Investments and Business

Scott Christensen was standing on a mountain looking down into Yellowstone National Park late last month when he spotted a fresh track from a grizzly bear in the mud, about two inches in front of his foot. He wasn’t scared, but rather relieved and gratified.The bear, as well as other wildlife, including the thousands of elk that migrate through the area, would be able to keep roaming on the side of the mountain, known as Crevice Mountain, instead of ceding territory to heavy machinery and miners in search of gold.Mr. Christensen, the executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, a…

Two years ago, when interest rates were low, the average Hayden home was a 1,900 square-foot three-bedroom that cost $500,000, or about $2,000 a month, said Steve Klingman, the company’s president, in an interview. This assumed a 5 percent down payment and a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage with a 3 percent interest rate.Now, as borrowing costs consume more of buyers’ mortgage payments, Hayden is lowering prices and square footage to keep customers’ payments stable. The average Hayden home is now 1,550 square feet and costs about $400,000, or $2,100 a month, Mr. Klingman said. To buy it, however, a customer has…

The widely used chatbot ChatGPT was designed to generate digital text, everything from poetry to term papers to computer programs. But when a team of artificial intelligence researchers at the computer chip company Nvidia got their hands on the chatbot’s underlying technology, they realized it could do a lot more.Within weeks, they taught it to play Minecraft, one of the world’s most popular video games. Inside Minecraft’s digital universe, it learned to swim, gather plants, hunt pigs, mine gold and build houses.“It can go into the Minecraft world and explore by itself and collect materials by itself and get better…

Investors are betting that the Federal Reserve, which has raised interest rates to their highest levels in 22 years, may finally be finished.Several top Fed officials have indicated in recent days that the central bank’s effort to cool the economy through higher borrowing costs is being amplified by recent market moves that are essentially doing some of that job for them.In particular, attention has focused on a run-up in interest rates on U.S. government debt, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond briefly touching a two-decade high last week. That yield is incredibly important because it acts as the…

On a recent afternoon Susan Allen gazed at a sun-soaked hillside cloaked in a rich autumn palette of red, gold, purple and green. The retiree from Lebanon, Ky., sat licking her lips after savoring a syrup-dipped pickle at the Morse Farm Maple Sugarworks in Montpelier, Vt., a popular stop on central Vermont’s leaf-peeping circuit.“I love it,” she said of the pickle and the place. “The weather’s been beautiful. The scenery is gorgeous.”Her traveling companion nodded in agreement. The two of them had heard about floods that devastated parts of the state this summer but, Ms. Allen said, they had not…

Federal Reserve policymakers expected that rates might need to rise slightly higher as of their September meeting, freshly released minutes from the gathering showed. But they were also determined to creep forward carefully, wary that they could overdo it and clamp down on the economy too hard.Officials left interest rates unchanged at their Sept. 19-20 meeting, having raising them sharply since March 2022. Rates are now set to 5.25 to 5.5 percent, up from near-zero 19 months ago.Even as policymakers left borrowing costs steady last month, they projected that they might need to make one more rate move in 2023.…

The conflict unfolding thousands of miles away in Israel and Gaza has its roots in decades of complex strife between Jews and Arabs over land. But to hear the way it’s being described in American conservative media, much of the fault and responsibility lies with one man: President Biden.The operational failures that allowed Hamas to plan and execute the attack without warning? American intelligence, not just Israeli intelligence, dropped the ball, conservative critics said over the past week.The money Hamas raised to pull off such an organized, multipronged military operation? The Biden administration’s loosening of financial sanctions allowed Iran to…

Ford Motor said on Thursday that it could not improve its contract offer to the United Automobile Workers union without hurting its business and its ability to invest in electric vehicles.The automaker also said the union’s decision to expand its strike to Ford’s largest factory, the Kentucky Truck Plant, would probably hurt workers at other factories and lead to layoffs across the auto industry.“We are very clear,” Kumar Galhotra, president of the Ford division that makes combustion engine vehicles, said in a conference call with reporters. “We are at the limit. Any more will stretch our ability to invest in…

Ford Motor has recalled about 238,000 Explorers because of a defect that poses a risk of the sport utility vehicles rolling away if the parking brake is not engaged.The affected models, from 2020 through 2022, have been discontinued.“The rear axle horizontal mounting bolt may fracture and cause the drive shaft to disconnect,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said in a letter to Ford on Thursday.If the shaft, a rod that transfers power to the wheels and makes the vehicle move, disconnects, it could result in a loss of drive power or a vehicle rollaway if the parking brake is…