Financial related news.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Pay and benefits for America’s workers grew in the final three months of last year at the slowest pace in two and a half years, a trend that could affect the Federal Reserve’s decision about when to begin cutting interest rates. Compensation as measured by the government’s Employment Cost Index rose 0.9 [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — Now that income tax filing season officially started on Monday, a limited number of taxpayers in 12 states will soon be eligible to join an Internal Revenue Service pilot program that will allow them to calculate and submit their returns to the government directly without using commercial tax preparation software. The Direct [...]
WASHINGTON — The International Monetary Fund has upgraded its outlook for the world economy this year, envisioning resilient growth led by the United States and a slower pace of inflation. In its latest outlook, the 190-country lending agency said that it now expects the global economy to grow 3.1 percent this year, unchanged from 2023 [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — Chair Jerome Powell will enter this week's Federal Reserve meeting with inflation approaching the Fed's target rate, the economy growing and the unemployment rate near a half-century low. A year ago, most economists had envisioned a much darker outlook. As the Fed raised interest rates at the fastest pace in four decades [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge cooled further last month even as the economy kept growing. Last week's government report showed that prices rose 0.2 percent from November to December, a pace consistent with pre-pandemic levels and barely above the Fed's 2 percent annual target. Measured from a year earlier, prices increased [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — The nation's economy grew at a 3.3 percent annual pace from October through December, according to a new report from the Commerce Department. The report said the gross domestic product — the economy's total output of goods and services — decelerated from its 4.9 percent growth rate the previous quarter. It was [...]
NEW YORK (AP) — Now that bitcoin funds are trading, which is the best to own? The answer is not necessarily the one that rises the most. The job of these funds is to track the price of bitcoin, whatever that is, in what can be a more convenient thing to own for many investors. [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — A measure of consumer sentiment by the University of Michigan has jumped in the past two months by the most since 1991. A separate survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that Americans’ inflation expectations have reached their lowest point in nearly three years. The survey, released last week, [...]
A new Nationwide survey of Americans aged 60 to 65 years old has revealed that many adults in that cohort are not as financially comfortable as they expected at this point in their lives. Respondents ranked inflation as the greatest threat to their retirement security at 90 percent, while cuts to Social Security benefits and [...]
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — On the first business day of the new year, Missouri Treasurer Vivek Malek began accepting applications for about $120 million of state-subsidized, low-interest loans to small businesses, farmers and affordable housing developers. Within six hours, Malek had so many requests for the money that he had to cut off applications. [...]