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Nashville-based LifePoint Health, a company with 80 rural hospitals and owned by private equity firm Apollo Asset Management, is negotiating to buy Ardent Health Services, which operates 30 hospitals in six states. The deal would create a $10-billion hospital chain. Ardent operates acute-care hospitals in growing urban and suburban areas, mostly in Oklahoma and Texas. ...

The Biden administration will keep existing tariffs in place for now on some European wines, cheeses, and other foods, despite complaints by food-industry trade groups that the levies are raising costs for restaurants and consumers. The 25-percent tariffs were imposed on $7.5 billion worth of Europe’s goods in late 2019 by the Trump administration to...

Software company Salesforce.com will expect at least 65 percent of its 54,000 employees to be in its corporate offices only one to three days a week after the COVID pandemic recedes, up from 40 percent now, the company has announced. As a result, it will permanently abandon an unspecified amount of office space in cities...

Disappointed with the speed of the vaccine rollout, companies across America have canceled plans to recall employees to their offices this spring. Many businesses have rescheduled the returns for September or later or are refusing to set any date at all for regrouping. Qurate Retail has pushed back a May return date until September for...

In 2020, 3,140 U.S. trucking businesses shut down, 185 percent more than in 2019, according to Broughton Capital.  More than half of the failures took place in the year’s second quarter when the economy cratered as politicians locked down states’ economies in the face of the COVID pandemic. A record number of the closures occurred...

The U.S. budget deficit totaled a record $738 billion during the first four months of the federal government’s current fiscal year, an 89-percent rise against the same period a year earlier, the U.S. Treasury Department reported. Revenues reached $1.2 trillion for the period, also a record, while expenses soared 23 percent to a never-before-seen four-month...

“We are still very far from a strong labor market whose benefits are broadly shared,” Jerome Powell, chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, said in a 10 February speech to the Economic Club of New York. Powell pledged a “patiently accommodative” monetary policy for as long as needed, even as the jobs market grows stronger,...

New claims for unemployment benefits totaled 793,000 during the week of 8 February, only slightly less than the previous week’s 812,000. The new figure topped the estimate of 760,000 from economists surveyed by Dow Jones. New weekly claims for jobless benefits have topped 700,000 every week for 11 months. Continuing claims dropped by 145,000 to...