Christine Romans

Stock market highs in today's AI boom mirror the dot-com bubble

Martin Goebel thinks his St. Louis company could benefit from Trump’s tariffs — if he weren’t already in a costly legal battle with his insurer.

The president-elect inherits robust growth, sticky but much lower inflation and cooling but sturdy gains in pay and hiring. His policies could affect all those trends and more.

Industry experts don’t expect mortgage rates to plummet soon, and many buyers who aren’t waiting around have scooped up budget-stretching properties.

Americans are weighing which candidate they want to entrust with a solid economy that they’re starting to feel better about but still aren’t too fond of.

The FTC said reported losses exceeded $110 million last year, up nearly tenfold since 2020, as fraudsters increasingly persuade victims to send them large sums through crypto kiosks.

The attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump is highlighting the ongoing political polarization in the United States and has spurred calls to cool dangerous rhetoric. NBC’s Kate Snow reports for TODAY.

Jim LaPointe knows that how the economy feels “depends on your perspective.” Four years after Covid-19 lockdowns kicked off a home fix-up frenzy, the central New Jersey contractor’s business remains through the roof. While Home Depot said earlier this month that customers are increasingly holding off on big projects, LaPointe is seeing the opposite. He’s been turning some clients away to avoid being “booked up a year in advance.” “They’re going nuts with this,” he said of homeowners’ appetite fo…

Stock markets threw a tantrum Tuesday, posting big losses after slightly hotter-than-expected inflation data stoked worries that interest rate cuts may not be coming soon. But don’t freak out. Markets tend to overreact. January’s consumer price index report is just one number in an overall trend that has been moving steadily in the right direction. Inflation has cooled from a 6.4% annual growth rate in December 2022 to less than half that a year later. “It’s important not to overreact and jump…

Look no further than the fast-food drive-thru for evidence of inflation fatigue. Food companies have been passing along higher labor and ingredient costs to consumers long after inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022. Diners are getting fed up, eating less fast food and griping on social media that their go-to cheap meals aren’t so cheap anymore. Sales show it. McDonald’s reported underwhelming results in the fourth quarter, and Yum Brands showed weaker-than-expected growth in its top brands, whi…

People who bet on a slowdown in the U.S. job market lost again last month. The economy added 353,000 jobs in January, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday. That’s nearly double what economists expected and well above the already-respectable monthly average of 255,000 for 2023. Wages also grew a stronger-than-expected 4.5%, and the jobless rate stayed in a tight range at 50-year lows. “The labor market is the little engine that could,” said John Leer, chief economist at the business intelli…

After a year of recession doomsaying, an unexpectedly resilient economy is boosting the White House as it ramps up selling its record to Americans who’ve just started shaking off their “vibecession.” At the same time, senior administration officials say they’re increasingly confident the situation on the ground can largely speak for itself. The economy grew at a strong 3.1% pace between the fourth quarter of 2022 and the same period last year, every inflation measure is cooling, the job market r…

The explosion of “Buy Now, Pay Later” services has set off alarms that consumers are desperate, rushing into the largely unregulated installment loans after running out of mainstream credit options. While that’s the case for plenty of BNPL users, industry experts say many others are turning to the services by choice, seeing them as a complement — or alternative — to credit cards. Texas mom Savannah Thrower, 27, has been using “Buy Now, Pay Later” to keep spending on clothes, shoes, makeup and ho…

Sleep through Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Don’t worry. While the two post-Thanksgiving sales days featured plenty of discounts, retailers are still pushing to lure in shoppers all through December. Yes, there were record-setting deals in some categories over the holiday weekend, and plenty of people wasted no time taking advantage of them. In-store sales looked more modest this year compared with e-commerce, as shoppers extended a yearslong trend of shifting more of their buying online. Maste…

By just about any measure, the mighty American economy is chugging along nicely. The much-forecast recession of 2023 simply never happened. Instead, the jobless rate has remained below 4% for two years, wages are finally rising faster than inflation, and the economy revved up in the third quarter to post a nearly 5% growth. Bipartisan investments in infrastructure and computer chip manufacturing are just starting to bear fruit, fueling more economic tailwinds in the months ahead. In fact, in a n…

Weaker-than-expected job growth in October and a slight uptick in unemployment show the red-hot job market is finally cooling. That’s a good thing. The Federal Reserve has been trying to get the worst inflation in years under control by raising interest rates. A slowing job market may be evidence that its strategy is working. “With less heat seen in the job market, this report should go over well at the Federal Reserve,” Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst at Bankrate, said in a note Friday. F…

The historic $1.78 billion National Association of Realtors verdict in Kansas City, Missouri, this week could trigger a major disruption in the housing market, but it’s unclear when millions of people will know how the decision will affect residential real estate costs. The case hinged on the commissions, usually of 6%, that sellers pay their agents, who then split them with the buyers’ agents. It has been a cornerstone of how the NAR — a powerful trade group of 1.5 million members — does busine…