Financial related news.
WASHINGTON (AP) — For all the sound and fury about raising the nation's debt limit, most economists say federal borrowing is not at a crisis point ... at least not yet. The national debt is at the core of a dispute about how to raise the government's legal borrowing authority, a mostly political argument that [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — Sooner or later, either Wall Street or the Federal Reserve has to blink. Nearly a year into the Fed's drive to quash inflation by hiking interest rates at a blistering pace, investors still don't seem to fully believe what the Fed warns is coming next: higher rates through the end of the [...]
NEW YORK — Over the past few years, a number of companies have attempted to act as the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank, promising lucrative returns to customers who deposited their bitcoin or other digital assets. In a span of less than 12 months, nearly all of the biggest of those companies have failed spectacularly. [...]
WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Vice Chair Lael Brainard said last week that high inflation in the United States is easing and suggested it was possible that the Fed's interest rate hikes could slow price acceleration without causing significant job losses. Speaking in Chicago, Brainard sketched out a more optimistic outlook for inflation than some Fed [...]
WASHINGTON — Wholesale prices in the United States rose 6.2 percent in December from a year earlier, a sixth straight slowdown and a hopeful sign that inflation pressures will continue to cool. The latest year-over-year figure was down from 7.3 percent in November and from a recent peak of 11.7 percent in March. On a [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Federal Reserve has only a limited role to play in combating climate change, Chair Jerome Powell said earlier this week, a stance that puts him at odds with environmental activists who have pushed central banks worldwide to take steps to restrict lending to energy companies. Maintaining the Fed's independence, Powell said, [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve officials suggested at their most recent meeting that a continuing streak of robust hiring could keep inflation elevated and was a key reason why they expected to raise interest rates this year more than they had previously forecast. In the minutes of their mid-December meeting released last week, the officials [...]
NEW YORK — Wall Street expects companies to face a reckoning with the realities of hot inflation, a slowing economy and rising interest rates in the latest round of earnings results. Analysts are forecasting an earnings contraction of about 3.5 percent for the fourth quarter, according to FactSet. That estimate, as of the end of [...]
Taxes are falling and minimum wages rising for residents in numerous states as a variety of new laws are taking effect that could impact people's finances and, in some cases, their personal liberties. Some new laws could affect access to abortion. Others will ease restrictions on marijuana and concealed guns, or eliminate the need to [...]
LOS ANGELES — Economists are baffled by a wider-than-usual divergence between long-term mortgage rates and the yield on the benchmark government bond that is driving a sharp rise in borrowing costs and helped to torpedo the housing market in 2022. The gap, or spread, between the 10-year Treasury yield and the average rate on a [...]