Financial related news.
WASHINGTON — Inflation jumped in December at its fastest year-over-year pace in nearly four decades, surging 7 percent and raising costs for consumers, offsetting recent wage gains and heightening pressure on President Joe Biden and the Federal Reserve to address what is increasingly Americans' central economic concern. Prices have spiked during the recovery from the [...]
WASHINGTON — Prices at the wholesale level surged by a record 9.7 percent for all of 2021, setting an annual record and providing further evidence that inflation is still present at all levels of the U.S. economy. The Labor Department reported that its producer price index, which measures inflation before it reaches consumers, did slow [...]
WASHINGTON — With inflation surging, unemployment falling and wages rising, some economists are warning that the Federal Reserve may have waited too long to reverse its ultra-low-rate policies — a delay that could put the economy at heightened risk. Inflation has become the most serious threat to the economy, a growing worry for the financial [...]
States and localities in November paid out the largest amount of rental assistance to cash-strapped tenants since a federal program began, the Treasury Department said in a statement last week. The $2.9 billion paid out is the latest sign that the program's early hiccups have been mostly been resolved and it is now turning to [...]
State and local governments will have greater flexibility to spend $350 billion of federal COVID-19 aid under new rules from President Joe Biden's administration. The revised rules mean that most cities and counties will be free to spend their entire allotment on any government services without having to prove they lost revenue during the pandemic. [...]
WASHINGTON (AP) — The job market is nearly healthy enough that the central bank's low-interest rate policies are no longer needed, Federal Reserve officials concluded last month. Fed officials also expressed concerns in minutes from its December meeting, released Wednesday, that surging inflation was spreading into more areas of the economy and would last longer [...]
WASHINGTON — Forecasting economic change in a pandemic was always going to be hard. Now omicron, the new COVID-19 variant sweeping across the globe, has made it even harder. Economists and policymakers, after all, have no real-world experience contending with the economic fallout from a worldwide pandemic. In the United States and other wealthy countries, [...]
DETROIT (AP) — A couple of months ago, a woman paid a visit to Jeff Schrier's used car lot in Omaha, Neb. She was on a tight budget, she said, and was desperate for a vehicle to commute to work. She was shown three cars priced at her limit, roughly $7,500. Schrier said the woman [...]
NEW YORK — The head of the nation's second-largest bank said consumers are spending "at a faster rate" than he's ever seen but he remains concerned about how inflation and supply-chain issues will influence the economy going into the winter. In an interview with The Associated Press, Bank of America Chairman and CEO Brian Moynihan [...]
Wall Street delivered another strong year for investors in 2021, as a resurgence in consumer demand fueled by the reopening of the global economy pumped up corporate profits. As of Dec. 22, the S&P 500 had risen 25 percent, its third-straight annual increase. Along the way, the benchmark index set 67 all-time highs. The market [...]