Tag: Business News

As the American electric grid becomes less dependable, a growing number of businesses and homeowners are buying their own power systems to protect themselves from being left in the dark. Twenty years ago, only 0.57% of U.S. homes worth $150,000 or more had installed backup generators, mainly along hurricane-prone coastlines, according to backup-power provider Generac Holdings Inc. Now the number is 5.75%, a 10-fold increase.

The Federal Reserve formally adopted new ethics rules aimed at limiting financial-market trading by its top officials, senior staff and close family members. The central bank revealed the broad contours of these new rules last fall following disclosures of active trading by some of its officials, and it expanded the scope of the restrictions in their final form. The Fed on Friday said the new rules “aim to support public confidence in the impartiality and integrity of the [interest-rate-setting Federal Open Market] Committee’s work by guarding against even the appearance of any conflict of interest.”

Federal Reserve officials pushed back Friday against the prospect that they would begin raising interest rates next month with a larger half-percentage-point increase in their benchmark rate. Recent data pointing to stronger hiring, consumer spending and inflationary pressures had prompted investors in bond and interest-rate futures markets to place growing probabilities on a larger rate increase at the Fed’s next meeting, on March 15-16. The Fed typically raises rates in smaller, quarter-percentage-point increments and hasn’t made a larger increase since 2000.

American Airlines Group Inc. said it is further trimming its summer flying schedule due to Boeing Co. ’s continuing delays in delivering new 787 Dreamliners. American, the world’s largest carrier by passenger traffic, is planning to temporarily suspend routes including those between Seattle and London, Los Angeles and Sydney, and Dallas and Santiago, Chile, according to a securities filing Friday. It will also delay the launch of service between Dallas and Tel Aviv, and reduce flight frequencies between Miami and São Paulo, Brazil.

The hot U.S. housing market extended into the new year as buyers rushed to purchase homes in the face of record-low inventory and climbing mortgage rates. Existing-home sales rose 6.7% in January from the prior month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 6.5 million, the National Association of Realtors said Friday, with home sales increasing in regions across the country. January sales fell 2.3% from a year earlier.

General Electric Co. warned that supply-chain problems, labor shortages and inflation would weigh on its financial results in the first half of the year. The disclosure Friday, in a newsletter for GE investors, sent shares of the industrial giant down about 6%. They ended the day at $92.69, little changed from a year ago, after adjusting for a reverse stock split..

Facebook was long one of the surest bets in digital advertising. No longer. Martha Krueger, who runs a gift-basket business called Giften Market, used to spend her entire advertising budget on Meta Platforms Inc.’s Facebook and Instagram. She picked up a new customer for every $14 she spent.

‘Get in the boats and go.” As the coronavirus pandemic upended global commerce in March 2020, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell repeatedly invoked the urgent British evacuations from Dunkirk in World War II. This wasn’t the time, he said, to get hung up on the technicalities that central bank economists and lawyers love to chew over. Mr. Powell bluntly directed his colleagues to move as fast as possible. They devised unparalleled emergency-lending backstops to stem an incipient financial panic that threatened to exacerbate the unfolding economic and public-health emergencies.

U.S. health regulators delayed their review of Pfizer Inc.’s Covid-19 vaccine in children under 5 years old because the initial two-dose series so far wasn’t working well against the Omicron variant during testing, people familiar with the decision said. An early look at data showed the vaccine to be effective against the Delta variant during testing while that was the dominant strain, but some vaccinated children developed Covid-19 after Omicron emerged, the people said.

WASHINGTON—President Biden is shifting his message on inflation to show he understands Americans’ economic woes, in the midst of mounting public frustration over rising prices and after pleas from worried Democrats to change his tune. In recent weeks, Mr. Biden has made personal appeals in his speeches to families facing higher prices for food, gasoline and cars. Addressing county officials this week he said: “I grew up in a family where the price at the pump was felt in the kitchen. Everybody knew. Everybody felt it. I understand.” In Virginia last week, he said: “I know food prices are up, and we’re working to bring them down.”