Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Wall Street is mounting an unusually public effort to keep President Donald Trump from installing longtime ally Kevin Hassett as the next chair of the Federal Reserve, turning a normally discreet vetting process into a full scale lobbying campaign. The fight is not just about personalities, it is about whether the central bank will prioritize…
The federal government’s official jobs scorekeeper expects some familiar careers to fade quickly over the next decade, even as the broader labor market keeps expanding. The fastest shrinking roles share a common thread: routine tasks that can be automated, digitized, or reorganized out of existence. For workers in those fields, the projections are a warning…
Target’s latest round of corporate layoffs is not just another cost-cutting headline, it is a clear signal that white-collar work in America is being rewired around relentless efficiency, volatile demand, and a shrinking sense of security. As one of the country’s most recognizable retailers pares back thousands of office roles even while stores stay busy,…
Minnesota is confronting a welfare fraud scandal that has already produced nearly $1 billion in alleged losses, yet the emerging investigations suggest the damage may extend far beyond a single program or community. What began as a story about pandemic food aid has widened into a broader reckoning over how the state monitors public money,…
Morgan Stanley’s shifting expectations around a December Federal Reserve move capture how fragile market conviction has become in the face of stubborn inflation and noisy labor data. After initially penciling in a year-end rate cut, the $1.3 trillion asset manager stepped back from that call when incoming numbers suggested the economy was not cooling as…
Stubbornly high prices and a cooling job market are pulling the Federal Reserve in opposite directions at the very moment its decisions carry maximum political and economic weight. Inflation is no longer raging, but it is proving sticky enough that cutting interest rates too quickly could reignite the problem, even as hiring momentum fades and…
The closure of a $102 million General Motors factory and the loss of 1,700 union jobs has hit one Midwest town like a controlled demolition, taking out not just a major employer but the economic scaffolding around it. What looks on paper like a corporate “footprint adjustment” feels on the ground like a generational rupture,…
The interception of a sanctioned Russian tanker by the USS Stockdale near Venezuela has turned a slow-burning sanctions story into a visible test of sea power, energy leverage, and political resolve in the Caribbean. As Washington tightens the screws on fuel shipments that have been worth roughly 3 billion dollars to Nicolás Maduro’s government, the…
Republicans are seizing on fresh watchdog findings to argue that the Affordable Care Act’s insurance marketplaces are bleeding taxpayer dollars through lax oversight and systemic vulnerabilities. Their case hinges on a surge in improper payments, which they say reflects not just bureaucratic error but a sprawling ecosystem of fraud, abuse, and misaligned incentives. As the…
Meta spent the past four years trying to convince Wall Street and ordinary users that a future of virtual offices, legless avatars, and bulky headsets was worth tens of billions of dollars. Now the company is quietly backing away from that bet, cutting metaverse budgets, shrinking its hardware ambitions, and talking up artificial intelligence instead…