Bloomberg Vancouver’s multimillion-dollar homes are increasingly out of reach for Vancouverites. And nothing speaks to the Canadian city’s affordability crisis more than its empty houses. Vacant or temporarily occupied dwellings have more than doubled since 2001 to 66,719 last year as neighborhoods are hollowing out, said Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, who analyzed census data ...
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American consumer confidence retreats from a 13-year high
Bloomberg Consumer confidence retreated in February from a 13-year high as Americans tempered expectations of their finances and the economy, with sentiment remaining sharply divided among party lines. The University of Michigan said that its preliminary index of sentiment cooled to a three-month low of 95.7 from 98.5 in January. The median projection in a Bloomberg survey called for 98. ...
Read More »Uber suffers for Trump ties, Tesla’s Musk goes unsullied
Bloomberg While Uber got shellacked for its link to President Donald Trump, the electric carmaker and sometimes-rival Tesla Inc. has comfortably weathered its association with a president who has lower approval ratings than any predecessor in his first days in office. Uber Technologies Inc. lost customers and drivers and became the subject of a campaign on Twitter that encouraged ...
Read More »Disney boosts stake in Paris theme park
Bloomberg Walt Disney Co. plans to take full ownership of its ailing theme park in Paris to get the resort under control after 25 years of ups and downs at its first and only outlet in Europe. Disney is acquiring a 9 percent stake in Euro Disney SCA from Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal’s Kingdom Holding Co. for 2 ...
Read More »Ford to spend $1 billion on AI from ex-Google, Uber leaders
Bloomberg Ford Motor Co. is investing $1 billion in a months-old startup founded by two pioneers in the nascent autonomous vehicle sector. The Pittsburgh-based artificial intelligence company Argo AI will develop the brains — specifically, a virtual driver system — for the fully autonomous vehicles Ford has promised to bring to market in 2021. Founders Bryan Salesky and Peter ...
Read More »Sears rallies after CEO makes comeback plan
Bloomberg Sears Holdings Corp. rose the most in more than two years after Chief Executive Officer Eddie Lampert vowed to fix the troubled retailer, saying he would lower its debt burden and cut annual expenses by at least $1 billion. The cost savings will be part of a push to reduce overhead and more tightly integrate the Sears and ...
Read More »Slumping wage growth mars surge in Canadian jobs
Bloomberg Canada’s workers are getting plenty of jobs, just not wage increases. Data show a labor market that’s finally beginning to create new jobs, while at the same time offering little evidence that’s translating into higher incomes for workers as wage growth and hours worked slump. It’s a conundrum that casts a shadow over the report, which showed 48,300 ...
Read More »Intel Corp to invest $7 billion to complete Arizona chip factory
Bloomberg Intel Corp. Chief Executive Officer Brian Krzanich said the semiconductor maker will invest $7 billion to complete a chip factory in Chandler, Arizona, becoming the latest company to use a meeting with President Donald Trump to tout spending and job-creation plans that were already in place. Krzanich, speaking in the Oval Office, called the investment an expansion of ...
Read More »German exports break record as Trump targets trade balance
Bloomberg Germany posted a record trade surplus in 2016, which may further fuel accusations by the Trump administration that Europe’s largest economy is exploiting a “grossly undervalued†euro. Exports climbed 1.2 percent last year to 1.2 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion), the Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden reported on Thursday, while imports rose 0.6 percent to 954.6 billion euros. That ...
Read More »US home price gains rise in the fourth quarter
Bloomberg Home price gains accelerated in the fourth quarter, with increases reported in 89 percent of US metropolitan areas, as competition heated up for a record-low supply of listings, the National Association of Realtors said. The median price of an existing single-family home rose from a year earlier in 158 of the 178 areas measured, the group said in ...
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