Policymakers in Washington are promoting electric vehicles as a solution to climate change. But an uncomfortable truth remains: Battery-powered cars are much too expensive for a vast majority of Americans.

Congress has begun trying to address that problem. The climate and energy package passed on Sunday by the Senate, the Inflation Reduction Act, would give buyers of used electric cars a tax credit.

But automakers have complained that the credit would apply to only a narrow slice of vehicles, at least initially, largely because of domestic sourcing requirements. And experts say broader steps are needed to make electric cars more affordable and to get enough of them on the road to put a serious dent in greenhouse gas emissions.

The Japanese conglomerate SoftBank reported on Monday its largest ever quarterly loss, $23.4 billion, driven by poor performance of its flagship tech investments and a weak yen.

It was the second straight quarter of enormous losses for the company, which has been staggered by broad weakness in global stocks, causing paper losses in the company’s portfolio of publicly traded tech giants as well as markdowns on its holdings in hundreds of unlisted companies.

The losses are the biggest in decades for the company’s eccentric founder, Masayoshi Son, who staked its future on huge, often undisciplined, investments in tech companies that he believed would transform entire industries — from grocery shopping to construction — as the world transitioned into a digital age.

In his first extensive response to Twitter’s suit against him, Elon Musk accused the social media company of fraud, reiterating arguments that it concealed the true number of spam and bot accounts on its platform. in a legal filing made public on Thursday, Mr. Musk’s lawyers asserted that the proportion of those accounts was closer to 10 percent, while Twitter has maintained it was less than 5 percent. His lawyers also accused Twitter of hiding the number of its users who see ads. Twitter continues to say its figures are accurate. The two parties are still slated to resolve their disputes in Delaware’s Court of Chancery in October, when a judge will decide whether Mr. Musk’s claims that Twitter withheld information about spam accounts on the site are legitimate or if he must still complete the $44 billion deal.

Daniel B. Maffei is at once a crucial player in the campaign to subdue inflation, and a figure virtually unknown outside the confines of his wonky Washington domain.

He’s the chairman of the Federal Maritime Commission, a small, traditionally obscure institution that has been thrust into a central role in the Biden administration’s designs on taming soaring prices — a menace that could determine which party next controls Congress.

The commission regulates the international shipping industry at American ports, an element of modern life that is typically ignored but has emerged as a reason major retailers are short of popular goods, and why people renovating homes are waiting months for doorknobs.

The drug company Eli Lilly said it “will be forced” to look outside the state for employment growth. The engine maker Cummins said the law will “impede our ability to attract and retain top talent.”

At any given time, millions of workers are overdue on at least one bill. But it is the rare employer that is late in cutting its paychecks or that bounces them altogether.

Therein lies an opportunity for lending companies like Kashable and OneBlinc and for retailers that do business at sites like payrolljewelry.com and purchasingpower.com: Put yourself at the front of the repayment line by drawing directly from those reliable paychecks. Let other billers wait around to see if customers bounce a payment from their bank account or don’t bother to make one at all.

This clever maneuver is possible thanks to payroll mechanisms that go by terms like “allotment” and “split deposits.” As long as your employer allows it — and some notable big ones, like the federal government, do — employees can set it up themselves.

BUENOS AIRES — Eduardo Rabuffetti is an Argentine who has been to the United States once, his 1999 honeymoon in Miami. Yet he probably knows the $100 bill better than most Americans.

He says he can pick out a counterfeit by touch. He can tell you exactly what $100,000 looks like. (Ten half-inch stacks, small enough to hold in one hand.) And on numerous occasions, he has walked down the streets of Buenos Aires with tens of thousands of U.S. dollars tucked into his jacket.

That is because Mr. Rabuffetti, a property developer who has built two office towers and a house here, bought the land for each of those buildings in $100 bills.

America’s job market is remarkably strong, a report on Friday made clear, with unemployment at the lowest rate in half a century, wages rising fast and companies hiring at a breakneck pace.

But the good news now could become a problem for President Biden later.

