Finance
-
Current price of oil as of April 8, 2026
At 8:40 a.m. Eastern Time today, the price of oil sits at $93.76 per barrel, using Brent as the benchmark (we’ll explain what that means shortly). That’s a decrease of $19.64 since yesterday morning and roughly $TK more than at this time last year. oil price per barrel % Change Price of oil yesterday $113.40
-
U.S. had a national debt ‘home run’ in its grasp, says Jamie Dimon—but the government did nothing, and now its best option is crisis management
The U.S. national debt stands at more than $39 trillion, with interest paid on the debt now amounting to more than $1 trillion a year. Before too long, that figure will double. What this borrowing (and its related interest payments) will ultimately mean for the economy remains to be seen: Theories range from a market
-
Jamie Dimon warns of growing crypto competition in annual letter: ‘We need to roll out our own blockchain technology’
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has long been among the crypto sector’s most notable skeptics. Dimon vowed in 2017 to fire any JPMorgan trader who traded bitcoin and has called the oldest cryptocurrency a “fraud” and a “pet rock.” More recently, though, Dimon has become more open to the technology and, this week, he acknowledged that
-
2 years ago, Saudi Arabia quietly canceled the ‘petrodollar’ deal with America that wired the world economy for 50 years. Then war broke out in Iran
The gold standard may have ended in the early 1970s, but something else quietly took its place for the next 50 years: oil. The so-called “petrodollar” system wasn’t well understood for most of this time, but a secret deal between Henry Kissinger and Saudi Arabia ensured the dollar would remain the dominant reserve currency. The
-
Bill Ackman’s $64 billion Universal Music play is part of his strategy to become the next Warren Buffett
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman’s hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital, is planning to buy Universal Music Group (UMG), the world’s largest music group, which represents artists including Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Bob Dylan, and the Beatles. The $64 billion pitch announced Tuesday is Ackman’s latest move to turn Pershing into a “modern-day” Berkshire Hathaway and become
-
Aspire built a financial stack used by 50,000 firms. Now it’s coming to the U.S. to take on Ramp and Mercury
The business of corporate credit cards is intensely competitive as U.S. startups like Ramp, Brex, and Rho challenge incumbents like American Express and SAP Concur. Now, a new player is turning up on the scene: Singapore-based Aspire, which believes it can compete in the U.S. by offering its own suite of products aimed at global
-
The AI trade is over. Top Wall Street analysts say the AI opportunity might be just starting
The crash that was widely predicted just last summer hasn’t arrived yet. There was no single day when the AI stock market euphoria buckled, no Lehman moment, no front-page meltdown. Instead, over the better part of a year, Wall Street did something far more methodical—and far more telling: it slowly, deliberately, and almost silently wound
-
Trump, the $39 trillion national debt, rosy growth assumptions and the question of ‘a sustainable path’
President Trump’s fiscal year 2027 budget is built on a single, load-bearing bet: that the U.S. economy can grow at 3% annually for the next decade. The White House says that growth will flood federal coffers with new tax revenue and eventually bend the national debt, now sitting at over $39 trillion, onto a downward
-
Top economist Mark Zandi says the indicator that has called every recession since WWII just signaled we’re already in one
Economists have spent months debating if a recession is on the horizon. One economic indicator predicts most of those arguments are already moot. Mark Zandi, the top economist at Moody’s Analytics, said the U.S. economy could already be in a recession, according to the Vicious Cycle Index (VCI), an economic indicator Zandi and his colleagues
-
Bitcoin slides with risk assets as Trump’s Iran ultimatum looms
Bitcoin slipped as cryptocurrencies were swept up in broader market volatility after a series of attacks on Iran’s infrastructure as President Donald Trump’s key ceasefire deadline approaches. The largest cryptocurrency fell as much as 2.5% before paring some losses in New York trading. The decline erased gains from the previous day, when Bitcoin briefly topped