business

One of the greatest takedowns of the minimum wage you’ll ever find comes from an unlikely place. The minimum wage is the Jason Vorhees of economics. It just won’t die. No matter how many jobs the minimum wage destroys, no matter how many times you debunk it, it always comes back to wreak more havoc. …

Hundreds of publicly traded companies appear to be keeping government-backed loans meant to help small businesses weather the coronavirus crisis. Only 68 of the 424 public firms that disclosed receiving $1.3 billion in loans from the federal Paycheck Protection Program had pledged to return them as of early Monday morning, according to regulatory filings compiled …

Big tech companies such as Facebook and Google have touted their efforts to help small businesses struggling during the coronavirus pandemic — but those efforts may eventually take customers away from the small businesses they were supposed to help, according to a new report. Facebook and Instagram Shops were announced this week to help shuttered …

A group of GOP senators has begun to push for a coronavirus relief bill with a focus on infrastructure progress, even as others in Senate Republican leadership remain wary of an additional massive spending package. “I want to do infrastructure,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) told CNN on Wednesday. “I told Trump, this is the …

An additional 2.4 million Americans filed jobless claims during the past week, bringing the total number of unemployed Americans to 38.6 million, or about 23 percent of the workforce. “The hemorrhaging has continued,” Torsten Slok, chief economist for Deutsche Bank Securities, told the New York Times. Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom has authored a study claiming …

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin on Tuesday warned that continued lockdowns meant to slow the spread of coronavirus could scar the U.S. economy. “There is the risk of permanent damage” if the economy stays shut, Mnuchin told lawmakers at a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee. “We’re conscious of the health issues and we want to …

President Trump has awarded a major contract to a Virginia company to manufacture Covid treatments in the U.S. The $354 million four-year contract was awarded to Virginia-based Phlow Corp. by Health and Human Services’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority to make pharmaceutical ingredients and medicines related to the coronavirus. The company says it is …

Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell warned in an interview released on Sunday that a full economic rebound following the coronavirus pandemic may not occur until the end of 2021. Powell described the sudden slowdown as the “biggest shock that the economy’s had in living memory” during the interview on CBS’s 60 Minutes. “This economy will …

China is preparing to place U.S. companies including Apple and Boeing on an “unreliable entities list” in response to newly announced sanctions on tech giant Huawei. “China will take forceful countermeasures to protect its own legitimate rights,” a source told China’s government-owned Global Times. The country could cease purchasing planes made by Boeing, and impose restrictions …

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world’s largest producer of silicon chips used in computers and other electronic devices, announced on Friday that it would build a factory in Arizona. The company, a major supplier to Apple, said on Friday that it “welcomes continued strong partnership” with the U.S. federal government and the state of Arizona. …