News

San Ramon-based Chevron Corp. (NYSE: CVX) said that it would cut up to 7,000 jobs as its drastically reduces spending for 2016.

Business economists downgraded their expectations for GDP growth next year to 2.7 percent, but most expect the Federal Reserve to start raising interest rates this December.

Just over half of 11th graders (56 percent) who took the new tests are “ready or conditionally ready” for college in terms of English literacy, while just 29 percent meet those standards in math. For an economy that increasingly runs on tech and professional jobs that require strong math, science and communications skills, that’s not a good sign.

The shops and the two manufacturing facilities that serve them will close by the end of September.

Clothing giant Gap, Inc. (NYSE: GPS) will lay off 250 workers at its San Francisco headquarters and shutter 175 stores, the company said Monday.

The total climbed to more than $11.4 billion last year, according to the California Workers’ Compensation Institute, which is up $4.5 billion from the industry 10-year low in 2009, but still $4.7 billion less than 2004’s historic high of $16.1 billion 11 years ago.

The Obamacare exchange had hoped to enroll 1.7 million Californians this spring, but the final tally was about 1.4 million, virtually the same as last year. Now its board is considering a plan to cut spending next fiscal year by 15 percent — or $58 million — compared to the current fiscal year. It also plans to slash its significant marketing and outreach budget by 33 percent, to $121.5 million.

Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente will plant a $20 million information technology campus in Midtown Atlanta — a project that will create about 900 jobs.

Real estate firm Redfin says the median selling price in February in San Francisco was up 16.2 percent from a year ago, to $979,750. And people are buying them. Closed residential sales in San Francisco were up 12 percent from February 2014.

The San Francisco metro area – where the $952,162 median home price is more than twice the state median – seems to have all the symptoms that the state’s legislative analyst office says causes a housing sickness across California’s coastal cities. High housing costs in those cities are caused by insufficient supply, which are in turn caused by community resistance, environmental objections and scarce land.

As a result, companies affected by the slow ports are finding ways to import their product without using West Coast ports, including the ports of Seattle and Tacoma. In California, agriculture groups have warned of long-term economic damage if the slowdowns persist.

Oakland port officials have said the labor dispute “needs to be settled … quickly” to avoid further economic harm as businesses suffer from cargo delays. “Central Valley farmers can’t ship their produce. Small business owners can’t get goods to put on the shelf. Harbor truckers can’t do their jobs. Everyone is suffering,” the port said in a statement on Wednesday. “If the situation worsens … if West Coast ports shut down, the U.S. economy and the global supply chain will be jeopardized.”

The company expects to grow by a factor of more than 12 to more than 300 employees by 2018.

The region’s housing mismatch increasingly affects hiring and corporate location decisions. In early 2014, Charles Schwab Corp. told employees in San Francisco that it planned to move “a significant number of San Francisco-based jobs” to other locations around the country over the next three to five years. The move is expected to involve more than 1,000 of its Bay Area workforce of 2,700.

Wells Fargo’s stock-market cap hit $285.5 billion on Dec. 5, based on 5.19 billion shares outstanding as of Oct. 31, according to Bloomberg News.