Since mid-March 2026, Walmart has required owners of select new Vizio televisions to sign in with a Walmart account before they can finish setting up the television or use its smart features. The retailer announced the change on March 23, 2026, at the IAB NewFronts, the annual event where media companies pitch advertisers on the...
American investors now owe their brokers a record $1.5 trillion. That figure comes from the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority’s margin statistics, which reported $1,502,072 million in debit balances in customers’ securities margin accounts for June 2026. It was a 6.1% increase from May and a 49.0% increase from a year earlier, and the highest reading...
Intro LendingTree released a national housing vacancy study on July 7, 2026, finding that roughly 14.5 million U.S. homes — about one in ten housing units — sit vacant. Florida alone accounts for approximately 1.5 million of them, nearly as many as the other nine states in the top-ten vacancy ranking combined. The headline number...
Dr. Anthony Fauci sat before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday, July 29, delivered an opening statement, and then said almost nothing else for more than two hours. Under subpoena from committee chairman Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases invoked his...
Within a span of four trading days at the end of July, three things happened in sequence. A senior strategist at Citadel Securities publicly argued that the Federal Reserve should surprise markets with an interest rate increase. The Federal Reserve declined to do so. And Citadel — the hedge fund founded by the same man,...
Introduction Elon Musk has acquired the assets of APR Energy, a Jacksonville, Florida company that deploys trailer-mounted gas turbines on accelerated timelines. Neither Musk nor APR announced the transaction. It surfaced instead through two regulatory filings — a Federal Trade Commission early termination notice dated May 14, 2026, and a Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure...
Introduction On July 29, 2003, two U.S. senators walked into a press conference and ended a Pentagon research program in a single news cycle. The program, called the Policy Analysis Market, would have let a small pool of registered traders buy and sell contracts on political and economic events in the Middle East. Within about...
Introduction Ninety-nine days remain before the November 3 general election, and the ballot voters will see in most of the country is not finished being written. The 2026 primary season opened March 3 in Texas and North Carolina and does not close until September 15 in Delaware. Between now and then, voters in roughly a...
Introduction On Sunday, July 26, Democratic Socialists of America national co-chair Megan Romer sat for a rapid true-or-false round with Fox News Sunday host Shannon Bream and affirmed, one after another, the most structurally ambitious planks in her organization’s new national program: abolishing the U.S. Senate, replacing the presidency and the Supreme Court, abolishing Immigration...
Intro City councils from Syracuse to Denver have spent the past year voting down contracts with Flock Safety, the Atlanta company whose automated license plate readers became the most visible symbol of American street-level surveillance. Activists have called the votes a privacy victory. In a growing number of those cities, the poles did not stay...