The Equilibrium Impact of Credit Frictions: Evidence from Default Risk Using Firm-Level Data

The Federal Reserve may soon be drawn into the Trump administration’s efforts to back the embattled currency of U.S. ally Japan. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent wants the apolitical Fed to expand a lending facility that would enable Japan to support its currency without roiling the sensitive U.S. Treasury market. That request comes as new Fed…

We construct a novel stock-level measure of volatility disagreement as the cross-sectional dispersion of realized variance forecasts built from heterogeneous information sets and machine learning models. Sorting single-name delta-hedged straddles on this measure yields a long-short return of −5.14% per month, robust to known option return predictors and not subsumed by disagreement about first moments…

Thursday, February 12, 2026 GAO Stands Out in its Ability to Answer the Tough Questions. Here’s How We Do it. Before Congress makes tough policy decisions, it often comes to GAO for information. This episode looks at some of the toughest questions Congress has asked GAO to answer, and how we did it. We’ll learn…

The rally in Microsoft shares “has legs” because its capital spending is showing a payoff.

Loadings at a Mediterranean port have picked up as Saudi Arabia races to offer its oil to buyers through a lengthier — and more expensive — backdoor.