Personal Finance

Wall Street expects Morgan Stanley to report a 35.7% year-over-year EPS increase and 15.4% revenue growth when results drop Wednesday at 7:30 a.m. ET, with Wealth Management asset-management revenue projected at $5.12 billion following Q1 record net new assets of $118.4 billion. The key household-finance question is whether fee compression from Vanguard's February 2026 cuts across 84 fund share classes is showing up in Morgan Stanley's blended asset-management fee rate. Macro delinquency data offers little alarm — commercial bank credit card delinquencies edged down to 2.92% in Q1 2026 — but Morgan Stanley's specific consumer credit portfolio detail will not be available until the 10-Q filing.

As of July 21, 2026, the CFPB's rewrite of Regulation B formally removes disparate-impact liability from federal fair-lending enforcement under ECOA, narrows the discouragement prohibition to statement-based conduct with a scienter requirement, and restricts for-profit Special Purpose Credit Programs from using race, sex, color, or national origin as eligibility criteria. Every entity meeting the Regulation B creditor definition — banks, credit unions, nonbank lenders, fintechs, and retailers — must now revise compliance, marketing, and fair-lending testing programs built around the effects test since the 1970s. A pending APA lawsuit filed May 27, 2026 in the D.C. District Court did not seek a preliminary injunction, so the rule took effect on schedule, though disparate-impact claims remain available to plaintiffs under state ECOA analogues and the Fair Housing Act.

The Senior Citizens League maintained its 3.8% projection for the 2027 Social Security cost-of-living adjustment on July 14, 2026, even after a deflationary June CPI print driven by a 9.7% drop in gasoline prices. If the estimate holds, the average retired-worker benefit would rise from $1,937.53 to $2,011.15 per month, though independent analyst Mary Johnson projects a higher figure of at least 4.7%. The final adjustment will be determined by the SSA in October 2026, using CPI-W data from July, August, and September that has not yet been released.

A KFF analysis of preliminary 2027 rate filings from 77 carriers in 16 states and DC found a median proposed premium increase of 14%, which would mark a second consecutive year of double-digit hikes following a finalized 20% increase for 2026. Insurers attribute the requests to a 10% medical-cost trend assumption, an estimated 4-percentage-point morbidity effect from the expiration of enhanced premium tax credits, and federal regulatory changes projected to reduce Marketplace enrollment by 1.2 to 2 million people. These are proposals, not final rates; state insurance commissioners typically negotiate reductions before approving rates ahead of the November 1, 2026 open-enrollment start date.

The June 2026 CPI report recorded the largest single-month headline decline since April 2020, driven almost entirely by a 9.7 percent drop in gasoline prices following the reversal of a geopolitical energy spike. Core inflation held steadier, rising 2.6 percent year-over-year, while shelter posted its smallest monthly gain since January 2021 at 0.1 percent. The data reduced the probability of a Federal Reserve July rate hike from 42 percent to 17 percent and pushed the Senior Citizens League's 2027 Social Security COLA projection to 3.8 percent, or roughly $77 more per month for the average retiree.