Finance
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Whirlpool has a word for what the Iran War is doing to its industry: recession
Whirlpool has a word for what’s happening to its business. Two, actually, and both of them are “recession.” On the company’s first-quarter earnings call Wednesday, CEO Marc Bitzer and North America president Juan Carlos Puente both reached for the same term to describe what the war in Iran has done to U.S. appliance demand. Industry
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Oil developer Sentinel just got the U.S. and Japan to fund a deepwater terminal near Texas—but it won’t put a dent in spiraling prices until 2028
U.S. petroleum exports are rising to record highs amid the Iran war, and now a little-known developer will build a large oil-shipping hub deep in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico—but only with funding from the Trump administration and Japan. The unusual government investment for Sentinel Midstream’s multibillion-dollar Texas GulfLink deepwater terminal is a
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Tapestry thinks it’s cracked the code of ‘expressive luxury’ for Gen Z: a ‘Goldilocks’ combo of aspirational and approachable
Tapestry has a theory about why Gen Z keeps buying Coach bags: The brand is just fancy enough to feel like an achievement, and just affordable enough to actually be one. “Our price and brand positioning of expressive luxury is truly the Goldilocks of brand positioning in our industry,” Todd Kahn, CEO and brand president
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Americans owe $1.68 trillion on car loans — more than credit card debt and as much as all federal student loans
Some types of debt seem inescapable. Tens of millions of American are saddled with mortgages, student loans, credit card debt or a combination of the three. But there’s another place where Americans also carry huge outstanding liabilities: in their garages. Cars are rivaling everything else in terms of debt bondage for everyday Americans. Roughly one
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Two Americas, one drive-thru: Welcome to fast food’s contradictory, split-screen economy
The American consumer didn’t disappear in the first quarter of 2026. They just got pickier about where they spent their money — and the divergence is rippling through the fast food industry with unusual force. This week’s cascade of restaurant earnings produced a striking set of contradictions: Taco Bell delivered a blowout 8% same-store sales
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The American Dream is moving to the Midwest—Michigan and Wisconsin beat the coasts for the hottest housing markets, Redfin finds
You can buy a house outside Detroit for $158,000. That’s why the Midwest just beat the coasts—again—for America’s hottest neighborhoods. Six of the 10 hottest neighborhoods in the U.S. for 2026 are in the Midwest, according to a Redfin analysis released Wednesday. This marks the second consecutive year the region has dominated Redfin’s annual ranking
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Crypto users keep getting robbed because of a simple design flaw—but a solution is at hand
If you have ever paid online with Stripe’s new Link wallet, autofilled a checkout with Apple Pay, or topped up a Revolut account, you have used a piece of financial architecture that took decades to perfect. Sadly, for crypto and all its talk of reinventing money, the crypto industry has stubbornly failed to catch on.
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Elizabeth Warren seeks information on Meta’s latest stablecoin plans in letter to Mark Zuckerberg
Meta rolled out a stablecoin pilot on Facebook last week following years of false starts, and it didn’t take long before a familiar antagonist took notice. On Wednesday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) delivered a letter to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg calling its “lack of transparency” surrounding its stablecoin plans “troubling” and seeking answers to a
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Iran War forces DoorDash to shell out $50 million to help struggling delivery drivers
DoorDash said Wednesday it expects to spend more than $50 million in the second quarter on gas price relief for its delivery drivers. The San Francisco-based company said in March that it would offer extra compensation to U.S. and Canadian drivers as part of a temporary program to offset a sharp increase in gas prices
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Current price of oil as of May 7, 2026
By 8:45 a.m. Eastern Time today, oil had reached $100.45 per barrel, measured using the Brent benchmark. That’s $6.07 less than it cost yesterday morning and about $38.90 above its price a year earlier. Oil price per barrel % Change Price of oil yesterday $106.52 -5.69% Price of oil 1 month ago $112.30 -10.55% Price