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    Japan’s Debt, Now Twice the Size of Its Economy, Forces Hard Choices

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    Japan’s government faces pressure to curtail debt-fueled spending that some argue has staved off populist waves.Japan, which has the highest government debt among leading economies, is finding it difficult to spend like it used to.Debt-fueled public spending, enabled by low interest rates, has long been a way to address the country’s problems. Struggling farmers and emptying countrysides received generous payments from the central government. Relief aid during the Covid-19 pandemic morphed into new outlays for defense and subsidies to help consumers weather inflation.The spending continued even as more social security funding was needed for Japan’s growing number of seniors. Government debt has ballooned to nearly $9 trillion — more than double the size of the economy.Now, ahead of a heavily contested summer election, Japan’s ruling party is facing pressure to add even more debt. Small businesses hurting from U.S. tariffs are calling for government aid, and households squeezed by rising prices are demanding a rollback in taxes.But as the Bank of Japan moves away from the negative interest rates that for years made it easy for the government to borrow, the limits on spending are more stark.Recently, the market for Japanese government bonds has reflected concern about the country’s fiscal health. The yields on long-term bonds, an indication of investor confidence in the government’s ability to pay back its debts, rose to record highs at one point last week. And weaker-than-expected demand for an auction of 40-year bonds on Wednesday kept investors on edge.

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    Japan 30-year government bond yield
    Source: FactSetBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gloves Lincoln Wore to Ford’s Theater Sell for $1.5 Million at Auction

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      More than 100 relics connected to President Abraham Lincoln brought in $7.9 million, auctioneers said. The proceeds will help a presidential foundation repay a loan.A pair of leather gloves worn by President Abraham Lincoln to Ford’s Theater on the night of his assassination fetched $1.5 million at auction this week, part of a trove of relics from his life and death that a debt-saddled presidential foundation had put on the block.One of two handkerchiefs that Lincoln had with him on that fateful date in American history, April 14, 1865, sold for $826,000, according to Freeman’s | Hindman in Chicago, the auction house that handled Wednesday’s sale.Like the gloves, which a friend of the Lincolns had framed for display on his dining room wall, the handkerchief was described in an auction catalog as having been potentially stained with the president’s blood.And a cufflink-style gold and onyx button with the letter “L” on it, which a doctor removed to check for Lincoln’s pulse as he lay on his deathbed, went for $445,000.The auction of the items from the Lincoln Presidential Foundation, which was conducted in person, online and by phone, raised nearly $7.9 million, the auctioneers said.The total included a 28 percent buyer’s premium, which auction houses tack onto the hammer price to help cover expenses from sales.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Bond Sell Off Raises Questions About U.S. Safe Haven Status

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      A sharp sell-off in U.S. government bond markets has sparked fears about the growing fallout from President Trump’s sweeping tariffs and retaliation by China, the European Union and others, raising questions about what is typically seen as the safest corner for investors to take cover during times of turmoil.Yields on 10-year Treasuries — the benchmark for a wide variety of debt — shot 0.2 percentage points higher on Wednesday, to 4.45 percent, a big move in that market. Just a few days ago, it had traded below 4 percent. Yields on the 30-year bond rose significantly as well, at one point on Wednesday topping 5 percent. Borrowing costs globally have also shot higher.The sell-off comes as investors have fled riskier assets globally in what some fear has parallels to what became known as the “dash for cash” episode during the pandemic, when the Treasury market broke down. The recent moves have upended a longstanding relationship in which the U.S. government bond market serves as a safe harbor during times of stress.Volatility has surged as stock markets have plummeted amid fears that the U.S. economy is hurtling toward stagflation, in which economic growth contracts while inflation surges. The S&P 500 is now on the verge of entering a bear market, meaning it has dropped 20 percent from its recent high.“The global safe-haven status is in question,” said Priya Misra, a portfolio manager at JPMorgan Asset Management. “Disorderly moves have happened this week because there is no safe place to hide.”Scott Bessent, the U.S. Treasury secretary, sought to tamp down concerns on Wednesday, brushing off the sell-off as nothing more than investors who bought assets with borrowed money having to cover their losses.“I believe that there is nothing systemic about this — I think that it is an uncomfortable but normal deleveraging that’s going on in the bond market,” he said in an interview with Fox Business.But the moves have been significant enough to raise broader concerns about how foreign investors now perceive the United States, after Mr. Trump decided to slap onerous tariffs on nearly all of its trading partners. Some countries have sought to strike deals with the administration to lower their tariff rates. But China retaliated on Wednesday, announcing an 84 percent levy on U.S. goods after Mr. Trump raised the tariff rate on Chinese goods to 104 percent.In a social media post on Wednesday, the former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence H. Summers said the broader sell-off suggested a “generalized aversion to US assets in global financial markets” and warned about the possibility of a “serious financial crisis wholly induced by US government tariff policy.”“We are being treated by global financial markets like a problematic emerging market,” he wrote. More

