Investments and Business

President Biden, whose approval rating has suffered amid high inflation, is beginning to pressure large grocery chains to slash food prices for American consumers, accusing the stores of reaping excess profits and ripping off shoppers.“There are still too many corporations in America ripping people off: price gouging, junk fees, greedflation, shrinkflation,” Mr. Biden said last week in South Carolina. Aides say those comments are a preview of more pressure to come against grocery chains and other companies that are maintaining higher-than-usual profit margins after a period of rapid price growth.Mr. Biden’s public offensive reflects the political reality that, while inflation…

Hours before Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, was set to testify on Wednesday about child safety online, lawmakers released internal documents showing how his company had rejected calls to bulk up on resources to combat the problem.In 90 pages of internal emails from fall 2021, top officials at Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, debated the addition of dozens of engineers and other employees to focus on children’s well-being and safety. One proposal to Mr. Zuckerberg for 45 new staff members was declined.The documents, which are being released in full for the first time, were cited in a…

Walmart, the nation’s largest private employer, is raising salaries and benefits for store managers as it looks for ways to retain them.Walmart said on Monday that managers of its U.S. stores would be eligible for grants of up to $20,000 in company stock every year. The stock will vest over a three-year period, with a percentage vested each quarter.Earlier this month, Walmart said it would increase the average salary for store managers to $128,000 from $117,000. The big-box retailer also said bonuses for store managers could reach up to 200 percent of base salary, with a store’s profitability becoming a…

Four mothers sat quietly in the nursing room around midnight, breastfeeding their newborn babies. As one mother nodded off, her eyelids heavy after giving birth less than two weeks earlier, a nurse came in and whisked her baby away. The exhausted new mom returned to her private room to sleep.Sleep is just one of the luxuries provided by South Korea’s postpartum care centers.The country may have the world’s lowest birthrate, but it is also home to perhaps some of its best postpartum care. At centers like St. Park, a small, boutique postpartum center, or joriwon, in Seoul, new moms are…

Boeing hoped 2024 would be the year it would significantly increase production of its popular Max jets. But less than a month into the year, the company is struggling to reassure airline customers that it will still be able to deliver on its promises.That’s because the Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday that it would limit the plane maker’s output until it was confident in Boeing’s quality control practices. On Jan. 5, a panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 body shortly after takeoff, terrifying passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight and forcing the pilots to make an emergency…

No profit grows, Shakespeare once wrote, where no pleasure is taken. And so in the tedious march of life, we find joy in small things: The rising of the sun. A fine glass of wine. The greasy snap of a well-dressed potato crisp.But soft! Not so fast. Life affords no simple pleasures, and even that delectable crunch comes with a weighty debate: How much potato doth a true crisp — chip, to the Americans — contain?This — and several other probing questions of the crisp aficionado — was immortalized by a British tax appeals court last week, which ruled that…

In the Red Sea, attacks by Iranian-backed Houthi militants on commercial ships continue to disrupt a crucial trade route and raise shipping costs. The threat of escalation there and around flash points in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Yemen and now Iran and Pakistan ratchets up every day.Despite the staggering death toll and wrenching misery of the violence in the Middle East, the broader economic impact so far has been mostly contained. Oil production and prices, a critical driver of worldwide economic activity and inflation, have returned to pre-crisis levels. International tourists are still flying into other countries in the Middle East…