Publicly held federal debt stands at about $29 trillion, nearly double the level when Trump signed his original tax cut in 2017.

Among metropolitan areas especially reliant on higher education, three-quarters of them suffered weaker economic growth between 2011 and 2023 than the U.S. as a whole. In the prior decade, most of these same metro areas grew faster than the nation did.

The 401(k) giant Empower will start allowing private credit, equity and real estate in some of the accounts it administers later this year. The firm is expected to announce Wednesday that it has joined with seven firms to offer these investments.

Coinbase Global has agreed to acquire Deribit, the world’s biggest trading platform for bitcoin and ether options, for roughly $2.9 billion.

The latest Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) revealed the hiring rate ended March at 3.4%. When excluding the pandemic, the hiring rate is hovering near its lowest levels of the past decade.

A household in the top 0.1%—roughly 133,000 households each worth at least $46.3 million—accumulated an average $3.4 million a year since the third quarter of 1990, in 2024 dollars. In comparison, the wealth of the rest of the top 1%—roughly 1.2 million households each worth at least $11.2 million—grew by an average $450,000 per household, per year.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed almost 1,000 points on Monday and is headed for its worst April performance since 1932. The S&P 500’s performance since Inauguration Day is now the worst for any president up to this point in data going back to 1928.

While the U.S. may import more manufactured goods than it exports, it runs a large trade surplus in financial services. The overall U.S. trade surplus for financial services in 2024 was about $130 billion.

Some 49 million options contracts changed hands each day in 2024, up from 19 million contracts in 2019. And as the size of the market has grown, individual investors’ slice of it has, too: They made up 29% of all options activity at the end of last year, up from 23% at the beginning of 2020.

The Barclays high-yield bond capitulation signal jumped 34 percentage points since the end of March to 91%, its highest level since October 2023, when Treasury yields surged on inflation fears. When the gauge hits 100%, the market is in full capitulation. That has happened five times this century: during the 2008-09 financial crisis; the 2011 European debt crisis; when oil prices plummeted in 2016; the start of the pandemic in 2020; and when interest rates surged in 2022.