Economy

Alan Murray, the chief executive of Fortune, announced on Wednesday that he would step down next year.In a note to staff members, Mr. Murray said he had agreed with Fortune’s owner and board that he would help the company transition to new leadership and then leave his role at the end of April.He said that during his tenure, Fortune had been established as an independent company, grew its audience and revenue, and “produced three straight years of profits.”“That turnaround story is the foundation for the next stage of Fortune’s growth,” Mr. Murray wrote, “during which the owner has made clear he plans to continue to invest in quality journalism, innovate in new product areas, and expand internationally.”Mr. Murray, 68, joined Fortune as the top editor in 2014. The magazine, part of Time In...

Why It Matters: The economy nears prepandemic measures.Job openings are closely monitored by the Fed, which has tried to fight inflation over the past 19 months by increasing interest rates, aiming to cool the economy and reduce labor demand, though it took a pause at its most recent meeting.“The Fed won’t make policy decisions based on one JOLTS report, but it does keep the risks tilted toward another rate hike,” Nancy Vanden Houten, lead U.S. economist for Oxford Economics, said of the August increase in job openings.The S&P 500 slumped 1.4 percent, while the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond, a crucial benchmark interest rate around the world, rose 0.1 percentage points to 4.8 percent, indicative of investors’ betting on stronger growth ahead.Job openings have gradually come down f...

With a growing number of satellites orbiting the Earth and space junk increasingly becoming a concern, the Federal Communications Commission announced on Tuesday that it had for the first time fined a company for failing to properly dispose of a dead satellite.The commission said that Dish, the television provider, had agreed as part of a settlement to pay a $150,000 fine for failing to thrust its defunct EchoStar-7 broadcast satellite to a higher altitude and into a designated space junkyard zone where it would pose little threat of colliding with active communications satellites and other spacecraft.As part of the settlement, Dish admitted liability, the F.C.C. said.Commercial broadcast satellites like EchoStar-7 require an F.C.C. license to operate in space. The license includes a commi...

Yard signs along the quiet country roads of Green Charter Township, Mich., home to horse farms and a 19th-century fish hatchery, blare a message that an angered community hopes is heard by local leaders, the Biden administration and China: “No Gotion.”The opposition is to a plan by Gotion, a subsidiary of a Chinese company, to build a $2.4 billion electric vehicle battery factory on roughly 270 acres of largely uninhabited scrubland. An investment of that magnitude can transform a local economy, but in this case it is unwelcome by many. Residents fear that the company’s presence is a dangerous infiltration by the Chinese Communist Party, and it has led to backlash, death threats and an attempt to unseat the elected officials who backed the project.The debate over the factory has turned a t...

This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, which gathered experts last week in the Greek capital to discuss global issues.Moderator: Steven Erlanger, Europe-based diplomatic correspondent for The New York TimesParticipants: Nanna-Louise Wildfang Linde, vice president of European governmental affairs for Microsoft; and Dr. Benedikt Franke, vice chairman and chief executive, Munich Security ConferenceExcerpts from the panel Rethinking Security: When Threats are Invisible have been edited and condensed.STEVEN ERLANGER The topic before us is cybercrime and we’ll get to that, but first I wanted to talk to Nanna-Louise about what’s in the backdrop of almost all our conversations, which is the war in Europe, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and that in that war there’s a ...

The United Auto Workers said on Tuesday that the union would expand its strike against three U.S. automakers on Friday if it was unable to make substantial progress in contract talks with them.Nearly 13,000 U.A.W. members walked off the assembly lines at three plants last Friday, one each at the three companies — General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler. The union has demanded a 40 percent wage increase over four years, better benefits and other changes. The automakers, which are based in or have a big presence in Michigan, have offered raises of about half as much.In a video posted on Facebook on Tuesday, the union’s new president, Shawn Fain, said workers could walk out of more plants at the end of this week.“If we don’t see serious progress to noon Friday, Sept....

On the same day that Sam Bankman-Fried’s trial on federal fraud charges begins, the best-selling author Michael Lewis is set to publish a widely anticipated book on Tuesday about Mr. Bankman-Fried’s failed cryptocurrency exchange, FTX.Mr. Lewis, the author of “The Blind Side,” “The Big Short” and “Moneyball,” spent months interviewing Mr. Bankman-Fried and other top FTX executives, and had access to the company’s headquarters in the Bahamas for the book, “Going Infinite.”The book features previously unreported details about Mr. Bankman-Fried’s empire, from its founding in the Bay Area to its epic collapse in the Bahamas last year. Here are some takeaways.Is Bankman-Fried guilty?Mr. Lewis does not offer a “yes” or “no” answer. He depicts Mr. Bankman-Fried as delusional and often callous in ...

Cryptocurrency lobbyists were riding so high in early 2022 that an FTX executive felt comfortable directly emailing Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, to ask him to meet with Sam Bankman-Fried, the soon-to-be-disgraced founder of the cryptocurrency exchange.It worked.“The day that would work for me is February 1,” Mr. Powell replied to a Jan. 11 email from Mark Wetjen, an FTX policy official and former commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.Mr. Powell’s public calendar shows that he and Mr. Bankman-Fried met as planned. And Mr. Wetjen went on to send the Fed chair two policy papers that FTX had recently published, according to emails obtained through a public records request. “Hope you’re finding these useful!” Mr. Wetjen wrote. “Great to have people like...

A year ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was a fixture on magazine covers and in the halls of Congress, a tousle-haired crypto billionaire who hobnobbed with movie stars and bankrolled political campaigns.On Tuesday, the founder of the failed FTX digital currency exchange is set to leave the jail where he has been confined for more than seven weeks and stand trial in a Manhattan courtroom on federal charges of fraud and money laundering, capping one of the largest and swiftest corporate collapses in decades.The charges against Mr. Bankman-Fried, 31, have put the rest of the crypto industry on trial with him. He has emerged as a symbol of the unrestrained hubris and shady deal-making that turned cryptocurrencies into a multitrillion-dollar industry during the pandemic. The demise of FTX in November he...

The United Automobile Workers union said on Wednesday that it planned to expand its strike against the big three Michigan automakers on Friday if negotiators failed to make substantial progress on new contracts.The union ordered workers to walk off the job nearly two weeks ago at three vehicle assembly plants — each owned by one of the companies, General Motors, Ford Motor and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler and Jeep. Last Friday the union broadened the strike to include spare parts-distribution centers owned by G.M. and Stellantis, saying it had made progress in its talks with Ford.The U.A.W. president, Shawn Fain, is scheduled to update members in a video streamed live on Facebook on Friday morning.The union is seeking a substantial wage increase to make up for much smaller raises ove...