Main Street Dollars

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Borrowers whose federal student loans are in default are not watching money disappear from a paycheck or a tax refund this month, and the U.S. Department of Education still has not said when that could change. The delay the agency put in place in January on its two main collection tools remains the department’s active…

A judge threw out the formula behind farmworker wages, and the Labor Department had to warn employers

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in Jobs & Wages

A federal judge in California has ruled that the government’s current method for setting minimum pay on foreign farm labor is unlawful, and the Department of Labor has since posted a public notice warning employers that some of them could eventually owe back pay. The wage floor at issue does not stay confined to visa…

Nearly two million Americans have been out of work for more than six months

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in Jobs & Wages

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest Employment Situation report, released September 4, 2026, shows long-term joblessness holding stubbornly high even as the broader labor market looks calm on the surface. Close to 1.9 million people had been out of work for 27 weeks or more in August, a stretch long enough that unemployment insurance…

A new banking rule defining an unsafe practice takes effect November 2

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Federal banking regulators have rewritten one of the oldest and vaguest phrases in bank oversight: “unsafe or unsound practice.” For decades, examiners leaned on that phrase to flag almost anything about how a bank ran itself, from thin paperwork to slow fraud controls, often without a fixed legal definition to point back to. A new…

The rule stopping a bank from charging twice for the same bounced check is gone

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in Fees & Overdraft

Federal banking regulators have spent the last year and a half unwinding rules meant to limit how many times a bank can charge for the same bounced payment. The most direct of those rollbacks landed this spring, when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation dropped supervisory guidance that had discouraged FDIC-supervised banks from charging more than…

A Kansas City credit union with 1,015 members was handed to a $9 billion institution

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A credit union chartered just four years ago to serve overlooked pockets of Kansas City no longer exists as its own institution. The National Credit Union Administration confirmed that WeDevelopment Federal Credit Union, which held 1,015 member accounts and $2.4 million in total assets, has been absorbed into CommunityAmerica Federal Credit Union, a Lenexa, Kansas…

Five federal agencies told banks they may tell a customer an account was closed over suspected fraud

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Banks have long operated under a strict confidentiality law when it comes to suspicious activity reports, and that silence sometimes left ordinary account holders guessing about why a deposit bounced or an account got shut down overnight. On September 2, 2026, five federal regulators moved to close that information gap: the Federal Reserve, the Federal…

Cash App users are getting refund checks under a $75 million CFPB order

Sep 11, 2026

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in Settlements & Claims

Some Cash App users are opening their mailboxes this year to find a paper check they never asked for, sent by a company most of them have never heard of. The checks trace back to a January 2025 order from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau against Block, Inc., the parent company of Cash App, over…

Treasury says a single $1,000 deposit at birth could be worth about half a million dollars by retirement age

Sep 11, 2026

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Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stood before a room of lawmakers in late January and made a claim that sounds almost too good to check: a single $1,000 government deposit, left untouched for decades, could grow into roughly half a million dollars by the time a child retires. The number is attached to Trump Accounts, the…

Former AT&T customers who never cashed a 2024 refund check are getting the money by Zelle instead

Sep 11, 2026

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