Author: Money Mechanics

During an otherwise quiet day for earnings and data, President Donald Trump was meeting with congressional leaders at the White House as the closing bell rang at the New York Stock Exchange Monday.An iconic retailer will report its most recent financial results tomorrow, but if the president and the so-called “big four” from the House of Representatives and the Senate can’t agree on a new budget bill by Tuesday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will not release the September jobs report on Friday.The White House is making plans in case the federal government shuts down at 12:01 am Eastern Standard…

To help you understand what is going on in the global economy and what we expect to happen in the future, our highly experienced Kiplinger Letter team will keep you abreast of the latest developments and forecasts (Get a free issue of The Kiplinger Letter or subscribe). You’ll get all the latest news first by subscribing, but we will publish many (but not all) of the forecasts a few days afterward online. Here’s the latest…Japan has entered a pivotal moment in its economic history, undertaking its most ambitious policy and structural reforms in a generation to escape from decades of…

Key Takeaways The initial accumulation of $100,000 is the hardest and most important step in building wealth, Munger says. Frugality, discipline, and patience are essential to getting to that threshold. Once you reach that critical threshold, compounding accelerates wealth growth. As Warren Buffett’s legendary right-hand man at Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger spent decades building a $2.6 billion fortune. Munger’s advice on how to start building wealth was blunt and honest. It’s also a stark contrast to the get-rich-quick promises that are so common today. Munger, who passed away in 2023, said the hardest part of getting rich is putting together…

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd‘s (NYSE: BABA) (NYSE: BABAF) stealth AI expansion may be Wall Street’s blind spot—but it’s Nvidia Corp’s (NASDAQ: NVDA) margin moat that’s directly in the crosshairs. CEO Eddie Wu has pledged to surpass the company’s $53 billion AI investment as demand for compute skyrockets, setting up a clash that could echo Beijing’s solar strategy a decade ago: flooding the market with cheaper supply, undercutting Western rivals, and rewriting the margin math.Nvidia’s Moat Under SiegeNvidia has enjoyed a golden era, selling high-end GPUs at luxury pricing that has driven its gross margins above 70%. However, insiders warn that…

In-brief analysis September 29, 2025 Two electricity markets in the Midwest still generate more electricity from coal than from natural gas in at least some months of the year: Southwest Power Pool (SPP) and the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO). We expect these two regions will generate more electricity from coal than from natural gas in some upcoming winter months, based on forecasts in our latest Short-Term Energy Outlook. As recently as 2021 and 2022, both SPP and MISO were producing more electricity from coal than from natural gas in every month of the year.…

80.3% of mortgaged U.S. homeowners have a rate below 6%, down from a record 92.7% in the second quarter of 2022. Just over half (52.5%) of mortgaged homeowners have a rate below 4%, down from 65.1% in 2022. Increased housing supply shows that the mortgage rate lock-in effect is easing, but many buyers are still waiting for rates to drop to 6% or below to make a move. The share of mortgaged U.S. homeowners with a rate of at least 6% rose to 19.7% in the second quarter, the highest level since 2015. And with the weekly average mortgage rate…

On Monday, Anthropic launched a new frontier model called Claude Sonnet 4.5, which it claims to offer state-of-the-art performance on coding benchmarks. The company says Claude Sonnet 4.5 is capable of building “production-ready” applications, rather than just prototypes, representing a leap in reliability from previous AI models. Claude Sonnet 4.5 will be available via the Claude API and in the Claude chatbot. The pricing for developers is the same as Claude Sonnet 4: $3 per million input tokens (roughly 750,000 words, or more than the entire Lord of The Rings series) and $15 per million output tokens. In the last…

Key Takeaways Homes marketed as “fixer-uppers” are being searched for more often and getting more views than similar homes not marketed as such, says Realtor.com.These homes can be bought for cheaper, and there are a range of terms like “good bones” or “project home” that can make it clear the home is a fixer-upper.Certain areas in the Midwest, Northeast, and South tend to have more of these homes and with bigger discounts to otherwise similar homes in the area. In a housing market with high home prices and stubbornly high mortgage rates, some Americans are looking for any way possible…

Klarna Group (NYSE: KLAR) began publicly trading on Sept. 10. Klarna is a global payment provider specializing in buy now, pay later (BNPL) solutions for consumers. Like many stocks that go public, KLAR stock has been volatile. After closing its first day of trading at $49.48, the stock has dropped approximately 13% taking a lot of the FOMO (fear of missing out) from the stock price.  That could be a good sign for investors. This isn’t an ordinary year for initial public offerings (IPOs). But if investors buy into the bull case for Klarna, it could be one of the…

Key Takeaways Shares of Western Digital and Seagate Technology surged Monday as Morgan Stanley analysts raised their price targets for the stocks citing AI-driven demand trends. Both stocks have already more than doubled in value since the start of the year. It’s been a good year for investors in data storage stocks. Morgan Stanley analysts say artificial intelligence could make it even better. The bank’s analysts over the weekend boosted their price targets and forecasts for hard drive makers Western Digital (WDC) and Seagate Technology (STX), anticipating “stronger for longer” demand driven by cloud infrastructure spending and growing data retention needs…