Top stories
Half of America's Service Companies Paid More for Supplies Last Month. Fuel Came Up Twice as Often as Anything Else.
Filling a Heating-Oil Tank in Massachusetts Costs About $700 More Than Last Year. The State Has Declared an Energy Emergency.
Investors Asked to Pull 39% of Blue Owl's Tech Lending Fund. It Will Pay Out 5%.
The Senate's Permitting Deal Would Give Opponents 150 Days to Sue. It Would Also Send Data Centers Their Grid Bill.
Chip Sales Passed $1 Trillion by August. In February, That Was the Forecast for the Whole Year.
Qualcomm Will Buy Patents From Huawei. Two Years Ago, Washington Stopped It Selling Huawei Chips.
Asher Lara Wants to Fill Restaurant Seats. The Test Is Whether His Instincts Scale.
Florida Says Atlantic Coast Life Is $170 Million Short. South Carolina Says $900 Million of Annuities Unlock This Year.
Schneider Is Paying a 42% Premium for PTC. The Price Is Still Below Where PTC Traded a Year Ago.
Customs Took In $333 Billion in Fiscal 2026. Refunds Sent About $147 Billion Back Out.
For 16 Months, Health Care Has Added More Jobs Than the Whole American Economy
Toyota Came Within 38,000 Cars of GM Last Quarter. Hybrids and Sedans Closed Most of the Gap.
The Big Read
The NumbersAmerica Imported a Record $421 Billion in August. Without Computers, Chips and Telecom Gear, Imports Are Down This Year.
In March 2025 Americans were stockpiling. In August 2026 they were buying servers, chips and network equipment. Take those out and the country is importing about 9 per cent less than in the same months of last year.
A container ship on the Savannah River in Georgia. Capital goods made up 43.6 per cent of American goods imports in August. File photograph.
The United States bought $420.8 billion of goods and services from the rest of the world in August, according to figures published on Tuesday by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. It is the most in any month since the monthly series began in 1992. The previous high, $416.4 billion, was set in March 2025, the month before the administration announced its "reciprocal" tariffs.
Exports rose as well, to $315.2 billion, but by less. The deficit widened by $12.7 billion to $105.6 billion, the largest since that same March. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected a shortfall of about $102.1 billion.
The two records look alike on a chart. They are made of different things.
Markets
Paramount Sold $41.4 Billion of Bonds to Buy Warner Bros. They Fell the Next Day.
The financing had to be done fast, with a fee of about $7 million a day running from 1 October.
The Numbers
Washington Paid $709 Billion of Interest This Year, Almost as Much as It Sent the States for Medicaid
The debt grew 7 per cent and the rate on Treasury notes rose.
Weather
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Infrastructure Everybody Depends On Should Not Be Owned by a Competitor
Coverage Should Follow the Approval, Not the Advice
You Cannot Delegate the Thing You Have Never Done
Business
True Food Kitchen Raised $100 Million in 2022. It Entered Bankruptcy With Two Weeks of Cash.
The chain's sales barely fell last year.
Pakistan Has Nine Bidders for a State Power Distributor. The Losses Will Stay on Everyone's Bill.
A sale changes who runs the wires.
C.H. Robinson Is Paying $5.8 Billion for RXO. The Price Rests on $300 Million of Savings.
RXO is expected to make $137 million of adjusted EBITDA this year.
There Are 30% Fewer Japanese Companies in China Than in 2012. Those That Stay Still Make Things There, but Fewer Count on Selling There.
Japanese firms are not leaving China so much as changing what they use it for.
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A Pacific Hurricane Made Landfall in Baja. Its Flood Watches Reach Iowa.
The Long View
Hiring Has Been Stuck for 30 Months. In August, Americans Spent as if It Wasn't.
AI
OpenAI Cancelled One GPT-6.1 on Monday and Shipped Another on Tuesday. The Second One Costs a Fifth.
Money
Apple Pay Reached India With One Bank's Credit Cards. UPI Handled 24.5 Billion Payments in August.
Business
LNG Canada Will Double to 28 Million Tonnes. The Announcement Has a Date in the 2030s and No Price.
Editor's Choice
The Five Fairford Suspects Are Out on Bail. British Police Say They Have an Open Mind. Washington Says a Foreign Actor.
The British account is of a farmer's phone call, material reported as not viable, and a bail decision taken at the first deadline.
Latest News
Everything we have published, newest firstThe G-7 Will Release 100 Million Barrels. Some May Already Have Been Promised in March.
The Group of Seven agreed on Friday to release 100 million barrels of diesel and crude from emergency stocks over four months, coordinated by the International Energy Agency. The statement gives no split between diesel and crude, names no countries, and describes the release as implementing existing commitments. US diesel stocks are at their lowest for late September in four decades of weekly records.
China Says It Shipped America $258 Billion of Goods This Year. America Counted $158 Billion.
From January to July, China reported $258.1 billion of exports to the United States. The US Census Bureau recorded $158.3 billion of imports from China and Hong Kong. The difference, almost $100 billion, is five times its usual size, and a Peterson Institute analysis says tariff evasion is the most likely reason. Vietnam's figures run the other way.
Business
Schneider Is Paying a 42% Premium for PTC. The Price Is Still Below Where PTC Traded a Year Ago.
