WASHINGTON — A trade dispute over Canadian lumber that began when Ronald Reagan was president has become a political problem for President Biden, with home builders and members of Congress urging the administration to try to strike a deal that could help bring down the cost of critical building materials.

Lumber prices remain far above prepandemic levels, even after falling sharply in recent weeks, an increase driven in part by strong housing demand and an abundance of home improvement projects during the pandemic. The higher-than-normal prices are among a wide range of supply chain complications that have cropped up as the economy picks up steam.

But unlike other commodities that have been in short supply, lumber is also the subject of a long-running trade dispute between the United States and Canada, adding a layer of diplomatic intrigue to the scramble for in-demand building materials. The two countries are locked in a thorny disagreement over softwood lumber,...

The country’s biggest banks are ready to put more money in their shareholders’ pockets.

Several Wall Street banks announced plans on Monday to increase dividends and buy back their stock as the economy rebounds from the coronavirus pandemic.

Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo were the most aggressive. Morgan Stanley said it would double its dividend to 70 cents per share and expand a previously announced share buyback plan to $12 billion from $10 billion. Wells Fargo also said it would double its dividend, to 20 cents per share, and buy back $18 billion of its own shares.

The banks moved to return money to shareholders after passing the Federal Reserve’s annual stress test last week, which was the final hurdle to ending temporary restrictions on payouts that were put in place because of the pandemic.

JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank by assets, said it would increase its dividend to $1 a share starting in the third quarter, from the current 90 cents....

Representatives for the F.T.C. and the New York attorney general did not immediately have comments.

Christopher Sgro, a spokesman for Facebook, said: “We are pleased that today’s decisions recognize the defects in the government complaints filed against Facebook. We compete fairly every day to earn people’s time and attention and will continue to deliver great products for the people and businesses that use our services.”

The news pushed Facebook’s stock up 4.2 percent, and the company passed $1 trillion in market capitalization, a first for the social network and one of only half a dozen companies to reach such a valuation.

The decision was a major blow to bipartisan attempts in Washington to rein in Big Tech. President Biden has installed critics of the technology giants in key regulatory roles, including Lina Khan as chair of the F.T.C., and he is expected to issue broad mandates this week for federal agencies to address corporate concentration across the...

WASHINGTON — A federal court threw out the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust complaint against Facebook on Monday, dealing a major setback to the government’s push to break up the social media giant.

The complaint the Federal Trade Commission filed in December was insufficient and failed to provide enough facts to back its claims that Facebook had a monopoly over personal social networking, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote in an 53-page opinion.

The judge, James E. Boasberg, said that the case was not dismissed. But he said that the agency needed to refile the complaint within 30 days.

The “Internet Computer” is an ambitious crypto project by the Dfinity Foundation, a Swiss nonprofit organization with big Silicon Valley backers like Andreessen Horowitz. Last month, it was the darling of the crypto world when it held a bonanza of an initial coin offering, valuing its token, known as ICP, at tens of billions of dollars in market cap. It’s a different story now, after ICP has lost more than 90 percent of its value.

Even in the famously volatile crypto market, ICP stands out. The stunning climb and crash has people asking what really happened — and who may have profited.

“Something went wrong,” said Miguel Morel of Arkham Intelligence, a crypto analysis firm that tracked ICP tokens through the blockchain. In a report shared with DealBook, Arkham noted that “a token dropping over 90 percent in the first month after launch is highly unusual.” Arkham said that it found 44 “probable insider addresses” that deposited 10 million ICP tokens worth over $2...

This week, the European Central Bank proposed using gender diversity among criteria for approving board members at the banks it supervises. Such mandates are one lever for increasing representation of women in an industry still dominated by men.

Another lever — the focus of a recent qualitative study — is to change how banks distribute opportunities and rewards, the DealBook newsletter reports.

When women were asked by Women in Banking & Finance, a nonprofit group in London, to reflect on their careers, common complaints included that they were heard differently simply because they were women and that they were required to find an innovative niche to succeed in the finance industry. Men, on the other hand, were more often welcome on traditional paths. It was even worse for Black women, for whom “the headwinds were more intense and the tailwinds were fewer,” according to the report.

Half of women interviewed specifically mentioned “mediocre” men, who they...

Doug Guthrie spent 1994 riding a single-speed bicycle between factories in Shanghai for a dissertation on Chinese industry. Within years, he was one of America’s leading experts on China’s turn toward capitalism and was helping companies venture East.

Two decades later, in 2014, Apple hired him to help navigate perhaps its most important market. By then, he was worried about China’s new direction.

China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, was leaning on Western companies to strengthen his grip on the country. Mr. Guthrie realized that few companies were bigger targets, or more vulnerable, than Apple. It assembled nearly every Apple device in China and had made the region its No. 2 sales market.

