Author: Money Mechanics

The AvalonBay Communities Inc. Park Loggia condominium, center, is reflected in a building in New York, U.S.Mark Abramson | Bloomberg | Getty ImagesThe biggest ever merger of real estate investment trusts — the combination of Equity Residential and AvalonBay, announced Thursday — has investors and analysts alike left with dropped jaws. The all-stock merger will have a market capitalization of about $52 billion and a total enterprise value of approximately $69 billion, according to a release. It will create one of the largest real estate companies in the U.S., with more than 180,000 rental apartments. “This combination creates a new and fundamentally…

Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.The Corsair EX400U is an excellent, compact and portable external SSD for gamers, creative professionals, and mobile users. With 2TB of space, you’ll have plenty of storage for large program downloads, raw video files, photos, and more. And right now at Best Buy, you can pick one up for 62% off, bringing the price down to just $330 – one of the best external SSD discounts I’ve seen in a long time.Also: The best M.2 SSDsThe EX400U connects to your Apple devices via USB-C and Thunderbolt 4 for blazing fast file transfers. You’ll…

(Oil & Gas 360) By Greg Barnett, MBA – Ethanol has been embedded in U.S. fuel policy for more than a century, with modern support accelerating after the 1970s oil shocks and becoming structurally fixed through the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) enacted in 2005 and expanded in 2007. The stated objectives have remained consistent: improve energy security, reduce emissions, and support rural economies. This assessment evaluates whether those objectives were achieved using measurable outcomes—energy content, fuel economy, petroleum displacement, land use, water consumption, and cost—rather than policy intent. Energy Content and Fuel Economy The thermodynamic properties of ethanol are unambiguous. On…

Actress Aubrey Plaza has relisted her Spanish-style California compound with a steep $1.2 million discount—just two months after an offer on the home fell through.Plaza, 41, originally listed the picturesque Los Feliz abode for $6.5 million in September, eight months after her husband, film director Jeff Baena, died by suicide inside the property.Now, the “Dirty Grandpa” actress—who announced in April that she is expecting her first child with partner Chris Abbott—is changing up her tactics for finding a buyer, choosing to relist the property with a new agent, Carl Gambino of the Gambino Group at Compass. While Gambino was not available to comment on…

Please enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser or access the information through the links provided below. May 22, 2026 Agencies publish resolution plan feedback letters for certain domestic and foreign banking organizations Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Federal Reserve Board For release at 4:00 p.m. EDT The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Federal Reserve Board today published feedback letters for several resolution plans submitted in July 2025. Resolution plans, also known as living wills, must describe a banking organization’s strategy for orderly resolution in the event of material…

Thank you, Jens, and thank you to the European Central Bank for the opportunity to speak to you today.1 Like other central banks, the Federal Reserve is confronted with how to respond to the effects of the conflict in the Middle East, which has constrained supplies and raised prices for petroleum and other goods. While I am hopeful that the conflict is on a path toward a peaceful resolution, it is unclear how long these supply disruptions and their economic impact will last, and that has become one of the biggest questions for the U.S. economy and the path of…

Rather than signaling a search for a strong breakout in the second half of May, Bitcoin appears to be in a consolidation phase, gauging market sentiment. The fact that the attempt to break above $82,000 was met with selling does not mean buyers have completely pulled back; however, it is clear that risk appetite on the institutional side has weakened significantly. Outflows from spot ETFs, deleveraging in the futures markets, and renewed macroeconomic pressure stemming from rising bond yields are currently making Bitcoin’s upward movements more fragile. Conversely, the decline in supply on exchanges, the continued accumulation by large wallets,…

In the latest sign of these AI-heavy times, the National Transportation Safety Board temporarily removed access to its docket system after discovering that voices of pilots who were killed in a UPS plane crash last year had been re-created using AI and were circulating on the internet. The NTSB is prohibited by federal law from including cockpit audio recordings in its docket system, which otherwise contains troves of data on investigations and has historically been open to the public. But the accident docket for this flight included a spectrogram file of the voice recorder. A spectrogram uses a mathematical process…

The Federal Reserve has a new chair, but mortgage rates moved in the wrong direction this week. Even so, a review of the spring housing market reveals genuine green shoots—and a clear lesson for sellers about what actually moves homes.Kevin Warsh was sworn in as Federal Reserve chair this week. As Realtor.com® senior economist Jake Krimmel notes, the economic landscape has shifted considerably since his nomination. Middle East–driven inflation has all but removed near-term rate cuts from the table, potentially creating tension with the White House.That tension may prove constructive: It gives Warsh an early opportunity to demonstrate the Fed’s…

(Image credit: Getty Images)All three main equity indexes gapped up on Friday morning and rallied into the weekend, even as oil prices and bond yields remain elevated. There’s a new leader in charge at the most important central bank in the world. And the oldest of those main stock indexes just hit another new high.At the closing bell, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.6% at 50,579, a fresh all-time closing high. The Dow was up 2.1% for the week.The broad-based S&P 500 rose 0.4% to 7,473, ending the week with a gain of 0.9%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite…