Investments and Business

In the fall of 2022, two top Biden administration officials met in New York with a key European diplomat. Over dinner outdoors, they strategized about how best to throttle Russia’s oil revenues in retaliation for its invasion of Ukraine.Near the end of what had been a collegial meal, the European official, Bjoern Seibert, dropped a bombshell on his hosts, Mike Pyle of the National Security Council and Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary. Europe, Mr. Seibert said, had big problems with President Biden’s sweeping new climate law.Mr. Seibert, the head of cabinet for the president of the European Commission, said…

The Biden administration on Monday announced a $1.5 billion award to the New York-based chipmaker GlobalFoundries, one of the first sizable grants from a government program aimed at revitalizing semiconductor manufacturing in the United States.As part of the plan to bolster GlobalFoundries, the administration will also make available another $1.6 billion in federal loans. The grants are expected to triple the company’s production capacity in the state of New York over ten years.The funding represents an effort by the Biden administration and lawmakers of both parties to try to revitalize American semiconductor manufacturing. Currently, just 12 percent of chips are…

Conventional wisdom dictates that retiring with debt — especially a debt as large and significant as a mortgage — is financially dicey at best and potentially ruinous at worst.That’s not how Brian Lindmeier sees it. “It just doesn’t make any sense at all to pay off the house,” he said.Mr. Lindmeier, 80, a retired purchasing and inventory manager, and his wife, Cindy, who retired from the local public school system, refinanced their home in Orange, Calif., at the end of 2020. They rolled over their balance into a new 30-year loan and slashed their interest rate in half to a…

Lawyers representing victims of Jeffrey Epstein sued two of the disgraced financier’s closest advisers on Friday, accusing them of “aiding, abetting and facilitating” his sex trafficking of young women and teenage girls.The civil suit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, seeks class action status on behalf of Mr. Epstein’s many victims. It comes just a few months after two big banks agreed to pay hundreds of millions dollars to Mr. Epstein’s victims to settle lawsuits that claimed the banks had enabled his activities.The newest lawsuit seeks money damages from Mr. Epstein’s longtime personal lawyer, Darren Indyke, and his longtime accountant,…