Author: Money Mechanics

Real gross domestic product decreased in 39 states in the first quarter of 2025, with the percent change ranging from 1.7 percent at an annual rate in South Carolina to –6.1 percent in Iowa and Nebraska, according to statistics released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (table 1). Current-dollar gross domestic product (GDP) increased in 47 states and the District of Columbia, with the percent change ranging from 8.7 percent at an annual rate in North Dakota to –2.7 percent in Iowa. Personal income, in current dollars, increased in all 50 states and the District of Columbia in…

Key Takeaways Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte requested that the Department of Justice investigate mortgage applications filed in 2021 by Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, alleging she violated mortgage law.President Trump said Cook should resign immediately, which would allow him to appoint a replacement to the Fed policy committee that sets interest rate policy.Trump in recent months has berated Fed Chair Jerome Powell for not cutting interest rates, and has also accused the central bank head of mismanaging a large renovation at Fed headquarters. President Donald Trump is expanding his attacks on the Federal Reserve, this time targeting…

As we look forward to the CPI report next week, the monthly-repeating theme is ‘when will the tariff effect show up?’ The answer, so far, is ‘not yet,’ but economists who had forecasted the end of life as we know it when the Trump tariffs went into effect have been befuddled. I’ve already admitted in this column that I was educated in the tradition of ‘tariffs bad,’ but that over the years Trump’s insistence otherwise has made me carefully re-think of which ways tariffs are truly bad, and which ways they’re not so bad. Naturally, if tariffs were uniformly bad…

Key Takeaways Members of the Federal Open Market Committee considered inflation driven by tariffs to be a bigger threat to the economy than joblessness, according to minutes of a July meeting released Wednesday.Tariff-related inflation concerns dominated the discussion before the FOMC’s decision to keep the central bank’s key interest rate steady.The thinking of FOMC members may have shifted after a shocking decline in job creation was reported days later. Behind closed doors, officials at the Federal Reserve said much the same as they’ve said in public: that concerns over tariffs stoking inflation led them to keep the central bank’s interest…

As the panic fades, investors’ nerves are still jangling. For the time being, stockmarkets have stopped convulsing and the prices of American Treasury bonds are no longer in freefall. Yet share indices across America, Asia and Europe have hardly recovered their poise (see chart 1); instead, day-to-day drops of one percent or more have become unremarkable. The VIX index—Wall Street’s “fear gauge”, which measures expected volatility using the market price of insurance against it—has fallen from its nerve-shredding peak reached a fortnight ago. It is nevertheless at a level last seen in 2022, amid a grinding bear market (see chart…

Shares of SoFi Technologies Inc SOFI are falling Wednesday afternoon, swept up in a broader market sell-off impacting technology and growth-oriented stocks. The move extends a volatile period for the fintech company, which is otherwise up some 135% since the stock’s April low, as investors weigh its impressive operational performance against recent strategic financial decisions.What To Know: Despite Wednesday’s pullback, SoFi earlier received positive price target revisions from analysts at both JP Morgan and Citigroup. JP Morgan maintained its Neutral rating on the stock while raising its target from $22 to $24, while Citigroup reiterated a Buy rating and increased…

Thank you for inviting me to speak today on payments innovation.1 It is an exciting time to work in payments. While I have always been interested in the topic, I would have never imagined decades ago that payments would generate this amount of enthusiasm, where now some of the coolest jobs in tech are working in this area. The payment system is experiencing what I have called a “technology-driven revolution,” where the latest advances in computing power, data processing, and distributed networks have fueled growth in innovative new payment services.2 This includes 24/7 instant payments, user-friendly digital wallets and mobile…

Lorene Cowan, 44, thought she would own a home by now. However, in New York City, where Cowan lives and works, home prices have soared beyond reach.”I would love to buy a home. That’s the next step,” said Cowan, a business and life coach. But “in New York, the entry in became so much more difficult,” she said.In fact, New York notched the highest annual rise in home prices of all the metropolises in the latest Case-Shiller 20-city composite, up 7.4% in May compared with the prior year. The median listing price of a home in New York City is…

U.S. border agents searched more electronic devices during a three-month period than ever before, according to new government statistics.  The data shows that U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the agency tasked with immigration screening at the U.S. border, searched 14,899 devices of international travelers between April through June, a 17% rise on the previous record high recorded in early 2022.  Most of these searches are “basic,” where U.S. border agents demand the password to the traveler’s device and look through its contents without using equipment. While citizens cannot be denied entry to the U.S., their devices can be seized indefinitely…

Everyone wants to stay fully independent as we age. A few people over age 80 do and they don’t suffer from memory loss either. They are called “super agers” because they do not suffer the same mental and physical declines as almost everyone else. They’ve been studied by researchers for decades. We do have some answers to what makes them different from everyone else. Maybe we all wish we could be super agers ourselves. What Is A Super Ager? The term describes someone over 80 with an exceptional memory — one at least as good as the memories of people…