Author: Money Mechanics

Imagine the stock markets are plummeting, your portfolio has incurred a significant unrealized loss and you need a substantial sum of cash immediately. What’s your safety net?Having an emergency fund minimizes the need to sell investments during market downturns. It protects your future profits by keeping your investments intact, allowing them to recover and grow.It also helps cover expenses if your income stops or decreases, if you need to pay medical bills not covered by insurance, settle taxes, handle auto and home repairs or support family members. From just $107.88 $24.99 for Kiplinger Personal Finance Become a smarter, better informed…

These days, a yield north of 4% on a safe place to park your cash is a pretty good deal. So Series I savings bonds, which are offering a 4.26% composite rate on newly issued bonds, are worth a look. And because their interest rate adjusts based on inflation, they’re especially useful if you want to hedge against rising prices. In April, consumer prices rose at an annual rate of 3.8%, the highest level in nearly three years.At TreasuryDirect.gov, you can purchase I bonds for a minimum of $25, with an annual limit of $10,000 per person. Backed by the…

While the overall catastrophe bond market yield or coupon available to investors continued to rise through the month of June 2026, Plenum Investments noted that softening remains the dominant trend across new cat bond issuance.Catastrophe bond total returns rose to 9.46% by June 26th, rising from 9.42% as of May 29th. Seasonality continues to be muted so far, with a number of factors pulling against each other in the catastrophe bond market. Chief among these is supply and demand, with investor appetites remaining very strong and supply of capital, driven to a meaningful degree by cash from maturities, remaining high.…

Meta and Snap rolled out new smart glasses last month, the latest sign that the industry is racing to put a camera and an AI assistant onto users’ faces. As the fast-growing market heats up, upstarts like Even Realities are muscling in on the giants. Even Realities, a three-year-old Shenzhen-headquartered startup, has raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round led by Meituan and previous backer Tencent; the round valued the startup at $1 billion valuation. Founder and CEO Will Wang told TechCrunch that while rivals chase camera-equipped devices built around content capture and AI, his company is betting on…

(World Oil) –  Flowserve has completed its $490 million all-cash acquisition of Trillium Flow Technologies’ Valves Division (TVD), expanding its portfolio of engineered flow-control products and services for global energy and industrial markets. Source: Flowserve The acquisition adds Trillium’s portfolio of mission-critical valves, actuators and flow-control equipment, strengthening Flowserve’s capabilities across conventional and emerging energy applications, as well as industrial infrastructure. The transaction excludes Trillium’s French valve operations. Flowserve said the acquisition broadens its product offering while expanding its service and aftermarket capabilities. TVD’s installed base and specialized valve technologies are expected to complement Flowserve’s existing portfolio and strengthen its position in…

A historic Rhode Island compound that predates the nation’s founding by more than 50 years—and is rumored to have once been home to founding father Benjamin Franklin’s sister—has hit the market for $3 million.Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, The Grange at Potowomut was built in Warwick, RI, in 1723—53 years before Franklin and his fellow Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence.It is, the 10.9-acre property’s website states, a home “that has been at the center of American life since before America existed.” But its heritage can be traced back even further to 1684, when the Greene…

According to rates from the Zillow lender marketplace, mortgage rates are up significantly since Sunday, June 28. The current 30-year fixed rate rose by 23 basis points since last week to 6.40%. The 15-year fixed increased by 11 basis points to 5.86%, and the 5/1 ARM rose by 43 basis points to 6.52%. Read more: Weekly survey of mortgage lenders with the lowest rates: 6% is back (without fees) Today’s mortgage rates Here are the current mortgage rates today, Sunday, July 5, 2026, according to the latest Zillow data: 30-year fixed: 6.40% 20-year fixed: 6.29% 15-year fixed: 5.86% 5/1 ARM:…

Metals – Aluminium Under Pressure After EGA Update LME came under renewed pressure yesterday, with the three-month price falling towards $3,000/t as the market continued to unwind the geopolitical risk premium built up during the Middle East conflict. Sentiment was weighed down by an update from Emirates Global Aluminium (EGA). It said that around 7% of production pots at its Al Taweelah smelter have been restarted, highlighting steady progress in restoring output following the missile and drone attacks earlier this year. The update reinforced expectations that supply disruptions in the Gulf will prove temporary. Concerns over lost Middle Eastern production…

The U.S. economy saw job creation cool sharply heading into the summer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday.Nonfarm payrolls for June increased by a seasonally adjusted 57,000 for the month, slower than the downwardly revised 129,000 added in May and worse than the 115,000 Dow Jones consensus forecast.The unemployment rate, however, dropped to 4.2%, slightly ahead of the 4.1% where it was a year ago.The move lower was largely due to a slump in the labor force participation rate, which dropped 0.3 percentage point to 61.5%, the lowest since March 2021. Household employment plummeted during the month, with 507,000…

America has just crossed a monumental milestone, celebrating its 250th birthday. And, as the fireworks fade, there’s no better way to carry on the celebrations than by taking a stroll down memory lane to where it all began—and, more specifically, where those who founded our nation were living when they did so.To truly understand how America became the nation it is today, it is important to first grasp the foundations that were laid more than a century before the Declaration of Independence was first signed. The very first homes that were built in the country were done so by those…