Ross Stores is ramping up store growth in 2026 as demand for discount apparel and home goods remains resilient, with the retailer opening 17 new locations and planning more than 100 additional sites this year.

The company said the latest openings – 13 Ross Dress for Less stores and four dd’s Discounts locations – mark the start of its 2026 rollout, which targets approximately 110 new stores in total, including about 85 Ross locations and 25 dd’s Discounts stores.

The expansion follows solid performance from stores opened in 2025, reinforcing management’s expectations that value-focused retail will remain a key draw for consumers.

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Off-price retailers have continued to benefit as shoppers seek lower-cost alternatives for apparel and home goods, particularly as price sensitivity persists across discretionary categories.

Geographically, Ross expanded its namesake brand across the Mountain, Midwest and Northeast regions, while also strengthening its presence in key Sunbelt markets.

For dd’s Discounts, the company added locations in its core markets of California and Texas, along with its first store in Utah, signaling expansion into new territory.

The new stores are also expected to support local job creation and broader economic activity tied to store development.

Looking ahead, Ross said it sees a long-term opportunity to grow to approximately 2,900 Ross Dress for Less stores and 700 dd’s Discounts locations nationwide – or about 3,600 stores in total – underscoring confidence in sustained demand for discount retail.

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In conjunction with each opening, the company said it is supporting community initiatives through donations to local Boys & Girls Clubs or First Book literacy partners focused on underprivileged youth.

The U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday will tell Congress that it’s facing a serious financial crisis and is on pace to run out of cash in less than a year without significant reforms.

Postmaster General David Steiner testified before a House Oversight subcommittee and told lawmakers that the USPS needs higher stamp prices and the ability to borrow more money along with other reforms – including changes to pension funding and liabilities calculations, workers’ compensation and retirement fund investment strategies.

Steiner has put forward possible options for cutting costs, including ending six-day-a-week deliveries, closing post offices or raising first-class mail stamp prices from the current 78 cents to $1 or more.

“In order to survive beyond the next year, we need to increase our borrowing capacity so that we don’t run out of cash,” Steiner said in prepared testimony. “The failure to do this could lead to the end of the Postal Service as we know it now.”

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Stamp prices have risen 46% since early 19, when they were 50 cents. Steiner argues that those prices are still far lower than postage costs in other countries.

USPS has also reached its current borrowing cap of $15 billion, precluding the agency from taking out additional loans.

Reuters previously reported in December that Steiner thought the USPS was on track to run out of money as soon as early 2027 amid mounting losses. 

USPS has reported net losses of $118 billion since 2007 as volumes of its most profitable product, first-class mail, fell to the lowest level since the late 1960s.

POSTMASTER GENERAL LOUIS DEJOY STEPPING DOWN AMID US POSTAL SERVICE FINANCIAL TURMOIL

Steiner said that if USPS were to reduce deliveries to five days a week, it would save the agency about $3 billion per year, while closing small post offices in remote areas would save about $840 million.

However, Steiner cautioned that both of those options “may not be palatable to Congress or the American public.”

USPS currently delivers to more than 170 million U.S. addresses on a six-day-a-week schedule.

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The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is set to tell lawmakers on Tuesday that it’s critical to “address USPS’s unsustainable business model before it will be responsible for billions in new annual expenses for retiree healthcare, likely in 2031.”

USPS’ peak postage volume was 213 billion pieces of mail in 2006, while that figure has fallen by more than half to 104 billion pieces of mail in 2025. 

Steiner noted that at current stamp prices, that translates to a loss of $81 billion. He added that in the years since 2006, USPS “was thrown overboard and instead of tossing us a life jacket, we were thrown an anchor.”

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Congress in 2022 provided USPS with $57 billion in financial relief over a decade and required the agency’s future retirees to enroll in a government health insurance plan.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Investors are offloading software loans in debt vehicles at a discount, in the latest sign of pain in the software industry, which is being upended by AI.

In recent weeks, several managers of collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) have started exploring ways to reduce their exposure to software, as they grapple with the prospect of a wave of rating downgrades on junk bonds and potential defaults down the line, according to three CLO managers and several credit industry analysts.

The push to reduce exposure shows how the pain in private ​credit and software is still working through the system after the software rout in January and February that was largely triggered by the release of Anthropic’s latest AI tools, which raised fears of widespread disruption across the technology and professional services industries.

“Software is a sector where there is more selling coming from CLO managers than there is buying right now,” said Jim Egan, co-head of securitized products research at Morgan Stanley, adding that there was elevated exposure to software within broadly syndicated loans (BSLs), which are corporate loans that are arranged by investment banks and sold to a wide group of credit investors ‌like CLOs. Egan added CLOs currently ⁠have lower exposure ⁠to riskier companies, which are “CCC” rated, compared to a year ago.

CLOs, which buy up small chunks of numerous individual leveraged loans, in recent years capitalized on the credit boom and bought up loans that backed hundreds of software buyouts in the height of a dealmaking boom during and after the pandemic. During the same period, CLOs ​also hoovered up their holdings in other non-software sectors that are now faced with the existential threat emerging from AI. According to initial estimates from JPMorgan analysts, around $40 billion to $150 billion of U.S. CLO holdings fall within sectors that are most associated with AI risk.

