Anna Edwards

Federal Reserve officials are expected to leave interest rates unchanged at their meeting on Wednesday, buying themselves more time to assess whether borrowing costs are high enough to weigh down the economy and wrestle inflation under control.But investors are likely to focus less on what policymakers do on Wednesday — and more on what they say about the future. Wall Street will closely watch whether Fed policymakers still expect to make another interest rate increase before the end of the year or whether they are edging closer to the next phase in their fight against rapid inflation.Central bankers have already…

For more than two decades, workers at a factory in Perrysburg, Ohio, near Toledo, have been making something that other businesses stopped producing in the United States long ago: solar panels.How the company that owns the factory, First Solar, managed to hang on when most solar panel manufacturing left the United States for China is critical to understanding the viability of President Biden’s efforts to establish a large domestic green energy industry.Mr. Biden and Democrats in Congress last year authorized hundreds of billions of dollars in federal incentives for manufacturing solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, electric cars and semiconductors. The…

The Biden administration on Wednesday announced that it was awarding $238 million through the Defense Department to set up eight hubs around the United States for promoting innovation in the semiconductor industry.The funds are one of the earliest releases of the nearly $53 billion in grants and subsidies that Congress and the Biden administration have approved to build up the domestic semiconductor industry, which U.S. officials say has been left vulnerable by decades of offshoring.The Biden administration has a variety of funding programs in the works to encourage chip research institutions and manufacturers to set up operations in the United…

Hollywood’s bitter, monthslong labor dispute has taken a big first step toward a resolution.The Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 11,000 screenwriters, reached a tentative deal on a new contract with entertainment companies on Sunday night, all but ending a 146-day strike that has contributed to a shutdown of television and film production.In the coming days, guild members will vote on whether to accept the deal, which has much of what they had demanded, including increases in compensation for streaming content, concessions from studios on minimum staffing for television shows, and guarantees that artificial intelligence technology will not…