Gas prices and worries about war-related inflation caused consumer confidence to fall in May. The latest edition of The Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index showed that confidence dipped 0.7 points to 93.1 this month, down from an upwardly revised 93.8 in April, according to a...
Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller says interest rates should remain steady amid continued inflation. “With regard to future rate cuts, I am going to need to see improvement on inflation or a significant deterioration in the labor market before I would consider reducing the policy...
Teenage job-seekers could be facing a cruel summer thanks to inflation and rising fuel prices. In fact, the summer of 2026 could end up being the worst summer for teenage employment since the U.S. federal government began monitoring such data in 1948, The Wall Street...
High gas prices drove consumer sentiment down to a new low in May. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment dropped by five points during the month, to 44.8, according to the Surveys of Consumers’ final results for May. The reading came a month...
Business activity in the United Kingdom is declining amid a “perfect storm” of economic factors, said Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global Market Intelligence. The S&P Global Flash UK PMI composite output index, which gauges activity in the private manufacturing and services sector,...
Business uncertainty remained elevated in March, with 27% of payment executives reporting high uncertainty levels even as optimism about the next 12 months rose, according to new PYMNTS Intelligence data. Executives appear increasingly willing to accept that volatility is no longer an occasional disruption but...
Polymarket has introduced what it calls the first prediction markets connected to private company performance. These new offerings, launched Tuesday (May 19), are designed to let users bid on events at “some of the most sought-after private companies,” while also giving institutional investors another signal as to how...
Some tech executives warn that artificial intelligence (AI) will usher in mass waves of layoffs. Amazon Web Services (AWS) CEO Matt Garman is not one of them. “Everybody’s entitled to their opinion, but I don’t think that’s true,” Garman told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ)...
The modern economy increasingly runs on two separate operating systems. One is digital, asset-light and geographically fluid. The other is physical, capital-intensive and exposed to every fracture line in the global order. New findings in the April 2026 edition of The 2026 Certainty Project from...