Business - Thursday, March 12, 2026

New Zealand’s economic recovery probably lost momentum in the final months of 2025, highlighting its fragile nature even before any impact from the spiraling Middle East conflict and surging oil prices.

"Believe me, you'll be kicking yourself if you sell everything and then you have to watch this market rebound without you," CNBC Jim Cramer said Thursday.

Mortgage rates fell below the critical 6 percent threshold just a couple weeks ago. But they’re climbing again as new inflation concerns have roiled financial markets.

One of Australia’s biggest pension funds, Rest Super, is on the hunt for more private markets investments in the US, underscoring the strong appetite from the country’s fast-growing A$4.5 trillion ($3.2 trillion) sector that’s on a roadshow across three American cities.

Ulta Beauty reported fiscal fourth-quarter earnings Thursday that beat Wall Street revenue expectations but missed on earnings per share.

The stock index fell 1.5 percent on Thursday, as concerns continued to grow about oil prices rising amid the war in the Middle East.

Remedy for partnership’s post-Covid woes was the old-fashioned one of basic shopkeeping and cutting costs It turns out, the remedy for the John Lewis partnership’s post-Covid woes of a few years ago did not lie in seeking outside capital or building 10,000 buy-to-rent flats. Rather, the solution was the old-fashioned one of cutting costs and concentrating on basic shopkeeping. As it happens, the wild idea of seeking external investors was virtually dead the moment it was loosely aired , such was the uproar among customers and staff about the threat to the 100%-employee owned model. But the home-building adventure did get going until it was ditched by the newish chair, Jason Tarry, a couple of weeks ago . He accepted, in effect, a point that should have been obvious at the outset: if the building assumptions relied on interest rates remaining at near-zero for years, the project would not survive contact with events. Continue reading...

Peru left interest rates unchanged after inflation accelerated above the midpoint of its target range for the first time in more than a year.

The basic assumptions that have underpinned hedging strategies for decades are coming undone by the escalating war in Iran.

Shantanu Narayen led Adobe through a transition to subscription software, and he's been positioning the company to grow in the artificial intelligence age.