Author: News Room

In a striking sign of the Chinese economy’s stagnation, the central bank said on Friday that it had temporarily stopped buying government bonds.The central bank’s unexpected action is aimed at braking a recent shift by investors toward purchasing bonds while shunning riskier assets like stocks and real estate. That shift has driven China’s long-term interest rates to a record low.The decision to stop buying government bonds is especially unusual because interest rates have been rising lately in most of the world, in response to inflation fears. The concern about the Chinese economy is the opposite: chronically low inflation that is…

The monthslong fight by legislators to ban the social media app TikTok in the United States is expected to come to a head on Friday when the Supreme Court hears arguments to decide the app’s fate for its 170 million American users.If TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, does get banned on Jan. 19, here is what users can expect to happen:Will TikTok still be available to download on app stores?No. The law passed by Congress last year would make it illegal for app stores from companies like Apple and Google to distribute or issue updates to TikTok at…

Vince McMahon, the co-founder and former chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment, agreed on Friday to settle with federal securities regulators over allegations that he failed to disclose multimillion-dollar settlements he had reached with two women when he led the W.W.E.Mr. McMahon, one of professional wrestling’s best-known personalities, agreed to pay a $400,000 fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission and reimburse $1.3 million to the W.W.E.Mr. McMahon, 79, agreed to the settlement without admitting or denying the charges in an order made public by the regulator.The S.E.C. said that while the W.W.E. was listed as a party to the…

Employers stuck the landing in 2024, finishing the year with a bounce of hiring after a summer slowdown and an autumn marred by disruption.The economy added 256,000 jobs in December, seasonally adjusted, the Labor Department reported on Friday. The number handily beat expectations after two years of cooling in the labor market, and the unemployment rate edged down to 4.1 percent, which is very healthy by historical standards.The strong result — unclouded by the labor strikes and destructive storms of previous months — may signal renewed vigor after months of reserve among both workers and businesses. Average hourly earnings rose…

The Trump Organization on Friday issued a new ethics agreement that it said would govern how the family and President-elect Donald J. Trump would conduct themselves over the next four years to try to avoid conflicts of interest, even though the president is legally exempt from federal conflict of interest laws.The measures described in the document largely echo pledges the family made eight years ago, when Mr. Trump first became president. They include appointing an outside ethics lawyer to review major family business transactions worth more than $10 million, keeping assets Mr. Trump owns in a trust and limiting his…

Financial markets have been choppy since the November election, and for good reason. With the next presidential administration promising sharp policy changes on a broad range of economic issues, there is plenty to be nervous about.The new proposals are dizzying. The president-elect says he wants to deport millions of immigrants; impose tariffs on all countries, especially China; slash taxes; expand the use of cryptocurrency; eliminate wind-powered electric generation; and increase production of fossil fuels.It’s impossible to know which policies are fanciful, which will be carried out or what all the economic and market consequences might be. No wonder the markets…

The lobby of Shutters on the Beach, the luxury oceanfront hotel in Santa Monica that is usually abuzz with tourists and entertainment professionals, had by Thursday transformed into a refuge for Los Angeles residents displaced by the raging wildfires that have ripped through thousands of acres and leveled entire neighborhoods to ash.In the middle of one table sat something that has probably never been in the lobby of Shutters before: a portable plastic goldfish tank. “It’s my daughter’s,” said Kevin Fossee, 48. Mr. Fossee and his wife, Olivia Barth, 45, had evacuated to the hotel on Tuesday evening shortly after…

James Arthur Ray, an Oprah-endorsed motivational speaker who spent two years in prison for manslaughter after the 2009 deaths of three people in a sweat lodge, the culmination of a three-day spiritual program he ran in the Arizona desert, died on Jan. 3 in Henderson, Nev. He was 67.His brother, Jon Ray, announced the death on social media. He did not say where in Henderson Mr. Ray died or cite a cause, but he did say the death was unexpected.Mr. Ray was struggling to succeed as a motivational speaker when he appeared in “The Secret,” a 2006 documentary made by…

Stocks and bonds tumbled on Friday, as investors’ worries over the scale of government borrowing were amplified by signs of stubborn inflation, extending a sharp rise in borrowing costs for consumers and companies.Stronger-than-expected data on the labor market released on Friday intensified concerns that the economy continues to run at a solid pace, stoking inflation fears and dampening expectations of further rate cuts by the Federal Reserve.The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note, which underpins a host of corporate and consumer loans, rose 0.17 percentage points for the week, a big move in that market. On Friday, the 10-year…

Laura Kate Jones, a real estate agent in Los Angeles, is trying to find a house for a client whose Pacific Palisades home turned to rubble this week. The woman and her two children were left with no belongings but the clothes on their backs.Ms. Jones has been scouring the West Los Angeles rental market to find a house that the family could rent for the next eight months, or longer. On Friday morning, she noticed something disturbing on the rents of at least three of the properties she had been tracking: 15 to 20 percent increases overnight.The sudden surge…