Finance
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‘This is the way’: Elon Musk endorses Warren Buffett’s famed 5-minute plan to fix the national debt
The national debt is set to reach $40 trillion in the near future if it continues to grow at its current pace. That has caught the attention of the richest man in the world. Elon Musk has joined the likes of Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in supporting a solution to…
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‘Americans are literally getting squeezed’: A top economist on why your wages are disappearing while the rich keep booking vacations
Consumer sentiment in the U.S. has officially never been worse. The University of Michigan’s final April reading came in at 49.8, the lowest in the survey’s 74-year-history. Three of the four lowest sentiment readings ever recorded have now happened in the past nine months. To be fair, the survey isn’t without its critics. Economists have…
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Iran war is draining world’s oil buffer at an unprecedented pace
The world has burned through oil inventories at a record speed as the Iran war throttles flows from the Persian Gulf, eating into the very buffer that protects against supply shocks. The rapidly shrinking stockpiles mean that the risk of even more extreme price spikes and shortages is getting ever-closer, leaving governments and industries with…
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The federal government must issue more debt than it expected as cash flow weakens, and ‘the bond market is shouting’
The Treasury Department announced this week that it expects to borrow more than anticipated in the current quarter as incoming cash flow has been weaker than initially projected. The $189 billion now estimated for the April-June quarter is $79 billion more than what Treasury saw in February. And after adjusting for a larger-than-expected cash balance…
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Trump Media posts $405 million loss driven by crypto holdings
The Trump family media group posted a net drop of $405.9 million in the first quarter, largely driven by unrealized losses in cryptocurrencies held by the company. Trump Media & Technology Group Corp., which is the parent company of Truth Social, released its first-quarter 2026 results on Friday reporting a positive operating cash flow of…
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Russian debt defaults are surging, with a quarter of the bond market at risk, while Putin hides in bunkers fixated on his war instead of the economy
The Russian economy is now shrinking, and businesses are having more trouble keeping up with debt payments, representing a potentially systemic threat to the country’s bond market. According to data from the central bank this week, GDP contracted 0.5% year over year in the first quarter, far below projections for 1.6% growth, due in part…
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Investors are betting big on senior housing. There’s just one problem—the baby boomers they’re chasing can’t pay the rent
The silver tsunami is shaking up commercial real estate after years of senior housing being the quiet corner of the market. Major office renovations and headquarters projects, industrial warehouses, data centers, and apartment complexes received more institutional attention for years as senior housing was hammered by the pandemic, prompting investors to look elsewhere. But now…
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This economist studied 400 years of recessions. His bleak conclusion: stop trying to predict them
In the early 18th century, the American colonies suffered a depression-level economic contraction. There was no war. No financial panic. No obvious villain—except, as it turns out, Blackbeard. Atlantic piracy had reached its peak, blockading the port of Charleston and choking off trade routes from the Caribbean to Long Island. Trade collapsed. The money supply…
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Why GameStop’s bid for eBay echoes one of the worst business deals of all time
By the start of 2000, I was already a veteran writer for Fortune warning our readers that the dot.com craze had lifted Nasdaq valuations to unsustainable highs. All of the time-honored metrics pointed to the same outcome—crash ahead! Then, AOL and Time Warner, Fortune‘s parent as owner of magazine-maker Time Inc., issued a shocker for…
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These experts made their careers grading travel credit cards and they say you’re being ripped off. It’s a $1.28 trillion crisis
There is a genre of content on social media where people sit in front of a camera and read their credit card balances out loud—and not from one card, but all of them. $7,500 on one, $8,900 on another, $10,000 on a third. Then a fourth, a fifth. “Everybody wants an Amex Pink card until…