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      How to Pay Off Credit Card Debt

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      A new report finds that people are spending more on their cards and paying down less. Financial experts offer tips for reducing that debt, starting with looking at your spending habits.Credit card debt is weighing on many Americans.The share of credit card holders making just the minimum monthly payment is at a 12-year high, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia reported last month. People are spending more on their cards but paying off less, increasing the amount of debt carried month to month and paying more in interest. And more people are late in paying their monthly card bill.“Credit card performance is showing signs of consumer stress,” the bank’s report said.Adding to the stress is the fact that interest rates on credit cards have risen in recent years. The average rate was more than 21 percent at the end of last year, the Federal Reserve said, compared with about 15 percent in 2019.So whether you observe “frugal” February or try a “no spend” challenge, now is a good time to make a plan to chip away at your balances.Right after the new year, “people have so many things on their mind,” said Charlestien Harris, a financial counselor in Clarksdale, Miss., with Southern Bancorp Community Partners. “By February, a person has a chance to settle down. You can begin to focus more and name a goal or two.”If you’re worried about your card debt, there are options that can help you get it under control — such as transferring your balance to a lower-rate credit card, if you qualify. But the first step is to get a clear picture of your spending habits, said Daniel Yerger, a fee-only financial planner in Longmont, Colo.“Before you consolidate or refinance the debt, you have to address the ‘why’ of what’s happening,” Mr. Yerger said. If you are consistently spending beyond your means, moving the debt to a new card isn’t likely to help in the long run. “We can shuffle it around,” he said, “but you want to get ahead of it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      BlackRock Acquires HPS, a Major Lender of Private Credit

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      The world’s largest investor is buying HPS, a major provider of private credit, for $12 billion.BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, is known for its heft in the public markets, particularly through its iShares exchange-traded funds.But this year, BlackRock has been aggressively claiming a major foothold in the private markets. On Tuesday, it made its latest push, announcing a deal to buy HPS Investment Partners — a firm that specializes in making private loans to companies — for roughly $12 billion.Buying HPS, which manages $148 billion in investor money, would fundamentally reshape almost any other financial firm in the world. For BlackRock, which manages about $11.5 trillion for its clients, that figure is just a small percentage of its overall asset base.Still, the deal to buy HPS, after two other significant private-market transactions this year, is helping answer a question that BlackRock’s own investors have been asking: With so much money already, where can BlackRock grow?Early this year, BlackRock spent roughly $12.5 billion to acquire Global Infrastructure Partners, a major investor in airports and data centers across the globe. In June, it announced a $3 billion deal to buy Preqin, a major data provider for the private markets.The HPS deal will make BlackRock one of the five largest providers of private credit in the world.Private credit is a corner of finance that has exploded in recent years. A number of nonbank investment firms, including HPS, Blue Owl and Ares, have become major lenders to large, typically highly indebted companies. In doing so, they’ve taken market share away from major banks.In the past decade, this private-credit market has grown to about $2 trillion, more than 10 times its size in 2009. In its news release announcing Tuesday’s deal, BlackRock predicted that the market would more than double to $4.5 trillion by 2030.BlackRock’s chief executive and chairman, Laurence D. Fink, said investors were increasingly looking for a mix of both private debt and publicly traded bonds. “The blending of public and private credit is a standard for long-term durable fixed income portfolios,” he said on a conference call on Tuesday.Investors appeared to like the deal, sending BlackRock’s stock up nearly 2 percent Tuesday. This year, its stock has jumped 30 percent, outperforming the S&P 500, which is up about 27 percent.While most analysts, including Glenn Schorr at Evercore ISI, cheered the deal, Mr. Schorr offered a note of caution on BlackRock’s recent spate of deal-making: “It does come with execution risk as money, power and integration issues” arise. More

