As Wall Street braces for the Federal Reserve to — probably — raise interest rates on Wednesday, some analysts have said that the recent turmoil in the banking industry may have already generated similar effects to a rate increase, namely by slowing the economy. The Fed began raising interest rates a year ago to combat […]
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Britain’s inflation rate unexpectedly rose last month, reversing its recent downward trend and potentially undermining expectations that the Bank of England was close to halting interest rate increases. Consumer prices in Britain rose 10.4 percent in February compared with a year earlier, the Office for National Statistics said on Wednesday. The rate had slowed for […]
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Lithium, the common ingredient in almost all electric-car batteries, has become so precious that it is often called white gold. But something surprising has happened recently: The metal’s price has fallen, helping to make electric vehicles more affordable. Since January, the price of lithium has dropped by nearly 20 percent, according to Benchmark Minerals, even […]
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Customers of Silicon Valley Bank aren’t going to lose any of their deposits. Neither will the businesses or individuals who have money at Signature Bank. That resolution, however, doesn’t make the upheaval of the last several days any less scary. As stocks of banks like First Republic and even brokerage industry stalwarts like Charles Schwab […]
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Federal Reserve officials received a complicated signal from February’s employment report, which showed that job growth retained substantial momentum nearly a year into the central bank’s campaign to slow the economy and cool rapid inflation. But it also included details hinting that the softening the Fed has been trying to achieve may be coming. Policymakers […]
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The Justice Department on Tuesday filed a lawsuit seeking to stop JetBlue Airways from buying Spirit Airlines, arguing that the $3.8 billion deal would reduce competition in a highly concentrated industry. In the suit, the Justice Department said that by absorbing Spirit, JetBlue would eliminate a disruptive force that has kept fares low across the country. The […]
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Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, made clear on Tuesday that the central bank is prepared to react to recent signs of economic strength by raising interest rates higher than previously expected and, if incoming data remain hot, potentially returning to a quicker pace of rate increases. Mr. Powell, in remarks prepared for delivery […]
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Anyone buying a ticket for a concert, baseball game, Broadway play or flight has experienced it: Seats are now priced with dizzying complexity, with costs in some instances changing minute by minute, based on demand. But movie theaters? In many ways, they have been trapped in pricing amber. A seat has cost the same no […]
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Six Flags, the theme park operator, recently shifted to a more premium model by raising prices and limiting discounts, which Selim Bassoul, the chief executive, described as “bold changes to our business model in order to elevate the guest experience.” It has had mixed results so far. In the nine months through September, attendance at […]
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Here’s my takeaway: If you want tickets to a big, highly promoted arena show, whether it’s Bruce or Beyoncé, set a budget and register for the sale. If there are tickets you can afford, buy them. If not, log off and bide your time. Decent seats may well be available at better prices when the […]
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WASHINGTON — As the fight in Ukraine has dragged on for the past year, another battle has unfolded in parallel: a war of words between Russia and the West over who is more interested in ending the conflict peacefully. For now, analysts and Western officials say, serious peace talks are extremely difficult to envision. Both […]
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Stocks slumped Friday on their way to their worst week of the year, as investors balked at fresh government data that added to a flurry of signals showing a resurgence in inflation. The S&P 500 fell by around 1.3 percent in midday trading, setting the stock index up for a third straight week of declines […]
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Within months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year, there was near panic in Europe over energy supplies. Mainstay flows of natural gas through pipelines from Russia were dwindling to a relative trickle, pushing wholesale prices up more than 10 times the level of a year earlier. Oil prices were high. Lawmakers warned of fuel […]
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Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — wants power users to start paying for some of its sites’ features, taking a page out of Twitter’s playbook in charging for verified blue check marks. A new subscription service called Meta Verified will become available this week in Australia and New Zealand and will […]
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When the Agriculture Department finished its calculations last month, the findings were startling: 2022 was a disaster for upland cotton in Texas, the state where the coarse fiber is primarily grown and then sold around the globe in the form of tampons, cloth diapers, gauze pads and other products. In the biggest loss on record, […]
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WASHINGTON — Inflation has slowed from its painful 2022 peak but remains uncomfortably rapid, data released Tuesday showed, and the forces pushing prices higher are proving stubborn in ways that could make it difficult to wrestle cost increases back to the Federal Reserve’s goal. The Consumer Price Index climbed by 6.4 percent in January compared […]
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Declines in new car prices are pushing down used electric vehicle prices, too. They have fallen 17 percent since July, according to Recurrent, which tracks the used car market. That’s largely because of Tesla cutting the price of the Model 3 and G.M. lowering the price of the Chevrolet Bolt by almost $6,000 last year. […]
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Oil prices rose sharply on Friday after Russia’s deputy prime minister, Alexander Novak, said that his country would cut production in March by 500,000 barrels a day — or about 5 percent of its output. Russia is the world’s third-largest producer of oil, and the announcement by Mr. Novak, who is the Kremlin’s point person […]
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From soda to soap, consumer giants like PepsiCo and Unilever continue to raise the prices of their products significantly, passing on the higher costs they face, and consumers continue to spend, cutting back only modestly in recent months. Prices will continue to rise, or at least remain at high levels, executives said. On Thursday, PepsiCo […]
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Sneaky fees have become a big part of America’s consumer economy. Hertz charges almost $6 a day simply for using a toll transponder in a rental car. Marriott and Hilton add nightly “resort fees” to the bill even at hotels that nobody would consider to be resorts. American, Delta and United list one airfare when […]
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Some middle seats at AMC movie theaters will be more expensive than others as part of the company’s new ticket-pricing strategy, announced this week. AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest cinema chain, said in a news release on Monday that this new pricing system, known as Sightline at AMC, would be in place at all of […]
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WASHINGTON — Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, underscored on Tuesday that the central bank has more work to do when it comes to slowing the economy, and that officials remain determined to wrestle rapid inflation under control. Mr. Powell, speaking in a question-and-answer session at the Economic Club of Washington D.C., […]
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Other recent measures were also offering reasons to believe the economy was coming off its rolling boil. Consumer spending fell at the end of last year, a sign that Americans were finally becoming more cautious in the face of rising prices, dwindling savings and fears of recession. And the housing market appeared to be slowing […]
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Federal Reserve officials have said that they are looking for the labor market to cool as they assess how much more they need to do to slow the economy, and the job report on Friday suggested that policymakers may still have a ways to go. Employers hired ravenously in January, the jobless rate dipped to […]
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+750,000 jobs +517,000 in January Jan. ’22 Jan. ’23 +750,000 jobs +517,000 in January Jan. ’22 Jan. ’23 The American labor market unleashed a burst of hiring in January, producing another wave of robust job growth even as interest rates continue to rise. Employers added 517,000 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department […]
Read MoreWhich shortage came first: the chicks or the eggs? Spooked by a huge spike in egg prices, some consumers are taking steps to secure their own future supply. Demand for chicks that will grow into egg-laying chickens — which jumped at the onset of the global pandemic in 2020 — is rapid again as the […]
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