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🔍Scoops Spotlight

🔍Scoops Spotlight

Breaking down the latest news impacting your life, business, and money.

Scoops Team
September 18, 2026

Hey friends - fall is here, and I haven’t had a single pumpkin flavored thing yet. This might be the weekend. Also, my wife has asked me for costume ideas for us and our baby. Please help. Accepting all weird ideas.

Welcome back to the weekly Scoops Spotlight, where we’ll serve up a little summary of the most important business and money news of the week with the company scoops that got the most community reactions.

🌎 The Big Picture

Here's what you need to know this week:

Borrowing's getting pricier, but your savings account is going to pay more.
Employers are holding onto their people.
Coal and gas plants just got a free pass on air pollution.
Gas prices are climbing again, and it's going to sting.
Workers are producing more than ever, but their paychecks aren't keeping up with the cost of living.

▶️ Borrowing's getting pricier, but your savings account is going to pay more.

For the first time in three years, Federal Reserve officials unanimously voted to bump their benchmark interest rate up by a quarter point, landing it in the 3.75%–4% range. Chair Kevin Warsh didn't sugarcoat it: prices are still rising way too fast. The Fed now expects the cost of living to climb 3.7% this year, and they don't see inflation hitting that 2% target until after 2028.

Variable-rate debt is where you'll feel it first. Credit cards, home equity lines of credit, business lines of credit — they're all tied directly to the Fed's benchmark, so they jump fast.

Mortgage rates were already on the move before this, since they follow Treasury yields rather than the federal funds rate. Markets pushed those yields higher this summer on the back of Fed expectations, inflation fears, geopolitics, and growing debt concerns. The 10-year Treasury yield broke above 5% this week, its highest point in nearly two decades, and dragged the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate up to nearly 7% last week, the highest in over a year, per the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The upside? Savings accounts and money market funds are going to start paying more.

▶️ Employers are holding onto their people.

Just 196,000 workers filed new unemployment claims last week, one of the lowest readings since 1969, according to the Labor Department. Labor Day timing and the back-to-school season can shake the weekly numbers around, but the four-week average still dropped to a five-week low, coming in under last year's figures.

▶️ Gas prices are climbing again, and it's going to sting.

Renewed fighting between the U.S. and Iran near a key Middle East oil route is pushing crude prices up. The national average hit $4.47 a gallon this week, according to AAA, matching prices from early June and running 40% higher than a year ago.

▶️ Coal and gas plants just got a free pass on air pollution.

The EPA finalized the repeal of a 2024 rule that would've required power plants to capture and store at least 90% of their carbon emissions by 2032. Regulators say scrapping the rule will help keep electricity bills from rising as much, but there's concern about the health risks. The previous administration's EPA had estimated that the rule would deliver $370 billion in public net benefits, including preventing 360,000 asthma cases in 2035 alone.

▶️ Workers are producing more than ever, but their paychecks aren't keeping up with the cost of living.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported nonfarm business productivity grew at a 1.4% annualized pace last quarter, with workers producing 2.2% more output per hour than a year ago. This is a trend. Productivity's grown at a 2.1% annualized pace since the current business cycle kicked off in late 2019, beating the 1.5% pace of the cycle before it.

But workers aren't the ones seeing the rewards. After adjusting for inflation, paychecks are buying less than they did a year ago. Real hourly compensation dropped at a 3.3% annualized pace last quarter. And workers are taking home a shrinking slice of what they produce, with the labor share of income hitting 52.8% in the second quarter, the lowest on record in eight decades. More and more of those gains are flowing to corporate profits, not to the people doing the work.

How are you feeling about the economy?

👍 | 👎

🏭 The Companies Everyone’s Talking About

Anthropic's CEO is trying to slow AI development as fears grow.

Anthropic wants the AI industry to slow down before AI grows too powerful for humans to control, and one of its own researchers isn't sure there's much time left. Chief Executive Dario Amodei published an essay urging AI companies to pace development and said Anthropic is beginning by letting outside evaluators check its safety work.

Days earlier, researcher Jacob Coxon resigned, warning that Anthropic and OpenAI are racing toward systems able to hack networks and act on their own faster than people could stop them.

Fellow researcher Evan Hubinger agreed, putting the odds of this causing human extinction above 10% within a decade.
Anthropic is also preparing for one of the largest stock market debuts ever, targeting a valuation near two trillion dollars, even as it raises these very concerns.

Target pushed back its timeline for eliminating emissions, now aiming for net zero by 2050.

Target pushed back two major climate goals this year. It now aims for net-zero emissions by 2050, rather than 2040, and a deeper cut in supply-chain emissions by 2035, rather than 2030. The retailer cited broader changes needed in energy and technology systems, the same reasoning PepsiCo gave when it pushed back its own net zero target in 2025.

Coca-Cola, McDonald's, and Starbucks have also downgraded or struggled to hit similar goals. Target has cut emissions from its own stores and buildings by 67.9% since 2017 and now runs entirely on renewable electricity, both ahead of schedule. So there's definitely progress, just not as much as Target hoped.

AMC Entertainment criticized Robinhood for creating stock tokens tied to its shares without the company's permission.

AMC Entertainment is fighting back after Robinhood created stock tokens tied to its shares without asking. These tokens are digital assets that trade on blockchain and mirror a company's stock price, but buyers get no ownership or shareholder rights. A separate company issues the tokens and holds the real shares that back them.

Chief executive Adam Aron called the tokens outrageous, saying they could confuse investors and interfere with AMC's ability to raise money, and that AMC would raise the matter with the SEC.

Robinhood's chief executive, Vlad Tenev, defended the tokens, saying that companies can't control financial products built around their shares once those shares trade publicly. He confirmed the tokens carry no voting rights and declined to say how Robinhood would vote the shares backing them.

Apple unveiled its first folding iPhone, but analysts aren't sure who is actually supposed to buy it.

Apple unveiled its first folding phone, the iPhone Duo. Starting at $1,999, with the priciest version reaching $3,199, the foldable opens to a larger screen for multitasking, like a tablet. Apple also released the iPhone 18 Pro, starting at $1,199, alongside a larger iPhone 18 Pro Max. Unlike past launches, Apple didn't clearly define the foldable's target buyer.

Folding phones account for less than 3% of global smartphone sales. Samsung, which has sold folding phones since 2019, only recently overcame early problems with broken screens and peeling parts. Analysts still expect Apple to sell millions of these phones this year, largely on brand loyalty rather than a clear new use case.d vote the shares backing them.

Oura filed to sell shares in an initial public offering after a big year of sales growth.

Oura, the company behind a popular health-tracking smart ring, is going public on the Nasdaq under the ticker OURA. Regular investors will be able to buy shares in the company on the public stock exchange for the first time, and the company will earn fresh funding.

The Finnish wearables maker turned a dramatic corner over the past year, growing sales 74% to $1.21 billion and earning $60.8 million in profit over nine months, compared to just $1.6 million the year before. The company also launched a redesigned ring 40% smaller than its predecessor. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are leading the offering, which could value Oura at more than $16 billion.

❔ The Big Question of the Week

Should energy companies feel responsible for the pollution caused by burning fossil fuels?

Scoops app users: We have taken the beta app offline for a short period for some major updates. Can’t wait to show you all what we’ve been working on! Reach out if you have any questions.

We’re going to switch up the content in this spotlight for a bit to make sure you all have the info you need to master your week.

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