Economy

General view of the Bank of England building in London. LONDON – The Bank of England announced its decision to keep interest rates stable at its June meeting, but described the choice as “finely balanced” after the UK reached its 2% inflation target. Money market prices pointed to a near 50% chance of a rate cut in August as investors interpreted a subtly dovish message. The central bank's reference rate is 5.25%, the highest level in the last 16 years, maintained since August. Seven members of the monetary policy committee voted in favor of maintaining the rate, while two favored…

Related media - Associated media The European Union (EU) is accusing Microsoft of foul play after regulators charged the tech giant with unfairly bundling its popular Teams video conferencing software with its Office suite. This practice, the EU says, gives Teams an unfair advantage over competitors like Zoom and Slack. The issue centers on how Microsoft packages Teams within its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 subscriptions, which include programs like Word, Excel, and Outlook. Regulators believe this bundling essentially forces companies to adopt Teams if they want those other widely used Microsoft programs. This, they argue, hurts competition by limiting…

Linked media - Connected media Anthony J.F. O’Reilly, a charming, ambitious, Irish-born former president of the H.J. Heinz Company, who also owned newspapers, luxury brands, and trophy houses in France and the Bahamas, only to lose nearly everything in his eighth decade, died on 18 May in Dublin. He was 88 years old. The Irish Times and other Irish newspapers, citing a family spokesperson, said he died in hospital. No cause was given. From his earliest days, Mr. O’Reilly, known as Tony, showed an embarrassment about gifts. He was a top-flight rugby player while still a teenager: the “red-haired pin-up…

Related media - Associated media That has changed significantly in recent years, as the three national credit reporting agencies – TransUnion, Equifax and Experian – have eliminated much of that debt from credit reports. Over the past two years, they have stopped reporting debts under $500 and debts less than a year in collections. According to a recent study by the Urban Institute, these changes have erased medical debt from the credit reports of millions of Americans. The percentage of Americans with unpaid healthcare bills on their credit reports dropped from 12% in August 2022 to 5% in August 2023.…

Connected media - Associated media In the Shek Tong Tsui area, where Return Home Hunan opened in May, many of the brightly colored restaurants – once mainstays of the neighborhood – had recently closed their doors. A restaurant that served cheap noodles and milk tea was gone, as was a restaurant where retirees gathered to eat dim sum and catch up on the day’s news. “The restaurant business is hard work,” said Roy Tse, the owner of a local restaurant that sold lunch rice dishes once popular among office workers in Hong Kong’s Taikoo Shing business district. There are fewer…

Related media - Linked media At the center of the federal criminal trial is an incident in 2021 in which Mr. Watson’s deputy deceived Goldman Sachs employees on a fundraising call by posing as a YouTube executive. The revelation of the call precipitated Ozy’s downfall. Defense lawyers for Mr. Watson and Ozy blamed his deputy, Samir Rao, for the fake phone call and for misrepresenting Ozy’s financial data to potential investors. Ms. Frison said in her opening statement in May that Mr. Rao was “incompetent for the role he was filling.” Mr. Rao and Suzee Han, Ozy’s former chief of…

Associated media - Linked media GM and Ultium released statements saying they were pleased with the deal. The union has said it wants to use the Ultium Cells contract as a model to negotiate local deals at other battery plants that GM and its Detroit rivals are building. GM began production this year at a battery plant in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and has another under construction in Lansing, Michigan. Ford Motor plans two battery plants in Kentucky, one in Tennessee and one in Michigan. Stellantis, the maker of Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge and Ram vehicles, plans two battery plants in Indiana.…

Linked media - Linked media An Amazon spokesperson said in a statement that the company is appealing the sanctions and denied that the company used “fixed quotas.” Spokeswoman Maureen Lynch Vogel said “individual performance is evaluated over an extended period of time, relative to the performance of the entire site team” and that workers can “review their performance whenever they wish.” . California law also prohibits quotas that interfere with employees’ ability to take mandatory breaks or use the bathroom, or that prevent employers from following state health and safety laws. Experts said the law was among the first in…

Related media - Associated media Tiana’s Bayou Adventure uses the same trails as Splash Mountain, and riders still ride in vehicles made to look like hollowed-out logs. But everything else has been redesigned. Instead of a suspenseful story involving Br’er Rabbit being thrown into a field of brambles, the new attraction focuses on a Mardi Gras party: Tiana and her friend Louis, a trumpet-playing alligator, are at the search for creatures to form a band. Midway through the film, the cheerful Mama Odie, a voodoo queen in “The Princess and the Frog” and now a “fairy godmother of the bayou,”…