Investments and Business

Walmart will add 150 stores in the United States over the next five years, a major expansion drive for the retail giant.The company said the move, which it announced in a statement on Wednesday, would involve millions of dollars in investment. Walmart employs roughly 1.6 million people in the United States, and said it hires hundreds of people each time it opens a new store.Walmart had just over 4,600 stores nationwide at the end of October, down from more than 4,700 a year earlier. The company has not opened a new U.S. store since late 2021.Most of the stores that…

The unwavering belief of Chinese home buyers that real estate was a can’t-lose investment propelled the country’s property sector to become the backbone of its economy.But over the last two years, as firms crumbled under the weight of massive debts and sales of new homes plunged, Chinese consumers have demonstrated an equally unshakable belief: Real estate has become a losing investment.This sharp loss of faith in property, the main store of wealth for many Chinese families, is a growing problem for Chinese policymakers who are pulling out all the stops to revive the ailing industry — to very little effect.…

In 2018, Anna-Lisa Miller was working with agricultural cooperatives in Hawaii, helping them reinvest in their communities through shared ownership.Ms. Miller, who had gone to law school and had planned to do civil rights litigation, loved the principle of workers partaking in the financial success of their employers, and the next year joined Project Equity, a nonprofit that helps small businesses transition to worker ownership. But it was slow going, with each transaction requiring customized assistance.Then she came across an investor presentation from a different universe: KKR, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. In it, a KKR executive,…

Edward E. Crutchfield, a banker who grew a small North Carolina bank into one of the nation’s largest through a deal-making spree that earned him the nickname “Fast Eddie” and helped establish Charlotte, N.C., as a national financial hub, died on Jan. 2 at his home in Vero Beach, Fla. He was 82.His death was confirmed by his son, Elliott, who said his father had dementia.When Mr. Crutchfield graduated from business school in 1965, he took a job as a credit analyst at First Union bank in Charlotte. It was the lowest-paying job he was offered, but he thought he…

In early January in San Antonio, dozens of Ph.D. economists packed into a small windowless room in the recesses of a Grand Hyatt to hear brand-new research on the hottest topic of their annual conference: how climate change is affecting everything.The papers in this session focused on the impact of natural disasters on mortgage risk, railway safety and even payday loans. Some attendees had to stand in the back, as the seats had already been filled. It wasn’t an anomaly.Nearly every block of time at the Allied Social Science Associations conference — a gathering of dozens of economics-adjacent academic organizations…

Voters in New Hampshire received robocall messages over the weekend in a voice that was most likely artificially generated to impersonate President Biden’s, urging them not to vote in Tuesday’s primary election, according to the state attorney general’s office.The fake recordings, which told listeners that “your vote makes a difference in November, not this Tuesday,” were manipulated to seem as if they had been sent by an officer of a Democratic committee, the office said.The attorney general’s office stressed that voting in the primary would not rule out voters from also casting ballots in the general election in November.“These messages…