Members of an Iraqi parliamentary commission are calling for an investigation into large power-generation contracts struck with General Electric Co. and its competitors, saying the government in Baghdad overpaid.

The lawmakers have also called for probes into contracts with Siemens Energy AG , a spinoff of German conglomerate Siemens AG , and local rivals. GE has entered into at least $6 billion of electricity contracts in Iraq in recent years, while orders from Siemens have approached 1 billion euros, equivalent to around $1.2 billion.

The request for an official inquiry comes from three prominent backers of the Iraqi government, which is under pressure to address extended power cuts during one of the Middle East’s hottest summers on record.

The members of the so-called integrity commission, created in part to address problems with the power grid, want an investigative panel set up by Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi to examine the pricing of the...

U.S. business groups sued to block parts of a federal rule requiring insurers and employers to disclose prices they pay for healthcare services and drugs, the latest legal challenge to efforts to make public rates that have long been kept secret.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, which represents pharmacy-benefit managers, filed lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies last week in federal courts in Tyler, Texas, and the District of Columbia. They claim certain provisions of the rule go beyond federal authority and could raise healthcare costs.

Wall Street’s biggest banks told the Federal Reserve ahead of its late July policy meeting that they were expecting the central bank to start pulling back on bond-buying stimulus at the start of next year.

U.S. stocks climbed Friday, but ended the week with losses to conclude a bumpy stretch of trading.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose about 224 points, or 0.6%, to 35118. The S&P 500 added 0.8% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite advanced 1.2%.

Despite Friday’s gains, all three indexes ended the week with declines, weighed down by steep losses among shares of economically-sensitive companies like banks, materials companies and energy producers.

Stocks have been knocked back this week by fears that an uptick in Covid-19 infections and a slowdown in China’s growth could impede the economic recovery. New lockdowns to contain the coronavirus could put further pressure on already shaky supply chains. Worries about rising inflation levels and the Federal Reserve’s signals that it will scale back some of its easy money policies have also cut into investors’ appetite for riskier assets, analysts say.

“We’re looking at a period of very strong, but...

U.S. government bond yields edged higher Friday following signals the Federal Reserve is on track to begin reversing easy-money policies later this year.

The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury note increased to 1.260% compared with 1.241% on Thursday.

Yields, which move in the opposite direction of bond prices, have recently reversed part of a decline from earlier this month. That is in part due to expectations that the Fed will begin to scale back, or taper, asset purchases, a view reinforced by the release this week of minutes from the central bank’s July meeting.

In recent days, the labor market’s recovery and inflation numbers have been at the center of the debate within markets about the Fed’s timeline to end bond purchases and eventually begin raising rates. Meanwhile, yields on U.S. Treasury inflation-protected securities, or TIPS, have moved higher in recent weeks, according to Tradeweb data.

“The question really was more on the...

Topps Co.’s plan to go public in a blank-check merger has been derailed by new exclusive contracts that Major League Baseball and its players’ union signed with a different trading-card company.

Topps, the leading baseball-card company since the 1950s, had reached a deal in April to become publicly traded through a merger with Mudrick Capital Acquisition Corp. II , a special-purpose acquisition company. SPACs are shell companies that raise money on public markets and then merge with a private business to make the target company publicly traded.

The deal fell through by mutual agreement after MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association both reached new exclusive licensing deals with Fanatics Inc., an online sports-merchandise retailer, starting in the coming years. Makers of sports trading cards rely on such deals for the rights to use players’ images and teams’ logos and trademarks.

With the deal’s collapse, Topps will remain private, it said....

The economy is still doing very well, but the already bad Covid-19 situation brought on by the Delta variant threatens to get even worse. It is an environment that has put both the Federal Reserve and investors in a fix.

Minutes from the Fed’s July meeting, released Wednesday, show that central bank policy makers want to start reducing monthly bond purchases by the end of the year, and there are some at the Fed who would like to start that in short order, say with an announcement at the September meeting. They view the Fed tapering its purchases down to zero—a process that could take the better part of a year—as a necessary condition for raising rates. The sooner it finishes tapering, the sooner they have the option of raising rates.

And they would like to at least have the option of raising rates sometime next year. Inflation has been elevated, after all, and though it seems likely it could cool a bit in the months ahead, next year it could still be above the...

Amazon.com Inc. plans to open several large physical retail locations in the U.S. that will operate akin to department stores, a step to help the tech company extend its reach in sales of clothing, household items, electronics and other areas, people familiar with the matter said.

The plan to launch large stores will mark a new expansion for the online-shopping pioneer into bricks-and-mortar retail, an area Amazon has long disrupted.

Some of the first Amazon department stores are expected to be located in Ohio and California, the people said. The new retail spaces will be around 30,000 square feet, smaller than most department stores, which typically occupy about 100,000 square feet, and will offer items from top consumer brands. The Amazon stores will dwarf many of the company’s other physical retail spaces and will have a footprint similar to scaled-down formats that Bloomingdale’s Inc., Nordstrom Inc. and other department-store chains have begun opening,...

It is getting more expensive to pay for things with a credit card.