Mr. Biden and his aides pointed to the hiring spree as evidence that the United States is not in a recession and celebrated the report, which showed that employers added 528,000 jobs in July and that pay picked up by 5.2 percent from a year earlier. But the still-blistering pace of hiring and wage growth means the Federal Reserve may need to act more decisively to restrain the economy as it seeks to wrestle inflation under control.

Fed officials have been waiting for signs that the economy, and particularly the job market, is slowing. They hope that employers’ voracious need for workers will come into balance with the supply of available applicants, because that would take pressure off wages, in turn...

For years, Democrats and even some Republicans such as former President Donald J. Trump have called for closing the so-called carried interest loophole that allows wealthy hedge fund managers and private equity executives to pay lower tax rates than entry-level employees.

Those efforts have always failed to make a big dent in the loophole — and the latest proposal to do so also faltered this week. Senate leaders announced on Thursday that they had agreed to drop a modest change to the tax provision in order to secure the vote of Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, and ensure passage of their Inflation Reduction Act, a wide-ranging climate, health care and tax bill.

An agreement reached last week between Senator Chuck Schumer, the majority leader, and Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, would have taken a small step in the direction of narrowing carried interest tax treatment. However, it would not have eliminated the loophole entirely and...

College students who are already shopping for laptops, textbooks and other campus gear may want to add something else to their list: renter’s insurance.

The insurance can help pay for personal property that is stolen or damaged by accidents like fires from cooking. It offers liability coverage to help cover medical and legal costs if someone is injured at your place or someone’s belongings are damaged. And some policies pay for a hotel and meals, if a calamity leaves the property unlivable.

Students may not think they have much gear, but replacing clothes, furniture and electronic gadgets adds up. A stolen backpack with a laptop, tablet and textbooks can easily total $3,000, said John Fees, co-founder and managing director with GradGuard, which markets student renter policies.

U.S. job growth accelerated in July across nearly all industries, restoring nationwide employment to its prepandemic level, despite widespread expectations of a slowdown as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates to fight inflation.

Employers added 528,000 jobs on a seasonally adjusted basis, the Labor Department said on Friday, more than doubling what forecasters had projected. The unemployment rate ticked down to 3.5 percent, equaling the figure in February 2020, which was a 50-year low.

The robust job growth is welcome news for the Biden administration in a year when red-hot inflation and fears of recession have been recurring economic themes. “Today’s jobs report shows we are making significant progress for working families,” President Biden declared.

While the French famously obsess about the dilution of their culture at home, it is not unfair to say that their great nation’s cultural sway appears to have dwindled in the larger world as well. To give two examples that touch me where I live, the primacy of French cuisine — once regarded as the world’s best — is finis. No longer is the cozy French bistro a staple of every American city.

And though little remarked upon, so, too, can be seen the declining fortune of the French automobile, a device whose invention traces to Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, who in 1769 went forth from the Void-Vacon commune in northeastern France with the world’s first self-propelled vehicle, a steam-powered tricycle built like a wagon.

While still dominant in their home market, French cars claim only a small, if loyal, following in the United States. They haven’t been sold here since the early 1990s, despite their significant role in Stellantis, the name given to Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and...

Brian Armstrong, the chief executive of the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States, traveled across the world to make an announcement in early April: Coinbase was bringing crypto to India.

In an auditorium in Bangalore, Mr. Armstrong, wearing a type of loose buttoned shirt popular in India, said Coinbase planned to set up a hub of 1,000 employees there by the end of 2022. The company was investing in Indian start-ups and allowing local customers to buy and sell digital currencies on its exchange. For Coinbase, it was a chance to transform finance in a country of more than one billion people and lure new customers from across Asia.

“Namaste,” Mr. Armstrong declared. “We come with humility and respect.”

But that week, Coinbase got some bad news. A government-backed group issued a statement suggesting that the company would be unable to use a crucial payments platform — a system that was supposed to allow Coinbase customers to convert their rupees...

