Here are three of the week's top pieces of financial insight, gathered from around the web:
Missing your stimulus check?
The rollout of stimulus checks last week was marred by serious snags, said Heather Long and Michelle Singletary at The Washington Post. "Up to 21 million tax filers" who used H&R Block, TurboTax, or Jackson Hewitt did not get refunds "if they received an advance on their tax refund or had the fee for tax preparation taken out of the tax refund." The IRS says it does not have access to bank account information for those filers, though TurboTax disputes that. While the IRS urged those affected to input their account information on the agency's "Get My Payment" portal, many filers who tried to use the site were confronted only with a cryptic message saying their payment status was not available. Some taxpayers also vented about not receiving the $500 allotted for children, while others said checks were going to dead relatives.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
More bets against the market
Many hedge funds are betting the stock market rally won't last, said Karen Langley at The Wall Street Journal. The market rebounded 28 percent in the first weeks of April, but "investors are bracing for the possibility of more volatility" as companies report earnings. Short sellers, who borrow shares and sell them in anticipation of buying them back at lower prices, made $68.1 billion worth of bets last week against the SPDR S&P 500 Trust, the biggest exchange-traded fund tracking the broad index. Nearly a third of all available shares were purchased for the purpose of selling short — the most since January 2016. Fund managers are especially pessimistic about the travel industry; short sellers "have added a collective $797 million to their short positions against Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Marriott, and Wynn over the past 30 days."
Forced out of network
A patient battling cancer also had to battle with his insurer just to move his lifesaving surgery out of a hospital where he risked COVID-19 infection, said David Lazarus at the Los Angeles Times. David Roe, 29, is fighting stage 4 colon cancer and required immediate surgery. But his surgeon "advised having the operation performed" elsewhere, because recovery "would be too risky in the hospital's intensive-care unit, which was filled with dozens of COVID-19 patients." The other hospital wasn't in network for Roe, however, and his insurer, UnitedHealthcare, said Roe would have to pay the $75,000 surgery bill. The insurer reversed its decision only after Roe's lawyer and California regulators intervened.
This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.
