Author: Money Mechanics

Most people think there’s only one way to buy a home: You save up for the down payment, and you take out a mortgage to cover the rest. But there’s another option called a subject-to mortgage. With these arrangements, the buyer agrees to take over the seller’s mortgage payment. Both buyers and sellers might consider this option, since there’s no need to make a down payment or apply for a new mortgage — and it speeds up the sale process. However, as a financial educator and former HUD-certified housing counselor, I would rarely recommend entering a subject-to agreement. Why? Because…

Around 20% of global LNG flows and more than 1 billion barrels of crude supply have been disrupted since March, but the IEA still expects oil demand to remain relatively resilient despite lower Middle Eastern output. High oil and gas prices are temporarily boosting EV sales, solar demand, and coal consumption, as countries prioritize energy security and affordability during the crisis. Analysts argue the long-term global energy mix is unlikely to change dramatically, with oil, gas, and coal expected to regain market share once prices normalize Roughly one-fifth of global LNG flows has been impacted by the Hormuz crisis. The…

The National Commodity and Derivatives Exchange (NCDEX) has now launched India’s first parametric weather derivative product, with the RAINMUMBAI contract expected to help market participants hedge the financial exposure of rainfall extremes and variability in the city of Mumbai and surrounding area.It’s seen as a significant milestone, as RAINMUMBAI is the first Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) approved exchange-traded weather derivative contract. It marks the culmination of what has been a particularly long journey for the NCDEX, as the exchange had first begun discussing a plan to launch a weather-index based product back in 2008. Since then, exchange-traded…

(By Oil & Gas 360) – Sand rarely gets the attention.   It doesn’t move markets the way crude prices do. It doesn’t dominate headlines like LNG exports, OPEC decisions, or geopolitical conflict. Yet without it, much of the modern shale industry simply doesn’t work. That reality is becoming more obvious again as U.S. drilling activity stabilizes, longer laterals continue expanding, and global supply disruptions tied to the Middle East push operators to maximize output from existing wells. Frac sand has quietly become one of the most important inputs in modern oil and gas production. And unlike earlier shale cycles, today’s…

Congress continues to pile Stealth Taxes on taxpayers. Retirees and near-retirees are the taxpayers snared most often by the Stealth Taxes. A Stealth Tax isn’t an across-the-board tax increase. Instead, Congress takes away a tax benefit or imposes a new tax on taxpayers with incomes above certain levels. Congress has increased the number of Stealth Taxes over the years. I believe Congress will continue to impose new Stealth Taxes and increase current Stealth Taxes. Retirees and pre-retirees will continue to pay the lion’s share of these taxes.The metric used to impose most Stealth Taxes is modified adjusted gross income. To…

Reality TV star Amanda Batula shed some light on at least one of the pain points in her relationship with estranged husband Kyle Cooke, revealing in Bravo’s new “Summer House” spinoff show, “In the City,” that Cooke kept a “spreadsheet” of all the money she owes him—including $117,000 in back rent.During the premiere episode of the new Bravo show, which was largely filmed in fall 2025, before Batula and Cooke split in January 2026, and prior to the public reveal of her relationship with “Summer House” co-star West Wilson, Batula, 34, confessed that she and her spouse had been bickering…

Please enable JavaScript if it is disabled in your browser or access the information through the links provided below. May 20, 2026 Federal Reserve Board requests public comment on a proposal to establish a “payment account,” which legally eligible financial institutions could use for the specific purpose of clearing and settling their payments For release at 4:00 p.m. EDT Following earlier public input, the Federal Reserve Board on Wednesday requested public comment on a proposal to establish a “payment account,” which legally eligible financial institutions could use for the specific purpose of…

A Power of Siberia natural gas pipelines facility in Heihe, Heilongjiang province, China, on Tuesday, March 21, 2023. Bloomberg | Getty ImagesRussian President Vladimir Putin met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing on Wednesday, with the long-stalled Power of Siberia 2 natural gas pipeline on the agenda, as the Iran war disrupts energy supplies.Kremlin foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov said Tuesday that the project “will be discussed in great detail between the leaders.” The planned 2,600-kilometer pipeline would carry 50 billion cubic meters of gas annually from Russia’s Yamal fields to China via Mongolia. Moscow and Beijing signed a…

Linus Torvalds and Dirk Hohndel at Open Source Summit North America 2026 sjvn/ZDNETFollow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google.ZDNET’s key takeawaysTorvalds likes AI, but AI sometimes doesn’t like Torvalds. Linux’s founder thinks there will always be work for programmers.AI continues to be a mixed blessing when it comes to finding and fixing security bugs.Speaking at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America, Linux creator Linus Torvalds said modern AI tools are reshaping how developers work on the kernel, driving up contribution volume and exposing new social and security stresses in the open‑source world. But he insisted “AI…

The options tape is noisy. Intraday volatility cycles, 0DTE reflexes, ETF-driven options growth, and increasingly granular expiration schedules are reshaping how liquidity forms, migrates, and occasionally disappears. This session examines where activity is truly concentrating across index and single-stock products, including the continued expansion of daily expirations into select equities, and how that evolution is influencing spreads, hedging behavior, market-maker capacity, and risk transfer. Panelists will explore how product design is steering flow through defined outcome ETFs, single-stock ETFs, cash-settled index expansion, and targeted daily expirations and discuss what these structural shifts imply for market stability, education, and liquidity quality…