CNN Business News

Tess Coward, a 27-year-old PR professional based in New York City, woke up feeling under the weather on Wednesday. But without the ability to make phone calls or receive text messages, she couldn’t get in touch with her doctor or log into the provider’s patient portal.

The average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was 6.06% for the week ending January 15, according to Freddie Mac. The last time home borrowing rates were this low was September 2022.

Inside The Washington Post, the impact was immediate. Reporters called the search “incredibly disturbing” and unprecedented. Natanson met with Post lawyers and security experts, scrambled to line up her own outside legal counsel, and urged her colleagues to keep reporting.

Federal immigration agents have been circling El Burrito Mercado, a prominent Mexican supermarket and restaurant in St. Paul, Minnesota, for the last week.

The United States is considering whether to strike Iran as turmoil intensifies for the country’s authoritarian regime.

The US has completed its first sale of Venezuelan oil since the US attached Venezuela and captured its president, Nicolás Maduro, earlier this month, according to an administration official.

President Donald Trump enacted a new 25% tariff on “certain advanced computing chips” on Wednesday, according to a White House fact sheet. That includes Nvidia’s H200 chip and AMD’s MI325X. However, chips imported to support building up the US technological supply chain would be exempt.

Verizon said some of its wireless services were down Wednesday, leaving many customers without access to voice and data services.

YouTube will now let parents limit the amount of time their teens can spend scrolling through its short-form video feature, Shorts, or block them all together.

Last month, Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson penned a first-person piece about her long year as “the federal government whisperer,” receiving tips from hundreds of federal workers. On Wednesday, the FBI searched her home, a source familiar with the situation told CNN.

Price hikes picked up speed for US-based businesses toward the end of last year, a potential signal that inflation has yet to peak and prices could soon rise faster for consumers.

Trump is threatening to take “strong action” against Iran just after capturing the leader of Venezuela. His administration is criminally investigating the chair of the Federal Reserve and is taking a scorched-earth approach on affordability by threatening key profit drivers for banks and institutional investors.

Perhaps no data point better encapsulates the American economy right now than this nugget from Delta’s quarterly earnings:

China recorded the world’s biggest ever trade surplus in 2025, as well as a 20% jump from 2024, capping off a year in which the world’s largest manufacturer defied US trade pressure by ramping up exports to other global markets.

Saks Global, the parent company of luxury retailer Saks Fifth Avenue, filed for bankruptcy protection late Tuesday, according to court documents filed in US Bankruptcy Court in Houston, Texas.

China on Wednesday reported a strong export run in 2025 with a record surplus of nearly $1.2 trillion, as producers braced for three more years of a Trump administration set on slowing the production powerhouse by shifting US orders to other markets.

Microsoft says it will ask to pay higher electricity bills in areas where it’s building data centers, in an effort to prevent electricity prices for local residents from rising in those areas. The move is part of a broader plan to address rising prices and other concerns sparked by the tech industry’s massive buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure across the United States.

US consumer prices rose 2.7% annually in December, closing out a year that saw slight progress on inflation but continued affordability concerns for many Americans.

The BBC is taking steps to have Donald Trump’s defamation lawsuit against it dismissed, a court document showed.

Amazon executives laid out their vision for Alexa’s future in an interview with CNN at the CES tech convention, where the company launched a new Alexa website and updates to other Amazon products.

After cutting interest rates three times in a row last year, the Federal Reserve indicated last month it probably won’t lower interest rates again for a while. A months-long pause, cemented by key economic data released Friday, may indeed be the best-case scenario for the world’s largest economy.

What is Corporate America so afraid of?

President Donald Trump wants to juice the economy with dramatically lower interest rates, to take credit for a booming stock market and, perhaps most of all, for his handpicked Fed chair to get off the stage.

Apple plans to use Google’s Gemini artificial intelligence model to power its updated version of Siri, which is set to launch later this year, the two companies announced Monday.

Investors took one look at the Trump administration’s criminal investigation of Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell and decided to resuscitate the “Sell America” trade, selling off US stocks, bonds and the dollar.

Wegmans, the supermarket chain known for its cult-like following, angered some loyalists after revealing it uses facial recognition technology at New York City stores.

Last January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was eager to have an ally in the White House to go after foreign regulations “pushing” American tech firms “to censor more” content.

Greenland’s untapped mineral wealth has landed the island at the top of President Donald Trump’s empire-building wish list.

Elon Musk’s Grok has been blocked by Indonesia and Malaysia, the first countries to do so after the AI tool’s “digital undressing” function flooded the internet with photos of women and minors in obscene manipulated images.

Federal prosecutors have opened a criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve’s $2.5 billion renovation of its headquarters in Washington, DC.

The United States attacked Venezuela and President Donald Trump is threatening to take Greenland “the hard way.” All the while, the US has an uncertain economic outlook and a weak jobs report.

President Donald Trump, like any politician whose polling is in the gutter, is desperate for a villain — any villain — to blame for America’s affordability woes. Enter Wall Street.

Venezuela is home to the world’s largest reported oil reserves. The country’s other commodities have also caught the Trump administration’s attention.

As President Donald Trump piled on new tariffs last year, many economists quickly warned that prices and unemployment would spike. With most of the 2025 economic results in, it’s looking like those forecasters get partial credit.

AI once again dominated CES, where companies from around the world gathered to flaunt new technologies. It’s where tech giants like Nvidia, Samsung, and Amazon made their case for the role AI will play in how people live and work, despite concerns of an AI bubble.

Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot has limited some aspects of its Imagine image generation features to paid subscribers on X, days after international uproar over the AI tool “digitally undressing” people, including children, upon user requests on X.

The food pyramid is getting turned upside down, with protein and dairy gaining more prominence in the suggested American diet. Sugar and processed foods are getting shunned even more with warning labels.

On Friday at 8:30 a.m. ET, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the latest snapshot on the health of the US labor market – and economists’ estimates vary wildly over what we should expect for the final jobs report of 2025.

President Donald Trump is set to meet with Big Oil executives Friday as part of a weeklong charm offensive to persuade America’s largest energy companies to return to Venezuela.

General Motors on Thursday said it will take an additional $6 billion hit against its earnings as result of it pulling back on its electric vehicle plans.

Paramount is not raising its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery above $30 per share, at least not yet.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the final jobs report for 2025 — and economists’ estimates vary wildly over what we should expect.

HED: Venezuela’s economy will be a mess for whoever runs it next

Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, Grok, has been flooded with sexual images of mainly women, many of them real people, by being prompted by users to “digitally undress” them and sometimes placing them in suggestive poses.

President Donald Trump made two extraordinarily unusual policy statements in rapid succession Wednesday that sent stocks sinking and raised serious questions about the limits of presidential power in a free-market economy.

Character.AI has agreed to settle multiple lawsuits alleging the artificial intelligence chatbot maker contributed to mental health crises and suicides among young people, including a case brought by Florida mother Megan Garcia.

Betting big on memestocks could pay off, at least for GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen. But a potentially huge payout hinges on a massive turnaround for the volatile video game retailer.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he intends to ban large institutional investors from buying additional single-family homes.

Finding a job continued to be a slog at the end of the year, new data shows: US businesses sought out fewer workers in November and hiring rates wilted even further.

Once again, Warner Bros. Discovery has chosen Netflix as its preferred suitor over Paramount.