Vol. 1, No. 61
Topic
The Business & Economy section follows the real machine underneath American daily life: jobs, wages, prices, interest rates, corporate strategy, and the financial markets that price all of it in real time. We cover the firms whose decisions shape what Americans pay for groceries, fuel, housing, and care; the regulators and central bankers whose decisions shape what those firms can do; and the workers whose paychecks rise and fall as a result.
Our beats include the Federal Reserve, the SEC, the FTC, the CFPB, the major exchanges, the largest U.S. banks, the largest U.S. technology firms, and the labor markets that hire most Americans. We pay close attention to earnings, layoffs, mergers, antitrust enforcement, and the macro indicators — inflation, unemployment, GDP, consumer sentiment, retail sales — that move policy.
Where a market story is really a household-finance story, we route to personal finance; where it's really a government-action story, we route to politics; where it's primarily a science or engineering story (drug approvals, semiconductor roadmaps, energy R&D), see science and technology.
Articles cite the underlying data: SEC filings (10-Ks, 10-Qs, 8-Ks, proxies), Bureau of Labor Statistics releases, Bureau of Economic Analysis reports, Federal Reserve communications and FOMC minutes, agency press releases, and primary corporate disclosures. We try to be specific about what numbers mean rather than reaching for a narrative — the line between "the economy is fine" and "the economy is breaking" is thinner than headlines usually suggest, and our job is to keep the specifics in view.
Amazon's longest Prime Day yet opens Tuesday with a record $26.3 billion in online spending forecast across U.S. retailers — and a tariff dynamic that is pulling summer purchases forward.
Federal enforcers blocked the JetBlue-Spirit merger to protect flyers from higher fares. Spirit died anyway, fares are at a four-year high, and the lesson is bigger than one airline.
Airline fares jumped 26.7% over the year through May, the steepest in years, even as jet fuel eased. Spirit's collapse and seat cuts are keeping summer tickets high.
President Trump says he'll put a 100% tariff on all French wine and champagne unless Paris scraps the 3% digital tax it levies on Apple, Amazon, Meta and Google — raising the stakes days before the G7.
Kevin Warsh opens his first Fed meeting under a mandate to lower rates. Futures traders now put better-than-even odds on a hike instead — and Wednesday's projections will show whether the Fed agrees.
Almost no one expects Kevin Warsh to cut rates at his first Fed meeting this week — which is exactly why it proves nothing. The real test of the Fed's independence comes at the meeting nobody's talking about yet.
SpaceX priced its record IPO at $135, then soared — up 19% on day one to $161 and past $177 since. Its market value has topped $2.3 trillion, almost three times the fair value Morningstar gave it.
Fox Corporation agreed to acquire Roku for about $22 billion, pairing its live sports and news with the streaming platform that sits inside more than 100 million households worldwide.
The European Central Bank raised interest rates for the first time in nearly three years, blaming the Middle East war's energy shock. Days later, the Fed meets in Washington with U.S. inflation running hotter still.
SpaceX just pulled off the largest IPO on record and made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire. The engineering milestone is real. So is the public's deepening dependence on one man's company.
The World Bank cut its 2026 global growth forecast to 2.5 percent, the weakest since the pandemic, and warned it could fall to 1.3 percent if the Middle East war's oil shock spreads to financial markets.
Markets read Wednesday's soft core CPI as proof inflation was cooling. The next morning's wholesale report told a different story — and it points at a war Washington keeps treating as someone else's problem.
Oracle posted record cloud revenue and a $638 billion backlog, then watched its stock fall about 12 percent as investors focused on a $23.7 billion cash-flow deficit and plans to borrow billions more.
A report that Google will use Intel to build more than 3 million of its AI chips in 2028 sent Intel shares surging and signaled that the AI hardware supply chain, long concentrated at TSMC, is starting to diversify.
May CPI rose 4.2% from a year ago, the fastest in three years, as energy prices surged. But core inflation cooled to a 0.2% monthly gain and shelter eased — and markets read it as confirmation the Fed holds next week.
Amazon and Corning struck a multibillion-dollar fiber deal that adds 1,000 manufacturing jobs in North Carolina — a sign the AI boom is now landing in factories, not just server farms.
Fertitta Entertainment is buying Caesars for $31 a share in the largest casino acquisition in U.S. history — a deal led by a sitting U.S. ambassador with ties to the president.
The Nasdaq fell 4% — its worst day in a year — as a hot jobs report spiked yields and chip stocks led a selloff that wiped about $1 trillion from markets.
The BLS reported 172,000 nonfarm payrolls for May — more than double the 80,000 estimate. Markets tumbled, rate-hike odds climbed, and Kevin Warsh's first Fed meeting just got far more complicated.
Berkshire Hathaway agreed to buy homebuilder Taylor Morrison for $6.8 billion in cash — the biggest deal yet under Greg Abel and a wager on a strained U.S. housing market.
ADP counted 122,000 new private-sector jobs in May — the strongest month since January 2025 — with broad gains across sectors and company sizes ahead of Friday's BLS report.
Broadcom posted record revenue and a 143% surge in AI chip sales on Wednesday, then watched its shares slip after hours — a sign of how high the bar has climbed for the AI trade.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative proposed new tariffs on 60 countries that have failed to prohibit forced labor goods — with India targeted during active bilateral trade negotiations.
Dollar General beat first-quarter estimates and raised its full-year forecast — but its fastest-growing customer segment tells a harder story about the American economy.
A New York Fed study finds remote work, not AI, explains most of the rise in young-graduate joblessness. The fix is mundane, and that should be a relief.
