Catherine Muccigrosso
Catherine Muccigrosso connects regional business developments and banking decisions to their practical consequences for workers, customers and local institutions. She reports on retail, banking and broader business news for The Charlotte Observer, with a focus on how corporate strategies, leadership changes and regulatory actions land on the ground. Her work is award‑winning and spans multiple newspapers in the Carolinas, Missouri and New York, giving her a broad perspective on how national trends move through local economies.
Coverage of Wells Fargo, Truist and regional banking
Muccigrosso’s banking coverage centres on the major institutions that shape credit, employment and confidence in the region, with sustained attention to Wells Fargo and Truist. She reports closely on Wells Fargo’s earnings and workforce decisions, including stories on revenue jumps paired with planned layoffs, which highlight the tension between shareholder results and staff cuts. She also follows the regulatory arc around the bank, explaining milestones such as the termination of its final Federal Reserve consent order and what that means for its reputation and oversight environment. Her work on Truist’s next chief executive takes an explainer format, walking through the incoming leader’s path from a prior banking role to community service positions, and situating that biography within the bank’s strategic direction and civic footprint.
Across these pieces, she treats banking news as more than numbers, using leadership changes, consent orders and layoffs as entry points into questions about stability, governance and accountability. Earnings and regulatory updates are framed in plain terms, with clear links to jobs, branch operations and local decision‑making rather than abstract financial commentary. The coverage is steady and iterative, giving readers a running account of how decisions inside large financial institutions accumulate into concrete changes in employment and oversight.
Jobs, incentives and corporate expansion deals
Muccigrosso regularly tracks how corporate promises translate into jobs, expansions or shortfalls for local communities. Her reporting on a shelved incentives package in a nearby suburb examines how a deal built on a commitment of 220 jobs unraveled when that pledge fell short, focusing on the mechanics of the agreement and the consequences when a company’s hiring plan does not match its public commitments. She also covers large‑scale expansion projects, such as a manufacturer’s roughly $1 billion build‑out to supply components for the AI data center boom, laying out the investment size, the operational changes and the anticipated employment impact.
These pieces sit alongside coverage of banks eyeing further layoffs, creating a fuller picture of both job creation and job loss within the regional economy.
Her approach in this area is deal‑driven and specific. Headlines and stories revolve around discrete incentives agreements, plant expansions, and workforce plans, rather than broad economic commentary.
She breaks down the key figures in each case - total investment, job counts, timelines - and pairs them with straightforward accounts of what elected officials, companies and residents stand to gain or lose when a project moves ahead or falls apart. The result is coverage that gives readers and stakeholders a clear sense of which promises are being kept, which are being revised and where the risks lie in tying public support to corporate hiring projections.
Community institutions and the impact of business decisions
Alongside banks and manufacturers, Muccigrosso reports on how business transactions affect community institutions, including nonprofits and local facilities. Her story on the contested sale of a YMCA property in Ballantyne focuses on critics’ description of the deal as “crummy” and details the concerns voiced by a county commissioner and members of the Morrison family about what the sale means for access to services and community space.
In her explainer on Truist’s incoming CEO, she foregrounds the executive’s ties to organizations such as the Boys & Girls Club, connecting corporate leadership to the nonprofit sector and its role in the region’s civic life.
This strand of her work treats community organizations and families as central actors in business stories, not peripheral voices. She uses their reactions to sales, leadership changes and strategic pivots to illustrate how decisions made in boardrooms reshape the landscape of youth programs, recreation facilities and other shared resources.
By combining financial details with the language and perspectives of affected residents and community leaders, she shows how business news intersects with daily life.
Industry shifts, technology and retail business
Muccigrosso’s broader business beat includes coverage of how technology, especially AI, and shifting consumer patterns influence regional industry. Her look inside a manufacturer’s expansion to serve AI data centers explains how demand for data infrastructure is driving capital spending and changing production plans, tying a global technology trend to a specific factory footprint and its workforce. More broadly, her author profile notes that she covers retail as well as banking, placing her at the intersection of consumer‑facing businesses and financial institutions in the local economy.
Her social media biography underscores this focus on retail, reinforcing that store‑level dynamics, brand changes and customer experience sit alongside her banking coverage in her daily reporting.
Across technology and retail stories, she favours concrete examples over abstractions, using specific companies, facilities and deals to illustrate larger shifts in how people work, shop and store data. The beat allows her to move between front‑of‑house retail issues and back‑end financial and industrial decisions, and her reporting links those spheres by showing how changes in credit, regulation and corporate investment flow through to the businesses residents see and use every day.
4 more finance journalists.
Abigail Summerville
Abigail Summerville brings a leveraged finance background to her work covering consumer and retail mergers and acquisitions for Reuters. She reports on deal-making and capital markets across food, beverages, spirits, personal care, skincare, bath products and pet food. Her stories focus on transaction terms, ownership stakes, valuation, debt structures and funding sources. She often breaks news on potential sales and strategic reviews before formal announcements. Notable coverage includes Sazerac’s acquisition of Au Vodka, Blackstone’s exploration of a ZO Skin Health sale, CVC’s efforts to sell the parent of Dr Teal’s, and Colgate-Palmolive’s planned divestitures. She also covers consumer IPOs, including Jersey Mike’s and Black Rock Coffee, and co-writes Wall Street market reports. She joined Reuters in 2022 after three years covering leveraged finance and primary debt markets.
Adekunle Agbetiloye
Adekunle Agbetiloye is a senior reporter who connects capital flows, hard numbers and energy transition to the wider African economy. He works at Business Insider Africa, covering how money, technology and energy reshape economic growth, jobs and living conditions. His beat spans the African economy, technology, energy transition, climate change, startups and critical minerals, with a focus on concrete deals and data-led stories. He reports on African startup funding cycles, sovereign wealth funds, billionaire investors, multilateral and private investment programs, energy and power markets, Bitcoin mining, and economic policy choices. His work follows how governments finance spending, manage debt and respond to social pressure, and how sector snapshots and health and development metrics reveal links between macro indicators, corporate strategy and everyday costs.
Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi connects Social Security, retirement programs and economic policy directly to the financial security of ordinary Americans, showing how macro decisions hit household budgets. She is associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch at CBS News, covering business and personal finance with clear, accessible explanations of complex money issues. Her core beat is Social Security and retirement, interest rates and inflation, and how policy, markets and company strategies affect workers, retirees, savers and investors. She reports on benefit adequacy, looming Social Security cuts, COLA changes, Federal Reserve rate decisions, fuel costs, trade tensions and labor’s share of income, always framing coverage around pocketbook impacts. Her background includes retirement reporting fellowships, prior staff reporting on technology, media and business, an Institutional Investor book on affluent investors, and freelance work for national outlets. She also writes science fiction and fantasy and is a Nebula Award finalist.
Alex Harring
Alex Harring turns fast-moving market, economic and corporate developments into clear pre-market briefings that show what will matter when U.S. trading opens. He is a markets and economics reporter for CNBC’s digital platforms and writes Morning Squawk, a flagship daily newsletter that gives readers five key things to know before the stock market opens. His beat spans financial markets, investing, consumer trends and the U.S. economy, with coverage of central bank decisions, inflation, corporate strategy, sector moves and geopolitical shocks. He focuses on how policy, data and earnings shape equities, interest rates, currencies and investor positioning, linking price action with underlying drivers in real time and in reported features. Harring’s background reporting on corporate news, business and the economy across print, digital, broadcast and streaming informs his habit of connecting markets, companies and geopolitics in one frame.