On Sunday, the eve of the Detroit auto show, GM unveiled early images of its first electric Cadillac. The company said Friday that its storied luxury brand would launch the first vehicle on its third-generation EV production system. Previous projects, the Volt plug-in hybrid and the Bolt battery car, have taken the Chevrolet badge. GM […]
Cheap small sedans and hatchbacks have long been the gateway into the auto market for many generations of American drivers. But demand for these models is shrinking fast in favor of larger, more versatile crossovers and sport-utility vehicles, and more auto makers are dropping them altogether from their U.S. lineups, creating fewer options for budget-minded […]
PG&E Corp.’s plan to file for bankruptcy protection has enormous repercussions for everyone from the homeowners suing the utility for California wildfire damages to the companies that furnish it with green energy. California’s largest utility said Monday it was preparing to file for Chapter 11 protection before the end of the month as it faces […]
But doesn’t a college education help lift the prospects of poor students who attend? Sometimes, said Mr. Vedder, but you have to graduate first. “Forty percent of our kids who go to college don’t graduate. We have a tremendous dropout rate, much bigger than the high-school dropout rate. These kids are saddled with a certain […]
Swiss mining giant Glencore provided nearly $1 billion in loans and advances to companies associated with an Israeli businessman accused of having corrupt ties to government officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The loans, made over a roughly 10-year period starting in 2007, were designed […]
Teachers in America’s second-largest school district began to strike Monday, pushing this city into the nationwide wave of growing educator activism and raising the pressure on a district already under financial strain. The strike comes after nearly two years of contract bargaining between the Los Angeles Unified School District and the United Teachers Los Angeles […]
Democratic Republic of Congo opposition leader Martin Fayulu said Friday he will challenge the official election result at the country’s constitutional court, as one of his campaign aides claimed his candidate had won in a landslide. Preliminary results announced early Thursday by Congo’s electoral commission said another opposition leader, Felix Tshisekedi, had come first in […]
Nearly half of millennials say they prefer socialism to capitalism, but what do they mean? “My policies most closely resemble what we see in the U.K., in Norway, in Finland, in Sweden,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told “60 Minutes.” Yet Sweden’s experiment with socialist policies was disastrous, and its economic success in recent decades is a […]
Two leading experts on the “gig economy” now say their estimates of its impact were too high, skewed by spotty data and the recession of a decade ago. Alan Krueger of Princeton University and Lawrence Katz of Harvard sifted through new evidence to explain how, in a 2015 survey, they overestimated how people cobbling together […]
Congo’s historic yet disorganized election suffered yet another delay on Sunday as the election commission admitted it had tabulated only about half of results on the day it was supposed to have completed the count. It did not say when it would be able to release results. The delay fuels suspicions that the election commission […]
Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal see a growing risk of recession in the U.S. Though few could identify a specific trigger—such as the business investment crunch that drove the economy down in 2001 or the housing crisis that caused a recession in 2007—economists pointed to a number of worries, including trade tensions with […]
Tame inflation, low gas prices and rising wages are putting more dollars in the pockets of American workers, a positive sign for consumer spending headed into 2019. After adjusting for inflation, average hourly earnings rose a seasonally adjusted 1.1% in December from a year earlier, the strongest rate of growth since September 2016, the Labor […]
The number of unfilled jobs in the U.S. fell in November to the lowest level since June, though openings still exceeded unemployed Americans. There were a seasonally adjusted 6.89 million job openings on the last business day of November, the Labor Department said Tuesday. That was down from a revised 7.13 million at the end […]
Thousands of shale wells drilled in the last five years are pumping less oil and gas than their owners forecast to investors, raising questions about the strength and profitability of the fracking boom that turned the U.S. into an oil superpower. The Wall Street Journal compared the well-productivity estimates that top shale-oil companies gave investors […]
If you spent 2018 mainlining misery about global warming, inequality, toxic politics or other anxieties, I’m here to break your addiction with some good news: The world got better last year, and it is going to get even better this year. Poverty around the world is plummeting; half the world is now middle class; and […]