Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 159
WASHINGTON (AP) — Calls grew Monday for an end to the financial secrecy that has allowed many of the world's richest and most powerful people to hide their wealth from tax collectors. The outcry came after a report revealed the way that world leaders, billionaires and others have used shell companies and offshore accounts to keep trillions of dollars out of government treasuries over the past quarter-century, limiting the resources for helping the poor or combating climate change. The report by the International Consortium of Investigative Jour...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Under fire for allegations that it bowed to pressure from China and other governments, the World Bank has dropped a popular report that ranked countries by how welcoming they are to businesses. The report is important to many companies and investors around the world: They use the World Bank's "Doing Business" report to help decide where to invest money, open manufacturing plants or sell products. Eager to attract investment, countries around the world, especially developing economies, have sought to improve their rankings i...
Joe Sobol, owner of Big Easy Construction in New Orleans, has bad news for homeowners who've been calling about roofs damaged by Hurricane Ida or to get an update on renovations that were scheduled before the storm ripped through the area. The job will cost a lot more than usual — and take much longer, too. Ida slammed into the Gulf Coast — then took its destruction to the Northeast — at a time when building contractors were already grappling with severe shortages of workers and depleted supply chains. The damage inflicted by Ida has magni...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite an uptick in COVID-19 cases and a shortage of available workers, the U.S. economy likely enjoyed a burst of job growth last month as it bounced back with surprising vigor from last year's coronavirus shutdown. The Labor Department's July jobs report Friday is expected to show that the United States added more than 860,000 jobs last month, topping June's 850,000, according to a survey of economists by the data firm FactSet. Economist Lydia Boussour at Oxford Economics is expecting even more — 1.02 million — partl...
WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S employers added 943,000 jobs in July and drove the unemployment rate down to 5.4% in another sign the economy is bouncing back with surprising vigor from COVID-19. But there is growing fear the fast-spreading delta variant will set back the recovery. The worry is that the resurgent virus could discourage people from going out and spending and trigger another round of shutdowns or other restrictions. "That is a definite downside risk,'' said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics. "The risk is f...
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Tesla founder Elon Musk took to a witness stand Monday to defend his company's 2016 acquisition of a troubled company called SolarCity against a lawsuit that claims he's to blame for a deal that was rife with conflicts of interest and never delivered the profits he'd promised. And to the surprise of no one, the famously colorful billionaire did so in the most personally combative terms. "I think you are a bad human being," Musk told Randall Baron, a lawyer for shareholders who was pressing Musk to acknowledge his m...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell last week to 712,000, the lowest total since early November, evidence that fewer employers are cutting jobs amid a decline in confirmed coronavirus cases and signs of an improving economy. The Labor Department said Thursday that applications for unemployment aid dropped by 42,000 from 754,000 the week before. Though the job market has been slowly strengthening, many businesses remain under pressure, and 9.6 million jobs remain lost to the pandemic that flattened the e...
WASHINGTON (AP) — America's job market delivered a burst of strength in February. It lifted hopes that the rollout of viral vaccines, the distribution of federal aid and the increasing willingness and ability of consumers to go out and spend will invigorate the economy as the weather warms up. Employers added 379,000 jobs, the government said Friday, the most since October and far surpassing economists' predictions. The unemployment rate, which dipped to 6.2%, has now dropped nearly every month since it peaked at 14.8% in April of last year a...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden's effort to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour could provide a welcome opportunity for someone like Cristian Cardona, a 21-year-old fast food worker. Cardona would love to earn enough to afford to move out of his parents' house in Orlando, Florida, and maybe scrape together money for college. More than 1,000 miles away in Detroit, Nya Marshall worries that a $15 minimum wage would drive up her labor costs and perhaps force her to close her 2-year-old restaurant, already under strain from the v...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The struggles that have afflicted the American job market since the viral pandemic tore through the economy nearly a year ago are keeping a tight lid on hiring. The Labor Department's report Friday that employers added a meager 49,000 jobs in January, after having slashed 227,000 in December, did nothing to brighten that picture. Still, the unemployment rate slid to 6.3%, its lowest level since March, from 6.7% in December. And January was the first month since June in which the economy generated more jobs than it did the m...
NEW YORK (AP) - Clay Reynolds is starting to make peace with a gut-wrenching reality: He may have to once again close his business, Arrichion Hot Yoga and Circuit Training. The $900 billion pandemic relief package that Congress has just approved contains billions in aid directed specifically at struggling small companies like Reynolds'. Arrichion received a loan last spring from the government's earlier economic aid program. But Reynolds, a co-owner, needs another. Business was down 75% in the third quarter. The fourth quarter will likely be...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits fell by 89,000 last week to a still-elevated 803,000, evidence that the job market remains under stress nine months after the coronavirus outbreak sent the U.S. economy into recession and caused millions of layoffs. The latest figure, released Wednesday by the Labor Department, shows that many employers are still cutting jobs as the pandemic tightens business restrictions and leads many consumers to stay home. Before the virus struck, jobless claims typically numbered a...
