Business

On a recent Saturday night, a group of dancers in outlandish costumes held signs outside the Star Garden topless bar in North Hollywood, urging customers to stay away. Dancers claimed they had been locked out for four months because they had petitioned club owners to reinstate two fired colleagues and improve security and safety measures. Strippers haven't successfully form a worker union since the effort at San Francisco's Lusty Lady in the 1990s, but dancers at the Star Garden were trying anyway. That is to a great extent in view of fruitful unionization endeavors at behemoths like Starbucks (SBUX), Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL), which snatched features and motivated others to send off their own — including staple laborers at a Massachusetts Trader Joe's and a gathering of creation l...

Alibaba shares fell Monday after US regulators added the stock to a growing list of Chinese firms that might be kicked off Wall Street if US auditors can't inspect their financial statements. Alibaba's stock plunged 11 percent Friday after the Securities and Exchange Commission put the company on its watchlist. Investors have worried about Alibaba for years, as the company has been caught up in a sweeping crackdown on China's booming technology sector. The stock has fallen nearly 70% from its all-time high and continues to struggle amid slowing growth and a weakening economy. The SEC can revoke the trading privileges of a company that has failed to allow American regulators to examine its financial audits for three straight years. China requires companies traded abroad to hold their ...

Hardly a month ago, trouble on Wall Street damaging to Netflix was the topic of scandal between April and May. Subsequently, investors were excited about the total number of Netflix customers abandoning the service. Actually, they are delighted. Netflix shares are up more than 6% in premarket trading on Wednesday after the company reported its latest results. The simple reason? It could have been so much worse. "It was a 'less-bad news is good news' quarter," analysts at Bespoke Investment Group said in a note to clients. Separating it: Netflix had previously pushed assumptions as low as possible, projecting that it would lose 2 million endorsers last quarter in the wake of shedding 200,000 in the initial three months of the year. That made space for a positive shock. "We're looki...

The global supply chain disruption sparked by the deadly coronavirus has taken a long time to recover. And now, as another wave of infections looms, some analysts are worried that manufacturers and transporters will have trouble getting goods to customers quickly enough to avoid a fresh wave of inflation. Container shipping has seen a rebound, according to Konstantin Krebs, managing partner at Capstan Capital, an investment banking firm that works with investors in containers and container shipping. "Containers are coming back onstream, and you can feel that," Krebs said. The Global Supply Chain Pressure Index from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York declined between April and June, though it remains "at historically high levels." The cost of booking a 40-foot shipping container has dr...

China's economy recorded a 0.4% decrease in growth in the last quarter in comparison to the previous fiscal year. For the first time in over two years, the effects of coronavirus lockdowns were felt in China, shutting down motorways and tightening social distancing measures as the country responded to the pandemic and the effects of the virus on the economy. Gross domestic product in the world's second largest economy contracted by 0.4% in the first quarter. The Chinese economy grew 6.7% in the third quarter from a year ago, sharply lower than the 4.8% increase it registered in the previous quarter and far below the 1% growth estimated by economists in a Reuters poll. On a quarterly basis, GDP shrank 2.6%. It was the weakest performance since the first quarter of 2020, when China's econ...

For the first time in two decades, the exchange rate between the euro and the US dollar has returned to parity. The euro reached $1.00 on Tuesday, down about 12% since the start of 2015. Unemployment fears have been stoked by high inflation and high-aspect energy uncertainty related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The European Union, which received roughly 40% of its natural gas supply from Russia before the war, is attempting to reduce its dependence on Russian oil and gas. At the same time, Russia has throttled back gas supplies to some EU countries and recently cut the flow in a critical piece of gas import infrastructure in Europe—the Nord Stream pipeline to Germany—by 60%. Now that critical piece of infrastructure has been shut down for scheduled maintenance, and German officials ...

The talks between the United States and China were held on Monday, August 5, to discuss challenges that the global economy faces amid a rising theory that some Trump-era tariffs could be cut to ease inflation and increase growth. US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and China's Vice Premier Liu He Beijing's top economic official   held a conversation that lasted for two hours, according to a Treasury Department statement. These talks were described as "candid" and are due to Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal stating that the Biden administration may choose to revoke some tariffs on of the Chinese mainland very soon. The Chinese readout noticed that the trade was "useful" and "sober minded." It added that the different sides examined "sees on the macroeconomic circumstance and th...

Tencent's largest shareholder, about a year after promising it would not sell its stock, will cease its gradual decrease of its stake in the Chinese social media giant and begin to repurchase its shares. Prosus, an independent offering by South African media and internet investment firm Naspers, announced Monday that it would halt its big Tencent investment to fund a share repurchase program. Tencent (TME) shares tumbled over 4% on Tuesday in Hong Kong following the news. On Monday, Prosus (PROSY) and Naspers (NAPRF)' stocks took off 16% and 23% in Amsterdam and Johannesburg, separately.   Amsterdam-based Prosus is Tencent's greatest investor with a 28.8% stake worth about $128 billion. It's not whenever Prosus first has sold Tencent offers as of late. Last April, Prosus s...

Vishal Garg, the CEO of Better.com who fired 900 employees over Zoom just before Christmas, has been sued by a former executive for allegedly misleading investors. A mortgage company backed by SoftBank agreed to a $7.7 billion merger with a blank-check firm to take the company public just over a year ago, but the so-called SPAC deal has yet to close. Since then, controversy surrounding founder Vikram Garg and surging mortgage rates have hurt the company's image and business. A former executive vice president for sales and operations at the company claimed in a lawsuit that Garg misrepresented Better.com's statements to ensure the SPAC merger moved forward. Garg was concerned that backers of Better.com might pull out of the merger after discovering its dramatic economic circumstances,...

Marriott Worldwide, Inc., a reservation service franchise, announced it was giving up its operations in Russia. The company cites Western economic sanctions as the main cause for its exit. Marriott International, the world's biggest hotel chain, announced that it would close its Moscow office and pause investment in Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine. However, its 22 hotels in Russia were mostly owned by third parties and remained open. In a statement, Marriott said: "We have come to the view that newly announced US, UK, and EU restrictions will make it impossible for Marriott to continue to operate or franchise hotels in the Russian market." The company stated it remained "focused on taking care of our Russian-based partners" and had been supporting employees in Ukraine a...