Author: Money Mechanics

Thank you, Professor Metrick, for the kind introduction and the opportunity to return to Yale to speak to the Yale Program on Financial Stability today.1 I have long admired and been a grateful consumer of all the insightful work you have done here since its inception in 2013. I know that a number of the staff of the Board of Governors have been contributors to, and are avid consumers of, your work. I place a high priority on using novel sources of information to address data gaps. Given that, let me commend the effort to turn the information gathering and…

Weekly pending sales Pending home sales data provides a week-to-week perspective, though results can be affected by holidays and short-term fluctuations. The last six weeks have shown positive yearly growth. However, the yearly growth did slow down last week and the week-to-week data dipped.Weekly pending sales usually take 30-60 days to hit the sales data. Typically, mortgage rates above 6.64% and breaking over 7% really impact the data. Under 6.25% has been the sweet spot over the past several years, excluding short-term variables.  Weekly pending sales last week over the last two years: 2026: 70, 209 2025: 69,183 Mortgage purchase…

You don’t have to abandon all your old AI memories to switch to Claude.  Thomas Fuller/NurPhoto via Getty ImagesFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysClaude AI now lets you copy memories from another AI service.The goal is to help you easily switch to Claude.The process uses instructions that you can copy and paste.Building a digital second brain usually involves weeks of tedious back-and-forth, as you slowly teach an AI your professional quirks, favorite hobbies, and specific writing style. While most platforms rely on this slow-burn “memory” to personalize your experience, Anthropic’s Claude is cutting out…

(Oil Price) – The oil shock will soon show up where it usually does—jobs. Goldman Sachs warned that higher crude prices could cost the U.S. labor market around 10,000 jobs per month through the rest of the year, as elevated energy costs ripple through the broader economy. The hit comes even after accounting for gains in the oil patch. Higher prices used to mean that a hiring boom in shale was soon to follow. Not this time, according to a Thursday note to Goldman clients. Today’s U.S. oil producers are leaner, more automated, and far less willing to chase growth at…

Aon, the global insurance and reinsurance broking group, has expanded its Automated Event Response (AER) service to include US severe convective storms (SCS), further assisting carriers to manage losses from what Aon describes as the costliest insured peril of the 21st century on a cumulative basis.In January, Aon reported that global insured losses from natural disaster events in 2025 hit $127 billion, with global SCS events accounting for $61 billion of this, the third-highest annual total on record for the peril. In the US alone, SCS events drove insured losses of $52 billion in 2025, according to Aon. In 2026,…

The team from Bluesky has built another app — and this time, it’s not a social network, but an AI assistant that allows you to design your own algorithm, create custom feeds, and, one day, vibe-code your own app. At the Atmosphere conference over the weekend, Bluesky’s former CEO, Jay Graber, now chief innovation officer, and Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee, presented the AI app, called Attie, for the first time. Conference attendees will become the initial beta testers for the new experience, which leverages Anthropic’s Claude under the hood to create an agentic social app built on Bluesky’s underlying protocol,…

Generac Holdings Inc. (NYSE:GNRC) was featured on Mad Money as Jim Cramer shared his take on the stock amid a sliding macro environment. Cramer discussed the stock’s price action and the reasons behind it, as he stated: Generac stock is more quizzical. Generac, the company that makes backup generators, is going great guns. It’s always had a strong residential business because of the debilitated electric grid and the increasingly erratic weather. Sure, the residential business struggled last year with rates still elevated and a light hurricane season last fall. But after some severe winter storms and with just a little…

(By Oil & Gas 360) – The 1974 oil price shock remains one of the defining moments in modern economic history. Triggered by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) oil embargo following the Yom Kippur War, crude prices quadrupled in a matter of months. It exposed deep structural vulnerabilities in Western economies and reshaped global energy policy for decades. Fast forward to today, and while the headlines, geopolitical tension, supply disruption, and volatile prices feel familiar, the underlying system is very different. Understanding both periods side by side helps clarify what is truly comparable and what is not.…

(Image credit: Getty Images)Financial mistakes tend to fall into two categories: Small missteps and major crises. Miss a credit card payment and get hit with a late fee? Misstep. Lock in major losses during a market crash? Crisis.Retirement is different. Decades-long timelines turn routine decisions into make-or-break moments, and the consequences are not always clear. Common 401(k) and IRA mistakes can be a gateway to compounding losses. The most dangerous of these mistakes is deceptively simple.While the retirement industry has made strides in getting people to save, we are failing them on the most critical next step: Putting that money…

Thank you, Francisco, for the kind introduction. It is an honor to be here at the Economic Club of Miami.1 Tonight I will talk about a topic too large to ignore: the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet. Like any other bank, the Fed’s balance sheet is a record of the assets and liabilities we hold. The assets are primarily Treasury securities and agency mortgage-backed securities (MBS). The liabilities include all U.S. currency in circulation, reserve balances banks hold at the Fed, and the Treasury General Account. The size and composition of these holdings matter because they affect the amount of money…