Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
First Brands Group, the bankrupt auto-parts supplier behind brands like Autolite spark plugs, has begun cutting jobs across its North American operations after potential acquirers pulled back from the deal table. The layoffs come just days after federal prosecutors charged company executives with a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme, a development that has thrown the firm’s already…
General Motors is cutting thousands of electric vehicle jobs across its U.S. manufacturing operations, a decision that landed on workers at multiple plants effective January 5, 2026. The layoffs, spanning facilities in Michigan and Ohio and extending to joint-venture battery sites, stem from what GM describes as slower-than-expected EV adoption and shifting federal policy on…
The OECD and UNDP released a joint report this week arguing that accelerated climate action is not just an environmental necessity but the most cost-effective way to protect economic growth and reduce poverty worldwide. The report, timed ahead of the next round of Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement, lands as separate research estimates…
For decades, a set of economic assumptions about self-correcting markets and rational actors shaped how Wall Street managed risk and how Washington regulated finance. Those assumptions, embedded in formal models used by the Federal Reserve, the SEC, and major investment banks, failed spectacularly during the 2008 financial crisis. The wreckage left behind a trail of…
The War Department has signed an agreement to bring Elon Musk’s xAI and its Grok chatbot onto the military’s internal AI platform, GenAI.mil, with initial deployment targeted for early 2026. The deal, which carries a $200 million ceiling, has already drawn sharp criticism from at least one U.S. senator over procurement concerns and the chatbot’s…
The Supreme Court struck down tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, but the justices stopped short of ordering the federal government to return the money it collected. That gap between ruling and remedy has set off a scramble among importers, lawmakers, and at least one Fortune 500 company to force billions of…
Shares of International Business Machines plunged 13% on Monday, February 23, 2026, after Anthropic announced that its artificial intelligence technology can modernize COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still powers much of the world’s banking and government infrastructure. The single-day loss was IBM’s steepest since 2000, rattling investors who had viewed the company’s legacy mainframe…
Lucid Group is cutting roughly 12% of its U.S. workforce, a move the company tied directly to its push for better gross margins and long-term financial health. The layoffs, which affect an estimated 800 positions based on the company’s reported global headcount of approximately 6,800 full-time employees as of the end of 2024, land at…
Accenture has begun tying promotion decisions for senior staff to their weekly use of the firm’s artificial intelligence tools, a sharp escalation of a campaign that already trained 550,000 workers in AI during its most recent fiscal year. An internal communication directed at managing directors and associate directors warns that login frequency on platforms such…
Apple has announced a special event for March 4 that breaks from its familiar product launch formula. Instead of a single keynote at Apple Park in Cupertino, the company is staging simultaneous press gatherings across three continents and, according to multiple reports, plans to roll out new products through a series of daily press releases…