Author: Money Mechanics

’s latest pullback looks less like weakness and more like normalization. Its extreme lead over stocks had become difficult to sustain. For investors, the real question is whether the correction has restored value. Gold prices have recently caught many investors off guard. After a strong start to the year, there is suddenly little euphoria left. Since the beginning of the year, gold has fallen by about 5.6%. And this comes at a time when geopolitical conflicts are simmering, inflation concerns have not gone away, and many investors should actually be seeking safe havens again. Normally, this would be exactly the…

I’ll give you the unwelcome news first. Maryland recently became a more expensive place to sell a business. The 2025 budget added a new 2% surtax on capital gains for higher earners and stacked two new top income brackets on top of the old ones. Layer in the county piggyback tax that every Marylander pays, and a high-income seller’s combined marginal rate can land close to 12%. That’s a real bite out of a once-in-a-lifetime payday. Before you talk to buyers, get a realistic valuation range for your Maryland business. In 2026, the “right” price is the one a buyer…

Pimco is warning fixed-income investors to stay away from lower-quality credit, but sees plenty of opportunities in high-quality assets. The global asset manager, which has $2.27 trillion in assets under management, said in its 2026 outlook that the “credit loss cycle is upon us.” “After years of effortless returns, the default cycle is reasserting itself, and we expect significantly higher losses in lower-quality credit such as leveraged and private direct lending,” said the report, authored by global economic advisor Richard Clarida, chief investment officer of global fixed income Andrew Balls and chief investment officer Dan Ivascyn. “We view this as…

The U.S. government on Friday ordered Anthropic to immediately shut off access to two of its most powerful AI models — Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 — citing national security concerns. Anthropic announced on X that it has complied, but it made clear it thinks the government got this one wrong. The directive, which Anthropic said it received on Friday at 5:21 pm ET, forces the company to disable both models for all users worldwide — not just the foreign nationals the government’s export control order was nominally aimed at. Access to Anthropic’s other models isn’t affected. Why…

Brokerage giant Compass has said that a strict new Washington state law that prohibits private listings does not apply to properties marketed across its network of agents as “Private Exclusives” or “Coming Soon.”The new law, which Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson signed in March, took effect on Thursday. It prohibits real estate brokers from marketing properties to an exclusive group of brokers or prospective buyers, unless the property is concurrently marketed to the general public and all other brokers. The law, known as SB 6091, carries an exception for listings that could threaten the owner’s health or safety if marketed to the…

To help you understand what is going on in the global economy and what we expect to happen in the future, our highly experienced Kiplinger Letter team will keep you abreast of the latest developments and forecasts (Get a free issue of The Kiplinger Letter or subscribe). You’ll get all the latest news first by subscribing, but we will publish many (but not all) of the forecasts a few days afterward online. Here’s the latest…After a first half defined by the Iran war and its impact on oil, commodity prices and inflation, the rest of 2026 will test the global…

The main equity indexes were mixed this morning, ahead of the debut of Elon Musk’s SpaceX as a publicly traded company. The size and the scope of it were not sufficient to cover the market’s questions about the war in the Middle East, inflation and simpler things such as seasonality. Indeed, the biggest initial public offering (IPO) in stock market history happened on a Friday weeks into Wall Street’s traditional summer trading period.SpaceX (SPCX) started trading at about 11:45 am Eastern Standard Time and immediately popped 11.1% from its $135 offering price to $150. SPCX closed up 19.2% at $160.95,…

A major traditional finance product is moving to Solana with a planned $250 million commitment. Securitize, the tokenization platform with more than $4 billion in assets under management, has expanded its Securitize Tokenized AAA CLO Fund, known as STAC, to Solana. Ethena Labs, the creator of the USDe stablecoin, plans to allocate $250 million to the fund, marking one of the largest single commitments to tokenized structured credit on the Solana ecosystem to date. Related: Solana users can trade SpaceX stock starting June 12 What is a CLO and why does it matter A collateralized loan obligation, or CLO, is…

After months of consolidating high, just suffered a serious technical breakdown. The catalyst was a better-than-expected US boosting Fed-. That goosed the US dollar, unleashing gold-futures selling. This return of past years’ gold-fearing-Fed paradigm is vexing, yet irrational based on history. So it should prove short-lived, with this anomalous summer-doldrums selling carving a major bottom. As always understanding big unexpected price moves requires perspective. Back in late January, gold’s largest cyclical bull ever in US-dollar terms peaked after soaring an astounding 196.4% in 27.8 months without a single 10%+ correction! The speculative-mania buying climaxing that drove overboughtness stratospheric, as gold…

(BOE Report) – The extreme volatility of global oil prices has drained liquidity from the market this year at the fastest pace on record, as investors have become increasingly wary of committing cash to an asset that has become hostage to U.S. President Donald Trump’s daily social media posts on the Iran war. Liquidity, or how well matched the number of buyers is to the number of sellers, is the product of a number of factors, including traded volume and open interest. Open interest, or the number of Brent crude futures contracts that investors own, has fallen by nearly 17%…