(Reuters) – U.S. shoppers plan to spend a record $41.5 billion during the upcoming school year, a trade group forecast on Thursday, as families accommodate an inflation-driven rise in the prices of back-to-school items, particularly electronics. The survey by the National Retail Federation (NRF) predicts consumers will spend 12.5% more during one of the key…
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Andrea Gacki, a veteran U.S. Treasury official who helped design Washington’s Russia sanctions strategy, has been appointed director of the department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Thursday. Gacki, who has headed the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) since 2019, “guided the office through major world…
By Granth Vanaik (Reuters) -U.S. online sales during Amazon.com’s Prime Day shopping event rose 6.1% to $12.7 billion from last year, as inflation-hit Americans hunted for discounts on the e-commerce platform, Adobe Analytics data on Thursday showed. Shoppers spent $6.3 billion on the second day of the big sale as deep discounts on products such…
(Reuters) – Analysts are cautiously optimistic as second-quarter reporting season rolls out amid this year’s rally in U.S. stocks fueled by optimism over artificial intelligence (AI) and a resilient U.S. economy. Strategists expect profit at S&P 500 companies to have dropped 6.4% in the second quarter from a year earlier, according to Refinitiv data. Several…
(Reuters) – Germany on Thursday passed its long-awaited China strategy after months of wrangling within Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-way coalition over how much to toughen Berlin’s stance. Following are highlights of the paper and statements by German leaders. GERMANY’S ASSESSMENT OF CHINA * China is trying to create economic and technological dependencies in order to…
BEIJING (Reuters) – Alibaba’s Ele.me on Thursday became China’s first delivery platform to sign collective contracts on wages and labour safety with its staff, official media reported, as Beijing signals an end to its crackdown on the tech sector. The contracts will apply to 3 million workers on the platform across 11,000 delivery stations in…
(Reuters) – Virgin Galactic Holdings said on Thursday that the space tourism startup will launch its second commercial flight in a window that opens next month after a successful first flight in June. The firm is among the few U.S.-based space companies, along with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to cater to…
(Reuters) -Twitter has filed a lawsuit against four unnamed entities in Texas for data scraping last week, a move that showed why the Elon Musk-owned social network recently placed daily limits on the number of tweets a user could read. The complaint by Musk’s X Corp, which owns Twitter, alleged that the entities indulged in…
BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Mitsubishi Motors’ joint venture with China’s Guangzhou Automobile Group (GAC) on Thursday said it would cut staff costs to try to revive its fortunes after sharp sales declines for sport utility vehicles (SUV) such as the Outlander. State-owned automaker GAC said in a statement the venture would look to “optimise” its employment…
(Reuters) – Chindata Group Holdings said on Thursday Bain Capital, its largest shareholder, did not intend to sell any of its shares in the Chinese data center operator after a rival bid from China Merchants Capital (CMC). The unit of state-owned conglomerate China Merchants Group offered to acquire Chindata Group for $9.2 per American Depositary…
