Misty Pellew’s family lived in the dark for several days this month.
Pellew’s power was shut off Nov. 13 because of $602 in unpaid bills, the latest in a string of financial humiliations that began six months ago after her husband lost his $20-an-hour excavation job in northeastern Pennsylvania. The recent government shutdown dealt another blow, delaying federal funding for programs that helped the family pay for food and utilities.
Although Pellew’s lights were temporarily turned back on last week, they were set to be disconnected again if she didn’t pay another $102. With an overdrawn bank account, she was bracing to be without power again. Last time, her family ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner and slept in hoodies and gloves to keep warm.
“I feel so useless and helpless,” the 44-year-old said.
Soaring electricity prices are triggering a wave of power shutoffs nationwide, leaving more Americans in the dark as unpaid bills pile up. Although there is no national count of electricity shutoffs, data from select utilities in 11 states show that disconnections have risen in at least eight of them since last year, according to figures compiled by The Washington Post and the National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA). In some areas, such as New York City, the surge has been dramatic — with residential shutoffs in August up fivefold from a year ago, utility filings show.
On its face, 2025 has been a good year for the stock market. The S&P 500 was dragged out of its tariff-induced springtime slump by a small subset of AI-forward power players whose spectacular gains defied an otherwise softening economy. Even now, despite a rocky November, the benchmark index is up more than 12 percent since the start of the year.
A group of trillion-dollar brands known as the “Magnificent Seven” — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla — has been at the forefront of those gains, thanks in large part to corporate spending and intense interest in artificial intelligence. But economists and investors are raising concerns about the companies that aren’t part of the AI investment boom — in other words, most businesses in the United States.
An index that leaves out the seven high-flying tech firms — call it the S&P 493 — reveals a far weaker picture, as smaller and lower-tech companies report lackluster sales and declining investment.
“You have the headwind of de-globalization and tariffs, and the tailwind of AI … those forces are battling to a draw, and in that crosswind you get winners and losers,” said Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi. “Anything that is not connected to AI is throttled lower.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/what-the-s-p-500-is-hiding-about-the-economy/ar-AA1R1VUJ
Americans’ happiness is at a record low. Are we just using our money the wrong way?
In an exclusive YouGov poll for MarketWatch, just half of Americans said the way they are using and managing their money has made them happy
Cara Macksoud “cried every day” after buying a 5,000-square-foot house in Brooklyn. She had done well financially as a Wall Street trader, and raising her family in a large home had been a dream. But cleaning a house that size was a massive undertaking, and it seemed impossible to keep track of everyone’s belongings, as compared with when they lived in a smaller duplex. One day, her mother came over and noted the house needed window treatments. “All of a sudden, my time was being spent picking window treatments.” She thought, “This is miserable.”
Macksoud was raised to believe one’s home was their pride, but she realized, “I’m built differently,” she said. “I wanted to see things, I wanted to feel things. I wanted to experience people. And you don’t do that when you sit in the house on the sofa admiring your curtains.”
Well, it’s old news, but accurate. The Mag 7 represents something like 35% of the value of the S&P500! Whether one thinks there’s a bubble about to burst or not, there’s NO doubt that the portfolio has lost much of its inherent diversification — and that is a risk problem, plain and simple.
h/t Ray