October 13, 2026

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Morning, sunshine. In today’s small business news, singer and talk show host Kelly Clarkson is beefing with a Brooklyn boutique she claims gave her the Pretty Woman treatment when she inquired about the price of a $15,000 bird automaton. After Clarkson put the store on social media blast, it responded that the item simply wasn’t for sale (though the singer claims there was a price tag). We’ve been on Team Clarkson since From Justin to Kelly, so in solidarity we plan to walk into a Rainforest Cafe and try to buy all the animatronic animals.

—Abby Rubenstein, Brendan Cosgrove, Dave Lozo, Matty Merritt, Neal Freyman

In today’s newsletter, we’ll get into:

The wealthiest age group in America
The winners of the Nobel Prize in economics
The only thing worse than getting a real calendar invite for a meeting

Markets

Nasdaq

27,245.9

-0.44%

S&P

7,807.24

-0.06%

Dow

51,850.55

+0.38%

10-Year

5.240%

-- bps

Bitcoin

$82,831.73

-0.73%

Meta

$742.96

+3.38%

Data is provided by

*Stock data as of market close, cryptocurrency data as of 6:00pm ET. Here's what these numbers mean.

Markets: Hope you got a cake for the current bull market which turned four years old yesterday, with the S&P 500 having grown nearly 120% since October 12, 2022, thanks in large part to AI, per CNBC. The bond market was closed yesterday, and stocks were mixed as investors kept an eye on tensions roiling the Middle East. Meta rose as it released new AI models aimed at challenging the frontier models of its rivals.
Up next: Big banks will kick off the Q3 earnings season today, with JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, and Citi reporting.

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Golden years

Getting older is paying off for Americans

An older person's hands counting a stack of $100 bills

Krisanapong Detraphiphat/Getty Images

Americans over age 75 have a lot going for them. They got to make their youthful mistakes without having them immortalized on social media and listened to The White Album as a new release. More recently, new data from the Federal Reserve shows they’ve been getting richer.

In fact, families headed by someone aged 75+ are now the wealthiest in the US, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances released last week.

The survey measuring household wealth comes out every three years, and this most recent one shows that median family net worth, adjusted for inflation, rose 2% to $215,900 between 2022 and 2025. With the stock market rising, wealthier households saw a bigger boost, and older ones grew their wealth even more, as wealth decreased for younger families:

Wealth increased 37% for the 75+ group, but declined 23% for families under 35.
People aged 75 and older became the richest group in the US, with their median net worth growing to ~$505,000, compared with $367,000 in 2022. Their mean net worth grew 10% to $1.96 million.

Why the Boomers are OK

The affluence of the 75+ set is a marked change from the earlier dynamic in the US in which older people had less money as they began spending their savings. “This is totally reversed now,” NYU economics professor Edward Wolff told the Wall Street Journal.

With the Fed measuring wealth by assets such as stocks and home equity, minus liabilities like mortgages and debt, Wolff explained that many older people bought homes and stocks years ago that have since skyrocketed in value, so they’re reaping the benefits.

But the economy is not working out so well for everybody. Inflation is biting into the spending power of those on the other end of the wealth spectrum. Plus, the survey showed that many families are struggling with debt: almost 20% of families reported making a late loan payment over the last year, up from 12.2% in 2022. Recent research also shows that older Americans could be propping up consumer spending.—AR