A gauge of U.S. business prices rose broadly in June, driven in part by a rise in transportation costs that underscores the sector’s climbing labor expenses. The producer-price index, a measure of the prices businesses receive for their goods and services, rose a seasonally adjusted 0.3% in June from a month earlier, the Labor Department […]
U.S. consumer prices rose for a third straight month in June, eating away at modest wage gains and sending inflation to its highest rate in more than six years. The consumer-price index, which gauges what Americans pay for everything from veterinarian services to baby clothes, rose a seasonally adjusted 0.1% in June from the prior […]
California’s ballot initiative process, created 107 years ago to bypass a corrupt state government in Sacramento, is a form of “direct democracy” by which voters make policy themselves, at the ballot box. In recent years, however, it has also become a playground for enormously wealthy people, who use their personal resources to promote their preferred […]
Workers are choosing to leave their jobs at the fastest rate since the internet boom 17 years ago and getting rewarded for it with bigger paychecks and/or more satisfying work. Labor Department data show that 3.4 million Americans quit their jobs in April, near a 2001 peak and twice the 1.7 million who were laid […]
Businesses across the U.S. panned California’s new consumer-privacy legislation, saying it risked far-reaching damage to everything from retailers’ customer-loyalty programs to data gathering by Silicon Valley tech giants. The bill, which was introduced one week before it was passed and was largely sold as a way to rein in big tech firms, sweeps up a […]
It happened in Japan earlier this year when Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 4 suddenly became hard to find. A popular new game called “Monster Hunter: World” led to a surge of demand for the videogame machine. Engineers at Sony say the company couldn’t quickly make more because components ran short, especially the part called a multilayer […]
Americans are burdened with about $1.4 trillion in student loan debt. One in four has a low wage job, which is by far the highest proportion of any advanced economy. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of thousands of open positions in the U.S. in fields like cybersecurity, cloud computing, computer programming, data science, tech support and […]
American factory activity accelerated for the second straight month this summer, in part because manufacturers were scrambling to move goods ahead of threatened tariffs. The Institute for Supply Management on Monday said its manufacturing index rose to 60.2 in June from 58.7 in May. Numbers above 50 indicate activity is expanding across the manufacturing sector, […]
Hundreds of thousands of Americans started looking for jobs and employers added 213,000 to their payrolls last month, the Labor Department said Friday. Many of those job seekers were snapped up by employers while some were counted as unemployed while they sought out work, which helped push the jobless rate up to 4.0%, from an […]
The digital revolution relentlessly enables consumer products to become better, faster and cheaper. But environmental regulation has for decades been making household tasks more difficult, time-consuming and expensive. A new effort to rewrite some old rules suggests a consumer backlash may be brewing. “Make dishwashers great again. It should not take 2-3 hours to clean […]
A federal judge on Monday dismissed lawsuits by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland alleging that five of the world’s largest oil companies should pay to protect the cities’ residents from the impacts of climate change. U.S. District Judge William Alsup granted a motion by the companies— BP PLC, Royal Dutch Shell PLC, Exxon […]
Economists are raising their estimates of second-quarter U.S. growth after new government figures showed a smaller-than-expected trade deficit for May. The Commerce Department on Wednesday reported the trade deficit in goods narrowed 3.7% in May from the prior month, as exports climbed 2.1% and imports rose a more modest 0.2%. Export growth adds to the […]
Who is the world’s largest operator of wind and solar farms? It’s also America’s most valuable power company. Still stumped? It’s by design. “That is a marketing problem…that we foster intentionally,” Michael O’Sullivan, NextEra Energy Inc.’s head of renewable development, told University of Notre Dame students in 2015. The Florida company has grown into a […]
As several cities continue their suit against oil companies, The People of the State of California v. BP, Judge William Alsup has boiled the case down to its pivotal question. In March he ordered the legal counsels of both parties to help him weigh “the large benefits that have flowed from the use of fossil […]
California and eight other states rolled out a plan pressuring car companies and others to meet ambitious goals for sales of electric vehicles and other environmentally friendly automobiles—part of an effort to maintain tough local regulations while the Trump administration moves to relax nationwide standards for tailpipe emissions. The plan among the nine states, covering […]