Author: Money Mechanics

Crude oil prices extended their decline today, with sliding to $77.51 per barrel at the time of writing, and at $73.62 per barrel, on reports that the United States and Iran were making progress in their peace talks. The latest updates from the negotiations table include a report that the United States will waive sanctions on Iran’s oil industry for the 60-day duration of the cessation of hostilities agreed earlier this month. The two parties also agreed on a mechanism to end fighting between Israel and Lebanon, Reuters reported on Monday. Also on Monday, Bloomberg reported that at least three…

AXA XL, the global specialty insurance and reinsurance arm of the AXA Group, has been back in the catastrophe bond market in recent weeks, securing $67.5 million of retrocessional protection from a now-priced Galileo Re Ltd. (Series 2026-1) issuance that we have been told was more privately offered than its previous deals.With the transaction offered to investors on a more private basis, information is relatively limited with this latest catastrophe bond for AXA XL. We are told that ultimately the $67.5 million of cat bond notes will provide a source of industry loss based retrocession to protect the XL Bermuda…

(By Oil & Gas 360) – The next great American oil boom may not come from discovering a new basin. It may come from recovering more oil from fields that have already been producing for decades.  For more than a century, the U.S. oil industry has focused on finding new resources. From the giant conventional fields of Texas and California to the shale revolution that transformed North Dakota, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania, success has largely been measured by what operators could discover and develop.  But even after decades of production, enormous volumes of oil remain underground.  Traditional production methods often recover only 10% to 40%…

Implied volatilities declined across the board last week as the markets pivoted away from a hawkish Fed to an intense but ultimately positive US-Iranian weekend negotiation to end hostilities. USO 1M 25-delta call skew is now lower vs pre-War levels (USO call implied volatilities trading +3pts above comparable put implied vols vs a pre-War skew differential of +15pts). Interest rate volatility per VIXTLT Index has declined to a 1 percentile low despite both, the Fed’s hawkish tone and Kevin Warsh’s removal of forward guidance which in theory increases uncertainty (and therefore implied volatility) about future policy. Nonetheless, the probability of…

“Saturday Night Live” alum Leslie Jones is bringing her signature no-holds-barred humor to the world of vacation rentals in a brand-new HGTV series that promises plenty of laughs and dramatic property transformations.The comedian has teamed up with renovation expert Jasmine Roth for “Roast My Rental,” a new HGTV competition series that takes aim at some of America’s most cringeworthy short-term rental properties.The series is slated to premiere on July 24 and will follow the duo as they attempt to rescue struggling vacation homes that have become magnets for bad reviews and disappointed guests.“Millions of people check into vacation rentals each…

Kyle Kucharski/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.Need external storage? Samsung’s T9 portable SSD has 4 terabytes of space for $790, that’s 32% off the regular price of $1,144 (or $350 off). With the exorbitant cost of memory right now, this is a deal to pay close attention to. It’s one of the fastest portable SSDs on the market, with read and write speeds of up to 2,000 MB/s, designed for creators who need to move massive video and project files in minutes — not hours. Also: June Prime Day live blog 2026: We’re tracking Amazon deals on SSDs, TVs, laptops…

This WeekThis week saw renewed hopes for an Iran deal, fresh inflation data ahead of next week’s Federal Reserve meeting and SPCX’s IPO on Nasdaq – the biggest IPO of all time!Odds of a peace deal looked remote as recently as yesterday morning, with the U.S. and Iran exchanging attacks and President Trump promising further strikes.But, starting midday yesterday things turned around as President Trump canceled those attacks, and then said “final points [in a peace deal] have been… approved by all parties involved.” He added that the deal could be signed “maybe over the weekend,” and “we ended the war with Iran today.”Early Friday, there…

Population growth might be slowing, and more apartments and homes are going unsold and unoccupied. But that doesn’t mean the nation’s affordability challenges are getting better.Depressed demand and harsh affordability challenges are the defining stories of 2026, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies’ latest State of the Nation’s Housing report.For years, the solution to the U.S. housing crisis was simple: We just needed to build more. But the frenzied bidding wars of the early 2020s have given way to a more complex reality. Today, construction is up and population growth is down, yet the average American is…

The main equity indexes were mixed on Monday, as market participants continued to monitor negotiations between the U.S. and Iran and the status of the Strait of Hormuz. Investors, traders and speculators also observed the passing of Alan Greenspan, who led the Federal Reserve for almost 20 years and was among the most important central bankers of our time.At the closing bell, the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.3% to 51,712, but the S&P 500 was down 0.4% to 7,472, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite had shed 1.3% at 26,166.Communication services stocks were the worst-performing group, with the…

Rising food costs driven by inflation have been a problem for U.S. steakhouses ranging from high-end to budget establishments, leading some well-known restaurants to permanently shut their doors and in some cases file for bankruptcy An increase in the cost of beef that led to steak prices spiking 16% to $12.73 per pound in March 2026, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, affected menu prices and discouraged some diners from dining in steakhouses, taking a bite out of restaurant revenue. Steakhouses that have closed locations in the U.S. over the last three months have included Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse…