Business

The Biden administration has begun pumping more than $2 trillion into U.S. factories and infrastructure, investing huge sums to try to strengthen American industry and fight climate change.But the effort is facing a familiar threat: a surge of low-priced products from China. That is drawing the attention of President Biden and his aides, who are considering new protectionist measures to make sure American industry can compete against Beijing.As U.S. factories spin up to produce electric vehicles, semiconductors and solar panels, China is flooding the market with similar goods, often at significantly lower prices than American competitors. A similar influx is also hitting the European market.American executives and officials argue that China’s actions violate global trade rules. The concern...

The theatrical box office this holiday weekend was awash in “Mean Girls,” and TikTok may have been at least partly responsible for its domination.The new PG-13 rated film, a musical rendition of the 2004 original starring Lindsay Lohan, with songs that turned the 2018 Broadway adaptation (and two national tours) into a resounding hit, grossed $28 million over the holiday weekend. The movie landed in first place, beating the Jason Statham action film “The Beekeeper,” which earned $16.8 million. (Paramount Pictures expects “Mean Girls” to reach $32 million once receipts from the federal holiday on Monday in observance of Martin Luther King’s Birthday are added.)The news was a welcome reprieve for the theatrical box office, which did not benefit from a giant year-end blockbuster that often ca...

The Supreme Court agreed on Friday to hear a case brought by Starbucks challenging a federal judge’s order to reinstate seven employees who were fired at a store in Memphis amid a union campaign there.Starbucks argued that the criteria for such intervention by judges in labor cases, which can also include measures like reopening shuttered stores, vary across regions of the country because federal appeals courts may adhere to different standards.A regional director for the National Labor Relations Board, the company’s opponent in the case, argued that the apparent differences in criteria among appeals courts were semantic rather than substantive, and that a single effective standard was already in place nationwide.The labor board had urged the Supreme Court to stay out of the case, whose ou...

On Saturday night, NBCUniversal will make media history. For the first time, a National Football League playoff game — this one featuring the Kansas City Chiefs and the Miami Dolphins — will appear exclusively on a streaming service.And at NBCUniversal’s offices in New York and Los Angeles, executives are all too aware of the high stakes for the company and particularly its streaming service, Peacock.“There’s a lot riding on this game,” Kelly Campbell, Peacock’s president, said in an interview. “We feel that pressure.”The pressure is coming from many fronts. There’s a technical challenge: First-round N.F.L. playoff games regularly draw audiences of nearly 30 million people. Can Peacock, a service that has a much smaller subscriber base than rivals like Netflix, Disney+ and Max, handle a cr...

The global economy is at risk of a “wasted” decade and the weakest stretch of growth in 30 years, the World Bank warned on Tuesday, saying a sluggish recovery from the pandemic and crippling wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are expected to weigh heavily on output.In its semiannual Global Economic Prospects report, the World Bank projected that the growth in world output will slow further in 2024, declining to 2.4 percent from 2.6 percent. Although the global economy has been surprisingly resilient, the report warned that its forecasts were subject to heightened uncertainty because of the two wars, a diminished Chinese economy and the increasing risks of natural disasters caused by global warming.The converging crises in recent years have put the world economy on track for the weakest ha...

An emergency landing on Friday of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 jet in Portland, Ore., led the Federal Aviation Administration to order some U.S. airlines to stop using some Max 9 planes until they are inspected. The order affects about 171 planes owned by Alaska, United and other airlines. The episode also raised troubling new questions about the safety of a workhorse aircraft design dogged by years of problems and multiple deadly crashes.No one was seriously injured in Friday’s incident. The jetliner returned to the airport in Portland shortly after a chunk of the body of the plane broke off in midair, leaving a door-size hole in the side of the aircraft.Within hours of the episode, Alaska Airlines said it would ground all 65 of the Boeing 737 Max 9 aircraft in its fleet until mech...

The U.S. labor market ended 2023 with a bang, gaining more jobs than experts had expected and buoying hopes that the economy can settle into a solid, sustainable level of growth rather than fall into a recession.Employers added 216,000 jobs in December on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday. The unemployment rate was unchanged at 3.7 percent.Although hiring has slowed in recent months, layoffs remain near record lows. The durability of both hiring and wage gains is all the more remarkable in light of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive series of interest rate increases in the past couple of years. But a range of analysts warns that the coast is not yet clear and says the effects of those higher rates will take time to filter through business activity.“The real...

The national railways are also involved. In September, the German transport minister, Volker Wissing, vowed to free up 40 billion euros, about $43.6 billion, to revitalize the country’s rail network. “The rail infrastructure has been neglected for decades and brought to its absolute limits,” Dr. Wissing said in a statement. “This is no longer acceptable and unworthy of a progressive economic nation. We need the railroads as a climate-friendly mode of transport.”In Spain, the government has opened up its high-speed rail network to private competition with great success. And the national rail operator, Renfe, recently started direct services between Madrid and the French coastal city of Marseille, and between Barcelona and Lyon, France.And in France, President Emmanuel Macron promised in 202...

Federal Reserve officials wanted to use their final policy statement of 2023 to signal that interest rates might be at their peak even as they left the door open to future rate increases, minutes from their December meeting showed.The notes, released on Wednesday, explained why officials tweaked a key sentence in that statement — adding “any” to the phrase pledging that officials would work to gauge “the extent of any additional policy firming that may be appropriate.” The point was to relay the judgment that policy “was likely now at or near its peak” as inflation moderated and higher interest rates seemed to be working as planned.Federal Reserve officials left interest rates unchanged in their Dec. 13 policy decision and forecast that they would cut borrowing costs three times in 2024. B...

Jeff Zucker is returning to the world of morning television. Sort of.Mr. Zucker, the former CNN president and onetime executive producer of the “Today” show, is investing in Media Res, the independent Hollywood studio behind the hit prestige dramedy “The Morning Show” on Apple TV+.It’s the latest gamble by Mr. Zucker in his effort to build a mini media empire for RedBird IMI, the venture company he founded in 2022. The deal, announced on Thursday, is also his first direct involvement in the world of scripted programming since he ran NBCUniversal’s entertainment arm in the early 2000s.Neither side would disclose financial terms, but Mr. Zucker said in an interview that he planned to take a seat on the studio’s board and provide guidance and advice. The founder and chief executive of Media R...