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      Boeing Seeks to Line Up Billions in Financing as Strike Goes On

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      The aerospace giant said it could raise as much as $25 billion in debt or equity over the next three years, including a $10 billion line of credit.Boeing on Tuesday announced steps to improve its financial position as costs mounted and a strike by its largest union entered its second month.In two regulatory filings, the company said that it could raise as much as $25 billion by selling debt or stock over the next three years and that it had entered into a $10 billion credit agreement with a group of banks, which it has not yet drawn on.“These are two prudent steps to support the company’s access to liquidity,” the company said in a statement. The banks are BofA Securities, Citibank, Goldman Sachs Lending Partners and JPMorgan Chase.The moves come days after Boeing revealed about $5 billion in new costs and announced a restructuring that included plans to cut 17,000 jobs, or 10 percent of its work force.The strike, which began a month ago, is costing the company tens of millions of dollars a day, according to various estimates. Most of the workers who walked out are involved in production of commercial airplanes, bringing much of that work to a virtual halt, though one major airplane program is manufactured at a nonunion factory in South Carolina.Talks between the company and the union representing 33,000 striking employees, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, broke down last week, with Boeing retracting its latest contract offer and each side blaming the other for intransigence.Julie Su, the acting labor secretary, visited Seattle on Monday to meet with Boeing and the union, the union said in a statement.The strike is very likely costing Boeing about $1.3 billion in capital a month, according to calculations by Sheila Kahyaoglu, an analyst at Jefferies, the investment bank. Given those costs and its need for more debt, raising $10 billion by selling new shares would provide the company “considerable flexibility,” she added.Last week, S&P Global Ratings also said it was considering lowering Boeing’s credit rating, depending on how long the strike lasts, to junk status, a downgrade that would raise Boeing’s borrowing costs. The company’s debt totals nearly $58 billion, up from about $9 billion a decade ago.And the chief executive of one of the world’s largest airlines, Tim Clark of Emirates, said recently that Boeing could be forced to seek bankruptcy protection if it was not able to issue more shares to improve its financial position. “Unless the company is able to raise funds through a rights issue, I see an imminent investment downgrade with Chapter 11 looming on the horizon,” Mr. Clark told The Air Current, an aerospace news publication. More

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      Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment Files Chapter 11

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      The parent company of Redbox, which rents movies through kiosks, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday.Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, the parent company of the movie rental company Redbox, which is known for its distinctive red kiosks, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Friday.In the filing, Chicken Soup listed debts of about $970 million, and total assets of about $414 million. It owes millions to entertainment and media companies, including Universal Studios, Sony Pictures and BBC Studios Americas, as well as some retailers, such as Walgreens and Walmart, according to court filings.Chicken Soup for the Soul was founded in 1993 by two motivational speakers, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. The company’s inspirational book series, with titles like “From Lemons to Lemonade” and “Angels Among Us,” contains collections of stories for specific audiences, for example new mothers or cat lovers.Its original book, published more than 30 years ago, dispensed life advice and stories of overcoming obstacles with the hope that it would heal readers’ souls just as “chicken soup has a healing effect on the body of the ill.”The company, which has published more than 300 titles, has sold more than 500 million copies worldwide.Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment is separate from its book-publishing arm, which is unaffected by the bankruptcy filing. It was not immediately clear whether the Chapter 11 filing would affect the Redbox operation. The company declined to comment on Sunday.In 2022, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment acquired Redbox, a business founded in 2002 and recognized for its bright red DVD rental kiosks outside supermarkets and pharmacies. Redbox has about 27,000 kiosks across the United States.William J. Rouhana Jr. became the company’s chief executive in 2008 and ran the company with his wife, Amy Newmark, the publisher and editor in chief of the book division.Mr. Rouhana tried to expand the company into different products, including a line of soups, which ultimately failed. He founded the entertainment division of Chicken Soup for the Soul in 2016.The company requested relief to pay its employees, which it has been unable to do “for the two-week period ending on June 14, 2024.” Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment has about 1,000 full- and part-time workers.The company reported $636 million in net income loss in 2023, compared with $111 million in 2022, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. At the time that Chicken Soup for the Soul acquired Redbox, the movie rental company had more than $300 million in debt. More

