Money

The gross national debt exceeded $32 trillion for the first time on Friday, underscoring the country’s unsettling fiscal trajectory as Washington gears up for another fight over government spending.A Treasury Department report noted the milestone weeks after Congress agreed to suspend the nation’s statutory debt limit, ending a monthslong standoff.The $32 trillion mark arrived nine years sooner than prepandemic forecasts had projected, reflecting the trillions of dollars of emergency spending to address Covid-19’s impact along with a run of sluggish economic growth.Republicans and Democrats have expressed concern about the nation’s debt, but neither party has shown an appetite to tackle its biggest drivers, such as spending on Social Security and Medicare.The recent bipartisan agreement s...

When the world’s business and political leaders gathered in 2018 at the annual economic forum in Davos, the mood was jubilant. Growth in every major country was on an upswing. The global economy, declared Christine Lagarde, then the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, “is in a very sweet spot.”Five years later, the outlook has decidedly soured.“Nearly all the economic forces that powered progress and prosperity over the last three decades are fading,” the World Bank warned in a recent analysis. “The result could be a lost decade in the making — not just for some countries or regions as has occurred in the past — but for the whole world.”A lot has happened between then and now: A global pandemic hit; war erupted in Europe; tensions between the United States and China boil...

Are the days of overdraft fees almost over?The dreaded bank fees are shrinking, even as the share of households paying them remains the same, new financial research shows. And banks are increasingly offering their customers alternatives like small installment loans.Banks charge overdraft fees to cover shortfalls when customers spend more than the amount in their checking accounts. (Banks may also charge “insufficient funds” fees as a penalty when they let a payment bounce.) Once offered as a courtesy, overdrafts grew to become a lucrative source of bank revenue.But for a variety of reasons, including pressure from regulators, banks have been pulling back from charging the fees. Last year, bank revenue from overdraft and similar fees fell an estimated 6 percent from 2021, to $9.9 billion, ...

In a meeting in Beijing on Friday, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, traded warm smiles with Bill Gates and praised Mr. Gates as “the first American friend” he had met this year.The encounters in Beijing between Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken and his Chinese counterparts, starting on Sunday, are likely to feel noticeably chillier.The high-level meetings are aimed at getting the U.S.-China relationship back on track, and many American business leaders have been pushing the Biden administration to try to restore some stability in one of the world’s most important bilateral relationships.But for business leaders, and for officials on both sides, expectations for the meetings appear modest, with two main goals for the talks. One is to restore communication between the governments, which broke...