Juliana Kaplan
Juliana Kaplan traces how economic policy, labor market shifts, and inequality show up in ordinary lives, connecting big forces to the choices people make at their kitchen tables. At Business Insider, she is a senior labor and inequality reporter on the economy team, covering the labor force, taxes, and the people behind the numbers. Her work spans quick data-driven news and longform features that explain what changing economic conditions actually feel like for workers, consumers, and families.
Labor market and worker power
Kaplan’s core reporting focus is the labor market and the balance of power between workers and employers. She writes closely on how much risk people are willing to take in their careers, including pieces on workers demanding higher pay before they will leave a job and the growing reluctance to change roles without a strong financial upside.
She has reported on millennials stacking multiple jobs and skills because of burnout and insecurity, showing how résumé strategy and side gigs are responses to anxiety about long-term stability rather than simple ambition.
She covers organized labor and strikes with attention to individual experience as well as broader dynamics. Her work on a Kellogg’s worker on strike for weeks looks at what sustained industrial action means for pay, benefits, and personal life, placing a single worker’s story inside the wider fight over contracts and worker leverage.
Across these pieces she pairs survey data and official statistics with interviews and first-person accounts, giving the labor market a human face rather than treating it as a set of abstract indicators.
Kitchen-table economics and everyday trade-offs
A second strand of her coverage follows how inflation, prices, and budgets change day-to-day habits. Kaplan reports on Americans swapping steak dinners for egg-heavy breakfasts, using menus and grocery choices to illustrate how people reconfigure routines when food and dining move out of reach. She returns often to “kitchen table” decisions about where money goes, focusing on trade-offs around nutrition, convenience, and social time as household budgets tighten or shift.
She also looks at the social side of economic strain. Her reporting on a “fringe friend” crisis examines the erosion of casual friendships and the loneliness that comes with precarious work, remote jobs, and time pressure. In another vein, she has profiled the typical Taylor Swift fan through income, demographics, and voting patterns, showing how fandom ties into spending power, political identity, and generational experience.
These stories use cultural touchpoints and social trends to make economic pressures legible and specific.
Inequality, class identity, and taxing the rich
Kaplan covers inequality not just through income statistics, but through how people see themselves and how governments respond. She has written on Americans increasingly describing themselves as working class rather than comfortably middle class, linking that shift in identity to affordability concerns and persistent financial stress even for those with steady jobs. Her reporting tracks how perceptions of class and security evolve alongside wages, housing costs, and debt.
Her tax coverage follows the growing appetite for taxing the rich and the obstacles that arise once specific proposals are on the table. In her work on California’s push for a billionaire tax, she explains why a popular plan to levy a one-time wealth tax loses momentum when confronted with rival ballot measures, political opposition, and fears about unintended consequences. She connects polling, coalition politics, and revenue projections to the lived stakes for healthcare, education, and social programs, framing tax debates as fights over who shoulders risk in an unequal economy.
Longform Discourse on the people behind the numbers
Beyond daily labor and policy reporting, Kaplan frequently contributes longform pieces to Business Insider’s Discourse section. Those features explore themes such as the economics of irritation and “greedflation,” using narrative essays to unpack how pricing strategies and corporate behavior keep people feeling nickeled-and-dimed.
She ranges across subjects from DOGE and speculative assets to dynamic pricing and niche cultural movements, treating each as a lens on how markets and incentives shape behavior.
In these longer stories she blends reporting, analysis, and storytelling, often following a small group of people or a single phenomenon to illuminate a broader shift. Whether she is writing about new forms of religious enthusiasm, online subcultures, or emerging financial tools, the through-line is the same: economics is not just numbers on a chart, but a set of forces that structure everyday frustration, aspiration, and belonging.
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.