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      $29 Trillion: That’s How Much Debt Emerging Nations Are Facing

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      A decades-long crisis is getting worse, and now dozens of nations are spending more on interest payments than on health care or education.The Vatican’s meeting on the global debt crisis last week was not quite as celebrity-studded as the one that Pope John Paul II presided over 25 years ago, when he donned sunglasses given to him by Bono, U2’s lead singer.But the message that the current pope, Francis, delivered this time — to a roomful of bankers and economists instead of rock stars — was the same: The world’s poorest countries are being crushed by unmanageable debt and richer nations need to do more to help.Emerging nations are contending with a staggering $29 trillion in public debt. Fifteen countries are spending more on interest payments than they do on education, according to a new report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development; 46 spend more on debt payments than they do on health care.Unmanageable debts have been a recurring feature of the modern global economy, but the current wave may well be the worst so far. Overall, government debt worldwide is four times higher than what it was in 2000.Government overspending or mismanagement is one cause, but global events out of most nations’ control have pushed their debt problems into overdrive. The Covid-19 pandemic slashed business profits and worker incomes at the same time health care and relief costs were increasing. Violent conflicts in Ukraine and elsewhere contributed to rising energy and food prices. Central banks raised interest rates to combat soaring inflation. Global growth slowed.Pope Francis earlier this week in Rome.Fabio Frustaci/EPA, via ShutterstockWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alzheimer’s Takes a Financial Toll Long Before Diagnosis, Study Finds

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      New research shows that people who develop dementia often begin falling behind on bills years earlier.Long before people develop dementia, they often begin falling behind on mortgage payments, credit card bills and other financial obligations, new research shows.A team of economists and medical experts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Georgetown University combined Medicare records with data from Equifax, the credit bureau, to study how people’s borrowing behavior changed in the years before and after a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s or a similar disorder.What they found was striking: Credit scores among people who later develop dementia begin falling sharply long before their disease is formally identified. A year before diagnosis, these people were 17.2 percent more likely to be delinquent on their mortgage payments than before the onset of the disease, and 34.3 percent more likely to be delinquent on their credit card bills. The issues start even earlier: The study finds evidence of people falling behind on their debts five years before diagnosis.“The results are striking in both their clarity and their consistency,” said Carole Roan Gresenz, a Georgetown University economist who was one of the study’s authors. Credit scores and delinquencies, she said, “consistently worsen over time as diagnosis approaches, and so it literally mirrors the changes in cognitive decline that we’re observing.”The research adds to a growing body of work documenting what many Alzheimer’s patients and their families already know: Decision-making, including on financial matters, can begin to deteriorate long before a diagnosis is made or even suspected. People who are starting to experience cognitive decline may miss payments, make impulsive purchases or put money into risky investments they would not have considered before the disease.“There’s not just getting forgetful, but our risk tolerance changes,” said Lauren Hersch Nicholas, a professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine who has studied dementia’s impact on people’s finances. “It might seem suddenly like a good move to move a diversified financial portfolio into some stock that someone recommended.”Tell us about your family’s challenges with money management and Alzheimer’s. More