Author: News Room

For office landlords, a bad dream that began in March 2020 seems to finally be nearing an end — but only if you’re in well-located, high-end properties in major U.S. markets.Sales of office buildings across the country totaled $64.3 billion last year, up nearly 21 percent from 2023, according to MSCI Real Assets, a provider of commercial property research. In central business districts, which have suffered from empty buildings and streets long after pandemic stay-at-home orders ended, the pickup was even faster.Leasing activity is also gaining momentum, according to a report by CBRE, a real estate services firm: In 2024,…

Elon Musk declared last month that the federal government was engaged in “utterly insane” activity, claiming without evidence that it had distributed $100 billion to people without Social Security numbers.Two days after Mr. Musk’s comments, one of his key lieutenants, Steve Davis, began pressing the Social Security Administration for information. Mr. Davis called the agency’s leaders to insist they give a young engineer from Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency access to databases that contained sensitive information about Americans.Mr. Davis’s demand was “unprecedented,” Tiffany Flick, a former Social Security official, said in a sworn statement this month for a…

On March 4, a Trump appointee at the Department of Veterans Affairs circulated a memo to senior leadership. The agency, it said, would “move out aggressively” to improve efficiency, with an “initial objective” of cutting the work force to 2019 levels.The next morning, someone posted a copy of this “reduction in force” memo to a Reddit group called VeteransAffairs, an online community of 19,000 members. The copy was difficult to follow, a sequence of photos taken of the memo on a screen, but the message was clear enough: Some 80,000 jobs would be cut.Questions and comments poured in, some bewildered,…

President Trump has never been shy about criticizing the Federal Reserve, frequently seeking to pressure the nation’s central bank into reducing interest rates more swiftly.“Interest Rates should be lowered, something which would go hand in hand with upcoming Tariffs!!!,” Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social last month, adding: “Lets Rock and Roll, America!!!”But the Fed is expected to see things differently on Wednesday — choosing to hold rates steady in the face of rising prices and slowing growth — in a move that seems destined to stoke Mr. Trump’s anger.At the heart of the tension are Mr. Trump’s tariffs, which…

President Trump has said that tariffs will bring a flood of revenue for the United States. But corporate executives are having trouble navigating the volume of tariff pronouncements and the president’s on-again, off-again approach to trade policy.Many are turning to the same metaphor: The situation, they say, is “fluid.”“The tariffs are very fluid right now,” Ron Vachris, chief executive of the retail giant Costco, recently told analysts on an earnings call. “It’s hard to really give any predictions on what we can do, but we are prepared.”Others feel the same way about the ebb and flow of tariffs:“It’s very fluid…

The protests against President Aleksandar Vucic of Serbia had been growing in intensity and size when an unusual guest showed up in its capital this month to meet with the embattled European leader: Donald Trump Jr., the oldest son of President Trump.The quick visit by Mr. Trump, which included a meeting with Mr. Vucic to talk about U.S. foreign aid to Serbia, came as the Trump family and Jared Kushner, the American president’s son-in-law, were moving ahead with plans to build a Trump International Hotel in Belgrade, the first such property in Europe.The hotel is slated to be built atop…

Elon Musk has made the maximum allowable donation to Republican members of Congress who support impeaching federal judges who are impeding actions taken by President Trump, according to five people with knowledge of the matter.Mr. Musk has given the maximum hard-dollar donations he could to the campaigns of seven Republicans who have either endorsed judicial impeachments or called for some form of “action” in response to recent rulings against the Trump administration, including a weekend decision by Judge James E. Boasberg of Federal District Court in Washington. The combined federal limit for primary and general elections is $6,600.On Saturday, Judge…

new video loaded: Federal Reserve Extends Pause on Rate CutstranscriptBacktranscriptFederal Reserve Extends Pause on Rate CutsThe Trump administration’s tariffs most likely mean “further progress may be delayed” on getting inflation back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target, the central bank’s chair said.Labor market conditions are solid and inflation has moved closer to our 2 percent longer-run goal, though it remains somewhat elevated. In support of our goals, today, the Federal Open Market Committee decided to leave our policy interest rate unchanged. We do not need to be in a hurry to adjust our policy stance, and we are well-positioned…

The Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged on Wednesday for a second straight meeting. The March meeting was the central bank’s most direct acknowledgment to date that President Trump’s policies are set to have a real impact on the economy, stoking significant uncertainty about where inflation, growth and — ultimately — interest rates are headed. Here are the takeaways:Tariffs took center stage during the news conference with Jerome H. Powell. The Fed chair went as far as saying that tariffs likely mean “further progress may be delayed” on getting inflation back to the central bank’s 2 percent target. That recognition…

K.W. Lee, a pioneering Asian American journalist whose reporting led to the release of a Korean immigrant on death row in California, and who covered the Koreatown community targeted in the Los Angeles riots of 1992, died on March 8 at his home in Sacramento. He was 96.His death was confirmed by his daughters, Sonia Cook and Diana Regan.Mr. Lee was an immigrant who found his way to West Virginia in the 1950s, beginning an extraordinarily broad journalism career by covering election fraud and poverty in Appalachia.His articles for The Sacramento Union in the 1970s about the death-row inmate Chol…