Finance
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2025 was a turning point for your electricity bill and it’s just getting more expensive from here. It’s not just data centers
Last year increasingly looks like a turning point for American electricity bills. Retail electricity prices rose 7% in 2025 alone, part of a nearly 40% climb since 2021 that has made this decade the fastest period of electricity price growth on record. Wholesale costs are now 6.1% higher than a year prior — almost double…
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Single Gen Z women are destroying their male counterparts when it comes to buying their first house
Single Gen Z women are outpacing their male counterparts when it comes to buying a home. They accounted for 35% of all homebuyers in their generation, while single Gen Z men represented 18%, according to survey data from the National Association of Realtors. NAR surveyed people who bought a home between July 2024 and June…
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Variational raises $50 million Series A to bring liquidity from traditional markets to blockchain rails
The crypto industry has long defined itself in opposition to traditional finance but, in recent years, the two worlds are on a path to convergence. The latest example is Variational, a startup that has built a protocol for decentralized derivatives trading, but one that is aimed at gathering liquidity from traditional finance dealers rather than…
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The definitive guide to trade wars just dropped. Its authors have one message for Washington: Study your enemy
Soumaya Keynes and Chad Bown have spent nearly a decade talking about trade. They started as podcast partners—nights and weekends, no advertising, holding down day jobs at the Financial Times and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, respectively—because their employers were fine with this particular side hustle. Their origin story is, by Keynes’s own telling,…
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Current price of oil as of May 20, 2026
At 9:30 a.m. Eastern Time today, the price of oil sits at $110.34 per barrel, using Brent as the benchmark (we’ll explain what that means shortly). That’s a decrease of $2.59 since yesterday morning and roughly $44.50 more than at this time last year. oil price per barrel % Change Price of oil yesterday $112.93…
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Exclusive: Circle cofounder raises $30 million for Series A ‘AI-native bank’ Catena Labs
Sean Neville, who cofounded the stablecoin giant Circle, has raised another stash of capital from top-flight venture capitalists. His startup Catena Labs, which builds tools to allow AI agents to safely conduct financial transactions, announced Wednesday that it’s secured $30 million in a Series A funding round led by Acrew Capital and the crypto arm…
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U.S. national debt officially hits $39 trillion—adding approximately $5 billion a day since October
It wasn’t even a year ago that fiscal hawks were wringing their hands over a new national debt milestone: The debt had hit $38 trillion, and interest payments on an annual basis would be 13 figures. A little over 200 days later, the U.S. national debt stands at more than $39 trillion. According to Treasury…
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How the multibillion dollar AI data center boom has transformed CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate company
CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services firm, has long been associated with brokerage, facilities management, and investment sales. But the century-old company—founded in the aftermath of the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake—is now being reshaped by another kind of seismic event: the AI data center boom. The rise of generative AI has triggered…
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The 30-year Treasury yield just hit a level it hasn’t seen since before the Great Recession. Do the bond vigilantes ride again?
Back in 1993, the great Democratic strategist James Carville—famous for his quip, “it’s the economy, stupid”—told the Wall Street Journal that he used to think that if reincarnation existed, he wanted to come back as the president, the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. “But now I would like to come back as the bond…
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Buy now, pay later is the new financial lifeline for lower-income Americans, as consumer loans pile up to $19 trillion
Americans’ finances are getting stretched to historic margins, so the option to spread out payments on everyday purchases into multiple, usually interest-free installments has become increasingly appealing. What could go wrong? Buy now, pay later has morphed from a trend into a fixture of an American shopping experience. Kicked off through apps such as Klarna…