The Biden administration’s move on Thursday to strictly limit pollution from coal-burning power plants is a major policy shift. But in many ways it’s one more hairpin turn in a zigzag approach to environmental regulation in the United States, a pattern that has grown more extreme as the political landscape has become more polarized. Nearly […]
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Over the past few decades, in a surge of bipartisan national self-confidence, the federal government has borrowed a lot of money, sometimes in response to national emergencies and sometimes to do the things people thought were worth doing. We gave ourselves permission to incur all this debt because interest rates were low and many people […]
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Last week, employees at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tenn., voted by almost three to one to join the United Automobile Workers. By the numbers, this wasn’t a big deal: It involved only a few thousand workers in an economy that employs almost 160 million people. But it was an important symbolic victory for a […]
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The U.S. economy continued to grow but at a sharply slower rate early this year, as strong consumer spending was offset by weakness in other sectors. Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, increased at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the first three months of 2024, down from 3.4 percent at the end of 2023, […]
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President Biden, seeking to capitalize on a week of favorable political developments, plans to announce on Thursday that his administration will provide up to $6.1 billion in grants to Micron Technology, the latest federal award intended to shore up the nation’s domestic supply of semiconductors. Micron will use the grants to help build two leading-edge […]
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Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken cheered on the sidelines at a basketball game in Shanghai on Wednesday night, and spent Thursday chatting with students at New York University’s Shanghai campus and meeting American business owners. It all went to emphasize the kind of economic, educational and cultural ties that the United States is pointedly […]
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Europe’s central bankers are trying to get out of the shadow of the United States. For much of the past two years, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic raised interest rates aggressively to fight a surge in prices, and since last summer, they have left rates high as they assess whether inflation is under […]
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Sky-high mortgage rates and other elevated borrowing costs are pinching American consumers ahead of the 2024 election, threatening President Biden’s chances at a second term. Yet so far, Mr. Biden has not called on the Federal Reserve, which has raised interest rates to their highest levels in more than two decades, to slash those costs. […]
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By voting to join the United Automobile Workers, Volkswagen workers in Tennessee have given the union something it has never had: a factory-wide foothold at a major foreign automaker in the South. The result, in an election that ended on Friday, will enable the union to bargain for better wages and benefits. Now the question […]
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Stocks are on course for their longest losing streak of the year, as geopolitical turmoil rattles Wall Street and investors slash their bets on the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates any time soon. The S&P 500, one of the most widely followed stock indexes in the world, recorded a fifth consecutive decline on Thursday. Stocks […]
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Last year, the United Auto Workers announced an ambitious plan to organize workers and unionize foreign-owned auto plants in the South. “One of our biggest goals coming out of this historic contract victory is to organize like we’ve never organized before,” Shawn Fain, the president of the U.A.W., said after winning significant wage and benefit […]
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Mortgage rates rose above 7 percent for the first time this year, crossing a symbolically concerning threshold that threatens to keep millions of potential home buyers and sellers on the sidelines of a U.S. housing market that is increasingly showing signs of slowing. The average rate on 30-year mortgages, the most popular home loan in […]
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New John Deere tractors made their way last week through the sprawling port of Brunswick, Ga., their distinctive green paint glinting in the sunshine. Stevedores drove the tractors up a ramp into the belly of the Leo Spirit, a ship that would take them to Asia. As orderly as everything looked, the tractor convoy was […]
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As President Biden tours Pennsylvania, his campaign will run a new ad promoting his commitment to organized labor and attacking the economic policies of former President Donald J. Trump. The ad features JoJo Burgess, who is a steelworker and the mayor of Washington, Pa., a small town southwest of Pittsburgh. Mr. Biden is scheduled to […]
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President Biden delivered a flurry of attacks on former President Donald J. Trump during a Tuesday speech in Pennsylvania about taxes and economic policy, painting his Republican rival as a puppet of plutocrats who had ignored the working class. Visiting his hometown, Scranton, in a top battleground state that he has visited more often than […]
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The Federal Reserve is likely to wait longer than initially expected to cut interest rates given stubborn inflation readings in recent months, the central bank’s top two officials said Tuesday. Policymakers came into 2024 looking for evidence that inflation was continuing to cool rapidly, as it did late last year. Instead, progress on inflation has […]