Schneider Electric agreed on Sunday to buy PTC, the Boston maker of design and product-lifecycle software, for $205 a share in cash, valuing its equity at about $22.6 billion. That is 42.3 per cent above Friday's close, and 5 per cent below PTC's peak close in August 2025. The French group will borrow most of the money, sell up to €6 billion of new shares and pause its buyback for two years. Its shares fell about 10 per cent in Paris.
Shipping a Container From Asia to America Costs Four Times What It Did in February. To Europe, the Price Is Falling.
The closure of Hormuz raised fuel costs on every route. Seven months later, the bill is landing very unevenly, and the heaviest part of it is on American importers.
Mortgage Rates Are Back Where They Were in 2023. This Time the Cushion Is Already Spent.
For three years a narrowing gap between mortgage rates and Treasury yields kept home loans cheaper than the bond market alone would have made them. That gap is now close to its old normal, so further moves in the ten-year will reach borrowers almost one for one.
The Numbers
Insurers Keep Telling Surveys They Will Hire. Payrolls Show 90,000 Fewer Jobs.
The September jobs report added 29,000 jobs and cut 60,000 from the two months before. Inside it, insurance carriers and the businesses around them lost jobs for the 11th month running. They now employ about 90,000 fewer people than in May 2025, a faster fall than in any comparable stretch in data going back to 1990. In the industry's own hiring survey, carriers keep saying the opposite.
Metrics Cut Its Funds by Up to 12 Per Cent. KPMG Still Would Not Sign.
One of Australia's largest private credit managers wrote down three listed funds on Monday, by 2, 10 and 12 per cent, and said a clean audit was expected on Wednesday. On Wednesday the auditor said it was not ready. Metrics has now suspended redemptions and stopped publishing net asset values in the unlisted funds underneath. The share prices had been pointing at a lower number for months.
This is what a large American manufacturing investment increasingly looks like: more capacity, more automation, the same headcount, and a local incentive package written to stop a plant leaving rather than to bring new work in.
Markets
The Fed Will Now Show Banks the Stress Test Before They Sit It. One Governor Says That Is the Problem.
The Federal Reserve finalised two rules on Wednesday that put its stress test scenarios and models out for public comment every year and average banks' stress capital buffers over two tests. The Board says the changes should cut year-to-year swings in those requirements by about half without materially changing total capital. Governor Michael Barr says they will let banks optimise for the test instead of the risk.
What We’re Following
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The 30-Year Treasury Closed at Its Highest Since the Bond Came Back in 2006. Households Had Already Marked Up Their Inflation Forecast.
The Men Held Near Fairford Are Five Londoners. They Are on the Ordinary Police Clock, Not the Terrorism One.
Oil Rose 3 Per Cent on a Rejected Offer. The Strait It Is Pricing Logged 78 Ships in 20 Days.
Five Men Are in Custody Near RAF Fairford. No Attack Took Place, and No Official Has Alleged Iran Directed Anything.
China's Factories Grew Again in September. What They Pay for Materials Grew Faster.
China's official manufacturing index rose to 50.1 in September, back above the line after two months of contraction. Production picked up and the services and construction gauge recovered. But the index of raw material prices jumped to 60.8, the steepest reading since the spring, while the index of prices factories charge rose to 54.0. The gap between what manufacturers pay and what they get is widening again.
Washington Square Park Already Has a Stage. This Weekend, an Artist Is Offering Strangers a Turn on It.
The project began as conversations with strangers in the park. Its organizers say Drebin has had hundreds of them.
Opinion Voices
Argument and analysis from our columnists
Featured Voices
The reporters and editors behind the coverage
Cory Chamberlain
Senior Writer
Alison Acosta
Technology Correspondent
There Are 30% Fewer Japanese Companies in China Than in 2012. Those That Stay Still Make Things There, but Fewer Count on Selling There.
Chip Sales Passed $1 Trillion by August. In February, That Was the Forecast for the Whole Year.
Schneider Is Paying a 42% Premium for PTC. The Price Is Still Below Where PTC Traded a Year Ago.
Daniel Okafor
Markets Editor
America Imported a Record $421 Billion in August. Without Computers, Chips and Telecom Gear, Imports Are Down This Year.
Filling a Heating-Oil Tank in Massachusetts Costs About $700 More Than Last Year. The State Has Declared an Energy Emergency.
Investors Asked to Pull 39% of Blue Owl's Tech Lending Fund. It Will Pay Out 5%.
Margaret Holloway
Editor-at-Large
The Story So Far
The AI Buildout22 stories
- 5 Oct Chip Sales Passed $1 Trillion by August. In February, That Was the Forecast for the Whole Year.
- 3 Oct Five Tech Groups Asked Trump to Spare Data Centers From Chip Tariffs. For Now, They Are Exempt.
- 3 Oct America Now Spends More Building Data Centers Than Chip Plants. Most Other Private Building Is Shrinking.
- 26 Sept $30 a Seat and a Meter Behind It. What Microsoft's One-App Copilot Actually Costs a Buyer.
- 14 Sept The Market Read the Essay as a Forecast for Chip Demand
- 10 Sept The $875m Bet Is That Inference Is a Memory Problem
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