Business

The attacks on crucial shipping traffic in the Red Sea straits by a determined band of militants in Yemen — a spillover from the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza — are injecting a new dose of instability into a world economy already struggling with mounting geopolitical tensions.The risk of escalating conflict in the Middle East is the latest in a string of unpredictable crises, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine, that have landed like swipes of a bear claw on the global economy, smacking it off course and leaving scars.As if that weren’t enough, more volatility lies ahead in the form of a wave of national elections whose repercussions could be deep and long. More than two billion people in roughly 50 countries, including India, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa, the United Stat...

Over the past two weeks, the owner of a hip wine bar in Buenos Aires saw the price of beef soar 73 percent, while the zucchini he puts in salads rose 140 percent. An Uber driver paid 60 percent more to fill her tank. And a father said he spent twice as much on diapers for his toddler than he did last month.In Argentina, a country synonymous with galloping inflation, people are used to paying more for just about everything. But under the country’s new president, life is quickly becoming even more painful.When Javier Milei was elected president on Nov. 19, the country was already suffering under the world’s third-highest rate of inflation, with prices up 160 percent from a year before.But since Mr. Milei took office on Dec. 10 and quickly devalued the Argentine currency, prices have soared a...

The New York State Department of Health is scrutinizing Bellevue Hospital’s use of unlicensed technicians to assist doctors in weight-loss surgeries.Bellevue, a large public hospital in Manhattan, churns thousands of low-income patients through bariatric surgery every year, The New York Times reported this month. Doctors are paid in part based on the volume of surgeries.In their push for speed, bariatric surgeons have at times asked equipment technicians to scrub in and participate in surgeries because the surgeons were short on assistants, two Bellevue doctors told The Times. Those technicians, who worked for an outside vendor called Surgical Solutions, were not licensed to treat patients.The state health agency has begun an inquiry into the allegations, which could lead to a formal inves...

Typically, the esoteric inner workings of finance and the very public stakes of government spending are viewed as separate spheres.And bond trading is ordinarily a tidy arena driven by mechanical bets about where the economy and interest rates will be months or years from now.But those separations and that sense of order changed this year as a gargantuan, chaotic battle was waged by traders in the nearly $27 trillion Treasury bond market — the place where the U.S. government goes to borrow.In the summer and fall, many investors worried that federal deficits were rising so rapidly that the government would flood the market with Treasury debt that would be met with meager demand. They believed that deficits were a key source of inflation that would erode future returns on any U.S. bonds they...

Illumina, the leading producer of gene-sequencing machines, announced Sunday that it would sell Grail, a cancer test developer that it purchased for $7.1 billion in 2021.The move came two days after Illumina lost its case in a federal appeals court, which largely upheld a Federal Trade Commission ruling that Illumina should unwind its deal with Grail on antitrust grounds.The case was seen by antitrust experts as a test of regulators’ efforts to stop big companies from buying fledgling innovators.The deal had also faced a roadblock in Europe. In September 2022, the European Union said it would block the acquisition. Illumina, based in San Diego, previously stated publicly that if it was unsuccessful with appeals in either jurisdiction, it would divest the start-up.“We are committed to an ex...

Martin Guzman was a college freshman at La Universidad Nacional de La Plata, Argentina, in 2001 when a debt crisis prompted default, riots and a devastating depression. A dazed middle class suffered ruin, as the International Monetary Fund insisted that the government make misery-inducing budget cuts in exchange for a bailout.Watching Argentina unravel inspired Mr. Guzman to switch majors and study economics. Nearly two decades later, when the government was again bankrupt, it was Mr. Guzman as finance minister who negotiated with I.M.F. officials to restructure a $44 billion debt, the result of an earlier ill-conceived bailout.Today he is one of a number of prominent economists and world leaders who argue that the ambitious framework created at the end of World War II to safeguard economi...

William G. Connolly, who over a long career as an editor at The New York Times raised its journalistic standards, opened new opportunities for a more diverse range of employees and in 1999 brought that experience to bear in a wholesale revision of the newspaper’s venerable style guidebook, died on Tuesday in Maplewood, N.J. He was 85.His daughter, Kathleen, confirmed the death. He was in a rehabilitation facility recovering from a fall, she said.After more than 20 years at The Times — minus a few in the early 1980s, when he left to work at a Virginia paper — Mr. Connolly was elevated in 1987 to a new senior position in which he managed training and recruitment.In that role he oversaw the paper’s ethical guidelines, brought in new faces from a broader pool of applicants and turned a critic’...

Inflation data released on Tuesday showed that price increases remained moderate in November, the latest sign that inflation has cooled substantially from its June 2022 peak. That’s likely to keep the Federal Reserve on track to leave interest rates unchanged at its final meeting of the year, which takes place this week.The Consumer Price Index came out just hours before the Fed began its two-day gathering, which will conclude with the release of an interest rate decision and a fresh set of quarterly economic projections at 2 p.m. on Wednesday. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, is then scheduled to hold a news conference.Central bankers have embraced a recent slowdown in price increases, and Tuesday’s data largely suggested that inflation remains lower than earlier this year. Overall inflat...

The Nation, the progressive magazine that has published since 1865, will publish monthly instead of every other week starting in January.As part of the change, the magazine will now be a “bigger, richer” 84 pages, instead of the current 48 pages, Bhaskar Sunkara, the president of The Nation, said.D.D. Guttenplan, The Nation’s editor, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, its editorial director, said that the publication would continue to focus on long-form analysis and news from the political left. Ms. vanden Heuvel said that the staff was reconsidering the role the print magazine plays alongside the brand’s other products, including its website, podcasts, events and a possible book imprint — and that the coverage in print had a long shelf life.“People put aside magazines, circle what they want to re...

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York is expected to announce on Monday a plan to invest $1 billion to expand chip research activities in Albany, N.Y., as the state aims to continue as a global semiconductor center.The plan is expected to create 700 new permanent jobs and retain thousands more, and includes the purchase of new version of one of the world’s most expensive and sophisticated manufacturing machines, along with constructing a new building to house it.The initiative should draw $9 billion in additional investments from chip-related companies, according to state officials. They expect it to boost New York’s chances to be selected to host a new National Semiconductor Technology Center, a planned centerpiece of the research portion of federal money that Congress allocated in 2022 as part o...