The software ​and services sector accounts for about 15% of the collateral in currently outstanding syndicated CLO deals in the U.S., according to a Feb. 20 estimate from Morgan Stanley, which added that software alone makes up roughly 12% of CLO holdings, making it the single-largest subsector by concentration. Software exposure in direct lending is estimated to be about 19% based on private-credit focused CLOs, Morgan Stanley said in a March 17 note.
WIDENING SPREADSSpreads on CLOs, which are the risk premium that companies pay on the bonds over Treasuries, have widened over the past few weeks as fears of a meltdown in the $1.8 trillion private credit industry have spooked investors.

“We’re seeing some CLO managers reduce exposure to software – particularly ⁠where positions ‌were overweight or ahead of refinancing activity,” said Al Remeza, associate managing director at Moody’s Ratings. “At the same time, many view the current environment as a buying opportunity, especially for companies they believe are least vulnerable ​to AI disruption.”

A mix of investment-grade notes – which are senior unsecured corporate bonds – and high-yield leveraged loans of some software makers, including Intuit, Dayforce, and Citrix, were sold between a range of 89 cents and 98 cents on the dollar ⁠in late February and earlier in March, according to data compiled by the Trade Reporting and Compliance Engine (TRACE), which was developed by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority to track over-the-counter fixed-income transactions.

A few months ago, those same bonds and loans were trading at a premium, the data shows. Reuters could not determine ​which specific software companies CLOs sold. Dayforce and Citrix did not respond to requests for comment.

To be sure, while spreads across the software industry have widened, the spread on Intuit’s investment-grade bond that matures in 2033 is largely in line with the level at which it was issued in 2023, while its credit rating was upgraded to ‘A’ from ‘A-‘ by S&P Global in October last year. Intuit’s shares are down about 32% so far this year, as AI disruption fears have weighed broadly on the enterprise software industry.

“We bet the entire company on data and AI nearly ten years ago, when we declared our strategy to be an AI-driven expert platform to deliver done-for-you experiences. Our strategy is working; in the first half of our fiscal year 2026, we delivered 18 percent revenue growth while expanding margins,” an Intuit spokeswoman said in an email to Reuters.

ASSESSING AI RISK

While the current bout of selling could present a unique buying opportunity for distressed debt investors, several credit industry analysts cautioned that the buyer base for large swathes of these loans is ‌thin, adding that most large private credit firms and direct lenders are unlikely to participate in large software loan deals in the near term as they grapple with investor scrutiny amid rising redemption requests at their flagship funds.

“The majority of the CLO community is really taking its time to think about how to come up with a framework to assess AI risk, more on the single-name level, to really scrub their ​book to identify which are the ​names that are more prone to AI risk,” said Joyce Jiang, head ⁠of U.S. CLO Research at Morgan Stanley. “They’re still in the middle of doing that, so in the near term we think it’s not likely that there’s going to be dip buying from the CLO community at a full scale.”

This is likely to be exacerbated by the fact that CLO managers, who have relatively less exposure to software, are not yet seeing a strong enough reason to buy up loans that are coming to market, said Gavin Zhu, head of U.S. CLO Research at Barclays.

“It’s ​a bit more difficult to suddenly and opportunistically rotate back into software without a true catalyst. And I think that might be contributing to some of the continued weakness that we see on the loan side,” said Zhu.

Global CLO loan supply is expected to fall to about $150 billion this year, which would mark a 25% decline from last year, according to estimates from JPMorgan. This is because of a sharp decline in investor demand, as widening spreads, question marks over loan quality, and fears of deepening cracks in the multi-trillion-dollar credit market weigh on sentiment, experts said.

However, not all CLO managers are rushing to dump software loans at steep discounts. Credit fund managers and analysts said the recent selling activity, so far, has been selective and concentrated around relatively better-performing loans that have changed hands at a modest discount.

Rishad Ahluwalia, head of CLO Research at JPMorgan, said investor sentiment has turned more bearish in recent weeks as spreads have widened and CLO transaction volumes have dipped.

“For CLO managers, the appetite for stressed loans in orphan sectors, like software and services, is weaker,” said Ahluwalia.

Boeing expects its commercial airplane division to turn a profit in 2027, not this year as previously expected due to higher-than-expected costs of its purchase of parts supplier Spirit AeroSystems, its chief financial ‌officer said ⁠on Tuesday, ⁠in a new setback for the U.S. planemaker.

The commercial airplane division lost $632 million in 2025 and $2.1 billion in 2024.

The company expects to increase production of its popular 737 ​MAX jet from roughly 42 aircraft a month to 47 a month by year’s end and to deliver about 500 of the ​jets this year, Chief Financial Officer Jay Malave ⁠said at ‌the Bank of America Global Industrials Conference in ​London.

The single-aisle ​jet is critical to Boeing’s financial recovery. Planemakers receive ⁠the majority of cash from customers when they deliver new ​aircraft.

Deliveries in the first quarter were slightly hampered ​by damage to wiring on about 25 737s, but fixing the problem only required a few more days of work and will not hurt annual deliveries, Malave said.

Boeing shares were down 1% in early trading, continuing a 13% slide in the past month.
Malave said Boeing ‌does not plan to develop a new jetliner anytime soon.Boeing’s first-quarter 787 Dreamliner deliveries will be down slightly from ​a projected ​20 aircraft to ⁠about 15 of the popular widebody jet, mostly due to delays certifying premium-class seat designs, he said.

“The premium seating has been challenging,” he said. “Those are ​very strict, rigorous types of certifications.”

The planemaker wants to increase 787 production from its current rate of eight Dreamliners per month to 10 by the end of 2026. The company is expanding its 787 assembly plant in North Charleston, South Carolina.