Author: News Room
The call from a supervisor came to the steel shop floor in Sheffield, England, on Thursday afternoon: The tariffs were off. “Everything had changed for us,” said Richard Bott, as he stood near stacks of steel slabs still radiating waves of heat from the mill.In a trade deal with Britain announced with much fanfare on Thursday, President Trump agreed to lift the 25 percent tariffs on steel that had posed a dire threat to Britain’s struggling industry and to Mr. Bott’s employer, Marcegaglia Stainless Sheffield.The cavernous plant is one of the last remaining large steel-making facilities in a city that…
Top economic officials from the United States and China are poised to meet in Geneva on Saturday for high-stakes negotiations that could determine the fate of a global economy that has been jolted by President Trump’s trade war.The meetings, scheduled to continue on Sunday, will be the first since Mr. Trump ratcheted up tariffs on Chinese imports to 145 percent and China retaliated with its own levies of 125 percent on U.S. goods. The tit-for-tat effectively cut off trade between the world’s largest economies while raising the possibility of a global economic downturn.While the stakes for the meetings are high,…
The Trump administration has started an investigation into the import of commercial aircraft, jet engines and related parts that could lead to new tariffs on top of the many it has already put in place.According to a federal notice posted online on Friday, the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, started the investigation on May 1 under a provision of the Trade Expansion Act, which allows the president to impose tariffs on foreign products in the interest of national security.President Trump has already used that authority to impose tariffs on aluminum and steel, and to start similar investigations, including one last month…
Corporate America is stumbling in the dark, and so are investors.Ford and General Motors executives say they can’t estimate what lies ahead. There’s too much fog even to hazard a guess, so both companies have suspended earnings guidance — signals about future sales and profits — leaving investors to navigate on their own. And the automakers are not the only ones. A broad range of companies, including Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, the footwear company Skechers, UPS and the engine manufacturer Cummins, say they can’t talk confidently about the future.It’s earnings season again on Wall Street, and it’s a strange…
British Airways will get 32 new Boeing planes, in a deal worth nearly $13 billion, its parent company announced on Friday, a day after U.S. officials teased a big order was coming for America’s largest plane maker.IAG, which owns British Airways and other European airlines, said it had ordered the Boeing aircraft as well as 21 planes from Airbus, a French aerospace company, to be delivered between 2028 and 2033. Most of the planes were replacements for aging aircraft, but about a third were to expand the group’s fleet as it took a bet on long-haul flights.The announcement came after…
On a frigid day in early January, as she worked in her office in the Boston suburb of Billerica, Mass., Siyu Huang received a two-word text message.“Spinning wheels,” it said. Attached was a short video clip showing a car on rollers in an indoor testing center.To the untrained eye there was nothing remarkable in the video. The car could have been getting its emissions tested at a Connecticut auto repair shop (except it had no tailpipe). But to Ms. Huang, the chief executive of Factorial Energy, the video was a milestone in a quest that had already occupied a decade…
Randy Carr watched the news on his laptop the way you look at a doctor about to administer a shot — nervously and braced for pain. It was April 2, and President Trump was in the Rose Garden about to unveil new tariffs.An upbeat, slightly jacked 52-year-old, Mr. Carr is the chief executive of World Emblem, a privately held company based in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that produces about 150 million embroidered patches a year, most of which end up on shirts and hats. He radiates so much energy that even sitting down he appears to be set on vibrate. He’s…
An air traffic control facility that guides planes at Newark Liberty International Airport suffered a brief radar outage on Friday morning, the latest technological disruption at one of the nation’s busiest airports.The Federal Aviation Administration said that the outage, which affected communications and radar displays at the facility in Philadelphia, occurred just before 4 a.m. and lasted about 90 seconds.An air traffic controller mentioned the outage to the pilot of FedEx flight 1989 around that time, according to a publicly available recording of air traffic control communications with pilots.“FedEx 1989, I’m going to hand you off here, our scopes just…
Robert A.G. Monks, a lawyer and businessman from a prominent Massachusetts family who unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate three times but found a calling in his 40s as an influential defender of shareholder rights, died on April 29 at his home in Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He was 91.The cause was pancreatic cancer, which was diagnosed about a week before his death, his son, Bobby, said.By age 40, Mr. Monks had worked his way up to partner at the Goodwin Procter law firm in Boston, amassed a fortune running a regional oil and coal firm and other businesses, and made…
Gerhard Randers-Pehrson, an 81-year-old resident of Ossining, N.Y., believes the $10,000 cap should go up — but not too much. While Mr. Randers-Pehrson, a retired research scientist, said he paid $16,000 in state and local taxes last year, he does not expect to personally benefit from a higher cap. He would take the standard deduction instead of itemizing. But the issue still bothers him.“I don’t think we should punish areas that try to do right by the municipal services they provide,” he said. His congressman, Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican and one of the holdouts on the issue, has proposed…