MoneyWatch

Travel last summer was — in a word — wild. Pent-up “revenge” travel combined with relaxed restrictions caused a surge in demand. High fuel prices and limited airline capacity drove up costs, with overall travel prices increasing 17% over pre-pandemic levels by June 2022, according to NerdWallet’s Travel Price Index. What …

Egg prices are tumbling after five months of price hikes that drove some consumers to smuggle cheaper eggs from Mexico. Prices fell 6.7% in February, according to Consumer Price Index data released Tuesday. That comes after egg prices jumped each month starting in October, pushing the average price of a …

Stocks sank on Wall Street after the head of the Federal Reserve warned it could speed up its economy-rattling hikes to interest rates if pressure stays high on inflation.  The S&P 500 dropped 62 points, or 1.5%, to 3,986 on Tuesday, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average gave back 575 …

Eli Lilly plans to cut prices on its most commonly prescribed insulin products by 70% and will also cap customers’ out-of-pocket costs at $35 a month for those with commercial insurance who use its insulin.  The change comes as Eli Lilly and other insulin manufacturers face ongoing criticism for their …

Vanderbilt University is drawing heat from its student body for using ChatGPT to generate a communitywide letter addressing the recent mass shooting at Michigan State University.  The office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College of Education last week issued a statement that many have criticized as impersonal …

A little-known consumer advocacy group chose an unusual — and expensive — way to draw attention to what it sees as the threat to life and limb posed by Tesla vehicles’ “Full Self-Driving” system: It bought a Super Bowl ad. During Sunday’s broadcast of Super Bowl LVII, a spot from …

The idea of a national wealth tax has been floated for years by the likes of President Joe Biden and Senator Elizabeth Warren, although without yet gaining traction in Congress. Now, a group of lawmakers from eight states say they’re stepping in to introduce their own wealth taxes, with the …

Microsoft will let workers take as much time off as they want beginning next week.  Under the company’s new “Discretionary Time off (DTO)” policy, U.S.-based salaried employees will no longer have a fixed number of vacation days per year.  “Beginning January 16, 2023, Microsoft is modernizing our vacation policy to …

American consumers, bruised by a grueling 2022, face another year of living dangerously. Optimists and pessimists alike can point to their preferred indicators to predict how the year ahead is likely to go. In one corner, a recession looks probable this year. The Federal Reserve is also virtually certain to …

Just in time for Christmas, New York legislators returned to the state capital Thursday to give themselves a nice holiday gift: a pay raise that would make them the nation’s best-paid state lawmakers. Members of the state Assembly and Senate would make a base salary of $142,000 under a bill …