Business

The NRF forecasts 2026 holiday sales up 4.2% to $1.013 trillion, and Deloitte 4% to 4.8%, with online sales up as much as 8.4%. What it means for shoppers.

A Fed rate hike raises credit card and home equity rates within weeks and lifts savings yields; mortgages follow bond yields. What the 2026 hikes mean for you.

Kroger plans to cut 3,000 corporate jobs and Netflix about 1,000 as October 2026 layoffs pile up at HubSpot, Amazon, Flock Safety and Airtable. The full list.

Medicare open enrollment runs Oct. 15 to Dec. 7, 2026. For 2027 the Part D out-of-pocket cap rises to $2,400 and the deductible to $700. What else changes.

The average 30-year mortgage rate held at 7.40% in Freddie Mac's October 15 survey, up from 6.27% a year ago. The 15-year fell to 6.71%. What it costs you.

Netflix reports Q3 2026 earnings Tuesday, Oct. 20, after the close. It guided to $12.86 billion revenue and 82 cents a share, a week after cutting 6% of jobs.

U.S. consumer prices rose 3.7% in the year to September 2026, above the 3.6% forecast, as gasoline jumped 9.1% in a month. Core inflation rose to 2.6%.

Social Security benefits will rise 3.6% in January 2027, about $75 a month for the average retiree. SSI payments rise from December 31. Dates and amounts here.

The 10-year Treasury yield is about 5.1%, after topping 5% in September for the first time since 2023, on inflation, Fed hikes and heavy borrowing.

UnitedHealth earned $4.69 a share in Q3 2026, beating the roughly $4.12 forecast, on $112.7 billion in revenue, and raised its 2026 outlook to at least $20.50.

The Astoria cookie shop backed by Danny Meyer's investment fund closed its remaining stores, roughly two dozen in New York, New Jersey and Texas, at the end of business on Thursday, October 1. Staff were told the money had run out. Four days earlier, co-founder and former CEO Peter Phillips had sued the company and its controlling investor, saying he had been pressed to sign paperwork on more than $640,000 in small-business loans he personally guaranteed.

The cookie chain that put a pink box on every TikTok feed has closed at least 57 locations in 2026, at least 55 more franchises are listed for sale, and its CEO has told franchisees: 'It's my fault where we are today.' The headline number is the closures. The more revealing one is the gap between what a Crumbl costs to open and what it earns once it does.

UPDATED OCTOBER 15. On camera, in front of his own CNN anchor, David Ellison pledged 'complete and total editorial independence' and backed CNN's lawsuit over White House access. That is a promise, not a protection, and the board that would make it binding still does not exist. Meanwhile HBO Max and Paramount+ are confirmed to become one service, layoffs are coming with no number attached, and SKYD lost about a quarter of its price in one session. Paramount closed its $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery on Tuesday, creating Skydance. The coverage is calling it a media behemoth, which it is. The part worth your attention: two of America's four major television news organisations now answer to the same owner, and the only binding protection for their independence exists because twelve states sued — the DOJ's own consent order in June did not include one. There is now a 180-day clock running.

Q2 revenue $311M, up 18%. Net income $17M against a $26M loss a year ago. The segment everyone is calling 'film' grew 40% — but it is Advanced Materials & Chemicals, which also contains the pharmaceutical business Kodak is building, and no film revenue figure was disclosed. Meanwhile operations still burned $25M in cash, and Kodak is stockpiling silver.

Spider-Man: Brand New Day opened to $360 million, the largest domestic debut ever, and handed Cinemark its best domestic weekend on record. It lands on top of a quarter in which the chain cleared $1 billion in revenue for the first time in 42 years.

Leopold Aschenbrenner's Situational Awareness lost 67% in July and was forced to sell its entire public stock book to Citadel under margin calls. Assets fell from about $45 billion to roughly $10 billion. But the fund was up 439% through June, it is still up around 80% for the year, it was not liquidated, and it kept its Anthropic stake. He wrote the investor letter as guests arrived in Carmel for his wedding.

Strategy lost $8.22 billion in Q2, almost entirely from an $8.32 billion unrealised writedown on bitcoin now trading below its average purchase price. Its board has approved a programme to sell up to $5 billion of it, with $1.25 billion earmarked for dollar reserves. Michael Saylor's explanation for the slide: more than $1 trillion of capital has been vacuumed into AI data centres.

