The news at a glance

last updated 8 January 2015

Retail: Walmart to offer same-sex benefits

Walmart announced this week that it will offer health coverage to employees’ domestic partners, including same-sex partners, said Shelly Banjo in The Wall Street Journal. The retailer told employees that the new policy, to start next year, is “a business decision, not a moral or political one,” meant only to streamline operations across states with different definitions of marriage. The decision “marks a major change for the country’s largest private employer.” While at least two thirds of Fortune 500 firms offer benefits to domestic partners, Walmart has long drawn criticism from gay rights groups “for not providing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees with equal benefits.”

Walmart’s new policy “adds pressure on other resistant companies to follow suit,” said Renee Dudley and Chris Burritt in Bloomberg.com. While the big-box retailer described the change “mainly as a path to a consistent policy,” the switch “may help tip the balance” at other companies such as Exxon Mobil, which employs about 76,900 workers and is one of the largest remaining companies not offering equal benefits. “You can go to your board, and all of a sudden you’re not swimming against the stream as much as you were yesterday,” said Wallace Hopp of the University of Michigan. “You can say, ‘Jeez, Walmart does it.’”

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Brokerage firm Merrill Lynch has agreed to pay a record-breaking $160 million to settle allegations of racial bias, said Patrick McGeehan in The New York Times. The settlement ends an eight-year-old class-action discrimination suit filed on behalf of 700 black Merrill brokers who alleged that they were treated unfairly, received little help from managers, and were ostracized by co-workers. The payout, available to all black brokers and trainees at the firm since May 2001, “would be the largest sum ever distributed to plaintiffs in a racial discrimination suit against an American employer.”

Oil prices hit a six-month high of more than $110 a barrel this week amid “growing fears” that military intervention in Syria could disrupt the region’s oil production, said Gary Strauss in USA Today. Although Syria isn’t a major oil producer, prices had already been climbing since July, “when political upheaval in Egypt sparked concerns about access to supply routes through the Suez Canal.” Some oil analysts suggest that crude oil could even spike to $150 a barrel “if the Syrian conflict spills over to major producers and causes larger supply disruptions.”

JPMorgan Chase is facing more scrutiny from government regulators, said Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Ben Protess in NYTimes.com. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are planning to announce a series of enforcement actions and fines against the bank, which could cost JPMorgan at least $80 million in fines. The cases “center on concerns that the bank duped its credit card customers into buying products pitched as a way to shield them from identity theft.”

Bill Ackman is done at J.C. Penney, said Matt Townsend in Bloomberg.com. His hedge fund, Pershing Square Capital Manage-ment LP, sold its stake in the troubled retailer for $504 million this week—about half what he paid for it in 2010. The sale follows Ackman’s earlier decision to quit J.C. Penney’s board after it fired his handpicked CEO, Ron Johnson, causing “a public clash over its direction and management succession.” Morningstar analyst Paul Swinand said the stake sale ends a “debacle” for shareholders.

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