CNN – Business/Consumer

By Anna Bahney, CNN Mortgage rates fell once again this week, dipping for the fifth straight week. The 30-year fixed-rate mortgage averaged 6.31% in the week ending December 15, down from 6.33% the week before, according to Freddie Mac. A year ago, the 30-year fixed rate was 3.12%. Mortgage rates have risen throughout most of

By Oliver Darcy, CNN Business Staffers at The Washington Post are livid at publisher Fred Ryan. That’s according to conversations I had on Wednesday with nearly a dozen employees at The Post who expressed fury at the way Ryan announced in a town hall that the company would undergo layoffs in early 2023. Ryan said

By Paul R. La Monica, CNN Christmas is just 10 days away, and investors hoping for a Santa Claus rally have found little holiday cheer on Wall Street this month — especially Thursday. The Dow plummeted nearly 765 points, or 2.3%, Thursday, and it is down 4% in December following solid gains the previous two

By Alicia Wallace, CNN Black Friday may have been back in fashion this year, but the strong turnout at the start of the holiday shopping season last month wasn’t enough to counter a broader consumer pullback in spending. US retail sales fell sharply at the start of the holiday shopping season, dropping by 0.6% during

By Alicia Wallace, CNN The number of first-time claims for unemployment benefits fell to 211,000 for the week ended December 10, according to data released Thursday by the Department of Labor. That’s a drop of 20,000 from the previous week’s total, which was upwardly revised to 231,000; and the lowest level since September. Economists were

By Paul R. La Monica, CNN Investors around the world have been trying to adjust their portfolios to contend with big interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of England and other central banks this year. But Warren Buffett has no reason to be worried. It looks like the Oracle of

By Julia Horowitz, CNN Central banks in Europe on Thursday joined the US Federal Reserve in slowing down the pace of interest rate hikes as decades-high inflation shows signs of easing. The Bank of England and the European Central Bank both hiked rates by half a percentage point in their final meetings of the year.

By Chris Isidore, CNN Business Elon Musk just sold another 22 million shares of Tesla, raising $3.6 billion. Musk sold the shares on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday this week. The sales were disclosed in an SEC filing late Wednesday. Musk did not disclose the reason for the sales in the filing. They’re his first sales

By Angus Watson, CNN Australia’s parliament passed a new law Thursday capping its domestic gas price and some states’ coal prices, a move the government said would protect consumers from the “wartime whims” of the world. The move comes as tens of millions of Australians grapple with a surge in utility bills this year, despite

By Laura He, CNN The end of pandemic restrictions in China will eventually usher in a strong economic rebound as the country learns to live with the Covid virus, according to economists, even as a slew of data showed business activity plummeting in November. Retail sales declined 5.9% last month from a year ago, according

By Rob Picheta, CNN Nurses across much of the UK launched a historic strike on Thursday, as they walked out of hospitals and onto picket lines after several years of falling pay and declining standards left the country’s nationalized health care system in a state of crisis. As many as 100,000 members of the Royal

By Brian Fung, CNN Two Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday urged Meta to maintain Donald Trump’s suspension from its platforms when it revisits the matter in January, arguing that the former president’s recent posts on his own social media platform suggest he is likely to violate the social media giant’s policies if given a chance. The

By Danielle Wiener-Bronner, CNN Taco Bell knows you want fries with that. Especially during lunch. To compete with rivals such as McDonald’s during lunchtime, the chain is considering permanently adding fries to its menu, Taco Bell CEO Mark King said during an investor event Tuesday. “People that go to lunch want to have French fries.

By Chris Isidore and Vanessa Yurkevich, CNN When a freight train travels across the country, two people are in the cab of the locomotive working to keep the train, its often hazardous and flammable contents, and the communities they are passing through, all safe. Now the railroads are saying that, given today’s modern technology, just

By Jeanne Sahadi, CNN In its last policymaking meeting of the year, the Federal Reserve on Wednesday raised its benchmark interest rate for the seventh time in a row, to a range of 4.25% to 4.5%. That is the highest it’s been in 15 years. In a continued bid to tame decades-high inflation, the central

By Allison Morrow, CNN Sam Bankman-Fried’s multibillion-dollar crypto empire was run primarily by “grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals” who failed to institute basic corporate controls and even relied on QuickBooks to do their accounting, according to investigators. But standing by Bankman-Fried as his companies FTX and Alameda grew (and subsequently collapsed) were two respected Ivy-League