Investments and Business

Toni Irizarry recognizes that the economy has improved. Compared with the first wave of the pandemic, when Las Vegas went dark, and joblessness soared to levels not seen since the Great Depression, these are days of relative normalcy.Ms. Irizarry, 64, oversees a cafe at the Orleans Hotel and Casino, a property just off the Las Vegas Strip that caters mostly to locals. Guests have returned, filling the blackjack and roulette tables amid the cacophony of jingling slot machines — the sound of money.She started in the hospitality industry busing tables when she was only 16. Her paychecks have allowed her…

WeWork’s founder is trying to buy it Adam Neumann shot to fame by turning WeWork into a cultural and business phenomenon, before being ousted from the work space operator in dramatic fashion.But for the past several months, he has been trying to buy the now-bankrupt business — with the help of the hedge fund mogul Dan Loeb, DealBook is the first to report.Neumann’s new real estate company Flow Global is pushing WeWork to consider its takeover approach, according to a letter his lawyers sent to WeWork’s advisers on Monday. Flow which has already raised $350 million from the venture capital…

Gary, Ind., was once a symbol of American innovation. The home of U.S. Steel’s largest mill, Gary churned out the product that built America’s bridges, tunnels and skyscrapers. The city reaped the rewards, with a prosperous downtown and vibrant neighborhoods.Gary’s smokestacks are still prominent along Lake Michigan’s sandy shore, starkly juxtaposed between the eroding dunes and Chicago’s towering silhouette to the northwest. But now they represent a city looking for a fresh start.More than 10,000 buildings sit abandoned, and the population of 180,000 in the 1960s has dropped by more than half. Poverty, crime and an ignoble moniker — “Scary…

In the hours before the United States carried out strikes against Iran-backed militants on Friday, Washington hit Tehran with more familiar weapons: sanctions and criminal charges.The Biden administration imposed sanctions on officers and officials of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, Iran’s premier military force, for threatening the integrity of water utilities and for helping manufacture Iranian drones. And it unsealed charges against nine people for selling oil to finance the militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah.The timing seemed designed to pressure the Revolutionary Guards and its most elite unit, the Quds Force, at a moment of extraordinary tension in the Middle…

Walmart will add 150 stores in the United States over the next five years, a major expansion drive for the retail giant.The company said the move, which it announced in a statement on Wednesday, would involve millions of dollars in investment. Walmart employs roughly 1.6 million people in the United States, and said it hires hundreds of people each time it opens a new store.Walmart had just over 4,600 stores nationwide at the end of October, down from more than 4,700 a year earlier. The company has not opened a new U.S. store since late 2021.Most of the stores that…

There are more than four million electric vehicles on American roads, but fewer than 1,000 of them are heavy-duty trucks. On Tuesday, the three largest truck makers announced a push to remedy that deficit by calling on governments and utilities to help them build many more places to charge big rigs.Daimler Truck, which owns Freightliner; Navistar, which is controlled by Volkswagen; and Volvo Group North America have formed an association to push for chargers, improvements to the electricity grid and other measures they say are needed to promote battery- or hydrogen-powered trucks.The new organization, Powering America’s Commercial Transportation, will be…

In 2018, Anna-Lisa Miller was working with agricultural cooperatives in Hawaii, helping them reinvest in their communities through shared ownership.Ms. Miller, who had gone to law school and had planned to do civil rights litigation, loved the principle of workers partaking in the financial success of their employers, and the next year joined Project Equity, a nonprofit that helps small businesses transition to worker ownership. But it was slow going, with each transaction requiring customized assistance.Then she came across an investor presentation from a different universe: KKR, one of the world’s largest private equity firms. In it, a KKR executive,…

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 such as 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…

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen defended the Biden administration’s economic agenda on Thursday, drawing sharp contrasts with the policies of the Trump administration as President Biden begins to make the general election argument that he has been a stronger steward of the economy than his predecessor.The comments from Ms. Yellen came after new data released on Thursday bolstered that message: The United States economy grew at a healthy clip over the past year, surpassing 3 percent and defying expectations of a recession. The strong numbers coincided with an effort by the White House to amplify the president’s economic record and…

Since China reopened its borders in 2023 after three years of Covid isolation, domestic travel has thrived and high-speed rail has grown increasingly popular. But international trips in and out of the country are lagging, and flight capacity is still just two-thirds of prepandemic levels.The economic stakes are high. Before the pandemic, Chinese travelers were the world’s biggest spenders, accounting for 20 percent of global tourism spending, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization.In the past year, the Chinese authorities have tried to spur more inbound travel. Among the changes: China has waived travel visas or agreed to extend…