So Mr. Guthrie began touring the company with a slide show and lecture to ring the alarm. Apple, he said, had no Plan B.

The Victoria’s Secret Angels, those avatars of Barbie bodies and playboy reverie, are gone. Their wings, fluttery confections of rhinestones and feathers that could weigh almost 30 pounds, are gathering dust in storage. The “Fantasy Bra,” dangling real diamonds and other gems, is no more.

Carol Tomé had retired. After more than two decades working at Home Depot, where she rose to become chief financial officer, Ms. Tomé stepped down in 2019 and settled into the kind of postprofessional existence enjoyed by very well-compensated executives. There was a family office, a family foundation and a 600-acre farm in north Georgia.

The United States and Britain have agreed to end a long-running trade spat over aircraft subsidies, and not impose certain retaliatory tariffs for five years, the nations announced on Thursday.

The tariffs related to a 17-year dispute between the United States and the European Union over subsidies for Boeing and Airbus, and over much of that time, Britain was a member of the bloc. The agreement mirrors one reached between the United States and European Union on Tuesday.

The pact announced on Thursday also said the two nations would work together to “address the challenge posed by nonmarket economies, such as China” in the civil aircraft sector. China has built a state-sponsored aerospace manufacturer, Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China, to compete with Boeing and Airbus.

Britain and the United States agreed to explore a coordinated approach to screen investments in the aircraft industry financed by China and other nonmarket economies. These investments...

Record profits warranted record bonuses. That was the recommendation in January by executives at the biotech firm Emergent BioSolutions. The board of directors agreed, signing off on nearly $8 million in cash and stock awards for five company leaders.

The bonuses arrived this spring even as Congress was investigating the company’s production of Covid-19 vaccines in Baltimore, where manufacturing mistakes have rendered 75 million doses unusable and forced a two-month-long shutdown of operations.

Emergent has nonetheless enjoyed the best financial year in its two-decade history, thanks largely to the government’s largess and decision to sidestep the usual contracting rules, interviews and previously undisclosed documents show.

Without seeking competitive bids, federal officials in May 2020 not only committed to reserve production space at the troubled Baltimore plant, but also booked two Emergent facilities nearby to bottle and package vaccines and coronavirus...

The action came on an already big day for American antitrust. Lina Khan, 32, was sworn in as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, “the youngest in the agency’s history and its most progressive in at least a generation,” write The Times’s David McCabe and Cecilia Kang. Khan is a Big Tech critic whose views on Amazon changed how many think about monopoly in the internet era. She will now have power to reshape the rules: Her leadership role signals that the Biden administration will act on the trustbusting promises made on the campaign trail.

Right now, cracking down on corporations is one of the few things that unites a divided government. Democrats and Republicans at the state and federal level are calling for new antitrust rules and challenging Big Tech in court for alleged abuses of competition law. Notably, the very progressive Khan has some staunch Republican support. And the review of the insurance brokers’ merger began last year, when Donald Trump — another...

The Education Department wiped out more than $500 million in student loans on Wednesday, in its first step toward unclogging a badly backed-up relief program for students who were scammed by their schools.

For the first time in more than four years, the department approved new grounds for claims through the so-called borrower defense program, canceling debts for 18,000 applicants who attended ITT Technical Institute, a for-profit chain that abruptly collapsed in 2016. The program allows students who were defrauded by their schools to have their federal student loans forgiven.

The new approvals involved applications from two groups of students: those who attended ITT between 2005 and 2016 and said they had been misled about their earning chances, and those who attended between January 2007 and October 2014 and said they had been misled about their ability to transfer credits to other institutions.

“Our action today will give thousands of borrowers a fresh start...

The Education Department wiped out more than $500 million in student loans on Wednesday, in its first step toward unclogging a badly backed-up relief program for students who were scammed by their schools.

For the first time in more than four years, the department approved new grounds for claims through the so-called borrower defense program, canceling debts for 18,000 applicants who attended ITT Technical Institute, a for-profit chain that abruptly collapsed in 2016. The program allows students who were defrauded by their schools to have their federal student loans forgiven.

The new approvals involved applications from two groups of students: those who attended ITT between 2005 and 2016 and said they had been misled about their earning chances, and those who attended between January 2007 and October 2014 and said they had been misled about their ability to transfer credits to other institutions.

“Our action today will give thousands of borrowers a fresh start...

Five years ago, Google started making its own smartphones and voice-assisted speakers. Now, Google has a store to sell them in.

The company is set to open its first-ever physical store on Thursday on the ground floor of its Manhattan headquarters in the Chelsea neighborhood. The store will carry a full array of Google’s gadgets, including Pixel smartphones, Nest home devices and Fitbit’s wearable fitness products, the company said.

