Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
The United States is living through an economy that defies the usual labels. Growth is neither roaring ahead nor collapsing, yet households and investors are wrestling with a mix of resilience, strain, and uncertainty that feels unfamiliar. Instead of a classic boom or bust, the data and daily experience point to something more uneven and,…
Gift cards were supposed to be the safest, simplest present in the holiday arsenal. Instead, criminals have quietly turned them into a billion‑dollar pipeline, draining balances before many buyers or recipients ever get a chance to swipe. I want to walk through how this “gift card draining” wave works, why Americans have already lost roughly…
California’s unemployment bureaucracy has managed to do something that still shocks even after years of scandal: spend millions on technology that barely touched a worker’s hand. An official audit found that the state’s Employment Development Department burned through roughly $4.6 million on cell phones, data plans, and related gear that sat idle while jobless residents…
Foreign holidays to New York or Los Angeles now come with a new kind of packing list: passport, return ticket, and five years of social media history. Under President Donald Trump, the United States is knitting together expanded online screening of visitors with a broader system of “continuous vetting,” turning once-routine tourism into an ongoing…
Donald Trump came into office promising to slash Americans’ energy costs, vowing that prices for power and fuel would fall dramatically within a year. Twelve months on, the picture is more complicated: some benchmarks have eased from recent peaks, but household bills remain high and nowhere near half of what families were paying before. Energy…
Starbucks has agreed to a sweeping labor settlement in New York that will cost the company $38.9M and expose years of scheduling abuses affecting baristas across the city. The deal, tied to more than 500,000 alleged violations of local worker protection rules, signals that predictable hours and fair pay are no longer optional line items…
When a government-backed finance giant decides to abandon San Francisco’s storied financial district for a rising Southern city, it signals more than a simple change of address. The decision by one of the country’s most important housing finance institutions to decamp from California to Alabama captures a broader realignment of where white-collar power, capital and…
American retailers are staring down a theft and fraud problem measured in the tens of billions of dollars, and the old mix of guards, cameras, and locked cases is no longer keeping up. Now Amazon is pitching a new generation of AI-driven systems that it says can help crack a $100 billion shoplifting and “shrink”…
Olive Garden is about to go dark on one of the busiest dining days of the year, pausing operations at roughly 900 locations on Christmas so tens of thousands of workers can stay home. The move leaves an estimated 80,000 staff members off the schedule for 24 hours, reshaping holiday plans for both employees and…
The quiet shutdown of a beloved Southern cafeteria chain after an 88-year run is more than a business story. It is a jarring reminder of how fragile regional institutions have become, and how quickly hundreds of workers can lose their livelihoods when a legacy brand pulls the plug. As K&W Cafeterias closes every dining room…