Author: News Room

During President Trump’s first week back in the White House, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency identified an early focus of the cost-cutting operation: canceling leases for federal buildings that were considered underused.Mr. Musk’s team has since claimed credit for terminating leases for hundreds of properties across the country, including some that house federal workers at the Internal Revenue Service, the Food and Drug Administration, the Energy Department and the National Park Service.So far, Mr. Musk’s group has said that the effort will save around $500 million. But the Trump administration’s attempt to cancel leases and offload vast amounts of…

When Eleanor H., 66, called the Social Security Administration last month seeking details about her retirement benefits, she didn’t expect to comfort the representative who answered. The woman started sobbing.“I asked her what was wrong, and she said she and her co-workers were informed by email to accept a taxable $20,000 payout or risk termination,” said Eleanor, who lives in New Jersey (she asked to use only her first name out of privacy concerns).The rep still answered all of Eleanor’s questions. “Through her tears she said, ‘What am I going to do?’”The Social Security Administration, which sends retirement, survivor and…

Just days after President Trump won the 2024 election, Jerome H. Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, sidestepped a question about how the central bank would grapple with a toxic combination of high inflation, stagnating growth and rising unemployment.“The whole plan is not to have stagflation,” Mr. Powell told reporters. “Knock on wood, we’ve gotten this far without seeing a real weakening in the labor market.”Two months later, Mr. Trump’s aggressive tariff pronouncements, slash-and-burn cuts to the federal government and the resulting frenzy in financial markets have put the Fed in an incredibly uncomfortable spot.Outright stagflation remains a remote prospect:…

Forever 21’s operator in the United States filed for bankruptcy on Sunday, as the apparel company, which helped popularize fast fashion in the United States, struggles to compete with online retailers.F21 OpCo, the operator, as well as some U.S. subsidiaries, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the Bankruptcy Court of Delaware, court documents show. The company listed its estimated assets as between $100 million and $500 million, and liabilities of $1 billion to $5 billion. The company also filed for bankruptcy in 2019.Forever 21 found success in the early 2000s selling cheaply produced fashion that appealed to young women seeking…

For more than 80 years, Voice of America transmitted the news into countries, many of them authoritarian, where reliable sources of information about the outside world were often hard to come by.Now those broadcasts — long viewed as an important part of U.S. efforts to promote democracy and transparency overseas — are flickering out.Hours after President Trump signed an executive order on Friday calling for the dismantling of the federal agency that oversees Voice of America, hundreds of journalists, executives and other employees at the organization’s headquarters in Washington were informed that they were being put on paid leave. Employees…

The Chinese government and the Communist Party jointly issued a lengthy list of planned initiatives on Sunday to get people to spend more, in yet another move by Beijing to offset potential harm from its escalating economic warfare with Washington.The road map for economic stimulus included larger pensions, better medical benefits and higher wages — measures that could bolster China’s lagging domestic consumption. But it assigned many of these tasks to the country’s local governments, many of which are struggling under enormous debts and plummeting revenues from the sale of state land.The action comes as China’s leaders are searching for…

After the dot-com bubble burst in the early 2000s, Lars Staack decided to play it safe and invest his retirement savings in S&P 500 index funds, which are diversified and carry lower risk than owning individual stocks.It was a strategy that brought him peace of mind for more than two decades — until President Trump was elected in November. As he reviewed Mr. Trump’s comments in support of sweeping tariffs, Mr. Staack, 62, who retired two years ago, became increasingly uneasy about the savings he planned to use for the rest of his retirement.Those nerves about how Mr. Trump’s economic…

After climbing into a Tesla Model S last week, President Trump pledged to buy one. The next day, the Fox News host Sean Hannity said he had bought a Model S Plaid to support the embattled company, saying a Tesla “has more American parts in it than any other car made in our country.”In a backlash to the backlash against the tactics of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, prominent conservatives are rallying to the side of the electric car company led by Mr. Musk. They are hoping to swing enough like-minded consumers to offset a boycott of the electric…

President Trump has promised to create an age of American exceptionalism with policies that put the United States first, and ahead of other nations.But Mr. Trump’s moves in the early days of his administration have had the opposite outcome for the American stock market.The S&P 500, which for years had been soaring above the stock indexes of other countries, is now trailing major markets in Europe and China, as investors have started to pull money from the United States and reallocate it around the world.Since Mr. Trump’s inauguration, the S&P 500 has fallen 6 percent, while the Dax index in…

Junior Bridgeman, who followed a strong N.B.A. career with a remarkable run as an entrepreneur, acquiring hundreds of fast-food restaurants, a Coca-Cola bottling business and a minority stake in the Milwaukee Bucks, his team for a decade, died on Tuesday in Louisville, Ky. He was 71.The cause was a cardiac event, a family spokesman said. Mr. Bridgeman had been talking to a reporter for a local television station during a charity event at the Galt House Hotel when he said he felt that he was having a heart attack, the spokesman said, and he was taken to a hospital, where…