If homeowners are delinquent more than a year on making property tax payments, they’re at risk of owing large interest payments to private investors who buy up that debt. “It’s the poorest people paying the richest people,” Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas said.

Consumer prices climbed 6.4% in January from a year earlier, down from 6.5% in December. It was the seventh straight year-over-year slowdown and well below a recent peak of 9.1% in June. Yet it remains far above the Federal Reserve’s 2% annual inflation target.

More than 233,000 Cook County residents applied to be part of the $42 million program, and 3,250 households won a lottery to participate in the two-year program.

President Joe Biden checked those boxes, and a few more, during his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night. In part, he seemed to be laying the foundation to run for a second term. “We’ve been sent here to finish the job,” he said.

His speech before a politically divided Congress comes as the nation struggles to make sense of confounding cross-currents at home and abroad — economic uncertainty, a wearying war in Ukraine, growing tensions with China among them — and warily sizes up Biden’s fitness for a likely reelection bid.

“As we continue to work with our advisors to consider multiple paths, we are implementing actions to manage our business as efficiently as possible,” a Bed Bath and Beyond spokesperson said. “This store fleet reduction expands the company’s ongoing closure program.”

For months, the Fed has been warily watching the U.S. economy’s robust job gains out of concern that employers, desperate to hire, will keep boosting pay and, in turn, keep inflation elevated. But January’s blowout job growth coincided with an actual slowdown in wage growth.

Pay and benefits for America’s workers grew at a healthy but more gradual pace in the final three months of 2022, a third straight slowdown, which could help reassure the Federal Reserve that wage gains won’t fuel higher inflation.

All told, the national average has climbed by more than 9% since the end of last year — the biggest increase to start a year since 2009, according to Bespoke Investment Group.

In a span of less than 12 months, nearly all of the biggest cryptocurrency equivalent of a banks have failed spectacularly. Last week, Genesis filed Chapter 11, joining Voyager Digital, Celsius and BlockFi on the list of companies that have either filed for bankruptcy protection or gone out of business.

It is the company’s biggest-ever round of layoffs and adds to tens of thousands of other job losses recently announced by Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other tech companies as they tighten their belts amid a darkening outlook for the industry. Just this month, there have been at least 48,000 job cuts announced by major companies in the sector.

The Treasury Department said in a letter to congressional leaders it has started taking “extraordinary measures” as the government has run up against its legal borrowing capacity of $31.381 trillion. An artificially imposed cap, the debt ceiling has been increased roughly 80 times since the 1960s.

The company said it secured $150 million in financing that will allow it keep its stores open and operations running. As of October, the Company had 761 total Party City stores and 149 temporary Halloween City stores.

The ongoing slowdown in wholesale price growth is adding to evidence that the worst bout of inflation in four decades is steadily easing, though it remains far above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%.

What was once a cheap source of protein has become a luxury breakfast food. Egg prices have soared over the past year, as the worst avian flu outbreak in U.S. history has infected more than 57 million chickens.

A lingering bird flu outbreak, combined with soaring feed, fuel and labor costs, has led to U.S. egg prices more than doubling over the past year and hatched a lot of sticker shock on grocery aisles.