More small businesses—and even some larger ones—are charging shoppers a fee for credit-card purchases or offering them discounts when they pay with debit cards, cash or checks. The moves are meant to offset the various fees businesses pay on credit-card transactions, costs that have grown alongside generous cash-back and travel rewards.

Data on cash discounting is hard to come by, and less than 5% of 8 million card-accepting small businesses in the U.S. charge fees for credit-card payments, according to estimates from payments consultancy the Strawhecker Group. But that share has risen steadily in recent years. Five years ago, an estimated 2% or less of businesses charged fees on credit-card purchases.

The coronavirus accelerated the shift, sending businesses in search of revenue to make up for sales lost in the pandemic’s early months. CardX LLC said more than 6,400 merchants—most of...

Three months ago, chip-testing equipment maker FormFactor looked like a company in the wrong place at the wrong time. The truth is actually the opposite.

Semiconductor stocks were riding high earlier this year amid a chip production shortage that has crippled industries from automotive to consumer electronics. That shortage has driven chip manufacturers to boost expansion plans to keep up with demand, which in turn fueled stock prices in the sector. The PHLX Semiconductor Index hit a decade-high valuation of more than 27 times forward earnings by mid-February.

Naturally, that sparked worry among more seasoned investors long accustomed to the chip equipment industry’s cyclical nature. So when FormFactor posted its first-quarter results in late April, investors were looking hard for any signs of a peak. FormFactor’s disappointing gross margin projection for the second quarter triggered a hard selloff, costing the company nearly one-third of its market value over...

Chinese financial regulators summoned senior executives of troubled real-estate developer China Evergrande Group to a meeting on Thursday, and said the company needs to resolve its debt issues without destabilizing the property and financial markets.

Representatives of the People’s Bank of China and the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission attended the meeting with Evergrande, which is the country’s largest developer by contracted sales and its largest junk-bond issuer.

The regulators said in a brief statement that Evergrande’s industry-leading position means the company needs to ensure the real-estate market remains stable and healthy, and that it shouldn’t harm China’s broader financial stability.

They said Evergrande needs to defuse its debt risks, and told the company to be truthful in its disclosures and not disseminate false information. Evergrande didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Evergrande, which is...

All slowdowns should look like this.

Nvidia reported Wednesday afternoon that its fiscal second quarter revenue surged 68% year over year to $6.5 billion. That is a new quarterly record for the chipmaker, even as its growth rate slowed from the 84% reported in the prior quarter that ended in April.

Revenue in the company’s key videogaming and data center businesses grew by 85% and 35% year over year, respectively, though both also decelerated a bit from the previous quarter.

In other words, Nvidia is its own toughest competitor. The same holds true for its stock, which rose less than 3% following the results after having run up 36% over the last three months. At 47 times forward earnings, Nvidia is one of the most expensive chip companies on the market. It has also earned its premium, having tripled revenue while doubling adjusted operating margins in the last five years.

Still, there are questions about where the company is going and how...

WASHINGTON—A new breed of digital asset exchanges is potentially the holy grail for cryptocurrencies: online places for people to trade and lend that purportedly involve no middleman setting the rules or taking fees.

But these peer-to-peer networks, so far completely unregulated in the U.S., may not be immune from oversight, said Gary Gensler, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Some decentralized finance projects, known as DeFi, have features that make them look like the types of entities the SEC oversees, Mr. Gensler said in an interview Wednesday.

DeFi developers write software that automates transactions and say they then step away from the project, allowing it to operate with no central entity in charge. They argue that such decentralization defeats the need for oversight by the SEC, which has said that some cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin and ether, are sufficiently decentralized to avoid regulation.

But Mr. Gensler, who took...

The remnants of Greensill Capital, the U.K. financing company that collapsed earlier this year, filed for bankruptcy in the U.S., aiming to halt litigation filed by one of its biggest clients, a coal-mining company owned by the governor of West Virginia.

Greensill’s U.S. bankruptcy filing on Wednesday seeks to halt a lawsuit brought earlier this year by coal supplier Bluestone Resources Inc. and its owners, West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice and his family, according to court papers filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York.

WASHINGTON—Democrats are set to gain control over the nation’s derivatives-market regulator after one of the two Republicans on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission departs at the end of this month.

CFTC Commissioner Brian Quintenz, who was nominated in 2017 by then-President Trump at the recommendation of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), said in an interview he plans to leave the agency on Aug. 31. Though his five-year term expired in April 2020, he is legally eligible to remain at the regulator until the end of this year.

The departure will leave the CFTC’s five-member panel—which already had one vacancy following the exit of former Chairman Heath Tarbert in January—with two empty seats. It also could allow acting Chairman Rostin Behnam more leeway over policy by giving Democrats a majority on the commission.

Bloomberg reported last week that President Biden plans to nominate Mr. Behnam to lead the CFTC on a permanent basis. The White House...

Beijing’s crackdown on business that doesn’t support its policy goals suddenly looks like it might extend to luxury brands. Investors are only just waking up to the risks.

