Business

U.S. Debt on Pace to Top  Trillion Over Next 10 Years

U.S. Debt on Pace to Top $54 Trillion Over Next 10 Years

The United States is on a pace to add nearly $19 trillion to its national debt over the next decade as the mounting costs of an aging population and higher interest expenses continue to weigh on the nation’s fiscal outlook, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said on Wednesday.But the report did offer a sliver of relief: Recently enacted legislation to curb federal spending and a U.S. economy that has been growing faster than expected are making the fiscal picture slightly less bleak. Annual deficits over the next decade are 7 percent smaller than the $20.3 trillion the budget office forecast…
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Yellen Says Stable Financial System Is Key to U.S. Economic Strength

Yellen Says Stable Financial System Is Key to U.S. Economic Strength

Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen will tell lawmakers on Tuesday that the United States has had a “historic” economic recovery from the pandemic but that regulators must vigilantly safeguard the financial system from an array of looming risks to preserve the gains of the last three years.Ms. Yellen will deliver the comments in testimony to the House Financial Services Committee nearly a year after the Biden administration and federal regulators took aggressive steps to stabilize the nation’s banking system following the abrupt failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.While turmoil in the banking system has largely subsided, the Financial…
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N.F.L.’s Rapid Embrace of Gambling Creates Mixed Signals

N.F.L.’s Rapid Embrace of Gambling Creates Mixed Signals

Over the next week, the National Football League’s players, coaches, fans and executives will gather for an event that was virtually unthinkable just 10 years ago: the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, the gambling capital of the United States.Since the Supreme Court struck down, in 2018, a federal law that effectively banned sports betting outside Nevada — a prohibition once backed by the N.F.L.’s commissioner, Roger Goodell — the N.F.L. has embraced the gambling industry. It has forged partnerships reportedly worth nearly $1 billion over five years with sports betting companies, and permitted a sports book to operate inside one…
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Job Market Starts 2024 With a Bang

Job Market Starts 2024 With a Bang

The United States produced an unexpectedly sizable batch of jobs last month, a boon for American workers that shows the labor market retains remarkable strength after three years of expansion.Employers added 353,000 jobs in January on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department reported on Friday, and the unemployment rate remained at 3.7 percent.The report also put an even shinier gloss on job growth for 2023, including revisions that added more than 100,000 to the figure previously tallied for December. All told, employers added 3.1 million jobs last year, more than the 2.7 million initially reported.After the loss of 14…
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The Squeeze on British Businesses Is Not Letting Up Soon

The Squeeze on British Businesses Is Not Letting Up Soon

Britain’s economy faces a bracing fact: The number of companies that folded last year was the highest in three decades.More than 25,000 companies registered as insolvent in 2023, the most since 1993, according to government data published this week. As pandemic-related support measures for businesses ended, the wreckage from years of high debt and interest rates, soaring prices and a cost-of-living crisis become clearer. Insolvencies have spread from small to larger businesses, analysts said.Businesses still dealing with relatively high costs, demands for higher wages, supply chain uncertainties and wavering consumer confidence are hoping for brighter economic times. Slower inflation, stronger…
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Hottest Job in Corporate America? The Executive in Charge of A.I.

Hottest Job in Corporate America? The Executive in Charge of A.I.

In September, the Mayo Clinic in Arizona created a first-of-its-kind job at the hospital system: chief artificial intelligence officer.Doctors at the Arizona site, which has facilities in Phoenix and Scottsdale, had experimented with A.I. for years. But after ChatGPT’s release in 2022 and an ensuing frenzy over the technology, the hospital decided it needed to work more with A.I. and find someone to coordinate the efforts.So executives appointed Dr. Bhavik Patel, a radiologist who specializes in A.I., to the new job. Dr. Patel has since piloted a new A.I. model that could help speed up the diagnosis of a rare…
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