Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Nine states came in under the federal accuracy threshold for food assistance last fiscal year. The other 41 did not, and that arithmetic is about to stop being a bookkeeping curiosity and start being a line in state budgets. A law signed in 2025 converted the payment error rate from a performance statistic into a…
Ford CEO Jim Farley told a podcast audience that his company has thousands of open mechanic and technician positions paying as much as $120,000 a year, yet cannot fill them because the training pipeline produces far fewer skilled workers than the industry loses. The disclosure puts a sharp number on a problem that stretches well…
A bipartisan group of senators is pushing to create a fiscal commission charged with reining in federal spending and debt, which now exceeds $38.8 trillion. Senators Tim Kaine, a Virginia Democrat, John Curtis, a Utah Republican, and Angus King, a Maine independent, along with other colleagues, introduced the Bipartisan Fiscal Commission Act as the government’s…
A growing number of U.S. employers are abandoning performance-based raises in favor of uniform pay increases spread evenly across their workforces, a strategy compensation professionals call “peanut butter” pay because it smears the same thin layer over everyone. The tactic mirrors what companies did during the 2008-2009 financial crisis, when recession fears drove firms to…
Las Vegas built its legend on the promise of easy fun and affordable indulgence, but a growing number of Americans now see the trip as more hassle than escape. From rising prices to shifting travel habits, the city is colliding with a tougher economic mood and a more demanding audience. The result is a sharp…
Federal regulators across at least four agencies have now issued warnings about fraudulent messages reaching Americans’ phones through text and messaging apps, with scam losses hitting $470 million in 2024 alone. The concern is no longer limited to individual theft. A growing body of evidence ties the same phone-based misinformation channels to broader financial instability,…
The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate fell to 6.01% last week, its lowest point in more than three years, offering a rare window of relief for homebuyers who have spent months sidelined by elevated borrowing costs. The decline coincided with a U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down most of the tariffs imposed by the…
The post-2008 era of near-zero interest rates, when central banks flooded economies with cheap credit, is over. A convergence of sticky inflation, record sovereign borrowing needs, and fragile market plumbing now threatens to expose how deeply governments, corporations, and investors built their strategies around money that no longer comes cheap. The adjustment has barely begun,…
U.S. home prices in several high-cost regions have started to decline, trapping recent buyers who purchased near the market’s peak with shrinking equity and few options to move. At the same time, a new study finds nearly half of Americans feel stuck in their current homes as elevated mortgage rates freeze the broader housing market….
Home Depot reported fourth-quarter results on February 24, 2026, revealing that American homeowners have pulled back sharply on big renovation projects as housing affordability and job-security worries intensify. The nation’s largest home-improvement retailer posted $38.2 billion in quarterly sales, a 3.8% year-over-year decline, while comparable sales barely moved. The results, paired with a housing market…