NEW YORK (AP) — It would be just a temporary precaution. When the viral pandemic erupted in March, employees of the small insurance firm Thimble fled their Manhattan offices. CEO Jay Bregman planned to call them back soon — as soon as New York was safe again. Within weeks, he'd changed his mind. Bregman broke his company's lease and told his two dozen or so staffers they could keep working from home — possibly for good. The gains were at once unexpected and immediate. Bregman is saving money on rent. He no longer has to persuade recruits to re...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Evidence was abundant in the November jobs report that the U.S. economy's tentative recovery is sputtering as coronavirus cases accelerate and federal aid runs out. Hiring slowed sharply. Hundreds of thousands of people gave up looking for work. The proportion of the unemployed who have been jobless for at least six months rose. All told, the Labor Department said Friday, employers added 245,000 jobs in November — the fewest since April, the fifth straight monthly slowdown and well short of the gain economists had been exp...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose last week to 778,000, evidence that the U.S. economy and job market remain under strain as coronavirus cases surge and colder weather heighten the risks. The Labor Department's report Wednesday said jobless claims climbed from 748,000 the week before. Before the virus struck hard in mid-March, weekly claims typically amounted to roughly 225,000. They shot up to 6.9 million during one week in March before dropping yet remain historically high more than eight months...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Only a few of America's CEOs have made public statements about President Donald Trump's refusal to accept his election loss, but in private, many are alarmed and talking about what collective action would be necessary if they see an imminent threat to democracy. On Nov. 6, more than two dozen CEOs of major U.S. corporations took part in a video conference to discuss what to do if Trump refuses to leave office or takes other steps to stay in power beyond the scheduled Jan. 20 inauguration of former Vice President Joe Biden. O...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. economy is expected to rebound from a disastrous spring. Paralyzed by the coronavirus, economic output collapsed at a 31.4% annual pace from April through June — the worst such plunge on records dating to 1947. Growth is believed to have surged back in the July-September quarter. Yet the economy is still scarred. The Associated Press spoke recently with Timothy Adams, president of the Institute of International Finance, a trade group for the financial services industry that expects the economy to shrink 2.5% for 202...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump spent four years upending seven decades of American trade policy. In what became his defining economic act, Trump launched a trade war with China. On another front, he taxed the steel and aluminum of U.S. allies. And he terrified America's own corporations by threatening to wreck $1.4 trillion in annual trade with Mexico and Canada. He did it in typically combative, mercurial style — raising tariffs, hurling threats, walking them back, sometimes reopening conflicts that had seemed resolved. All of it...
WASHINGTON (AP) — A New York Times report that President Donald Trump paid just $750 in federal income tax the year he entered the White House — and, thanks to colossal losses, no income tax at all in 11 of the 18 years that the Times reviewed — served to raise doubts about Trump's self-image as a shrewd and successful businessman. That Sunday's report came just weeks before Trump's re-election bid served to intensify the spotlight on Trump the businessman — an identity that he has spent decades cultivating and that helped him capture the pre...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. government's war against the coronavirus is imposing the heaviest strain on the Treasury since America's drive to defeat Nazi Germany and imperial Japan three-quarters of a century ago. The Congressional Budget Office has warned that the government this year will run the largest budget deficit, as a share of the economy, since 1945, when World War II ended. Next year, the federal debt — the sum of the year-after-year gush of annual deficits — is forecast to exceed the size of the entire American economy for the first...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Government relief checks began arriving in Americans' bank accounts as the economic damage to the U.S. from the coronavirus piled up Wednesday and sluggish sales at reopened stores in Europe and China made it clear that business won't necessarily bounce right back when the crisis eases. With many factories shut down, American industrial output shriveled in March, registering its biggest decline since the U.S. demobilized in 1946 at the end of World War II. Retail sales fell by an unprecedented 8.7%, with April expected to b...
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — It took 15 minutes for the coronavirus to wreck Shelley Hutchings' carefully calculated financial plans. Hutchings, a bartender and performer, had lined up gigs in advance of the South by Southwest film, music and technology festival, which draws hundreds of thousands of visitors to Austin each year. She'd expected to earn about $3,000 — enough to pay her taxes and buy a new sewing machine for a tailoring business she runs. Relaxed, she sat down to watch a movie. Then her phone started vibrating. Cancellations rolled in....
WASHINGTON (AP) — Since breaking out of China, the coronavirus has breached the walls of the Vatican. It's struck the Iranian holy city of Qom and contaminated a nursing home in Seattle. And around the world, it's carrying not just sickness and death but also the anxiety and paralysis that can smother economic growth. From Florida, where the CEO of a toy maker who can't get products from Chinese factories is preparing layoffs, to Hong Kong, where the palatial Jumbo Kingdom restaurant is closed, businesses are struggling. The virus has g...
NEW YORK (AP) — The coronavirus outbreak began to look more like a worldwide economic crisis Friday as anxiety about the infection emptied shops and amusement parks, canceled events, cut trade and travel and dragged already slumping financial markets even lower. More employers told their workers to stay home, and officials locked down neighborhoods and closed schools. The wide-ranging efforts to halt the spread of the illness threatened jobs, paychecks and profits. "This is a case where in economic terms the cure is almost worse than the d...
China's worst health crisis in years has sparked fear and uncertainty for businesses from North America to Asia that depend on trade in the affected region. Experts say it's too soon to know how disruptive the crisis will prove. But it's already having an impact. McDonald's has shuttered restaurants in five Chinese cities, including the inland port city of Wuhan where the crisis is centered. Shanghai Disneyland has temporarily closed as a precaution. Restrictions on travel and fears of flying to the region are threatening to depress demand for...