On Tuesday, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a speech about growing wealth inequality and the “promotion of common prosperity.” Luxury investors, who didn’t react to intervention in the Chinese tech and private-education sectors in recent weeks, are belatedly concerned that the country’s super rich could be reined in. A selloff that started on Wednesday and gathered pace on Thursday has wiped 60 billion euros, equivalent to $70.26 billion, from the market value of Europe’s big four names, LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton , Kering, Hermès and Richemont.

A wealth-redistribution push in China is potentially bad news for the luxury industry. A small group of very wealthy individuals—numbering only 10,000, according to Jefferies estimates—generates around a quarter of all luxury sales to the...

WASHINGTON—A federal judge on Wednesday threw out federal approval of a multibillion-dollar oil project planned for Alaska, saying the government failed to properly assess the project’s impact on climate change and its potential harm to polar bears.

The ConocoPhillips Willow project in a federal oil reserve in the North Slope had been backed by both the Biden and Trump administrations, and comes with wide support from Alaskan political leaders. Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy criticized the decision Wednesday night, saying it put thousands of potential jobs at risk.

U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason agreed with challengers who argued that the Bureau of Land Management didn’t fully account for the greenhouse gases that would come from burning the oil Willow would produce, among other issues. The plaintiffs, led by the Center for Biological Diversity, included several environmental and Alaskan groups.

“As to the errors found by the Court, they are...

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The chip shortage is adding extra flavor to a 113-year-old Japanese seasoning company.

Japan’s Ajinomoto is renowned for inventing monosodium glutamate—the controversial flavor enhancer that adds umami to dishes. But it also makes a material that goes into the central processing units of computers around the world.

Using byproducts from making MSG, Ajinomoto manufactures a type of insulation material called Ajinomoto Buildup Film, or ABF. That in turn goes into a semiconductor component called ABF substrate, which connects microchips to circuit boards.

Chip makers such as Intel and AMD are seeing shortages in the substrate, as the Covid-19 pandemic has driven supply and demand out of kilter. Share prices of substrate manufacturers such as Japan’s Ibiden and Taiwan’s Unimicron have more than doubled in the...

All slowdowns should look like this.

Nvidia reported Wednesday afternoon that its fiscal second quarter revenue surged 68% year over year to $6.5 billion. That is a new quarterly record for the chipmaker, even as its growth rate slowed from the 84% reported in the prior quarter that ended in April.

Revenue in the company’s key videogaming and data center businesses grew by 85% and 35% year over year, respectively, though both also decelerated a bit from the previous quarter.

In other words, Nvidia is its own toughest competitor. The same holds true for its stock, which rose less than 3% following the results after having run up 36% over the last three months. At 47 times forward earnings, Nvidia is one of the most expensive chip companies on the market. It has also earned its premium, having tripled revenue while doubling adjusted operating margins in the last five years.

Still, there are questions about where the company is going and how...

Oil prices fell Thursday to their lowest level in about three months after the U.S. dollar strengthened on concern that the global economic recovery might slow and the Federal Reserve’s signals that it will scale back stimulus measures.

Brent crude oil, the international benchmark in energy markets, dropped 3.1% to $66.01 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate futures, a key U.S. gauge, declined 3.6% to $62.74 a barrel. Both benchmarks are on course for their lowest daily close since May.

The dollar’s advance to its strongest level since early November added to recent worries in energy markets. Investors had already grown increasingly nervous in recent days that rising Covid-19 cases are threatening to hobble the global recovery and could sap demand for oil in major economies like China.

A stronger dollar tends to put pressure on commodities denominated in the U.S. currency—such as oil and industrial metals like copper—which become more expensive for other...

A key bond-market signal suggests investors feel they have a firm grip on Federal Reserve policy, reducing the chances that the central bank’s Jackson Hole conference next week will break yields from their recent pattern.

For nearly two months, the extra yield investors demand to hold the 30-year U.S. Treasury bond over the five-year note has been mostly hovering just below 1.2 percentage points. The closely watched differential—known on Wall Street as the 5-30 spread—dropped sharply from about 1.4 percentage points after the Fed’s June 15-16 policy meeting.

Investors and analysts pay close attention to the 5-30 spread because it can show how near-term monetary policy is expected to affect the long-term economic outlook. In the early days of an economic expansion, the spread tends to be large because investors expect easy-money policies to help spur growth and inflation. The spread then tends to shrink as the Fed raises interest rates to cool the economy.

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Goldman Sachs Group Inc. said Thursday it agreed to acquire the money-management operation of Dutch insurer NN Group NV for about $1.87 billion, as the need for scale in the asset-management business to lower costs drives sector consolidation.

The New York-based investment bank said it plans to merge NN Investment Partners with its Goldman Sachs Asset Management arm to gain access to a bigger pool of retail and institutional investors in Europe and bolster its product offerings in areas such as European equities, investment-grade credit and green bonds.

The deal is Goldman Sachs’ biggest acquisition since David Solomon took over as chief executive in 2018.

NN Investment—which the deal values at about €1.6 billion, equivalent to $1.87 billion—has about 75% of its holdings in debt securities, according to an investment presentation on the business. The rest is split between equity and multiasset portfolios that combine different holdings including...