Economy

In April, Wojcicki notified the company of her intention to make an offer and take the company private.She followed it up with a non-binding proposal, disclosed in a regulatory filing on Wednesday, to acquire all outstanding shares of 23andMe not already owned by her or her affiliates for $0.40 per share. A special committee formed by the company rejected the CEO’s proposal as it saw the offer as insufficient and not in the best interests of the non-affiliated shareholders.Wojcicki had indicated in her proposal that she was working with advisers and intended to begin speaking to potential partners and financing sources.The committee in its response said it was prepared to provide her and potential investors additional time to submit a revised proposal in line with the company’s expectation.Other alternatives will be pursued to maximize value for shareholders, in the absence of a revised offer, the panel added.23andMe, best known for its saliva-based test kits that offer users a glimpse into their genetic ancestry, went public in 2021. More

The American job market significantly slowed in July, the Labor Department reported on Friday, adding 114,000 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis.The unemployment rate rose to 4.3 percent.The job gains were smaller than projected.Here’s what else to know:Easing wage growth: Wages rose by 0.2 percent in July compared with the previous month and 3.6 percent from a year earlier. Wage growth has been moderating for more than two years, as the intense competition to hire and retain workers has slackened. But several employers said in interviews that pressure to raise wages was still there.The Fed is watching closely: The Federal Reserve held the benchmark interest rate steady at 5.3 percent at its meeting this week, but Jerome H. Powell, the Fed’s chair, said a rate cut “could be on the table” at its next gathering in September, depending on the data. As Fed officials continue trying to bring down inflation by keeping interest rates elevated, they have also underscored that the central bank’s goal is to maintain a healthy labor market. More

Federal Reserve officials held off on cutting interest rates this week because they want slightly more data to feel confident that inflation is truly coming under control. But while that approach is cautious when it comes to price increases, it could prove to be risky when it comes to the labor market.High Fed interest rates help to cool inflation by slowing demand in the economy. When it costs more to borrow to buy a house or expand a business, people make fewer big purchases and companies hire fewer workers. As economic activity pulls back, businesses struggle to raise prices as quickly, and inflation moderates.But that chain reaction can come at a serious cost to the job market. And as inflation comes down, Fed policymakers are increasingly attuned to the risk that they might overdo it, tipping the economy into a severe enough slowdown that it pushes unemployment higher and leaves Americans out of work.Those concerns were not enough to prod central bankers to cut interest rates at their meeting this week. For now, Fed officials think that the ongoing slowdown in hiring and a recent tick up in joblessness signal that labor market conditions are returning to normal after a few years of booming hiring. But policymakers are sure to carefully watch the July jobs report set for release on Friday for any sign that labor conditions are cracking — and have been clear that they will be quick to react if they see evidence that the job market is taking a sudden and unexpected turn for the worse.“A broad set of indicators suggests that conditions in the labor market have returned to about where they stood on the eve of the pandemic,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said during a news conference this week. He later added that “I would not like to see material further cooling in the labor market.”Mr. Powell said the Fed stood prepared to react if the labor market weakened more than expected.While the central bank is already widely expected to lower rates in September, economists think that officials could move them down faster than they otherwise might if the job market is cooling notably. In fact, investors expect the central bank to cut rates by three-quarters of a point — equivalent to three normal sized rate cuts — by the end of the year.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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A tax incentive, with bipartisan roots, aims to foster development in poor areas. It has fueled building, but it hasn’t always aided local residents.On an Alabama day so oppressive that the sweat pools on your face in the shade, Alex Flachsbart talks almost too rapidly to understand and drives around central Birmingham with similar velocity. Every few minutes, he pulls over to expound on a victory: neglected public housing, a long-empty factory, a crumbling department store, all being transformed into shiny apartments or airy office and retail space.“This was one of Birmingham’s white-whale buildings,” Mr. Flachsbart said of a former Red Cross office that had been renovated into 192 rental residences. The development happened with the help of a powerful tax break created in 2017 to lure investors toward poorer neighborhoods, an idea championed by Democrats and Republicans and cited by former President Donald J. Trump as among his proudest economic policy achievements. (“One of the greatest programs ever for Black workers and Black entrepreneurs,” he called the incentive in an appearance this week at a National Association of Black Journalists conference.)But the relatively low-income areas covered by the incentive, known as opportunity zones, didn’t benefit equally. On Mr. Flachsbart’s tour of new projects in downtown Birmingham, the stops dry up in the historically African American northwest quadrant. There, developable lots and vacant buildings haven’t received as much of the capital flowing toward the buzzier parts of downtown.“O.Z. was a nudge there because it was already at a tipping point,” said Mr. Flachsbart, who has put together several of those deals as chief executive of a nonprofit organization called Opportunity Alabama. “There is a wall at about 17th Street.”Alex Flachsbart, chief executive of Opportunity Alabama, in the Burger-Phillips Lofts in Birmingham, a building being renovated with opportunity zone financing.Charity Rachelle for The New York TimesBirmingham and the rest of Alabama are a window into how money has and hasn’t soaked into the ground designated as opportunity zones over the past six years. Congress is taking a closer look as it considers extending the incentive, which expires in 2026 along with most of the 2017 tax law. More

