LOS ANGELES — That silver Dodge Ram Warlock with the 5.7-liter V-8 Hemi engine must have looked pretty sweet when gasoline prices hovered around $4 a gallon. Now, with gasoline topping $6 a gallon at some Los Angeles-area stations, a bit of sour’s been added to the mix.

Record-high gasoline and diesel prices are combusting driver budgets ...Read more

On a day when investors needed a place to hide, one alternative area of the market wasn’t providing any refuge: Bitcoin.

The world’s largest cryptocurrency had its worst day in more than two months, slumping almost 8% to about $54,350 as of Friday afternoon amid a rout in world stock markets on the emergence of a potentially dangerous ...Read more

Supply chain issues are disrupting retailers and restaurants, but a recent Bloomberg Opinion piece argues that Americans need to act more like Europeans who traditionally buy less.

Allison Schrager, a Bloomberg opinion columnist, writes that household consumption by Americans grew about 65 percent from 1990 to 2015, compared to 35 percent in ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — Ashton Caudillo headed out with his father early Friday morning to the Westfield Santa Anita in Arcadia looking for a hard-to-find PlayStation 5 well before the mall’s 7 a.m. opening. What they found surprised them: only a handful of other shoppers.

The 20-year-old’s father, Lawrence, has a distinct memory of Black Fridays ...Read more

SAN JOSE, California — In a strong signal that Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes will seek to blame her co-accused and ex-lover Sunny Balwani for alleged fraud at her failed startup Theranos, the defense team has asked the judge in her trial to let them put statements previously made by Balwani before the jury.

In a motion filed this week, ...Read more

The Era of Electrification has claimed its first big scalp.

Dodge is ending production of its iconic, V-8-powered Hellcat Challenger and Charger muscle cars models by 2023 as the brand transitions to a mix of electrified EV, hybrid, and plug-in drivetrains in the face of government regulations forcing battery-powered vehicles. The high ...Read more

Buy a new home and you can track its value on Zillow or Redfin. Buy a new car and JD Power is at your service tracking residual value.

If you own a Honda or Lexus, then your asset is looking pretty good.

That's the conclusion of ALG, a division of JD Power, and its 2022 Residual Value Awards which honor the Japanese companies as the top brands...Read more

The day before Los Angeles-based art department coordinator Crystal Hopkins voted against her union's proposed new contract, she stepped down as president of Local 871.

Hopkins said she was resigning from the post she won in 2018 in part because of concerns about the new agreement negotiated by the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage ...Read more

Is there an economic term that strikes more fear into the hearts of consumers than "inflation"?

Probably not. When inflation is rising even modestly, it becomes Topic A in the press, on cable news and over the proverbial backyard hedges and dinner tables.

Inflation is commonly regarded as a ravager of family budgets, a destroyer of political ...Read more

The American job market is a laggard, but it is catching up faster than it may first appear.

The U.S. economy is bigger than it was before the COVID-19 pandemic began. The stock market is higher. But there were 3.6 million fewer jobs in October compared to the end of 2019.

Closing that gap is a key factor for the Federal Reserve for how and ...Read more

Thirty thousand high-end snow globes are trapped in California's San Pedro Bay, split between two shipping containers on two ships in the idle flotilla offshore.

One ship arrived in late September; the other in late October. They've been stuck at anchor ever since.

Liz Ross, co-founder of CoolSnowGlobes, says that at this point in the season, ...Read more

If you want to save money on housing, here’s a tip: Avoid shouldering the costs of accompanying parking spots.

Parking spots are among the more expensive accouterments of housing. Two spots are around 360 square feet, which matches the square footage of this writer’s first Manhattan apartment — and that doesn’t factor in the space used ...Read more

A year since Floridians approved Amendment 2 to gradually raise the state’s minimum wage to $15, a Republican lawmaker is again looking for a way to pay workers less.

State Sen. Jeff Brandes of Pinellas County refiled a joint resolution that would authorize the Legislature to establish a subminimum wage potentially as low as $4.25 an hour ...Read more

Black Friday may not bring hordes of predawn deal hunters to stores the way it used to, but there’s still plenty of shopping expected to happen Thanksgiving weekend.

The National Retail Federation is forecasting record holiday sales of $843.4 billion or more during November and December, up 8.5% compared with last year. But earlier-than-usual...Read more

Home buyers remain in a tough bind, chasing after homes amid steeply rising prices.

The average price per square foot in Chicago is up more than 25% in the past year. In Salt Lake City, the average price per square foot has increased more than 20%. In Dallas, the price per square foot has increased more than 25% in the past year. And let’s ...Read more

Remember R2D2 beaming a hologram of Princess Leia pleading for help from Obi-Wan-Kenobi in the first Star Wars movie back in 1977?

Now a San Diego company aims to bring similar holograms to real life on desktop and handheld devices.

IKIN, founded four years ago by Taylor Scott Griffith and Joe Ward, is working on volumetric hardware, "neural ...Read more