Politics overshadowed Texas business news in 2017, both the election of President Donald Trump and meddling by the state legislature.

Businesses in San Antonio were whipsawed by the whims of state politicians, as well as the more than occasional tweet — whether it was proposals to impose tariffs on Mexican trade, gut the North American Free Trade Agreement or impose restrictions on transgender men and women from using public bathrooms. Much of what affected local entrepreneurs and corporations was out of their control, including hurricanes and gas shortages.

Oil prices stabilized in 2017 after a roller coaster ride over the previous four years, but they still couldn’t quite break $60 a barrel and aren’t expected to any time soon even as OPEC cuts production in countries across the globe to bolster prices. U.S. oil prices averaged about $50 a barrel for the year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

The equity markets were on a tear all year as the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Index hit new and increasingly higher records throughout the year, closing 2017 up TK percent and TK percent, respectively.

The Texas unemployment rate fell to its lowest level on record in November, 3.8 percent, which was below the already low national average of 4.1 percent. Home sales took off across the nation in 2017, but especially in San Antonio where the number of homes sold is expected to hit another record year and median home prices rose 9 percent from last November, according to the San Antonio Board of Realtors.

Except for Amazon.com, major retailers didn’t have such a good year. The list of bankruptcy filings piled up like jeans at The Gap, which announced plans in September to close 200 Gap and Banana Republic stores. Although The Gap didn’t file for bankruptcy protection in 2017, many others did, including: RadioShack, The Limited, Wet Seal, BCBG Max Azria, Payless ShoeSource, Rue 21, Gymboree, True Religion Apparel and Toys R Us.

Locally, Amazon bought Austin-based Whole Foods Market while several major grocers expanded operations here in San Antonio, including German-based discount grocer Lidl.

Here are some of the major stories that impacted San Antonio-area businesses in 2017:

January

Trump’s inaugural: Trump took office Jan. 20 and pledged an “America First” agenda that punctuated his campaign as well as the policies that he would roll out over the next 11 months. This theme would underscore his approach to business as he publicly lambasted companies that threatened to move operations overseas and rewarded those who added jobs in the U.S.

Mexican tariff: Within his first week in office, the Trump administration floated the idea for a 20 percent tariff on Mexican goods that sent executives here and across the border scrambling to fend off the attack. The tariff idea never went any where, but animosity between the U.S. and Mexico increased throughout the year as Trump moved forward with plans to build a border wall between the two nations and to renegotiate NAFTA.

Travel ban: Trump signed an executive order banning U.S. entry for 90 days for citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries, leaving students and employers in San Antonio anxious over their future here. The so-called Muslim travel ban would be rejected as unconstitutional by the courts, go through months of legal challenges and three revisions before the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily allowed the ban to take full affect in early December. The U. S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Seattle agreed Dec. 22 with an October ruling in Hawaii that said the order was illegal and exceeded his authority.

February

NAFTA fight brews: Mexican officials prepared to fight Trump on his Mexican Wall proposal as well as other negative trade talk. Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on Feb. 1 called for a 90-day assessment of NAFTA to prepare for negotiations.

Hog apocalypse: In Texas, Agriculture Secretary Sid Miller approved the use of a controversial pesticide to help fight what Miller called the “hog apocalypse.” The issue caught national attention, either because of the phrase “hog apocalypse” or because it allowed ranchers to use Kaput Feral Hog Lure to poison feral hogs on their lands. Wild hogs are fairly intelligent and destructive, costing the state roughly $52 million in damages a year, by Miller’s estimate.

Kaput essentially causes the hogs to bleed out internally for about a week before they die. The issue pitted the regulator against hunters and hog meat processors, who worried that the poison could make its way into meat they wanted to slaughter and sell. The regulation was put on hold in March.

March

Bathroom bill: Business groups pushed back against the so-called bathroom bill, legislation introduced by Texas lawmakers restricting public bathroom access for transgender men and women. Convention and meeting executives started threatening to pull their meetings from the state, sending tourism officials in San Antonio, Austin, Dallas and Houston to lobby against the legislation. Estimated losses for just those four cities on convention business came to a combined $407 million if meetings pulled out over the bill, according to a tally by the San Antonio Express-News.

The proposal ultimately died during a special legislative session after outcry from LGBTQ advocates and business groups, but San Antonio still lost about $3.1 million in convention business just because lawmakers were considering the bill, said Casandra Matej, president and chief executive officer of Visit San Antonio.

April

Silicon San Antonio? Video streaming service Hulu announced plans to place a major customer service center here that will eventually bring 500 jobs to San Antonio. The company was awarded $2 million in city, county and state incentives to locate its call center here. Hulu executives said they planned to spend $13 million on its new 45,000-square-foot campus for its “viewer experience operations.”

May

Uresti arrested: State Sen. Carlos Uresti was indicted along with three other individuals in two separate cases for bribery, wire fraud, conspiracy and other charges in connection with his involvement in bankrupt oil services company FourWinds Logistics and public corruption in Reeves County. The San Antonio Democrat, who denied all wrongdoing, was arrested and shackled at the U.S. District courthouse in San Antonio before being released on a $50,000 unsecured bond.

Uresti, whose law office was raided by the FBI in February, was indicted on 13 different charges that carry more than 200 years in prison if found guilty on all counts. The FourWinds trial is scheduled to start next month.

