Two rates run finance: the discount rate turns future cash into today's terms, and the risk-free rate sets the floor every risky return must beat.
Lena Fischer · October 9, 2026Unemployment insurance replaces part of a worker's wages under state-set formulas and weekly caps. Here is how benefit amounts are set and how payments arrive.
Lena Fischer · October 7, 2026
Coffee, cotton, oil: how raw material prices travel through the supply chain, where costs stick, and why shelf prices rarely move one for one.
Lena Fischer · October 5, 2026
A bigger paycheck does not always mean more buying power. How real wages strip out inflation and show what your pay truly buys.
Lena Fischer · October 4, 2026
The rollback would cut the 2031 fleetwide target by more than 30 percent. Who benefits, and in which quarter, is the open question.
Lena Fischer · October 2, 2026
Small candy counters survive on margins big chains cannot match — and on habits big chains cannot copy.
Lena Fischer · September 29, 2026Headlines compress. Data does not. A short guide to checking what an economic report actually said before sharing it.
Lena Fischer · September 27, 2026Core inflation strips food and energy prices from the index, producing the smoother series the Federal Reserve treats as the better guide to underlying price pressure.
Lena Fischer · August 28, 2026
Price, service and returns work differently at big-box chains and independents. Here is the mechanism behind each, and when each wins.
Henrik Larsen · October 1, 2026
A field guide to finding peak-season produce, fair prices, and stalls worth returning to.
Valentina Sokolov · September 21, 2026
The economy looks fine on paper. The people in it do not feel fine, and Goldman Sachs argues that gap is the story.
Lena Fischer · September 20, 2026
The Bureau of Labor Statistics' core inflation gauge, which excludes food and energy, climbed 0.2% for the month and 2.5% from a year earlier in the July 2026 report.
Valentina Sokolov · August 23, 2026
The BLS combines roughly 80,000 monthly price quotes with Consumer Expenditure Survey weights to produce the CPI, which rose 0.1% in July 2026 as core inflation climbed 0.2%.
Valentina Sokolov · August 20, 2026
The CPI is built from about 94,000 monthly price quotes weighted by household spending surveys, and its known limits — substitution, coverage, shelter lag — are published with it.
Henrik Larsen · August 26, 2026
A 2009 amendment to the Electronic Fund Transfer Act, enforced through Regulation E, bars most store and prepaid gift cards from expiring in under five years and caps dormancy fees, with carve-outs shoppers rarely see printed on the card.
Henrik Larsen · August 21, 2026Consumer spending posted its sharpest monthly drop in more than a year, even as annual retail sales growth continued to outpace headline inflation, government data show.
Henrik Larsen · August 12, 2026Dollar General and Dollar Tree grew to over 40,000 U.S. stores on small-basket, low-cost arithmetic — and hit the model's ceiling when the customer ran out of money.
Lena Fischer · August 1, 2026
The announced rollback of Biden-era fuel economy rules is a good moment to understand the 1975 system underneath the politics.
Lena Fischer · September 28, 2026
The small number on your statement follows a formula set by your issuer. Knowing the formula shows why the balance shrinks so slowly.
Gabriela Montoya · September 13, 2026IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32 sets the 2026 federal income tax brackets, and the mechanism behind them trips up more taxpayers than the numbers themselves.
Gabriela Montoya · August 17, 2026The $250,000 limit applies per depositor, per bank, per ownership category — a rule that legally multiplies coverage across accounts and is routinely misread.
Lena Fischer · August 5, 2026
A five-minute routine for finding the claim, the number, and the source behind any business headline.
Valentina Sokolov · September 24, 2026
Boards are keeping chief executives in place while companies strip out the management tier beneath them, new turnover and workforce data show.
Lena Fischer · August 18, 2026An LBO buys a public company with its own borrowed future cash flow — the arithmetic works when debt is cheap, the business is stable, and the exit door is open.
Lena Fischer · August 10, 2026Core inflation strips out food and energy to track the underlying trend. Here is what it measures, how it differs from headline CPI, and why the Federal Reserve tracks a different index entirely.
Lena Fischer · August 10, 2026