Author: News Room

A pillar of President Trump’s policies has been tariffs, which are taxes on products imported from other countries. He has imposed or threatened to impose them as a way to influence global supply chains, raise revenue and extract concessions from other countries. But what can often be lost amid proclamations targeting other countries is who ultimately pays for tariffs. It often isn’t the country itself. Understanding who will end up paying for the higher costs means understanding how manufacturing, trade and supply chains function — and how costs build along each step of the complex process. Take shoes, for example.…

The economic relationship between India and the United States is widely seen as good for both sides. Two-way trade is growing and, alone among Asian countries, India routinely trades more with the United States than it does with China, its neighbor and rival.Yet under President Trump, trade is a point of friction. Like virtually all countries that do business with the United States, India runs a surplus: Last year it shipped about $87 billion worth of goods and imported $42 billion, adding $46 billion to America’s trade deficit.Mr. Trump does not like those kinds of figures. He has railed against…

World leaders, tech moguls and assorted hangers-on (including yours truly) are gathered in Paris this week for the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit, a conference co-hosted by Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, to discuss a host of A.I.-related issues.The leaders of three American A.I. companies — Sam Altman of OpenAI, Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind — are here, as are a flock of prominent A.I. leaders, academic researchers and civil society groups. (Vice President JD Vance, who is leading the U.S. delegation, is expected to appear on Tuesday.)Between bites of…

California’s home insurance plan of last resort, designed for people who can’t get coverage on the private market, does not have enough money to pay claims from the Los Angeles wildfires and is getting an infusion of cash from regular insurers.State regulators said Tuesday that they will allow the program, known as the FAIR Plan, to collect $1 billion from private insurance companies doing business in California to pay its claims. That is likely to drive up insurance costs for homeowners across the state.The situation marks a perilous new stage for California’s home insurance market, which had already been reeling…

Everything clicked when Peter Thiel gave the speech about God.The occasion was a 40th birthday party for Trae Stephens, who is Mr. Thiel’s venture capital partner as well as one of the founders of Anduril Industries, a maker of high-tech defense systems and weaponry. It was a multiday affair, held in 2023 at Mr. Stephens’s home in New Mexico. It began with an evening roasting the birthday boy, followed by another toasting him and then a brunch with caviar bumps, mimosas and breakfast pizza. At the brunch (the theme was the Holy Ghost), Mr. Thiel, the Silicon Valley billionaire and…

President Trump has paused enforcement of a federal law he has long bemoaned: the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits companies from bribing foreign officials.The law, enacted in 1977, makes it illegal for companies that operate in the United States to pay foreign government officials to secure business deals. Mr. Trump’s order on Monday bars federal prosecutors from launching new investigations or enforcement actions for 180 days. The Trump administration also said it would review existing investigations to “restore proper bounds” on the law.The law, which is enforced by the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission, has…

Ford Motor could be forced to lay off employees if the Trump administration ends subsidies and other financial support for electric vehicle manufacturing, the company’s chief executive said on Tuesday.Ford has invested heavily in factories to produce batteries and electric vehicles in Ohio, Michigan, Kentucky and Tennessee, Jim Farley, the Ford chief executive, said at a conference in New York. If Republicans repeal Biden-era legislation that allocated billions of dollars in subsidies and loans for the projects, Mr. Farley said, “many of those jobs will be at risk.”Mr. Farley was also sharply critical of President Trump’s threat to impose tariffs…

We have spent much of the past 24 hours on the telephone trying to get to the bottom of Elon Musk’s hostile bid for Sam Altman’s OpenAI. It was a development in their corporate battle (or soap opera) that few could have seen coming. Altman, who is in Paris at an A.I. summit, hadn’t even seen the offer before rejecting it out of hand.But what does it mean to make a hostile bid for a nonprofit? How do board members actually balance any fiduciary duties they owe to investors in a for-profit subsidiary versus their institution’s mission? The man in…

European leaders vowed on Tuesday to retaliate after President Trump announced that he would raise tariffs on aluminum and steel to 25 percent, even as they held out hope for a potential deal that could stave off painful effects for a weakened economy.European Union officials have argued that Europe and the United States are deeply intertwined and that igniting a trade war would hurt both sides. But they have also been quietly preparing to hit back against possible U.S. tariffs, and officials have said they are ready to enact countermeasures if no trade solution can be found.“Unjustified tariffs on the…

President Trump has been in office less than a month, and Elon Musk’s vast business empire is already benefiting — or is now in a decidedly better position to benefit. Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man who has been given enormous power by the president, have been dismantling federal agencies across the government. Mr. Trump has fired top officials and pushed out career employees. Many of them were leading investigations, enforcement matters or lawsuits pending against Mr. Musk’s companies.Mr. Musk has also reaped the benefit of resignations by Biden-era regulators that flipped control of major regulatory agencies,…