A California state law is set to raise fast-food workers’ wages in April to $20 an hour. Some restaurants there are already laying off staff, halted hiring or are scaling back workers’ hours as they try to cut costs.

Vitruvian Partners, an investment firm with $17.5 billion of assets under management, is exploring options including the sale of a minority stake. The firm has held discussions about a potential transaction with investors including Blue Owl Capital and Blackstone.

While the S&P 500 is up 8% year to date, total money funds added more than $150 billion in assets through the first two months of 2024, or about $50 billion more than they did in the same period last year.

A record share of 401(k) account holders took early withdrawals from their accounts last year for financial emergencies. Overall, 3.6% of plan participants did so last year, up from 2.8% in 2022 and a prepandemic average of about 2%.

The equal-weighted S&P 500, which measures each company equally rather than by its market capitalization, rose to a record this past week. Almost one-fifth of the stocks in the index hit new 52-week highs on a recent day, the largest share since May 2021.

Stocks have switched from moving in the exact opposite direction to Treasury yields in the second half of last year, both as yields soared to a peak of 5% on the 10-year note and as they came back down, to having a slight tendency to rise and fall in line with yields.

Powell said that rate cuts won’t be warranted until officials have “gained greater confidence that inflation is moving sustainably” toward the central bank’s 2% goal.

The first batch of more than 25,000 letters will go out to taxpayers with more than $1 million in income, followed by more than 100,000 letters to people with incomes between $400,000 and $1 million. The notice says to file your return immediately or to explain either why you are late or don’t have to file.

With the strong labor market and a hawkish Fed, traders recalibrated their bets around rate cuts with June becoming the highest probability for the first cut. Meanwhile, some market investors have begun considering the possibility that we may not see rate cuts this year.

Global banking giant HSBC wrote down its 19% stake in Bank of Communications, a large Chinese bank, by $3 billion leading to a $153 million loss for the last quarter.