Business

Months after China Evergrande ran out of cash and defaulted in 2021, investors around the world scooped up the property developer’s discounted I.O.U.’s, betting that the Chinese government would eventually step in to bail it out.On Monday it became clear just how misguided that bet was. After two years in limbo, and with over $300 billion in debt, Evergrande was ordered by a judge in Hong Kong to liquidate, a move that will set off a race by lawyers to try to find and grab anything belonging to Evergrande that can be sold.In a small courtroom on the 12th floor…

The recession America was expecting never showed up.Many economists spent early 2023 predicting a painful downturn, a view so widely held that some commentators started to treat it as a given. Inflation had spiked to the highest level in decades, and a range of forecasters thought that it would take a drop in demand and a prolonged jump in unemployment to wrestle it down.Instead, the economy grew 3.1 percent last year, up from less than 1 percent in 2022 and faster than the average for the five years leading up to the pandemic. Inflation has retreated substantially. Unemployment remains at…

But the Met faces acute challenges. Mounting live opera is expensive, requiring lavish sets, star singers and a much larger orchestra and chorus than the biggest Broadway shows can boast. Inflation has added to the opera company’s burden, with the costs of shipping and materials increasing sharply. And ticket revenues last season from in-person performances and movie-theater broadcasts were down by about $25 million from before the pandemic.In addition to tapping its endowment, the Met said it would institute measures to cut costs and increase revenues that were suggested by Boston Consulting Group, which conducted a study of the company’s…

In early January in San Antonio, dozens of Ph.D. economists packed into a small windowless room in the recesses of a Grand Hyatt to hear brand-new research on the hottest topic of their annual conference: how climate change is affecting everything.The papers in this session focused on the impact of natural disasters on mortgage risk, railway safety and even payday loans. Some attendees had to stand in the back, as the seats had already been filled. It wasn’t an anomaly.Nearly every block of time at the Allied Social Science Associations conference — a gathering of dozens of economics-adjacent academic organizations…

The Federal Aviation Administration recommended late Sunday night that airlines begin visual inspections of door plugs installed on Boeing 737-900ER planes, the second Boeing model to come under scrutiny this month.The F.A.A. said the plane has the same door plug design as the 737 Max 9, which had 171 jets from its fleet grounded after a door panel was blown off one of the jets shortly after an Alaska Airlines flight left Portland, Ore., on Jan. 5., forcing an emergency landing.The door plugs are placed as a panel where an emergency door would otherwise be if a plane had more…

With inflation falling, unemployment low and the Federal Reserve signaling it could soon begin cutting interest rates, forecasters are becoming increasingly optimistic that the U.S. economy could avoid a recession.Wells Fargo last week became the latest big bank to predict that the economy will achieve a soft landing, gently slowing rather than screeching to a halt. The bank’s economists had been forecasting a recession since the middle of 2022.Yet if forecasters were wrong when they predicted a recession last year, they could be wrong again, this time in the opposite direction. The risks that economists highlighted in 2023 haven’t gone…