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The global economy is approaching a soft landing after several years of geopolitical and economic turmoil, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday. But it warned that risks remain, including stubborn inflation, the threat of escalating global conflicts and rising protectionism. In its latest World Economic Outlook report, the I.M.F. projected global output to hold […]
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Sam Sanchez, a Chicago restaurateur, was incensed when President Biden announced last September that his administration would extend work eligibility to nearly half a million Venezuelans, many of them migrants who had recently crossed the border illegally. What about his undocumented employees like Ruben, a Mexican father of two U.S.-born children who has been in […]
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An uneasy calm Investors are breathing a sigh of relief on Monday. Global stocks are in the green and oil prices have retreated from last week’s gains after Iran’s unprecedented drone and missile attack on Israel was mostly neutralized in the skies. But the calm could be short lived, as world leaders and markets focus […]
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Something deeply unusual has happened in the American housing market over the last two years, as mortgage rates have risen to around 7 percent. Rates that high are not, by themselves, historically remarkable. The trouble is that the average American household with a mortgage is sitting on a fixed rate that’s a whopping three points […]
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In western Pennsylvania, halfway through one of those classic hazy March days when the worst of winter has passed, but the bare trees tilting in the wind tell everyone spring is yet to come, Darren Mattern was putting in some extra work. Tucked at a corner table inside a Barnes & Noble cafe in Logan […]
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Views of Donald J. Trump’s presidency have become more positive since he left office, bolstering his case for election and posing a risk to President Biden’s strategy of casting his opponent as unfit for the presidency, according to a new poll by The New York Times and Siena College. While the memories of Mr. Trump’s […]
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The path to a “soft landing” doesn’t seem as smooth as it did four months ago. But the expectations of a year ago have been surpassed. April 13, 2024 The economic news of the past two weeks has been enough to leave even seasoned observers feeling whipsawed. The unemployment rate fell. Inflation rose. The stock […]
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Stocks slumped to a second consecutive weekly loss on Friday, as intensifying tension in the Middle East prompted caution among investors, adding to concerns about lingering inflation that had set off a retreat earlier in the week. The S&P 500 fell 1.5 percent on Friday in its worst day of trading since January, and ended […]
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The markets assume that former President Donald J. Trump has an even chance of winning the November election. So far, it appears they don’t care either way. The political prediction markets — which allow traders to place bets on the outcome of the November election — show that the presidential race is tight. After trailing […]
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Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, on Friday warned of an “unsettling” global landscape, highlighting a cascade of pressures including war, rising geopolitical tensions and inflation that threaten the economy and could weigh on the performance of the nation’s largest bank. Mr. Dimon’s remarks, made concurrently with his bank’s quarterly earnings report — […]
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Housing gloom The higher-for-longer inflation predicament has hit the U.S. housing market like a thunderbolt. Home prices and mortgage rates are climbing again, dashing hopes that financing costs would fall this year and adding another economic question that could hang over the presidential election campaign. More economists are paring their bets that the Fed will […]
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Maine has a lot of lobsters. It also has a lot of older people, ones who are less and less willing and able to catch, clean and sell the crustaceans that make up a $1 billion industry for the state. Companies are turning to foreign-born workers to bridge the divide. “Folks born in Maine are […]
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President Biden and his economic team had high hopes about how two years of rapid inflation would play out in the months leading to the November presidential election. Price growth would continue to cool. The Federal Reserve would cut interest rates. Mortgage rates and other borrowing costs would fall. Consumer moods would improve, and so […]
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Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent. For much of the past decade, she has focused on features about the presidency, the first family, and life in Washington, in addition to covering a range of domestic and foreign policy issues. She is the author of a book on first ladies. More about Katie Rogers
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America seemed headed for an economic fairy-tale ending in late 2023. The painfully rapid inflation that had kicked off in 2021 appeared to be cooling in earnest, and economic growth had begun to gradually moderate after a series of Federal Reserve interest rate increases. But 2024 has brought a spate of surprises: The economy is […]
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