Companies

Earnings for Nordstrom are expected later today. The retailer announced back in June that it was considering becoming a private company again. Buying out shareholders takes a lot of financing, and the company appears to be having a tough time getting formal talks going with potential investors. But that may not be such a bad […]

You may have heard about Disney’s announcement that it’s going to launch its own streaming service. The company is ending a deal with Netflix and says it wants more control over its destiny. And as for cable, that service that “cord cutters” and “cord nevers” spurn, is another streaming service a problem for them? Maybe […]

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has a study out today highlighting problems startups have getting financing. And the reason this matters? The report says startups account for “nearly all net new job creation” in the U.S. economy. For these companies to continue growing, they need to be able to access financing — and some are […]

The nation’s third-biggest cable company, Charter Communications, has a new feature for its subscribers: access to Netflix. More than half of the leading cable and subscription TV companies now offer Netflix. It wasn’t too long ago these forces were fierce rivals. So what’s behind the business of partnering instead? Click the audio player above to […]

One of the big names in corporate earnings news today was SoftBank, which reported that its quarterly profit rose 50 percent from a year ago. If you’ve never heard of the Japanese conglomerate, you probably have heard of Sprint. SoftBank bought a majority stake in the U.S. wireless carrier four years ago for 22 billion […]

Amazon announced this week that it’s going to apply its hassle-free returns policy to all items purchased on the website from October. That’s good news for consumers, but it’s a new burden for some third-party Amazon sellers, who, until now, could have policies of their own.  Click the audio player above to hear the full […]

As unemployment continues to fall and employers scramble to find the workers they need, demographic groups that traditionally lag economically are benefiting. The unemployment rate for African-Americans fell to 7.1 percent in June, just shy of the all-time low of 7 percent hit in April 2000. Unemployment rates for young people and those with a […]

The weather outside may be sweltering, so it might seem an odd time to be thinking about the holiday season, but that’s exactly what shippers are doing. Today FedEx announced it won’t be adding holiday surcharges to regular packages it delivers over that period. That’s significant, because in June, UPS announced it will add an […]