The cost of living is sky-high, and the chair of the Federal Reserve says that battling it is his highest priority. Financial markets don’t know quite how to react.

That, in a nutshell, is the situation now, with Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, raising interest rates to damp down inflation that hasn’t been this high in 40 years.

Something similar happened the last time inflation was out of control. Paul A. Volcker was the Fed chair then. He wrung inflation out of the economy, but at a great cost — hurling the nation into not just one recession, but two, in rapid succession. Unemployment soared, stocks fell repeatedly, interest rates oscillated and, for a while, bonds looked shaky, too.

The Roomba and iRobot’s other cleaning devices, including robotic mops and air purifiers, join a portfolio of Amazon-owned smart home devices that includes Ring doorbells and Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant and speaker. iRobot also makes an educational robot called Root that allows children to experiment with coding.

The strong jobs report was welcome news for President Biden, who has insisted in recent weeks that the United States is not in recession, even though it has suffered two consecutive quarters of economic contraction.

But the report also defied even the president’s own optimistic expectations about the state of the labor market — and appeared to contradict the administration’s theory of where the economy is headed.

Mr. Biden celebrated the report on Friday morning. “Today, the unemployment rate matches the lowest it’s been in more than 50 years: 3.5 percent,” he said in a statement. “More people are working than at any point in American history.”

In late 2010, General Motors sought to seize the high ground from Toyota’s successful Prius hybrid with the Volt plug-in hybrid — a car that could drive short distances on only electricity and fire up a gasoline engine for long trips.

But the Volt and other cars like it struggled to win over drivers as many early adopters opted for fully electric cars like Tesla’s Model S and the Nissan Leaf. G.M. quietly did away with the Volt in 2019 as it trained its sights on all-electric cars.

But a funny thing happened on the way to obsolescence: Plug-in hybrid sales are climbing in the United States, in part because of the recent surge in gasoline prices. Automakers sold a record 176,000 such cars last year, according to Wards Intelligence, up from 69,000 in 2020. This year, sales of plug-in hybrids could reach 180,000, analysts said, even as the overall new-car market drops to 14.4 million from 15.3 million a year earlier, according to Cox Automotive.

California’s Department of Motor Vehicles has accused Tesla of falsely advertising its driver-assistance technology in two complaints that could affect the company’s ability to sell cars in the state.

The agency said Tesla had misled customers by claiming in advertisements that vehicles equipped with its Autopilot and Full Self-Driving Capability programs were autonomous. If the agency’s complaints to the state’s Office of Administrative Hearings succeed, Tesla’s licenses to make and sell vehicles in California could be suspended or revoked.

Tesla “made or disseminated statements that are untrue or misleading, and not based on facts, in advertising vehicles as equipped, or potentially equipped, with advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) features,” the agency said in its complaints, which were filed on July 28.

BUENOS AIRES — Eduardo Rabuffetti is an Argentine who has been to the United States once, his 1999 honeymoon in Miami. Yet he probably knows the $100 bill better than most Americans.

He says he can pick out a counterfeit by touch. He can tell you exactly what $100,000 looks like. (Ten half-inch stacks, small enough to hold in one hand.) And on numerous occasions, he has walked down the streets of Buenos Aires with tens of thousands of U.S. dollars tucked into his jacket.

That is because Mr. Rabuffetti, a property developer who has built two office towers and a house here, bought the land for each of those buildings in $100 bills.

At any given time, millions of workers are overdue on at least one bill. But it is the rare employer that is late in cutting its paychecks or that bounces them altogether.

Therein lies an opportunity for lending companies like Kashable and OneBlinc and for retailers that do business at sites like payrolljewelry.com and purchasingpower.com: Put yourself at the front of the repayment line by drawing directly from those reliable paychecks. Let other billers wait around to see if customers bounce a payment from their bank account or don’t bother to make one at all.

This clever maneuver is possible thanks to payroll mechanisms that go by terms like “allotment” and “split deposits.” As long as your employer allows it — and some notable big ones, like the federal government, do — employees can set it up themselves.