Author: News Room
A first-of-its-kind bill to regulate parts of the cryptocurrency industry stalled in the Senate on Thursday, after Democrats blocked it amid concerns in their party about how President Trump and his family are profiting from crypto.On a vote of 48 to 49, the measure failed to muster the 60 votes necessary to advance. It would have regulated so-called stablecoins, a type of cryptocurrency tied to the value of an existing asset, often the U.S. dollar. The vote was a setback for the industry, which has made significant advances in Washington with the backing of Mr. Trump and a bipartisan group…
More than 20 times during a roughly 45-minute news conference on Wednesday, Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, referenced the idea of waiting to see how President Trump’s policies would ripple through the economy before taking any action on interest rates.Mr. Powell, who spoke after the Fed opted to extend a pause on interest rate cuts, said the central bank had the flexibility to do so because the economy overall was still on solid footing. He also stressed that it was the most prudent decision at a time when there was so much uncertainty about how much…
On Sunday morning, as Holly LaFavers was preparing to go to church, a delivery worker dropped off a 25-pound box of lollipops in front of her apartment building in Lexington, Ky.And another. And then another. Soon, 22 boxes of 50,600 lollipops were stacked five boxes high in two walls of Dum-Dums. That was when Ms. LaFavers heard what no parent wants to hear: Her child had unwittingly placed a massive online order.“Mom, my suckers are here!” said her son, Liam, who had gone outside to ride his scooter.“I panicked,” Ms. LaFavers, 46, said. “I was hysterical.”Ms. LaFavers said in an…
Donald Trump is the face of these cuts, but the cruelty of his administration is not the only story. After leaping upward in the 2000s, global giving for health grew very slowly through the 2010s. The culture of philanthropy has changed somewhat, too, with the age of the Giving Pledge — in which hundreds of the world’s richest people promised to donate more than half of their great fortunes to charity — yielding first to the upstart movement called Effective Altruism and then to a new age of extreme wealth defined less by altruism than by grandiosity. After the Gateses’…
Do you care where a diamond comes from?Historically, consumers didn’t have a choice. Natural diamonds were formed billions of years ago, deep beneath the earth’s surface, and were then thrust hundreds of kilometers to its crust by volcanic eruptions before eventually being extracted from mines in South Africa, Russia and elsewhere. Companies like De Beers convinced the world that a diamond is forever, made the stones synonymous with engagement rings and encouraged people to spend at least three months’ salary on a rock when they wed.But in recent years, the natural diamond industry has been upended by laboratory-grown diamonds, which…
The mood at MilkenAs dealmakers descended on the Beverly Hilton hotel in Los Angeles this week for the annual Milken Institute Global Conference, they were laser-focused on one type of deal: trade deals.The threat of an intensifying trade war cast a shadow over the event, Lauren Hirsch reports.Many business giants in attendance — including Bill Ackman, Jensen Huang and Ken Griffin — started the year imagining how good things could be under President Trump. But talk at this week’s event, behind the scenes at least, was about how bad it could get. Speculation ranged from cautious optimism that the U.S.…
The British government made faster economic growth its No. 1 mission. But efforts to kick-start it have been repeatedly knocked off course by a global economy lurching from one crisis to another.On Thursday, British officials appeared to secure a win. The country is set to announce some form of trade deal with the United States that will ease the impact of recent increases in U.S. tariffs.President Trump said on social media on Thursday that the agreement with Britain “is a full and comprehensive one that will cement the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom for many years…
The British government made faster economic growth its No. 1 mission. But efforts to kick-start it have been repeatedly knocked off course by a global economy lurching from one crisis to another.On Thursday, British officials appeared to secure a win: The country is set to announce some form of trade deal with the United States that will ease the impact of recent increases in U.S. tariffs.President Trump said on social media on Thursday that the agreement with Britain “is a full and comprehensive one that will cement the relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom for many years…
A’ja Wilson, a center for the Las Vegas Aces, is widely acknowledged as the best player in the Women’s National Basketball Association. She is something like the league’s on-court answer to LeBron James or Michael Jordan.“I don’t shy away from having conversations with her about being the greatest to ever play,” said Becky Hammon, who has coached the Aces since 2022.Ms. Wilson was the W.N.B.A.’s Rookie of the Year in 2018, won its Most Valuable Player Award in 2020 and 2022 and won a championship in 2022. But while she racked up achievement after achievement, one marker of basketball stardom…
Even as India was gearing up to use its military to strike at Pakistan this week, calling it revenge for a terrorist strike in Kashmir last month, the government was pursuing other forms of power projection as well: bloodless and more refined, and mostly aimed at Pakistan’s economic vulnerability.On Friday, May 9, the executive board of the International Monetary Fund is scheduled to meet three blocks from the White House. Indian officials have suggested that they will make a new case there: that the Fund should refuse the extension of a $7 billion loan to Pakistan described as crucial to…