Author: News Room

General Motors executives are closely tracking President Trump’s plans to impose tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, but the company is not yet making any major changes to its strategy in North America in response to the threatened tariffs.The automaker has pulled together an “extensive playbook” of possible options but won’t put them in place “until the world changes dramatically, and we see a permanent level of tariffs going forward,” the company’s chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, told reporters in a conference call on Monday evening.“I won’t go into the details exactly but we’ve been preparing for that and…

At the Federal Reserve’s final gathering of 2024, Chair Jerome H. Powell announced that the U.S. central bank was embarking on a “new phase” in how it would set interest rates.The Fed planned to “move cautiously” with cuts going forward, Mr. Powell told reporters at the time, reflecting officials’ thinking that they could afford to be patient with scant signs of an impending recession and lingering inflationary pressures. On Wednesday, the Fed is set to put that approach into action, pressing pause on further reductions for the first time since they began lowering borrowing costs in September.The question now looming…

A sell-off in the biggest technology companies in the United States rippled into Asia on Tuesday, with stock markets in Japan falling as U.S. markets appeared to stabilize.Japan’s tech-heavy Nikkei 225 fell 1.4 percent with Softbank, the Japanese investment firm with major holdings in the technology sector, falling about 5 percent. Arm Holdings, the U.S. listed chip design company that is 88 percent owned by Softbank, dropped more than 10 percent on Monday.Many financial markets in Asia, including those in China and Taiwan, were closed on Tuesday for Lunar New Year. Markets in mainland China are set to remain closed…

The Trump administration declared on Friday that the Gulf of Mexico had been renamed the Gulf of America, but popular mapping services from Google and Apple have continued showing the old name.On Monday, Google said it would update its maps to display Gulf of America as soon as the U.S. government updated its official maps.“We have a longstanding practice of applying name changes when they have been updated in official government sources,” the company said in a post on X.President Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20, his first day in office, to rename the gulf, in addition to…

Workers at a Whole Foods Market in Philadelphia voted on Monday to become the first unionized store in Amazon’s grocery chain, opening a new front in the e-commerce giant’s efforts to fend off labor organizing in multiple segments of its business.Employees at the sprawling Whole Foods store, in the city’s Spring Garden neighborhood, voted 130-100 in favor of organizing with the United Food and Commercial Workers union, the National Labor Relations Board said.Store employees said they hoped a union could help negotiate higher wages, above the current starting rate of $16 an hour, and better benefits. Some longtime employees, who…

Litigation has long been one of President Trump’s favorite weapons against media outlets whose coverage he objects to. But in at least one case, he is encountering an unforeseen obstacle: his previous arguments in court.On Monday, the board that awards the Pulitzer Prizes — which Mr. Trump sued in Florida in 2022 for defamation — said that the case should be put on hold because, as Mr. Trump has argued in two other cases, a state court should not be permitted to exert control over a sitting president.“Defendants agree,” wrote the law firm representing the board, Ballard Spahr. “To avoid…

The Senate on Monday voted 68 to 29 to confirm Scott Bessent to be President Trump’s Treasury secretary, putting in place the new administration’s top economic official who will steer an agenda that is focused on tax cuts, tariffs and deregulation.Mr. Bessent, a billionaire hedge fund manager with deep experience in financial markets, is taking over the job as Mr. Trump is sprinting to remake the U.S. economy in line with his “America First” vision. The new Treasury secretary will be responsible for helping to develop the Trump administration’s tax policies, plot the path for more tariffs on Mexico, Canada…

Tech stocks tumbled. Giant companies like Meta and Nvidia faced a barrage of questions about their future. And tech executives took to social media to proclaim their fears.And it was all because of a little-known Chinese artificial intelligence start-up called DeepSeek.DeepSeek caused waves all over the world on Monday as one of its accomplishments — that it had created a very powerful A.I. model with far less money than many A.I. experts thought possible — raised a host of questions, including whether U.S. companies were even competitive in A.I. anymore.DeepSeek is “AI’s Sputnik moment,” Marc Andreessen, a tech venture capitalist,…

After the United States blocked Nippon Steel’s bid for U.S. Steel, the Pittsburgh company is facing new pressure from an activist investor who is seeking to oust U.S. Steel’s leadership and thwart the companies’ efforts to revive the deal.The activist investor, Ancora, said in an open letter to U.S. Steel’s board on Monday that it has nominated nine directors, including Alan Kestenbaum, the former chairman and chief executive of Stelco Holdings.Stelco last year was acquired by the Cleveland- Cliffs, which is considering its own bid for U.S. Steel. Ancora wants Mr. Kestenbaum to replace U.S. Steel’s chief executive, David Burritt,…

Nvidia, which soared to the top of the stock market by selling the computer chips fueling the world’s artificial intelligence boom, has been dealt a tough reality check by a small Chinese company that showed it could do more with less of what Nvidia makes.On Monday, shares of Nvidia plunged more than 16 percent after the company, called DeepSeek, showed that it could train a cutting-edge A.I. system with a fraction of the Nvidia chips that had been used in the past by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.DeepSeek’s release challenged a tech industry consensus that in order to build bigger…