Top stories
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.
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.
Paramount Sold $41.4 Billion of Bonds to Buy Warner Bros. They Fell the Next Day.
Washington Paid $709 Billion of Interest This Year, Almost as Much as It Sent the States for Medicaid
Customs Took In $333 Billion in Fiscal 2026. Refunds Sent About $147 Billion Back Out.
The Big Read
The DealSchneider Is Paying a 42% Premium for PTC. The Price Is Still Below Where PTC Traded a Year Ago.
Fears that artificial intelligence will undercut software makers have pushed PTC's shares down 17 per cent this year. An industrial buyer has decided that makes it cheap. The merger agreement shows who carries the risk if Washington objects.
An engineer working in computer-aided design software. PTC makes CAD and product-lifecycle software used by more than 30,000 companies. File photograph.
On Friday, PTC's shares closed at $144.03. On Sunday its board agreed to sell the company to Schneider Electric for $205 a share in cash.
That is a premium of 42.3 per cent, and the two companies' joint announcement on Monday made a point of it. It is also less than PTC's shares fetched last year. They closed at $216.53 on 27 August 2025, their peak, and finished above $205 on 33 trading days between July and October 2025. Anyone who bought on those days would be selling at a loss.
The gap between those two numbers is the story of the deal. PTC, based in Boston, makes software used to design and manage complex physical products: computer-aided design, and the product-lifecycle systems that keep track of a part from drawing board to repair shop. It has more than 30,000 customers, generated €2.4 billion of revenue last year, not counting its ThingWorx and Kepware products, and, by Schneider's measure, kept about 40 per cent of it as adjusted operating profit. Its business did not collapse. Its share price did. PTC ended 2025 at $174.21, closed as low as $112.33 in June and was down 17 per cent for the year by Friday, as investors worried about what artificial intelligence would do to software makers. The company had responded by stepping up its share buybacks, Yahoo Finance reported.
National News
Springfield's Truck Plant Closed When GM's Contract Ran Out. Its New Owner Has Not Said When It Will Reopen.
The layoffs equal about 3 per cent of all the jobs in the Springfield metropolitan area.
The Numbers
Oil Is Up 61 Per Cent Since February. American Natural Gas Costs What It Did a Year Ago.
Two fuels from the same wells have parted company.
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
World
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.
Oil Averaged $96 in the Spring. The Economies of America's Oil States Shrank.
The government's state accounts show what a price shock does and does not do.
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Editors read every submission. Here is how to send documents, on background or on the record.
How to submitThe Picture
The Men Held Near Fairford Are Five Londoners. They Are on the Ordinary Police Clock, Not the Terrorism One.
Business
LNG Canada Will Double to 28 Million Tonnes. The Announcement Has a Date in the 2030s and No Price.
Explainer
A Pacific Hurricane Made Landfall in Baja. Its Flood Watches Reach Iowa.
Field Notes
The Five Fairford Suspects Are Out on Bail. British Police Say They Have an Open Mind. Washington Says a Foreign Actor.
Markets
The 30-Year Treasury Closed at Its Highest Since the Bond Came Back in 2006. Households Had Already Marked Up Their Inflation Forecast.
Editor's Choice
Oil Rose 3 Per Cent on a Rejected Offer. The Strait It Is Pricing Logged 78 Ships in 20 Days.
Washington says nearly 40 million barrels left the strait under escort in two days, a pace equal to the pre-war average.
Latest News
Everything we have published, newest firstMortgage Rates Are Back Where They Were in 2023. This Time the Cushion Is Already Spent.
The average 30-year mortgage rate rose to 7.28 per cent this week, Freddie Mac said, the highest since November 2023 and the biggest weekly jump since October 2022. The rate is the same as three years ago. What produces it is not. In 2023 lenders charged almost three points over the ten-year Treasury. Now they charge about two, and the ten-year is doing the rest.
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.
Business
Customs Took In $333 Billion in Fiscal 2026. Refunds Sent About $147 Billion Back Out.
The fiscal year closed on Wednesday with a record $332.6 billion of customs deposits, according to the Treasury's daily cash statement. It also closed with $157.8 billion paid out through Customs and Border Protection, against about $10.5 billion in each of the two previous years. Net of those payments, the border raised less than it did in fiscal 2025. Since May, it has paid out $17.5 billion more than it took in.
Metrics Cut Its Funds by Up to 12 Per Cent. KPMG Still Would Not Sign.
The disclosures say the losses are not realised and the loans have not been reclassified. They also show that most of the writedown came from equity rather than loans, and that the stock market had already marked these funds closer to the audited figure than the manager had.
Caterpillar Will Spend $1 Billion on a New Plant in Sanford. Its Workforce There Will Not Grow.
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.
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.
The project began as conversations with strangers in the park.
The Long View
Hiring Has Been Stuck for 30 Months. In August, Americans Spent as if It Wasn't.
The hires rate has sat between 3.1 and 3.5 per cent every month since March 2024, a pace last seen outside the pandemic in 2013. Quits are at 1.9 per cent. Yet real consumer spending rose 0.6 per cent in August while real disposable income did not grow, and the saving rate fell to 4.1 per cent. This week's data describe a labour market that has stopped moving and households that have kept spending anyway.
What We’re Following
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Five Men Are in Custody Near RAF Fairford. No Attack Took Place, and No Official Has Alleged Iran Directed Anything.
Thirty-Three Hours, Then a Board of Four. Automattic's Control Structure Was Never in Doubt.
Eight-Tenths of a Foot Below Sandy: The Nor'easter, Product by Product
$30 a Seat and a Meter Behind It. What Microsoft's One-App Copilot Actually Costs a Buyer.
OpenAI Cancelled One GPT-6.1 on Monday and Shipped Another on Tuesday. The Second One Costs a Fifth.
OpenAI dropped the planned October release of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal testing, its head of safety systems said, found it did not stay within scope or ask permission before acting. A day later, at DevDay, it launched GPT-6.1 Sol at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output, a fifth of GPT-6 Astra's standard prices. For buyers, the second announcement matters more than the first.
Apple Pay Reached India With One Bank's Credit Cards. UPI Handled 24.5 Billion Payments in August.
The launch is real and the market is enormous. The product that arrived is a tap-to-pay credit card wallet for one lender's customers, in a country where most digital payments do not touch a card at all.
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
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%.
Florida Says Atlantic Coast Life Is $170 Million Short. South Carolina Says $900 Million of Annuities Unlock This Year.
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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