Wednesday night's drawing carries an estimated $663 million jackpot after no one won Monday. The cash option — the amount a winner actually takes now — is $290.4 million, and federal withholding starts there. Meanwhile Mega Millions just paid out $803 million to a single ticket in Florida, ending its run while Powerball's continues.

Julie Masino leaves on August 10 with $4.63 million over two years — and company-funded personal security for an undetermined period after she goes. The logo she approved lasted eight days before Trump demanded its restoration and Cracker Barrel complied the same afternoon. She later said she felt 'fired by America.' David Deno, formerly of Bloomin' Brands, takes over.

Seven years after eBay employees sent live cockroaches, a fetal pig and a funeral wreath to a Massachusetts couple who wrote a newsletter about the company, the case has settled. Companies normally indemnify executives and absorb the damage quietly. This settlement names three of them, and Devin Wenig is personally paying $2 million plus $1 million to a First Amendment charity in Ina Steiner's name.

Ford beat on earnings and raised full-year guidance, and the stock rose. Underneath: Model e lost $919 million on about $1 billion of revenue, an EBIT margin of -89.6%, and the company booked $4.2 billion in charges to unwind its battery joint venture and kill EV programs. The entire electric strategy now rests on a $30,000 pickup nobody has seen.

Paramount Skydance intended to close its $111 billion acquisition by the end of September. It has now agreed not to close until five days after an antitrust trial, or June 1, 2027, whichever comes first. The unusual part isn't the delay — it's that the Justice Department cleared this deal in June, and twelve states are prosecuting the case Washington declined to bring.

Headlines are telling Costco shoppers they could be owed money. Most of them are not. The settlement covers people who were Washington State residents when they received a Costco marketing email between June 2021 and July 2026. No receipts required, but you have to file — and there is only one legitimate place to do it.

Nigeria's naira firmed to around ₦1,368 at the official window on July 24 while the parallel market sat near ₦1,415 — a gap far narrower than in past years. Reuters-polled traders still expect the naira, Ghana's cedi and Uganda's shilling to weaken, with Middle East fighting pushing crude higher.

Waymo will launch its own app in both cities in January 2028, ending three years of routing those markets solely through Uber. Uber has cited unsustainable economics and safety incidents it says Waymo was not forthcoming about. The FT reports Waymo is weighing a full exit.

King Jr. Kids' Meals now come with one of six PAW Patrol toys — Chase, Marshall, Rubble, Skye, Rex and Rhubarb the T-Rex — timed to 'PAW Patrol: The Dino Movie,' which opens August 14.

The triple-hormone drug produced up to 20.8% weight loss in people with type 2 diabetes and 22.6% in people with severe obesity and heart disease. Lilly will file with the FDA in early 2027. The cardiovascular numbers, though, are not the clean result the weight numbers are.

Verizon will supply more than $1 billion in dark-fiber connectivity for Google's AI data centers, CEO Dan Schulman said Friday, framing it as the first of several infrastructure agreements he expects to be worth multiple billions in revenue. The deal landed alongside raised full-year guidance.

The Google parent burned through $5.9 billion in the second quarter — its first cash burn on record — even as Google Cloud grew a record 82%. With Microsoft, Meta and Amazon reporting next week, investors are bracing for more of the same.

Midwest Poultry Services is pulling white and brown cage-free shell eggs produced in Texas after they were flagged for potential Salmonella Enteritidis. No illnesses have been linked so far — here's what to check in your fridge.

Nike is cutting off hundreds of online distributors in China and funneling buyers into its own branded storefronts — a high-stakes bet to rebuild the brand in a market where its sales are sliding and local rivals are surging.

The new duties take effect just after midnight Friday, replacing a blanket tariff Congress let expire. The administration says they punish countries that fail to block forced-labor imports; critics call the rationale a legal workaround unlikely to survive court challenge.

First-time unemployment applications fell by 22,000 last week, the biggest drop in three months, defying forecasts of a rise. But the record-low figure says as much about a shrinking pool of available workers as it does about a booming economy.

There was no announcement — Apple simply changed the numbers on its website on a Friday. Apple Music's first increase in nearly four years is now live, and it isn't the only price going up across the company's lineup.

Cracker Barrel is walking away from the fast-casual biscuit chain it bought years ago: 35 Maple Street locations and the brand name go to a rival, the remaining 16 close for good, and the company raised its profit outlook on the way out.

Netflix beat on profit and cleared $12.6 billion in quarterly revenue. Then its stock fell 8%. The gap between those two facts is the most important thing streaming's biggest company said all quarter.