Economy

Interest rate increases have directly affected the labor market by taking the air out of the tech sector; the information services category dropped 5,000 jobs in December. That doesn’t include the bulk of 18,000 recently announced layoffs at Amazon, or the 8,000 at Salesforce. Rising borrowing costs have also hamstrung home sales, resulting in sharp

Lower energy prices helped to push inflation in Europe lower last month, the European Commission reported on Friday, but many prices are still rising at a brisk pace and policymakers have given little indication that they plan to halt planned interest rate increases. Consumer prices in the countries that use the euro as their currency

Federal Reserve officials worried that inflation could remain uncomfortably fast, minutes from their December meeting showed, and some policymakers fretted that financial markets might incorrectly interpret their decision to raise interest rates more slowly as a sign that they were giving up the fight against America’s rapid price gains. Inflation is beginning to slow down

New car and truck sales likely fell to their lowest level in a decade last year because of a global shortage of computer chips and rising interest rates that have pushed up the cost of buying vehicles. Analysts expect the auto industry to have sold fewer than 14 million light trucks and cars in the

The labor market remained a key source of strength for households and the overall economy ahead of the holiday season, even as hiring struggles remained a headache for employers, the latest government data indicates. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Wednesday that there were 10.5 million U.S. job openings on the last day of November,

A Federal Reserve official compared inflation to Uber surge pricing on Wednesday in the first formal monetary policy remarks of 2023, kicking off what promises to be a contentious year of debate about how fast price increases will fade and how aggressive America’s central bank needs to be in counteracting them. Neel Kashkari, the president

What’s more, the growing gap between interest rates in Japan and elsewhere was pushing down the yen’s value, piling even more stress on the country’s highly import-dependent economy. That made some analysts speculate that the Bank of Japan would soon be forced to raise interest rates. Which brings us up to December, when Mr. Kuroda

Hidekazu Yokoyama has spent three decades building a thriving logistics business on Japan’s snowy northern island of Hokkaido, an area that provides much of the country’s milk. Last year, he decided to give it all away. It was a radical solution for a problem that has become increasingly common in Japan, the world’s grayest society.

The winter holiday season across most of Britain ends on Tuesday, but the return to work for millions of Britons comes on the same day as yet another train strike, promising a commute as unpredictable as the country’s increasingly erratic rail network. Britain begins the new year just as it ended the old one, in