FST1A

What does the U.S. government actually pay just to borrow the money it already owes? In fiscal 2026, the United States paid $1.052 trillion in net interest on its debt — about $2.88 billion every day, and 19.5 cents of every dollar it collected in taxes. This post is part of our depression series, which asks what a 1930s-style downturn would actually do to your money — the jobs, the house, the pension. The question here: is the debt itself the tripwire? The short answer is that the interest bill has become one of the largest items in the federal budget, and it is still growing — because the debt is bigger and new borrowing costs far more than the old debt it replaces. All figures below come from the U.S. Treasury's Monthly Treasury Statement (MTS) for fiscal 2026, published October 16, 2026, unless another source is named. The federal fiscal year runs from October 1 to September 30. The Short Answer: $1.05 Trillion — but Four Different Numbers Circulate Net interest — the cash ...

Want to know whether home prices are rising or falling in your city — not the national average? Four free sources publish a local house price index, and the one most people check first is the slowest. The Federal Housing Finance Agency covers every state and more than 400 metros. Case-Shiller covers the 20 biggest cities. Zillow goes down to the ZIP code. And the National Association of Realtors reports the actual dollar median for about 235 metros. Here is where each one lives, what it costs, and how fresh the numbers are. The Four Sources at a Glance All four are free to read at the source. The only catch is Case-Shiller: S&P's own site shows limited data, so the free route runs through the St. Louis Fed's FRED database. Source What it measures Local detail How fresh FHFA House Price Index Repeat-sales index 50 states, 400+ metros, ZIP codes About 2 months S&P Cotality Case-Shiller Repeat-sales index 20 metros + national About 2 months Zi...

Did U.S. home prices rise or fall in August 2026? The answer depends on which version of the same index you read. The unadjusted Case-Shiller National Index fell 0.2% from July. The seasonally adjusted version rose 0.3%. Both numbers describe the same homes in the same month. The gap between them is seasonal adjustment: a statistical step that strips out the part of the monthly move that happens every year, so what is left shows whether prices actually gained or lost ground. All figures below come from the releases published on October 27, 2026, unless noted. Here is how the adjustment works, where it shows up in the four most-quoted price measures, and which version to read for the question you are asking. Why House Prices Have a Season Every year, the housing market runs the same calendar — and prices follow it. Spring and summer bring more buyers: families move between school years, daylight lasts longer, and weather makes showings and moves easier. Winter brings fewer listings...

You know an electric car saves money on fuel. But what happens to its value when you sell it five years later? The average EV loses 57.2% of its value in five years — against 41.8% for the average car and 35.4% for a hybrid. That gap is the largest hidden cost of going electric, and it is bigger than five years of fuel savings for most drivers. The numbers below come from iSeeCars' March 2026 value-retention study of more than 950,000 five-year-old cars sold between March 2025 and February 2026. This post is the depreciation follow-up to yesterday's break-even comparison, Gas vs Electric Car: Which One Fits Your Driving? The 2026 Break-Even Math . The Headline Numbers: 57.2% vs 41.8% EVs are the worst-retaining segment in the study — and the gap is more than 15 percentage points. iSeeCars measures five-year depreciation as the difference between a car's original sticker price (MSRP) and its average used sale price five years later. Here is how each segment did in the March ...

Should your next car run on gasoline or electricity? The honest answer is not a brand or a verdict. It is a number: how many miles you drive, and where you plug in. Your annual mileage and your charging habits decide which car is cheaper — not the sticker price. At today's prices, a home-charged EV costs about a third as much per mile as a gas car. But the EV costs more to buy, and if you can only charge at public fast chargers, most of that advantage disappears. All figures below are as of November 8, 2026. AAA put the national average for regular gasoline at $4.04 a gallon on November 7, down from $4.17 five days earlier. The U.S. Energy Information Administration's latest residential electricity average is 18.16 cents per kilowatt-hour (August 2026). The Per-Mile Math, in One Table Home-charged electricity costs about a third of gasoline per mile. Public charging costs nearly as much as gas. The unit that answers the question is cents per mile. The inputs: a gas c...

Four headlines, four different answers. Is the typical American home up 0.7% or 2.4% over the past year? Both - and neither number is wrong. The four most-quoted home price measures track different homes, over different months, with different math. The gap between them is the story: it shows which homes are still gaining, which are stalling, and how far behind inflation prices have fallen. All figures below come from the releases current as of November 7, 2026. Each number is dated, because with housing data the month matters as much as the number. The Latest Readings, Side by Side Four measures, one market, a 1.7-point spread. Here is what each one said most recently: Measure Latest month Change from a year ago S&P Cotality Case-Shiller National August 2026 +2.1% FHFA House Price Index August 2026 +2.4% Zillow Home Value Index October 2026 +0.7% NAR median existing-home price September 2026 +1.3% Two of the four also report a dollar figu...

Was October a genuinely strong month for hiring — or just another headline that will be revised away? U.S. employers added 165,000 jobs in October 2026, and for the first time in months, the headline clears the Bureau of Labor Statistics' own ±122,000 margin of error. The unemployment rate edged down to 4.1%, and August and September were revised up by a combined 84,000 jobs. This is the results post for yesterday's explainer on how jobs report revisions work — and October is the rare release where the first number, the revisions, and the three-month trend all point the same way. All figures below come from the BLS Employment Situation release for October 2026 (USDL-26-1632), published November 6, 2026, at 8:30 a.m. ET, and are seasonally adjusted unless noted. The Headline: 165,000 Jobs, and Why This One Is Different 165,000 clears the bar that most monthly headlines never reach. The ±122,000 test: The BLS puts the 90-percent confidence interval around a monthly payro...