SEATTLE — Amazon has eclipsed Walmart to become the world’s largest retail seller outside China, according to corporate and industry data, a milestone in the shift from brick-and-mortar to online shopping that has changed how people buy everything from Teddy Grahams to teddy bears.

Propelled in part by surging demand during the pandemic, people spent more than $610 billion on Amazon over the 12 months ending in June, according to Wall Street estimates compiled by the financial research firm FactSet. Walmart on Tuesday posted sales of $566 billion for the 12 months ending in July.

Alibaba, the giant online Chinese retailer, is the world’s top seller. Neither Amazon nor Walmart is a dominant player in China.

In racing past Walmart, Amazon has dethroned one of the most successful — and feared — companies of recent decades. Walmart perfected a thriving big-box model of retailing that squeezed every possible penny out of its costs, which drove down prices and...

SIENA, Italy — Last month Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, acquired another distinction: Europe’s weakest lender.

The bank performed worse than any other in a test of its financial health by European regulators, the latest gloomy chapter in a long-running saga of ill-fated deals, financial shenanigans, criminal wrongdoing and even a mysterious death.

The stress test by regulators, which showed that a severe recession would wipe out the bank’s capital, has forced the Italian government to face an unpleasant truth: Monte dei Paschi’s five-and-a-half-century run is coming to an end. With prodding from Rome, UniCredit, one of Italy’s largest banks, said last month that it was in talks to buy Monte dei Paschi on the condition that the government keep all the bad loans.

Monte dei Paschi, founded in 1472, will probably live on as a brand name on bank branches in central Italy, and customers probably won’t notice much difference, at least at...

When Kmart opened its first store, in Garden City, Mich., in 1962, the aim was to become an all-under-one-roof retailer. Americans’ shopping habits had gravitated toward the suburbs after World War II, and Kmart was going to cater to them.

Kmart last opened a new store in 2002; since then, it has all been closings. When it merged with Sears in 2005, Kmart had 2,085 locations. With the abrupt closing of the Astor Place Kmart in Manhattan last month, the number of open Kmart stores is down to 17.

For a time, the company’s real estate decisions worked well. But as shoppers moved farther into the suburbs, Kmart didn’t move with them. Kmart continued to build inside beltways and urban centers, even though its core customers were no longer there, a strategy that helped lead to the company’s tumble, retail experts say.

But the retailers’s two-decade slide has transformed the commercial real estate market in unexpected ways, bringing churches, truck washes and...

A scion of the Sackler family, the billionaire owners of Purdue Pharma, vowed in court on Tuesday that the family would walk away from a $4.5 billion pledge to help communities nationwide that have been devastated by the opioid epidemic, unless a judge grants it immunity from all current and future civil claims associated with the company.

Absent that broad release from liability, said David Sackler, 41, a former board member and grandson of one of the founders, the family would no longer support the deal that the parties have painstakingly negotiated over two years to settle thousands of opioids lawsuits brought by states, cities, tribes and other plaintiffs.

“We need a release that is sufficient to get our goals accomplished, and if the release fails to do that, then we will not support it,” Mr. Sackler declared during the fourth day of fractious testimony in the confirmation hearing for the bankruptcy plan of Purdue Pharma, whose misleading marketing of the...

When the Paycheck Protection Program began last year to help small businesses that were struggling during the pandemic, the federal government was determined to get the relief money out fast — so it waived much of the vetting lenders traditionally do on business loans.

The absence of those safeguards meant that fraud was highly likely. But just how much of the program’s $800 billion was taken illicitly?

A new academic working paper released on Tuesday contains an estimate: Around 1.8 million of the program’s 11.8 million loans — more than 15 percent — totaling $76 billion had at least one indication of potential fraud, the researchers concluded.

“There’s been a lot of anecdotes about fraud, but the tricky thing about anecdotes is that it’s very difficult to put them together and get at the scale of what’s going on,” said Samuel Kruger, an assistant professor of finance at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business and one of the paper’s...

Two decades ago, only 9 percent of white Americans rated their health as fair or poor. But 14 percent of Hispanic Americans characterized their health in those terms, as did nearly 18 percent of Black Americans.

In recent years, access to care has improved in the wake of the Affordable Care Act, which reduced the number of uninsured Americans across all racial and ethnic groups. But the racial health gap has remained, according to a series of studies published on Tuesday in the journal JAMA.

A dismal picture of persistent health disparities in America was described in an issue devoted entirely to inequities in medicine. The wide-ranging issue included research on spending and patterns of care, comparative rates of gestational diabetes and the proportion of Black physicians at medical schools.

