Investments and Business

A British businessman who disappeared from public view in China in 2018 was sentenced to five years in prison in 2022, China’s Foreign Ministry said on Friday, in its first public acknowledgment of the case.The businessman, Ian J. Stones, had lived in China since the 1970s, working for companies like General Motors and Pfizer. For years after he vanished, there was no public information about his whereabouts, though some in the business community privately discussed his secret detention.A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry said that Mr. Stones had been convicted in 2022 of “buying and unlawfully supplying intelligence for an…

The U.S. economy continued to grow at a healthy pace at the end of 2023, capping a year in which unemployment remained low, inflation cooled and a widely predicted recession never materialized.Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, grew at a 3.3 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. That was down from the 4.9 percent rate in the third quarter but easily topped forecasters’ expectations and showed the resilience of the recovery from the pandemic’s economic upheaval.The latest reading is preliminary and may be revised in the months ahead.Forecasters entered 2023 expecting the Federal…

Passenger train drivers in Germany walked off the job on Wednesday and vowed not to return for six days in a strike over working conditions and pay that is expected to halt most long-distance and commuter rail travel across the country.The strike, one of the most significant on the national rail service in years, was announced on Monday by Claus Weselsky, the chairman of the G.D.L., a union that represents German train drivers. Mr. Weselsky, in a terse news conference, said that negotiations with rail bosses had broken down and accused the chief negotiator of the national rail company, Deutsche…

In the Red Sea, attacks by Iranian-backed Houthi militants on commercial ships continue to disrupt a crucial trade route and raise shipping costs. The threat of escalation there and around flash points in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and now Iran and Pakistan ratchets up every day.Despite the staggering death toll and wrenching misery of the violence in the Middle East, the broader economic impact so far has been mostly contained. Oil production and prices, a critical driver of worldwide economic activity and inflation, have returned to pre-crisis levels. International tourists are still flying into other countries in the Middle East…

With inflation falling, unemployment low and the Federal Reserve signaling it could soon begin cutting interest rates, forecasters are becoming increasingly optimistic that the U.S. economy could avoid a recession.Wells Fargo last week became the latest big bank to predict that the economy will achieve a soft landing, gently slowing rather than screeching to a halt. The bank’s economists had been forecasting a recession since the middle of 2022.Yet if forecasters were wrong when they predicted a recession last year, they could be wrong again, this time in the opposite direction. The risks that economists highlighted in 2023 haven’t gone…

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 get 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…

China’s No. 2 leader, Li Qiang, traveled to Switzerland with a message for the titans of the business world gathered for the World Economic Forum.“Choosing the Chinese market is not a risk, but an opportunity,” Mr. Li, China’s premier, told an audience in Davos on Tuesday.But there’s a different sentiment about China playing out in the stock market and it’s not so optimistic. The worries over China’s economy have been visible for months in Hong Kong, where stocks plunged 14 percent last year, the fourth consecutive annual decline.The new year hasn’t offered any relief, either, and economic data released by…

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…

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…

Shortly after dropping two Harvard scientists with financial conflicts of interest, the national organization assembling a committee to assess the evidence about drinking and health has chosen four new panelists, among them another Harvard professor who also has financial ties to the alcohol industry.The committee’s work, under the auspices of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, will be used to update the federal government’s dietary guidelines, which advise Americans on nutrition and diet, including how much they should or should not drink.Scientists at universities all over North America study the health effects of alcohol, and many do not…