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Dollar General Posts Record Sales

Dollar General set a quarterly sales record of $10.44 billion and upgraded its annual profit and sales outlook as Americans tighten their budgets and spend more at bargain stores and off-price retailers amid economic uncertainty. The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.2% annual pace from January ...

US Growth Likely To Slow To 1.6% This Year, Hobbled By Trump’s Trade Wars, OECD Says

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. economic growth will slow to 1.6% this year from 2.8% last year as President Donald Trump’s erratic trade wars disrupt global commerce, drive up costs and leave businesses and consumers paralyzed by uncertainty. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development forecast Tuesday that the U.S. economy — the world’s largest — will slow further to just 1.5% in 2026. Trump’s policies have raised average U.S. tariff rates from around 2.5% when he returned to the White House to 15.4%, highest since 1938, according to the OECD. Tariffs raise costs for ...

US Job Openings Rose In April, Signaling Resilience In The American Labor Market

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. job openings rose unexpectedly in April, showing that the labor market remains resilient in the face of uncertainty arising from President Donald Trump’s trade wars. The Labor Department reported Tuesday that employers posted 7.4 million job vacancies in April, up from 7.2 million in March. Economists had expected openings to drift down to 7.1 million. But the number of Americans quitting their jobs— a sign of confidence in their prospects — fell, and layoffs ticked higher. And in another sign the job market has cooled from the hiring boom of 2021-2023, ...

A Helping Hand

Pictured is St Susan’s Executive Director Cherie Rowland and owner of Chautauqua Comics, Al Steffens. Chautauqua Comics’s Free Comic Book Day event on May 3 raised $675 for St Susan’s Soup Kitchen, from 425 people who attended the event. According to St Susan’s staff, this donation ...

US Mint Moves Forward With Plans To Kill The Penny

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration says making cents doesn’t make sense anymore. The U.S. Mint has made its final order of penny blanks and plans to stop producing the coin when those run out, a Treasury Department official confirmed Thursday. This move comes as the cost of ...

April Sales Slow With High Mortgage Rates, Prices, Putting Chill Into Spring Buying Season

Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes fell in April, as elevated mortgage rates and rising prices discouraged prospective homebuyers during what’s traditionally the busiest time of the year for the housing market. Existing home sales dropped 0.5% last month, from March, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4 million units, the National Association of Realtors said Thursday. The sales decline marks the slowest sales pace for the month of April going back to 2009 in the wake of the U.S. housing crisis. March’s sales pace was also the slowest for that month going back to ...