The journal’s editors committed to a sharper focus on racism in medicine after a controversy in June, in which a staff member seemed to suggest that racism was not a...

The billionaire founder of Evergrande, China’s most indebted property developer, has stepped down from his position as chairman of the company’s main real estate arm, Hengda Real Estate Group, according to a notice filed to a government website on Tuesday.

The news that Xu Jiayin, the chairman, would be replaced by Zhao Changlong, a previous company director who will take over as general manager of the real estate arm, sent the developer’s shares falling more than 4 percent.

Details of the management change at Hengda Real Estate Group were published on the National Enterprise Credit Information System, a government corporate information site. A spokesperson for Evergrande said Mr. Xu would remain chairman of Evergrande.

Evergrande is the latest Chinese corporate giant to fall under the microscope of regulators looking to rein in unruly corporate debt. One of the country’s most debt-saddled companies, it has as much as $300 billion in unpaid bills, loan and...

Last month, federal authorities charged the founder of the electric vehicle manufacturer Nikola, which had gone public in the summer of 2020, with defrauding investors. They were led there partly by the work of a little-known Wall Streeter named Nathan Anderson.

A stock researcher and investor, Mr. Anderson and his upstart firm, Hindenburg Research, are having a moment. In early August, the Securities and Exchange Commission subpoenaed the sports betting firm DraftKings after Hindenburg said in a June report that it had potentially enabled black-market betting. And shares of Lordstown Motors have fallen nearly 70 percent since Hindenburg said in March that the electric truck maker was hyping commercial interest for its vehicle. Federal authorities are investigating Lordstown’s claims.

Mr. Anderson’s five-person firm, which takes its name from the German airship that blew up in 1937, is a newbie in the world of finance. Founded in 2017, Hindenburg specializes in...

ISLE OF WIGHT, England — For the second year running, a hallowed rite for millions of people in Britain — decamping to the warmer climate of the Mediterranean — has been disrupted by the pandemic. The number of flights in and out of Britain are half their 2019 levels.

This year, the Isle of Wight, a small island off the south coast of England, has lured even more visitors to its sandy beaches, coastal walks and arcades. But pandemic restrictions, staff shortages and the often uncooperative British weather are challenging visitors and business owners this season.

Times Insider explains who we are and what we do, and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.

When I conducted a little experiment recently for an article to highlight a corner of the cryptocurrency world, I knew I was creating something that would live on after the piece was published. But what happened still took me by surprise.

As a business reporter based in London, I have been riveted in recent months by the booming popularity of so-called hype coins. These are the down-market, volatile cousins of Bitcoin, the graybeard of the cryptocurrency world. There are more than 70,000 of these coins — with names like Klaytn, Chiliz, Helium and others you’ve never heard of — and a few dozen new ones are created each day.

On its face, the hype coin phenomenon is one of the most baffling financial crazes in history. At least if you went bust during the tulip mania in the 17th century, you could end up with some tulips. Hype coins...

SEATTLE — Amazon has eclipsed Walmart to become the world’s largest retail seller outside China, according to corporate and industry data, a milestone in the shift from brick-and-mortar to online shopping that has changed how people buy everything from Teddy Grahams to teddy bears.

Propelled in part by surging demand during the pandemic, people spent more than $610 billion on Amazon over the 12 months ending in June, according to Wall Street estimates compiled by the financial research firm FactSet. Walmart on Tuesday posted sales of $566 billion for the 12 months ending in July.

Alibaba, the giant online Chinese retailer, is the world’s top seller. Neither Amazon nor Walmart is a dominant player in China.

In racing past Walmart, Amazon has dethroned one of the most successful — and feared — companies of recent decades. Walmart perfected a thriving big-box model of retailing that squeezed every possible penny out of its costs, which drove down prices and...

When Kmart opened its first store, in Garden City, Mich., in 1962, the aim was to become an all-under-one-roof retailer. Americans’ shopping habits had gravitated toward the suburbs after World War II, and Kmart was going to cater to them.

Kmart last opened a new store in 2002; since then, it has all been closings. When it merged with Sears in 2005, Kmart had 2,085 locations. With the abrupt closing of the Astor Place Kmart in Manhattan last month, the number of open Kmart stores is down to 17.

For a time, the company’s real estate decisions worked well. But as shoppers moved farther into the suburbs, Kmart didn’t move with them. Kmart continued to build inside beltways and urban centers, even though its core customers were no longer there, a strategy that helped lead to the company’s tumble, retail experts say.

But the retailers’s two-decade slide has transformed the commercial real estate market in unexpected ways, bringing churches, truck washes and...

