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[ad_1] A shopper goes through shirts in the kids section at Old Navy in Denver, Colorado. Brent Lewis | Denver Post | Getty Images By striking down student debt forgiveness Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court not only added a hefty expense back into millions of Americans' budgets. It also created the latest challenge for retailers already struggling to predict how consumers may spend in the coming months. The court's decision squashed President Joe Biden 's plan to forgive up to $20,000 per borrower in federal student loan debt . Student loans will already take a bigger bite out of budgets this fall as payments and interest accruals resume after a more than three-year pandemic-related pause . Biden announced steps Friday to make the transition to resuming payments easier and create a path to forgiveness of some loans. The opinion means outstanding loan balances will be higher as those payments resume than they would have been if the court had ruled in favor of Biden. The

[ad_1] A range of retailers are again blaming shrink as one of the reasons they saw another quarter of lackluster profits. But some of those companies have started to offer more detail than ever on how much shrink, or items lost to factors like external or employee theft , damage or vendor fraud, is cutting into their bottom lines. At the same time, certain retailers pulled back on their contention that organized theft is a primary cause of losses, as scrutiny grows over claims about how much crime contributes to their struggles. During second-quarter earnings reports in August and September, nearly two dozen retailers said shrink has continued to weigh on profits. But the details each company provided, and the explanations they gave for losses, varied widely. Many of them said that shrink is at an all-time high and said the industry is struggling to control it. Still, it's difficult to compare the losses to past years because most of the companies have never previously disclo

[ad_1] Two weeks into the second half of the year, we put together a quick look at the top four performers and the bottom four in Jim Cramer's Charitable Trust, the stock portfolio we use for the Investing Club. The first full trading week of July saw Wall Street under some pressure Friday after a multisession winning streak. Gains month-to-date of roughly 2.4% for the Nasdaq add to the tech-heavy index's best first half (up nearly 32%) in four decades. There are some new names on both the July leaders and July laggards list since we did this exercise looking at our January to June portfolio performance. July leaders HAL mountain 2023-06-30 Halliburton stock performance since June 30 close Oilfield services giant Halliburton (HAL) flips from a first-half loser (down 16%) to top our second-half winner. Month-to-date, HAL gained nearly 12%, a recent rally that we took advantage of Friday morning by booking in some profits. During our Monthly Meeting on Wednesday, we told mem