Investments and Business

Deeper Into the Numbers: Core inflation slowed faster than expected.The volatility and international nature of energy prices means policymakers are also closely watching other measures of inflation to determine how embedded price growth has become in the economy. A key gauge of domestic price pressures is core inflation, which strips out energy and food costs. Last month, the annual rate of core inflation fell to 6.2 percent, from 6.9 percent in July, a faster decline than economists predicted. It was driven by a slowdown in services inflation, another key measure because it reflects companies’ labor costs — wages tend to…

The United Auto Workers said on Tuesday that the union would expand its strike against three U.S. automakers on Friday if it was unable to make substantial progress in contract talks with them.Nearly 13,000 U.A.W. members walked off the assembly lines at three plants last Friday, one each at the three companies — General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler. The union has demanded a 40 percent wage increase over four years, better benefits and other changes. The automakers, which are based in or have a big presence in Michigan, have offered raises of about half as…

The federal government’s first monopoly trial of the modern internet era is less than a week old, but already a central character has emerged: data. Its role, its use and its power are key issues in the Justice Department’s case against Google.The government claims that Google bribed and bullied smartphone producers like Apple and Samsung and the browser maker Mozilla to be their featured search engine, funneling far more data to Google and cutting off competitors.Data, the government says, drives the flywheel of Google’s success. Each search query adds data, which improves search results, attracting more users who generate still…

Since the start of the pandemic, labor unions have enjoyed something of a renaissance. They have made inroads into previously nonunion companies like Starbucks and Amazon, and won unusually strong contracts for hundreds of thousands of workers. Last year, public approval for unions reached its highest level since the Lyndon Johnson presidency.What unions haven’t had during that stretch is a true gut-check moment on a national scale. Strikes by railroad workers and UPS employees, which had the potential to rattle the U.S. economy, were averted at the last minute. The fallout from the continuing writers’ and actors’ strikes has been…

Instacart on Monday priced its shares at $30 each for its initial public offering, at the top of its expected range, in a sign of renewed demand for tech stocks.The San Francisco-based grocery delivery company had estimated that its shares would be priced at $28 to $30 a share. Instacart raised $660 million in the offering and was valued at $9.9 billion, significantly below its last private fund-raising round in 2021, which valued the company at $39 billion.The shares will begin trading on Tuesday on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol CART.Instacart’s offering showcases one of the largest…

Jonathan Isaac is a forward for the National Basketball Association’s Orlando Magic, but he is perhaps better known as someone who chose not to protest police brutality against Black Americans during a summer of widespread activism involving racial injustice.Mr. Isaac, who is Black, turned that singular moment in July 2020 — when he decided not to join many other N.B.A. players in kneeling during the national anthem as the league restarted in a Covid “bubble” setting in Orlando, Fla. — into a platform as a conservative political activist. In 2022, he spoke at a rally of Christian nationalists and anti-vaccine…

Dr. Leslie Hendeles began prodding the Food and Drug Administration to reject a decongestant in cold medicines when he had a mop of curly red hair and Bill Clinton had just become president.By the time opposition to the drug had coalesced, Dr. Hendeles was appearing, at age 80, as an expert to testify before the agency’s advisers, his hair white and his overview of the ingredient spanning 50 years.His advocacy culminated in the advisory panel’s unanimous vote on Tuesday, when it concluded that the decongestant, a common ingredient in cold and flu remedies, is ineffective.Prompted by the news, consumers threw…

Mykail James has a plan for when payments on her roughly $75,000 in student loans restart next month. She’ll cut back on her “fun budget” — money reserved for travel and concerts — and she expects to limit her holiday spending.“With the holidays coming up — I have a really big family — we will definitely be scaling back how much we’re spending on Christmas and how many things we can afford,” Ms. James said. “It’s just going to be a tighter income overall.”In October, roughly 27 million borrowers like Ms. James will once again be on the hook for…

In the gloom of China’s economy, one area of business is booming: cosmetics.After enduring nearly three years of mandatory masks and frequent lockdowns during the pandemic, many Chinese consumers, wary of big-ticket purchases like apartments, are now splurging on lipstick, perfume, moisturizers and other personal care products.But cosmetics companies from France, Japan, South Korea and the United States, which have invested heavily in China, are missing out on a lot of the action.As China’s cosmetics companies are booming, imports of cosmetics are wilting under regulations that the country imposed on foreign manufacturers during the pandemic.While China’s trade conflicts with the…