Main Street Dollars

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For more than a decade, anyone choosing a bank, a credit card or a mortgage servicer could read, at no cost, what other customers said happened to them in their own words. That free record stopped growing this month. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced it is no longer publishing the written narratives consumers attach…

July brought the fewest announced layoffs in two years, though employers named AI as the top reason for a fifth straight month

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in Jobs & Wages

The layoff numbers for July came in lower than any month in two years. Buried inside the same report is a detail that complicates the good news: for the fifth month running, the reason employers gave most often for cutting jobs was artificial intelligence. Both things are in the same tally, and a household trying…

Five states have locked in January 1 minimum wage raises, led by California at $17.40 an hour

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in Jobs & Wages

Five states have now published the minimum wage that will apply inside their borders on January 1, 2027. Each of the five arrived at its number by a different route — one by an inflation formula, one by statute written years in advance, one by a ballot measure’s schedule, two by legislation — and each…

A new Medicaid rule makes adults 19 to 64 log 80 hours a month, and states must have it running by January 1

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in Government Programs

Medicaid has a new condition attached to it, and it is not a proposal. A federal interim final rule took effect this summer requiring certain adults to demonstrate 80 hours a month of work or an approved substitute to keep their coverage. States have until January 1 to have the machinery running, which is why…

$23.8 million is going out to 640,038 Grubhub drivers and diners with no claim needed

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in Settlements & Claims

Most consumer refunds require a person to notice a deadline, find a claim form, and prove they belong to the class. This one does not. The Federal Trade Commission has identified who is owed money in the Grubhub case and is sending it — which shifts the entire risk of the program onto a single…

A Boca Raton man ran a $50 million Ponzi scheme from federal prison and was sentenced to 20 years

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in Fraud & Scams

Investors in a Florida real estate company were told their money was backed by a portfolio worth as much as $450 million. It did not exist. Neither, in a meaningful sense, did the man they thought was running things — the person directing the account had been in federal custody since 2020, serving a sentence…

Homeowners are borrowing against their houses again, pushing home-equity balances $142 billion above their 2022 low

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in Credit & Debt

Home equity lines of credit spent more than a decade going out of style. They were the instrument most associated with the 2008 housing collapse, balances shrank year after year, and a generation of homeowners came to treat borrowing against the house as something you did not do. That period is over, and the reversal…

Kroger has already closed 39 stores and is targeting about 60

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in Groceries & Gas

Kroger set out a store-closure program more than a year ago and put a number on it in a quarterly earnings release. What the company has never published is a list. That gap is why the count of stores actually closed has been assembled by reporters rather than announced, and it is worth separating the…

Washington cuts its share of SNAP administration in half on October 1, leaving states to cover 75 percent

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in Government Programs

Nothing about who qualifies for food assistance changes this fall. What changes is who pays for the staff that processes the applications. Beginning with the federal fiscal year that starts October 1, Washington’s share of the cost of administering the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program drops from half to a quarter, and states absorb the rest.…

Medicaid’s retroactive coverage window drops to two months for people 65 and older on January 1

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