Author: News Room

Regulators late Friday seized Republic First Bancorp, a troubled Philadelphia lender, in the first U.S. bank failure this year.Republic First Bancorp, known as Republic Bank, had about $4 billion in deposits at the end of January and assets worth $6 billion, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation said in a statement.“Substantially all” of its deposits will be assumed by Fulton Bank of Lancaster, Pa., the F.D.I.C. said, with Republic First’s 32 branches in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York reopening as soon as Saturday as Fulton Bank branches.Founded in 1988, Republic First was smaller than the midsize banks that collapsed last…

Paramount is preparing to announce the departure of its chief executive, Bob Bakish, as soon as next week, according to three people with knowledge of the matter, a sudden development even as the company is exploring a merger.The impending move is a result of Mr. Bakish’s worsening relationship with Shari Redstone, the company’s controlling shareholder, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing a delicate matter. Ms. Redstone grew frustrated with what she saw as his inability to get important deals across the finish line, including a sale of the Showtime and BET cable channels, the people said.Two people…

Federal regulators on Friday said that they had not yet discovered live bird flu virus in the first batch of retail milk samples they tested, a reassuring indication that the milk on store shelves remains safe despite an outbreak of the virus among diary cows.In an online update, the Food and Drug Administration said an initial set of tests looking for live virus, not just genetic fragments, suggested that the pasteurization process was effectively neutralizing the pathogen.“These results reaffirm our assessment that the commercial milk supply is safe,” the F.D.A. wrote in the update, adding that the testing efforts were…

An effort to give Trump more say on rates This week, investors had planned to examine the latest inflation data, due out at 8:30 a.m. Eastern on Friday, for clues about when the Fed would start cutting interest rates. But they now have something potentially bigger to digest.The Wall Street Journal reports that allies of Donald Trump are devising ways of watering down the central bank’s independence if he is re-elected president.If true, that change would represent the biggest shake-up in U.S. monetary policy in decades. But it also raises questions about whether such a plan is possible — or…

“Well, House Speaker Mike Johnson crashed Hamas’s spring break at Columbia today.”That quip came from the Fox News host Jesse Watters, who was interviewing Mr. Johnson on his prime-time show Wednesday.In response to a standoff between student protesters and the university’s president, Mr. Johnson had visited Columbia University’s campus, where students had set up encampments in solidarity with Palestinians. He was booed during a brief news conference on the steps of a school library.“So many of them, Jesse, don’t know what the heck they’re talking about,” Mr. Johnson said.Mr. Johnson’s appearance on “Jesse Watters Primetime” embodied the chiding and often…

Michael C. Jensen, an economist and Harvard Business School professor whose evangelizing for stock options, golden parachutes and leveraged buyouts helped to reshape modern capitalism and empower Wall Street’s greed-is-good era, died on April 2 at his home in Sarasota, Fla. He was 84.The death was confirmed by his daughter Natalie Jensen-Noll. She did not specify a cause.Even before he embarked on a peculiar late-career intellectual partnership with Werner Erhard, the controversial self-help guru who created est, Professor Jensen’s colleagues considered him among the most freethinking and divisive economists of his generation.“Mike was a kind of born proselytizer,” Eugene F.…

The Biden administration said on Friday that it was delaying a decision on whether to ban menthol cigarettes as federal officials take more time to consider the move.The White House has faced considerable opposition from the big tobacco companies that could lose billions of dollars from the move. But the proposal has also posed risks for President Biden in an election year because of his weakening support among Black voters, some of whom view it as heavy-handed.“This rule has garnered historic attention, and the public comment period has yielded an immense amount of feedback, including from various elements of the…

If you are filing tax returns, “the government already has your financial information,” she added. “It’s really difficult to understand the rationale.”Here are some questions and answers about the FAFSA and college financial aid:What states have universal FAFSA policies?In addition to Louisiana, where the policy remains in place for this year’s graduating class, at least six other states have a requirement tied to graduation: Illinois, Alabama, Texas, California, Indiana and New Hampshire, according to the attainment network. Four states — Connecticut, Nebraska, New Jersey and Oklahoma — plan to require it starting with the class of 2025, and Kansas is…

The federal government’s main auto safety agency said on Friday that it was investigating Tesla’s recall of its Autopilot driver-assistance system because regulators were concerned that the company had not done enough to ensure that drivers remained attentive while using the technology.The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in documents posted on its website that it was looking into Tesla’s recall in December of two million vehicles, which covered nearly all of the cars the company had manufactured in the United States since 2012. The safety agency said that it had concerns about crashes that took place after the recall…

At the start of 2024, investors expected the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates substantially this year as inflation cooled. But price increases have been surprisingly stubborn, and that is forcing a rethink on Wall Street.Investors and economists are questioning when and how much Fed policymakers will manage to cut rates — and some are increasingly dubious that Fed officials will manage to lower them at all this year.Inflation was coming down steadily in 2023, but that progress has stalled out in 2024. The Fed’s preferred inflation index climbed 2.8 percent in March from a year earlier, after stripping out…