Investments and 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…

A prominent Federal Reserve official on Tuesday laid out a case for lowering interest rates methodically at some point this year as the economy comes into balance and inflation cools — although he acknowledged that the timing of those cuts remained uncertain.Christopher Waller, one of the Fed’s seven Washington-based officials and one of the 12 policymakers who gets to vote at its meetings, said during a speech at the Brookings Institution on Tuesday that he saw a case for cutting interest rates in 2024.“The data we have received the last few months is allowing the committee to consider cutting the…

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,…

The trailer for “Annapoorani: The Goddess of Food” promised a sunny if melodramatic story of uplift in a south Indian temple town. A priest’s daughter enters a cooking tournament, but social obstacles complicate her inevitable rise to the top. Annapoorani’s father, a Brahmin sitting at the top of Hindu society’s caste ladder, doesn’t want her to cook meat, a taboo in their lineage. There is even the hint of a Hindu-Muslim romantic subplot.On Thursday, two weeks after the movie premiered, Netflix abruptly pulled it from its platform. An activist, Ramesh Solanki, a self-described “very proud Hindu Indian nationalist,” had filed…

Cindy Camp is one of many Americans facing rising utility costs. Ms. Camp, who lives in Baltimore with three family members, said her gas and electric bills kept “going up and up” — reaching as high as $900 a month. Her family has tried to use less hot water by doing fewer loads of laundry, and she now eats more fast food to save on grocery bills.Ms. Camp would like to save money on energy bills by transitioning to more energy-efficient appliances like a heat pump and solar panels. But she simply cannot afford it.“It’s a struggle for me to…

For 15 minutes, the cryptocurrency industry was euphoric.At 4:11 p.m. on Tuesday, the official X account of the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that regulators had approved a new investment product tracking the price of Bitcoin, an apparent victory for the embattled crypto industry. Coinbase, a giant crypto exchange, posted a celebratory banner. Crypto fans hailed it as a historic day for the industry. Bitcoin’s price spiked.Then at 4:26 p.m., Gary Gensler, the chair of the S.E.C., posted that the agency’s account had been compromised, resulting in an “unauthorized tweet.” An S.E.C. spokeswoman confirmed the hack in an emailed statement.The…