George Brian McGee, a finance executive in Florida, was driving home in a Tesla Model S operating on Autopilot, a system that can steer, brake and accelerate a car on its own, when he dropped his phone during a call and bent down to look for it.

Neither he nor Autopilot noticed that the road was ending and the Model S drove past a stop sign and a flashing red light. The car smashed into a parked Chevrolet Tahoe, killing a 22-year-old college student, Naibel Benavides.

One of a growing number of fatal accidents involving Tesla cars operating on Autopilot, Mr. McGee’s case is unusual because he survived and told investigators what had happened: He got distracted and put his trust in a system that did not see and brake for a parked car in front of it. Tesla drivers using Autopilot in other fatal accidents have often been killed, leaving investigators to piece together the details from data stored and videos recorded by the cars.

“I was driving and dropped my...

SIENA, Italy — Last month Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world’s oldest bank, acquired another distinction: Europe’s weakest lender.

The bank performed worse than any other in a test of its financial health by European regulators, the latest gloomy chapter in a long-running saga of ill-fated deals, financial shenanigans, criminal wrongdoing and even a mysterious death.

The stress test by regulators, which showed that a severe recession would wipe out the bank’s capital, has forced the Italian government to face an unpleasant truth: Monte dei Paschi’s five-and-a-half-century run is coming to an end. With prodding from Rome, UniCredit, one of Italy’s largest banks, said last month that it was in talks to buy Monte dei Paschi on the condition that the government keep all the bad loans.

Monte dei Paschi, founded in 1472, will probably live on as a brand name on bank branches in central Italy, and customers probably won’t notice much difference, at least at...

Retail sales dropped in July, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday, a sign that consumer spending was hampered amid an uneven economic recovery from pandemic-induced restrictions.

The 1.1 percent decline in sales last month, led by a fall in spending on homes and cars, followed an increase in spending in June and was a bigger drop than economists had expected.

The increase in coronavirus cases caused by a surge in the Delta variant of the coronavirus has not affected spending yet, but shoppers could pull back if lockdowns are reinstated. Sales at restaurants and bars increased as consumers continued to dine outdoors. As fall approaches and the weather gets cooler, diners might be more reluctant to eat outside.

Retail sales dropped in July, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday, a sign that consumer spending was hampered amid an uneven economic recovery from pandemic-induced restrictions.

The 1.1 percent decline in sales last month, which followed an increase in spending in June, was bigger than economists had expected and came as spending on homes and cars fell.

The increase in coronavirus cases caused by a surge in the Delta variant has not affected spending yet, but shoppers could pull back if lockdowns are reinstated. Sales at restaurants and bars increased as consumers continued to dine outdoors, but as fall approaches and the weather gets cooler, diners might be more reluctant to eat outside.

Retail sales dropped in July, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday, a sign that consumer spending was hampered amid an uneven economic recovery from pandemic-induced restrictions.

The 1.1 percent decline in sales last month, which followed an increase in spending in June, was bigger than economists had expected and came as spending on homes and cars fell.

The increase in coronavirus cases caused by a surge in the Delta variant has not affected spending yet, but shoppers could pull back if lockdowns are reinstated. Sales at restaurants and bars increased as consumers continued to dine outdoors, but as fall approaches and the weather gets cooler, diners might be more reluctant to eat outside.

Jerome H. Powell’s term as chair of the Federal Reserve ends in February. Slots for the vice chair and the Fed’s top bank regulator will also be up for grabs soon, and a position on the Fed’s Board of Governors is already vacant.

Assuming officials leave once their leadership terms end, the Biden administration may, in quick succession, be able to appoint four of the Fed’s seven board members, powerful policymakers who have constant votes on monetary decisions and exclusive regulatory authorities, Jeanna Smialek and Alan Rappeport report for The New York Times.

Many who would like to see Mr. Powell replaced play down the role Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will have in shaping President Biden’s decision wether to oust Mr. Powell. But Treasury secretaries have traditionally been central to the Fed selection process. Ms. Yellen’s views will carry significant weight in the deliberations, coloring both who is considered and the ultimate outcome.

It’s unclear...

Retail sales dropped in July, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday, a sign that consumer spending was hampered amid an uneven economic recovery from pandemic-induced restrictions.

The 1.1 percent decline in sales last month, which followed an increase in spending in June, was bigger than economists had expected and came as spending on homes and cars fell.

The increase in coronavirus cases caused by a surge in the Delta variant has not affected spending yet, but shoppers could pull back if lockdowns are reinstated. Sales at restaurants and bars increased as consumers continued to dine outdoors, but as fall approaches and the weather gets cooler, diners might be more reluctant to eat outside.