June

Lone Star Brewery fail: The $300 million proposed development of the Lone Star Brewery starts to unravel as Tennessee developer CBL & Associates Properties decided to pull out of the project. CBL executives say they dropped out of the project after receiving an anonymous letter regarding the owner of the property, Aqualand Development of San Marcos, and its president Mark Smith.

The land narrowly escaped foreclosure in November, but legal troubles would continue to plague the development. Cleveland development company NRP Group, which planned to build an apartment complex as part of the project, would later sue Aqualand over the botched deal.

WholeFoods.com: Online shopping giant Amazon made a dramatic push into brick-and-mortar retail, organic kale and kombucha with its $13.7 billion purchase of Austin-based organic grocery chain Whole Foods Market.

With more than 460 stores, Whole Foods was under fire from shareholders for dreary sales as organic grocers such as Sprouts Farmers Market and Natural Grocers — and traditional grocers such as H-E-B, Walmart, Kroger and Target — increasingly home in on the Austin-based grocery chain’s turf with their own organic options. The company reshuffled its board and appointed a new chief financial officer in May after reporting its seventh-straight quarter of falling same-store sales, a key indicator of retail performance.

July

Symphony saved: The Symphony Society of San Antonio, founded in 1939, reached a deal with some of its major donors to turn over its operations to a new nonprofit founded by some of the organization’s biggest financial backers beginning Sept. 1.

That deal would never get finalized. San Antonio supermarket chain H-E-B, the Tobin Endowment and the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation announced their decision in December to walk away from the plan.

August

NAFTA talks begin: U.S., Canadian and Mexican trade officials formally began renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement, a pact between the three nations credited with quadrupling trade since it took effect in 1994. They would not go well. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer criticized Mexico and Canada for “resistance to change” while Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland complained about America’s “winner-takes-all mindset” and said proposals “turn back the clock on 23 years of predictability, openness and collaboration under NAFTA.”

Harvey makes landfall: Hurricane Harvey made landfall along the Texas coast on Aug. 25, bringing with it 52 inches of rain for Houston and up to $200 billion in damages. The category 4 storm caused at least 91 deaths, mostly in Texas. It devastated Houston’s real estate market, flooded more than 500,000 cars and damanged more than 176,000 homes in Texas.

The storm’s impact will last for at least another year or more. Cleanup and recovery in Houston and coastal towns could take upwards of 20 months.

September

#Gasshortage: Harvey knocked 20 percent of all U.S. refining capacity offline, causing a relatively minor disruption in supply that exploded into a full-on panic as motorists across Texas lined up to buy gas. The urgency at the pump was exacerbated as news of a #gasshortage spread like wildfire across Twitter and Facebook.

The panic helped propel national prices up by an average of 27 cents a gallon and left more than 91 percent of all gas stations in San Antonio empty within three days. San Antonians who sat in lines 20 cars deep were buying at 2½ times their normal pace, according to Mayor Ron Nirenberg. Shortages were documented on social media and in newspapers from the Rio Grande Valley to Dallas-Fort Worth.

Equifax breach: Credit reporting company Equifax disclosed that cybercriminals stole sensitive data on 143 million U.S. customers. The company later revised that number to 145.5 million consumers. Former CEO Richard Smith resigned and spent the next several weeks testifying before Congress.

Credit Human tax package: Local credit union, Credit Human, recieves an $8.8 million package of tax breaks and development incentives to move its headquarters from the Northwest Side to an office building at the Pearl. The decision provoked skepticism from some officials and calls to reduce the amount of incentives, which were cut to $8.4 million.

October

Amazon.no: San Antonio and Bexar County made a public show of bowing out of the bidding process for Amazon’s next home, a $5 billion second headquarters dubbed HQ2 that sent state and local officials across the nation into a frenzy.

Amazon promised 50,000 new jobs that paid an average of more than $100,000 a year to the winning municipality.

“Blindly giving away the farm isn’t our style,” Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff and San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg wrote in a joint letter sent to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Erica Hurtak, spokeswoman for the San Antonio Economic Development Foundation, said San Antonio wasn’t “highly competitive from a real estate and incentives perspective.”

A report by New York research firm Moody’s Analytics released a few days later showed that the San Antonio-New Braunfels metropolitan area would have actually had a shot, ranking it 14th out of 65 potential locations across the nation.

November

Centro embezzlement: Centro San Antonio discloses that a former staff accountant allegedly embezzled $175,000 and CEO Pat DiGiovanni was stepping down, although he wasn’t accused of any wrongdoing. It would later say the amount was closer to $260,000.

December

Centro failed on background check: The San Antonio Express-News reported that the nonprofit group, which advocates for downtown development, never ran a background check on the woman accused of stealing the money, identified as Alicia Henderson.

Henderson was previously convicted of felony bank fraud, charged twice with theft by check and filed for bankruptcy at least twice. The revelations put Centro Chief Financial Officer Tony Piazzi, who oversaw Henderson’s work, at risk of also losing his job.

Symphony on brink: San Antonio supermarket chain H-E-B, the Tobin Endowment and the Kronkosky Charitable Foundation abandoned plans to save the symphony, saying that the organization’s retirement plan for its musicians was a “deal-breaker.” It was a move the musicians called a “union-busting power play.”