Investments and Business

The U.S. government’s persistent budget deficit and growing debts were low on Wall Street’s list of worries when interest rates were at rock bottom for years. But borrowing costs have risen so sharply that it is causing many investors and economists to fret that the United States’ big debt pile could prove less sustainable.Federal Reserve officials have raised interest rates to about 5.3 percent since early 2022 in a bid to control inflation. Officials predicted at their meeting last month that interest rates could remain high for years to come, shaking expectations among investors who had bet on rates falling…

Last month, Emma Tucker, the new editor in chief of The Wall Street Journal, gathered the newsroom to share a blunt message: The media industry had morphed “beyond recognition” and The Journal needed to adapt, or be left behind.“We don’t want to be the German car industry of news publishing,” she joked to the hundreds of staff members listening.Ms. Tucker, who took over as top editor in February, was addressing a group that had been, to a large degree, tentatively optimistic about their energetic new boss. But many were also unnerved by the speed of the changes she had already…

For as long as anyone can remember, the Indiana city of Kokomo has been a conservative stronghold. Ronald Reagan crushed Walter Mondale in Kokomo. Bill Clinton lost twice. So did Barack Obama. The current mayor, a Republican, is running unopposed for re-election. It’s a town known for something it would prefer to forget: a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1923 that was the largest ever.Yet somehow Kokomo produced a union leader whose rhetoric is aimed at toppling the conservative and moneyed classes — a rebel who rejects the niceties of an earlier era in favor of a sharp-edged confrontation.“Billionaires in…

Alan Murray, the chief executive of Fortune, announced on Wednesday that he would step down next year.In a note to staff members, Mr. Murray said he had agreed with Fortune’s owner and board that he would help the company with a transition to new leadership and then leave his role at the end of April.He said that during his tenure, Fortune had been established as an independent company, expanded its audience and revenue, and “produced three straight years of profits.”“That turnaround story is the foundation for the next stage of Fortune’s growth,” Mr. Murray wrote, “during which the owner has…

Follow live updates on the Sam Bankman-Fried fraud trial.A year ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was a fixture on magazine covers and in the halls of Congress, a tousle-haired crypto billionaire who hobnobbed with movie stars and bankrolled political campaigns.On Tuesday, the founder of the failed FTX digital currency exchange is set to leave the jail where he has been confined for more than seven weeks and stand trial in a Manhattan courtroom on federal charges of fraud and money laundering, capping one of the largest and swiftest corporate collapses in decades.The charges against Mr. Bankman-Fried, 31, have put the rest of…

Cryptocurrency lobbyists were riding so high in early 2022 that an FTX executive felt comfortable directly emailing Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, to ask him to meet with Sam Bankman-Fried, the soon-to-be-disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange.It worked.“The day that would work for me is February 1,” Mr. Powell replied to a Jan. 11 email from Mark Wetjen, an FTX policy official and former commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.Mr. Powell’s public calendar shows that he and Mr. Bankman-Fried met as planned. And Mr. Wetjen went on to send the Fed chair two policy papers…

When Jack Welch, the longtime chief executive of General Electric, presided over a global headquarters on a sylvan expanse in Fairfield, Conn., in the 1980s and ‘90s, he probably did not envision college students streaming into its two pristine office buildings. But on a recent morning, students at Sacred Heart University headed to classrooms on floors once filled with file cabinets and cubicles.Not that all the students at the Catholic university were aware that their classes were in the former home of a multinational conglomerate or were even familiar with the name General Electric.“I don’t really know what it means,…

Why It Matters: The economy nears prepandemic measures.Job openings are closely monitored by the Federal Reserve, which has tried to fight inflation over the past 19 months by increasing interest rates, aiming to cool the economy and reduce labor demand, though it took a pause at its most recent meeting.“The Fed won’t make policy decisions based on one JOLTS report, but it does keep the risks tilted toward another rate hike,” Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist for Oxford Economics, said of the August increase in job openings.The S&P 500 slumped 1.3 percent, while the yield on the 10-year Treasury…

Yard signs along the quiet country roads of Green Charter Township, Mich., home to horse farms and a 19th-century fish hatchery, blare a message that an angered community hopes is heard by local leaders, the Biden administration and China: “No Gotion.”The opposition is to a plan by Gotion, a subsidiary of a Chinese company, to build a $2.4 billion electric vehicle battery factory on roughly 270 acres of largely uninhabited scrub land. An investment of that magnitude can transform a local economy, but in this case it is unwelcome by many. Residents fear that the company’s presence is a dangerous…