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By BERNARD CONDON and STAN CHOE, AP Business Writers

NEW YORK (AP) — The upheaval in stocks has been grabbing all the headlines, but there is a bigger problem looming in another corner of the financial markets that rarely gets headlines: Investors are dumping U.S. government bonds.

Normally, investors rush into Treasurys at a whiff of economic chaos but now they are selling them as not even the lure of higher interest payments on the bonds is getting them to buy. The freak development has experts worried that big banks, funds and traders are losing faith in America as a stable, predictable, good place to store their money.

“The fear is the U.S. is losing its standing as the safe haven,” said George Cipolloni, a fund manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management. “Our bond market is the biggest and most stable in the world, but when you add instability, bad things can happen.”

That could be bad news for taxpayers paying interest on the ballooning U.S. debt, consumers taking out mortgages or car loans — and for President Donald Trump, who had hoped his tariff pause earlier this week would restore confidence in the markets. read more

LONDON (AP) — Ireland’s data privacy watchdog said Friday it’s investigating Elon Musk’s social media platform X over its use of personal data to train his artificial intelligence chatbot Grok.

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The Data Protection Commission said it has opened an inquiry into “the processing of personal data comprised in publicly-accessible posts” that European users posted on X.

“The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether this personal data was lawfully processed in order to train the Grok LLMs” under the bloc’s data privacy law, the commission said in a statement posted online. read more

I receive a great many inquiries about retirement accounts. One area of particular interest is Roth conversions.

Fortunately, IRA expert Ed Slott and his staff spend a great deal of time and effort addressing the most important questions you should be asking before you decide that a conversion makes sense for you. The following questions are very important. If you haven’t considered all of them, you probably should not be completing a conversion.

Question 1: When will you need the funds you are considering converting? If you are not looking at a 10- to 15-year time horizon, you probably should not be considering a conversion.

Question 2: Do you believe that future tax rates when you will be likely to withdraw funds from your account will be higher than current tax rates? If you believe that it is likely that future tax rates will be much higher than current tax rates, then you have more of an incentive to do a conversion.

Question 3: Where will the money come from if you do a conversion now? Do you have the funds available to do a conversion? Before you convert, it is essential that you determine what the income tax liability will be if you do a conversion. Naturally, you need to know what your marginal tax bracket will be, based on all of the other income you will be reporting in the year of conversion. It’s most cost- effective if your funds are available from non-IRA funds. read more

By CHRISTOPHER RUGABER and JOSH BOAK, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. consumer sentiment plunged in April, the fourth consecutive month of declines, in a seemingly sharp rebuke of President Donald Trump’s trade wars that have fueled anxiety over possible job losses and rising inflation.

The preliminary reading of the University of Michigan’s closely watched consumer sentiment index, released Friday, fell 11% on a monthly basis to 50.8, the lowest since the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the past year, sentiment has tumbled 34%.

The decline was “pervasive and unanimous across age, income, education, geographic region, and political affiliation,” said Joanne Hsu, director of the survey.

The share of respondents expecting unemployment to rise in the coming months increased for the fifth straight month and is now the highest since 2009 during the Great Recession.

While consumer sentiment is not always a reliable indicator of the overall economy, it has at times reflected shifting vibes in how the public feels about presidential leadership. Sentiment among Republicans has dropped 6% over the past month as Trump teased, then rolled out a series of aggressive tariffs, only to institute a 90-day pause of some import taxes Wednesday. read more