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TOKYO (Reuters) – A weak yen is hurting Japanese households’ sentiment and could erode their purchasing power, the government said in a report on Friday, underscoring its concern over the negative economic impact of the currency’s fall.When former premier Shinzo Abe’s administration deployed its “Abenomics” stimulus policies in 2013, rising inflation expectations helped improve household sentiment, the government said in an annual white paper analysing the economy.But a renewed rise in inflation expectations since mid-2023 has soured households’ mood, partly because the public reacted to media reports about rising food prices and the boost to import costs from a weak yen, it said.”A weak yen risks eroding consumers’ purchasing power” by pushing up inflation more than wage growth, the paper said.After languishing at 38-lows below 160 per dollar for much of July, the yen staged a sharp rally in the days leading up to and after the Bank of Japan’s decision on Wednesday to raise interest rates.It stood at 149.07 to the dollar in Asia on Friday as investors began shifting their focus on prospects of steady rate hikes by the BOJ, which would come in the face of an expected start to the U.S. monetary easing cycle by the Federal Reserve as soon as September.In the white paper that was prepared well before Wednesday’s BOJ decision, the government said the yen’s declines no longer push up export volume as much as in the past as more Japanese manufacturers shift production overseas.Rather, a weak yen weighs on smaller firms’ profits by boosting raw material import costs, the report said.A weak yen has become a source of concern for Japanese policymakers as it has dampened consumption by inflating the cost of importing fuel, food and raw material.Japanese authorities spent 5.53 trillion yen ($37 billion) intervening in the foreign exchange market in July to pull the yen off 38-year lows past 160 per dollar, official data showed.The Bank of Japan also cited the risk of an inflation overshoot from a weak yen as among reasons for raising interest rates on Wednesday.($1 = 149.5400 yen) More

TOKYO (Reuters) – The safe-haven Japanese yen and Swiss franc traded near multi-month highs against the dollar on Friday after an unexpected slump in U.S. manufacturing fuelled fears of a downturn, sending stocks and bond yields tumbling.Sterling languished at a one-month low after plunging almost 1% overnight as the Bank of England kicked off its interest-rate cutting cycle in a finely balanced decision. The euro also sagged near a one-month trough following dovish comments from the European Central Bank.The yen traded around 0.2% stronger at 149.085 per dollar, after popping as high as 148.51 overnight for the first time since mid-March. The franc edged to its highest since early February at 0.8726 per dollar.They were the only two major currencies to outperform the dollar overnight, which itself draws safe-haven flows, paradoxically even when the United States is the cause for concern.The risk-sensitive Australian dollar declined 0.14% to $0.6493 on Friday, extending the previous session’s 0.52% slide.That’s after megacaps led a Wall Street selloff on Thursday that reverberated in Asia, with Japan’s Nikkei plunging more than 4% and South Korea’s Kospi tumbling 2.5%.U.S. 10-year Treasury yields plunged as much as 14 basis points to 3.965% overnight, breaching the psychological 4% barrier for the first time in six months.”There was nowhere to hide overnight as dour economic data fuelled hard landing fears,” said Tony Sycamore, a markets analyst at IG.The U.S. economic outlook faces a crucial test later Friday, with the release of monthly payroll figures, and in the event of a weak result, “worries around a hard landing will intensify, as will calls for a 50-basis-point rate cut in September,” Sycamore said.Following the dour manufacturing numbers, traders now see 27.5% odds that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates by 50 basis on Sept. 18, up from 12% odds a day earlier, according to the CME Group’s (NASDAQ:CME) FedWatch tool.Meanwhile, sterling slipped 0.09% to $1.2723, and earlier dipped as low as $1.27215 for the first time since July 3.BoE Governor Andrew Bailey led a 5-4 decision to reduce rates by a quarter-point to 5%, and said the central bank would move cautiously going forward.The euro declined 0.07% to $1.07845, after reaching a three-week low of $1.07775 overnight.ECB policymaker Yannis Stournaras raised the risk of a weak euro zone economy sending inflation below the 2% target in an interview published on Thursday, reaffirming his expectation for two rate cuts this year. More