Author: Sara William

US President Donald Trump’s top trade officials will meet with their Chinese counterparts this week to discuss a de-escalation of their increasingly ugly and damaging trade war. The future of the global economy is riding on their success. The trade talks, the first in-person meeting between Chinese and American officials since the tit-for-tat tariff escalation kicked off in earnest in March, are unlikely to result in a trade deal, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Tuesday. But tariffs have reached such a high level that trade between the two countries has dropped off dramatically. Any thaw in the trade war could be a welcome…

Guesses about who the next Roman Catholic pope will be often prove inaccurate. Before the selection of Pope Francis in 2013, many bookmakers had not even counted him among the front-runners. This time, predictions are further complicated, because Francis made many appointments in a relatively short period during his tenure, diversifying the College of Cardinals and making it harder to identify movements and factions within the group. Still, discussion of potential names began long ago behind the Vatican’s walls and beyond. As the cardinals began meeting in Rome after Pope Francis’ funeral, papal watchers scrutinized snippets of statements emerging from…

The Trump administration resumed collection efforts on defaulted student loans Monday after a roughly five-year hiatus — and affected borrowers could begin feeling the financial consequences sooner than experts expected. The U.S. Department of Education released new details on what actions it plans to take, when. Here’s what to know. Federal benefits could be garnished by June The Education Department said it began this week alerting around 195,000 student loan borrowers in default that their federal benefits will be subject to garnishment in 30 days. Borrowers could have their benefits, including Social Security retirement checks, seized by the government as soon as June, the Education Department…

Hours after Donald J. Trump was sworn in for a second term, he issued an executive order laying the groundwork for mass deportations of immigrants and denying them legal assistance. Public interest groups focused on immigrant rights teamed up to fight the order and called in Gibson Dunn, a major law firm with the resources to help take on the White House. In January, Gibson Dunn, working with the groups, sued the Trump administration seeking to restore legal help for immigrants facing deportation. Two months later, Gibson Dunn changed its tune. Even though lawyers from the elite law firm had…

American companies are promising to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the United States as President Donald Trump deploys tariffs to promote domestic manufacturing, a gush of investment plans that the White House compiled on a new webpage titled The Trump Effect. Trump’s policies “have sparked trillions of dollars in new investment in U.S. manufacturing, technology, and infrastructure,” the site declares. And if they come to fruition, some corporate plans would represent a powerful increase in investment and potential jobs. But a review of the promised spending reveals that some companies committed to their investments previously, including under the Biden…

Starting Friday, the Trump administration is shelving a nearly century-old tax loophole that saved companies from paying tens of billions of dollars in fees on cheap imports, most of which come from China. The move stems from the sweeping tariffs President Donald Trump announced last month on most U.S. trading partners, and it will affect businesses from Etsy sellers and family-run footwear companies to e-commerce behemoths. In fiscal 2022, 83 percent of all U.S. e-commerce imports used the “de minimis” loophole, according to a government report. Trump initially did away with the de minimis exemption in February, but the move quickly overwhelmed…

The White House on Friday will release a partial budget proposal that calls for $163 billion in cuts to federal spending in the next fiscal year, a person familiar with the matter confirmed. The upcoming “skinny budget” will propose cuts to a broad array of federal spending on environmental, education, foreign aid and health-care programs, including many of those already targeted for reductions by the Trump administration or billionaire Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, the person said. Among the agencies proposed to see reductions include the Environmental Protection Agency, the Energy Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development,…

The clock is ticking on trade deals that the U.S. will need to strike with many nations, most notably China, to avoid what President Donald Trump’s Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, has described as an unsustainable tariff war. But in the U.S. farming sector, the damage has already been done and the economic crisis already begun. U.S. agriculture exporters say the global backlash to Trump’s tariffs is punishing them, especially through a decline in Chinese buying of U.S. farm products, leading to canceled export orders and layoffs. Peter Friedmann, executive director of the Agriculture Transportation Coalition, or AgTC, a leading export trade group for farmers, told…

President Trump this week revived a longstanding threat against Jerome H. Powell when he accused the Federal Reserve chair of “playing politics” and moving too slowly to lower interest rates. But privately, according to people close to Mr. Trump, the president has for months been aware that trying to oust Mr. Powell could inject more volatility into jittery financial markets. Investors are already uneasy after a period of tumult due to a blitz of tariffs announced by the administration this month. Undermining the political independence of the Fed, which is seen as critical across Wall Street, could risk a much…

Silicon Valley’s tech giants have long regarded antitrust scrutiny as an irritating cost of doing business. There will be investigations, filings, depositions and even lawsuits. Yet courts move slowly, while technology rushes ahead. Time works to the companies’ advantage, as the political winds shift and presidential administrations change. That dynamic often opens the door to light-touch settlements. But the stakes rose sharply for Google on Thursday, when a federal judge ruled that the company had acted illegally to build a monopoly in some of its online advertising technology. In August, another federal judge found that Google had engaged in anticompetitive behavior to protect its monopoly in…