multimillionaire…
Wall Street closed a choppy week with modest declines in the major indexes and a notable surge in the dollar, as investors tried to decipher what President Donald Trump really intends to do with Kevin Hassett and the Federal Reserve. The prospect that a leading Fed Chair contender might stay put at the White House…
President Donald Trump’s revived push to buy Greenland has moved from late-night punchline to live policy debate, complete with internal cost estimates and strategic talking points. The headline numbers are staggering, with a potential price tag approaching $1 trillion and official projections that any meaningful financial payoff would be decades away. The question is no…
The Biden-era language of “friendshoring” has given way to something blunter. U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is now pairing upbeat talk about an American manufacturing boom with a stark warning to foreign memory chipmakers: invest in U.S. plants or face tariffs of up to 100% on key products. The message is aimed squarely at South…
The age profile of billion-dollar AI founders is collapsing at a speed that would have seemed absurd even a decade ago. Unicorns that once emerged from veterans in their late thirties or forties are now being built, scaled and sold by people barely out of college. The wild part is that this is not just…
Bill Nye has spent the past year warning that deep cuts to NASA would be an “extinction-level event” for American space exploration. Now that Congress has moved to fully fund the agency despite pressure from the White House, he is responding with a mix of relief, frustration and a renewed warning that flat budgets can…
Tourism has roared back, and the money now flowing across borders is reshaping which countries sit at the top of the global travel economy. The biggest winners are not always those with the most postcard views, but the places that have turned visitor arrivals into serious export income and fiscal firepower. I want to map…
Congress has effectively nullified President Donald Trump’s attempt to gut the nation’s civil space program, approving a bipartisan spending package that keeps NASA’s budget largely intact and protects its core science portfolio. Instead of the sweeping reductions the White House requested, lawmakers delivered a modest trim that still signals long term support for exploration, climate…
Federal Reserve officials are lining up behind the idea that the next policy move could be a cut, and that it might come as soon as the January meeting. After two years of aggressive tightening, the central bank is now signaling that the balance of risks between inflation and jobs has shifted enough that easing…
Wall Street is fixated on when the Federal Reserve will finally cut interest rates, but the market’s real vulnerability sits deeper inside the institution itself. A central bank that is divided, politically pressured and wrestling with its own balance sheet is far harder for investors to price than a simple “higher for longer” path. The…