Inside, shoppers can try out devices and subscription services, while existing customers can get on-site repairs of broken products. The 5,000-square-foot store will include rooms where customers can experience “real-life scenarios” in which Google products can be useful, the company said.

General Motors is accelerating its plans to produce electric vehicles, the latest sign that automakers are engaged in a competitive race to transform themselves and embrace the electrification of cars and trucks.

The automaker said on Wednesday that it planned to build two more battery plants in the United States over the next several years, in addition to two battery factories it is already building in Ohio and Tennessee.

The company said it planned to spend $35 billion on E.V.s in the five years ending in 2025. That’s the second increase in the last eight months. A year ago, G.M. said it would spend $20 billion in that period, and in November increased the figure to $27 billion.

“E.V. adoption is increasing and reaching an inflection point, and we want to be ready to produce the capacity that we need to meet demand over time,” G.M.’s chief financial officer, Paul Jacobson, said in a conference call with reporters. “We know we’ll need those battery plants to...

The Education Department wiped out more than $500 million in student loans on Wednesday, in its first step toward unclogging a badly backed-up relief program for students who were scammed by their schools.

For the first time in more than four years, the department approved new grounds for claims through the so-called borrower defense program, canceling debts for 18,000 applicants who attended ITT Technical Institute, a for-profit chain that abruptly collapsed in 2016. The program allows students who were defrauded by their schools to have their federal student loans forgiven.

The new approvals involved applications from two groups of students: those who attended ITT between 2005 and 2016 and said they had been misled about their earning chances, and those who attended between January 2007 and October 2014 and said they had been misled about their ability to transfer credits to other institutions.

“Our action today will give thousands of borrowers a fresh start...

Five years ago, Google started making its own smartphones and voice-assisted speakers. Now, Google has a store to sell them in.

The company is set to open its first-ever physical store on Thursday on the ground floor of its Manhattan headquarters in the Chelsea neighborhood. The store will carry a full array of Google’s gadgets, including Pixel smartphones, Nest home devices and Fitbit’s wearable fitness products, the company said.

Inside, shoppers can try out devices and subscription services, while existing customers can get on-site repairs of broken products. The 5,000-square-foot store will include rooms where customers can experience “real-life scenarios” in which Google products can be useful, the company said.

TAIPEI, Taiwan — This is the age of “vaccine diplomacy.” It is also the era of its bitter, mudslinging opposite.

For months, Taiwan has been unable to purchase doses of the BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, and the island’s leaders blame “Chinese intervention.” China, which regards Taiwan as its own territory, calls this accusation “fabricated out of nothing.”

It is unclear what steps, if any, the government in Beijing has taken to disrupt Taiwan’s dealings with BioNTech, the German drugmaker that developed the vaccine with Pfizer. BioNTech declined to comment.

But the crux of the problem is that a Chinese company claims the exclusive commercial rights to distribute BioNTech’s vaccine in Taiwan. And for many people in the self-governing democracy, buying shots from a mainland Chinese business is simply unpalatable.

The Federal Reserve is about to release its first set of economic projections since March, after months of data surprises have shown the labor market healing more slowly and inflation moving up more quickly than many officials expected.

One of the documents released on Wednesday will show each Fed policymaker’s expectation for where the central bank’s benchmark interest rate — currently near zero — will be in the months and years ahead, and the latest update could get a lot of attention in financial markets.

Some economists predict the officials will pull forward their expectations for the first interest rate increase amid stronger inflation. In March, the median official did not expect rates to increase until at least 2024.

If three of the 18 Fed policymakers move up their rate estimates, the median projection would point to a first increase in the federal funds rate — the Fed’s main policy tool — by late 2023. That would still make for a long period of very...

About four years ago, Paul Hollowell found out that Amazon was making a gadget he desperately wanted: a camera whose sole purpose was to photograph his clothes.

The oval camera, called the Echo Look, worked by photographing several clothing combinations and using artificial intelligence to highlight which outfit looked best. Mr. Hollowell, an entrepreneur and a frequent traveler from Dallas, usually spent hours picking clothes to pack for a trip and believed the camera would help him decide. He ordered one for $200.

He was correct — the camera saved time. But what he didn’t predict was that Amazon would send an email three years later with sad news: The product and its app would soon cease to work. The company said it had included some of the Echo Look’s features, like giving style advice, in more popular Amazon products, so it was time to put the digital fashionista to rest.

Mr. Hollowell, 39, was angry. “You can sunset the service, but at least let me use...

Less than a decade ago, the economic malaise in Rocky Mount, N.C., was tangible. Rocky Mount Mills, a big cotton mill that had given the town its identity, had shut down in 1996, costing the area hundreds of jobs. Downtown was deserted. Nobody was hiring.