Author: Press Room

If your rent was due and you were a few hundred dollars short, and you could quickly get approved for a $700 loan with a low fee, would you be interested? A growing number of consumers are answering yes to this question, and banks and credit unions are increasingly meeting their needs with small-dollar loans, which are generally defined… Read the full article here

Donald Trump says there’s nothing that would make him drop out of the 2024 presidential race — even being convicted of a crime. In an interview that aired Tuesday night on Fox News, Trump was asked by Tucker Carlson: “Is there anything they could throw at you legally, that would convince you to drop out the race? If you get convicted in this case in New York, would you drop out?”  Trump… Read the full article here

© Reuters. By Andrew Goudsward (Reuters) – New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Monday nominated a judge to lead the state’s highest court after lawmakers rejected the Democrat’s previous pick from her own party. Rowan Wilson, an associate judge on the Court of Appeals, was named as chief judge of the same court, overseeing the state’s sprawling state judicial system. If confirmed, Wilson would be the first Black judge in the post, replacing Janet DiFiore who stepped down in August. “Judge Wilson’s sterling record of upholding justice and fairness makes him well-suited to lead the court at this critical time,” Hochul said…

By Peter Nurse    Investing.com — Oil prices rose Tuesday, continuing the recent positive tone ahead of an industry report of weekly U.S. crude stocks as well as a key U.S. inflation release.  By 09:15 ET (13:15 GMT), traded 0.9% higher at $80.43 a barrel, while the contract rose 0.5% to $84.62 a barrel. The , an industry body, is scheduled to release its weekly data on U.S. crude stockpiles later in the session and is expected to show another fall after last week’s drop of over 4 million barrels. The API numbers serve as a precursor to official inventory data…

By Gabriel Burin (Reuters) – Brazil’s inflation likely stayed high in March on rising gasoline bills, reigniting cost of living problems in the country’s stagnant economy and probably stoking more disagreement over policy, a Reuters poll showed. Consumer prices cooled in the second half of 2022 in reaction to an aggressive tightening campaign by the central bank. But inflation pressures reemerged after President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office at the start of this year. The monthly report on consumer prices scheduled for Tuesday could again push back expectations for policy easing towards the end of this year and…

One would be hard pressed to find any market in East Asia except the Philippines where startups are major digital banking players. In one jurisdiction after the next, regulators have ensured that incumbent lenders and in some cases large technology companies win the requisite licenses to operate online-only banks. After biding its time on digital banking for several years, Thailand is following in its neighbors’ footsteps, setting capitalization requirements and other hurdles that will likely eliminate scrappy upstarts from the application process. In its own words, the Bank of Thailand (BoT) requires that “major shareholders of the virtual bank must…

UnitedHealth Group (NYSE: UNH) is scheduled to report its Q1 2023 results on Friday, April 14. We expect UnitedHealth to post revenue in line and earnings slightly above the street expectations. The company will likely continue to benefit from the increased contribution of the Optum Health business, while its health insurance business will likely benefit from increased memberships. Not only do we expect the company to navigate well over the latest quarter, our forecast indicates that UNH stock has more room for growth, as discussed below. Our interactive dashboard analysis of UnitedHealth’s Earnings Preview has additional details. (1) Revenues expected…

I remember the day well. I was sitting at my computer and all of a sudden my screen froze up and was flashing. Someone had “taken over” my computer, but offered to fix it immediately. I reluctantly paid money, but felt real stupid afterwards. Here’s what happened to me. I was pretty spooked: On my computer, I suddenly saw a glaring a pop-up window on my screen. It looked like an apocalyptical error message from antivirus software with a message in the window warning me “about a security issue on your computer” (with a phone number to get help). Such…

The U.S. Postal Service proposed raising the price of first-class mail stamps from 63 to 66 cents this week, the second price hike so far this year.  Stamp prices have nearly doubled over the past two decades, increasing from just 37 cents in 2002. USPS most recently upped prices from 60 cents to 63 cents in January. If the proposed hike to 66 cents is approved by the Postal Regulatory Commission, then it will take effect in July.  “As operating expenses fueled by inflation continue to rise and the effects of a previously defective pricing model are still being felt, these…

Alejandro Lopez-Lira, a finance professor at the University of Florida, says that large language models may be useful when forecasting stock prices.He used ChatGPT to parse news headlines for whether they’re good or bad for a stock, and found that ChatGPT’s ability to predict the direction of the next day’s returns were much better than random, he said in a recent unreviewed paper.The experiment strikes at the heart of the promise around state-of-the-art artificial intelligence: With bigger computers and better datasets — like those powering ChatGPT — these AI models may display “emergent abilities,” or capabilities that weren’t originally planned…