Markets
ETF Proliferation Reaches Its Editing Phase
Fund launches have been outpaced by closures for the first sustained stretch in the product's history. The survivors reveal what the proliferation was actually for.
All Stories
22 stories by Daniel Okafor
National News
The Gas Tax Stops Paying for the Roads
A per-gallon levy funds American highways while fuel consumption decouples from road use. The replacement everyone points to is a mileage fee, and almost nobody has been willing to build one.
Money
Alternative Assets Creep Into Retirement Menus
Private equity, private credit and real assets are arriving inside ordinary retirement plans, bringing diversification arguments and fee questions in equal measure.
Opinion
The Meeting Is the Message, and the Message Is Usually Fear
Companies measure everything except the forty percent of payroll spent talking about work, and the audit they refuse to run would explain more than any engagement survey.
Money
The Health Savings Account Becomes a Retirement Vehicle
The best-taxed account in the American system was designed for medical bills and is increasingly being used as a supplemental retirement fund by the people who least need help saving.
Money
Small Businesses Discover Treasury Management
Higher rates taught small companies that idle cash has a price. The habits they built are outlasting the rates that created them.
Markets
Private Credit's Growth Is Slowing. Its Influence Is Not
The asset class that ate corporate lending is maturing. What it built while growing is now permanent market structure.
National News
Disaster Costs Are Rewriting the Deal Between States and Washington
As catastrophe losses mount, the informal understanding that the federal government backstops state disasters is being renegotiated in budget documents rather than speeches.
Markets
The Buyback Returns, With Better Manners
Share repurchases are running at a substantial pace again, and the companies doing them have learned to explain themselves. Disclosure has improved faster than the underlying discipline.
Markets
The Municipal Bond Market Finally Modernizes
The sleepiest corner of American finance is being dragged into the present by electronic trading, better disclosure and a generation of buyers who expect both.
Opinion
The Quiet Company Is Winning, and Nobody Is Writing About It
The most durable businesses of this decade are not the loudest ones. They are the ones that stopped performing for an audience and started compounding in private.
Money
Buy Now, Pay Later Grows Up and Gets Reported
Installment lending at the checkout spent years invisible to the credit system. As it becomes reportable, both the lenders and the borrowers are discovering what visibility costs.
Markets
Index Concentration Becomes a Risk Committee Problem
Broad market index funds have become substantially less diversified than the word index implies. Institutional allocators are reworking mandates written when the assumption held.
Money
Regional Banks Turn to Software to Defend Deposits
Facing depositors who can move money in seconds, smaller banks are investing in retention tooling that watches balances the way retailers watch shopping carts.
Markets
Investors Position for a Slower Path Down on Rates
Futures markets have spent the summer walking back easing expectations, and portfolio managers are adjusting duration, credit and cash accordingly.
Money
The Great Inheritance Arrives, Unevenly
The largest generational wealth transfer on record is underway. Most of it is moving to households that were already comfortable, and much of it is being consumed by end-of-life costs before it moves at all.
Leadership
Small Company Boards Are Getting Younger, and More Demanding
Board seats at small and mid-sized companies were long treated as honors. Rising liability, activist attention and operational complexity are turning them back into jobs.
AI
Small Models, Big Deployments
The frontier gets the headlines, but the volume is moving to compact models that run cheaply, privately and close to the work.
Health
Wearables Enter the Exam Room, on the Doctor's Terms
After a decade of patients arriving with watch data their doctors ignored, clinical workflows are finally being built to use it, selectively and skeptically.
Money
The Quiet Repair of the American Household Balance Sheet
Beneath the affordability complaints, savings behavior has shifted. Households are extinguishing revolving debt at rates not seen in a decade.
Technology
The API Economy Enters Its Utility Phase
The scramble of a thousand developer-tool startups is resolving into something duller and more durable: infrastructure priced, regulated and consolidated like the utility it always was.
Opinion
Companies Should Disclose AI Use the Way They Disclose Auditors
Voluntary vagueness about where AI touches customers is becoming a liability. A simple disclosure norm would serve companies better than the silence they are defending.