“They may think they have no other place to express their displeasure,” he said.

The far right is having a resurgence across Europe. This week, the Brothers of Italy party won the largest share of votes in Italian elections. And in Sweden, a group founded by neo-Nazis and skinheads looks set to become the largest party in the next government.

In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany, known by its German acronym AfD, has risen to about 15 percent in public polls and is planning protests in Berlin next month.

“People are not even using heating yet — that is still to come,” said Mr. Quent. “And, nevertheless, the AfD already had a visible upswing. This is, indeed, the scenario I have feared.”

In the Prague protest, many who joined bristled at the idea of being called fringe or far right.

“It’s not only energy prices rising — grocery prices, too. I am raising my granddaughter, and I am worried,” said Miroslav Kusmirek, who came from a town 30 miles outside the capital to protest on a rainy afternoon. “I see companies now struggling and I worry; if the company that employs me collapses, so will I.”

As he spoke, a speaker onstage from Germany’s AfD, Christine Anderson, was shouting to loud cheers, “You no longer live in a democracy!”

For energy experts, the populist surge adds yet another knot in the tangle of problems Europe is grappling with. On top of Russia’s cutting gas, France’s nuclear plants have been at half capacity because of maintenance issues, and a severe drought has hampered Germany’s ability to import coal over the summer.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/world/europe/prague-protests-economy.html

The British government’s sweeping fiscal plan, presented without an independent fiscal and economic assessment, has sent investors fleeing from British assets. The pound fell to a record low against the U.S. dollar on Monday, and traders suspected that the central bank would be forced to raise rates quickly, which pushed up short- and long-term borrowing costs.

The speed of the rise in bond yields had disrupted Britain’s mortgage market, with some lenders pulling offers on new mortgages because they had become too difficult to price.

“A decision by the government to scrap some of the tax cuts, or to cut spending sharply, would help to alleviate the stress in” currency and bond markets, Samuel Tombs, an economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a research note. “But its actions to date have eroded confidence among global investors, which cannot be easily restored. Accordingly, a painful recession driven by surging borrowing costs lies ahead.”

The market turmoil and the central bank’s intervention reveal the extent to which the government’s plans are at odds with the bank’s monetary policy goals. The government is trying to quickly generate economic demand, while the bank is trying to cool it to lower inflation.

On Tuesday, Huw Pill, the chief economist of the Bank of England, said the government’s fiscal plans would be met with a “significant” response by officials at the Bank of England, who are scheduled to meet again in early November.

Just last Thursday, the central bank said it would initiate its plan to sell bonds back to the market as it tried to end the long era of easy money in its fight against inflation. It had insisted there would be a “high bar” for the bank to deviate from the plan, which would over the next year reduce its holdings of bonds by £80 billion through sales and redemptions, to £758 billion. On Wednesday, the bank said it was postponing the start of sales until the end of October.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/business/economy/bank-of-england-bonds.html

Galloway doesn’t dispute any of that, but he chalks up the wage-productivity gap to a few fuzzier factors.

No. 1, he says, was that “we just decided that the consumer was king.”

In his estimation, the shift from an economy driven by manufacturing to one powered by consumers has had the pernicious effect of reorienting America’s business sector around catering to disgruntled, entitled customers.

He recalled how, as a child, his family would take its busted television to the repair shop and foot the bill to fix it. That’s no longer possible or even practical in most cases, as globalization and automation have driven the price of electronics so low that it usually makes more sense to just replace your flat-screen when it goes on the fritz.

Now, he said, “you expect a nice man in a brown suit to come take it and give you a new one, and a handwritten apology note from a customer service.”

To demonstrate the growing power of consumers, Galloway charts the number of goods carried each year by shipping containers, which increased from 102 million metric tons in 1980 to 1.83 billion metric tons as of 2017.

Factor No. 2 is what Galloway calls “the gross idolatry of ‘innovators,’” which has exacerbated economic inequality by heaping huge rewards on tech entrepreneurs, while harming working people.

Time magazine — which is owned by Mark Benioff, the founder of the customer service software company Salesforce — regularly features Silicon Valley titans on the cover of its annual “Person of the Year” issue, for instance.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/us/politics/scott-galloway-economy.html

Restricting these trucks to the highway also plays to their strengths. “The biggest problems for long-haul truckers are fatigue, distraction and boredom,” Mr. Rodrigues explained on a recent afternoon as one of his company’s trucks cruised down a highway in Northern California. “Robots don’t have a problem with any of that.”

It’s a sound strategy, but even this will require years of additional development.

Part of the challenge is technical. Though self-driving trucks can handle most of what happens on a highway — merging into traffic from an on-ramp, changing lanes, slowing for cars stopped on the shoulder — companies are still working to ensure they can respond to less common situations, like a sudden three-car pileup.

As he continued down the highway, Mr. Rodrigues said his company has yet to perfect what he calls evasive maneuvers. “If there is an accident in the road right in front of the vehicle,” he explained, “it has to stop itself quickly.” For this and other reasons, most companies do not plan on removing safety drivers from their trucks until at least 2024. In many states, they will need explicit approval from regulators to do so.

But deploying these trucks is also a logistical challenge — one that will require significant changes across the trucking industry.

In shuttling goods between Dallas and Atlanta, Kodiak’s truck did not drive into either city. It drove to spots just off the highway where it could unload its cargo and refuel before making the return trip. Then traditional trucks picked up the cargo and drove “the last mile” or final leg of the delivery.

In order to deploy autonomous trucks on a large scale, companies must first build a network of these “transfer hubs.” With an eye toward this future, Kodiak recently inked a partnership with Pilot, a company that operates traditional truck stops across the country. Today, these are places where truck drivers can shower and rest and grab a bite to eat. The hope is that they can also serve as transfer hubs for driverless trucks.

“The industry can’t afford to build this kind of infrastructure from scratch,” said Kodiak’s chief executive, Don Burnette. “We have to find ways of working with the existing infrastructure.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/28/business/driverless-trucks-highways.html

Geography also matters. Even among the largest landlords, those with a presence in Sun Belt cities such as Miami, Tampa, Nashville and Phoenix saw far faster rent growth than high-cost coastal markets like San Francisco, where rents fell substantially during the pandemic lockdowns as white-collar workers fled for remote locations.

Mid-America Apartment Communities, a publicly traded owner of 101,000 units concentrated in Georgia, Texas, Florida and North Carolina, has benefited from all these trends. Its new tenants make $91,319 on average and are in their mid-30s. In the first half of the year, its new and renewed leases increased 17.1 percent over their previous rates, driving the largest increase in its dividend per share in decades.

“We feel very good about the opportunity for pricing going forward and still believe now is the time to push rate versus volume,” said Tom Grimes, the company’s chief operating officer, explaining to investors on a quarterly earnings call that he’d rather raise prices than worry about turnover, which remains low. “Demand is good, and our priority is for growing rents.”

It’s harder to track the finances of privately owned real estate portfolios, which can range from a few hundred to a few thousand units — midsize landlords, in relative terms. But interviews suggest that even if they remain profitable, rising expenses have weighed more heavily on their bottom lines.

Take Swapnil Agarwal, whose Houston-based Nitya Capital has grown swiftly to encompass 20,000 units. He says insurance premiums, payroll costs and maintenance have combined to push his expenses to $7,000 per unit this year from $5,500 in recent years.

“It’s ironic, because our net operating margins have not gone up — actually, they’ve gone down,” Mr. Agarwal said. The picture may improve as he renews leases at market rates. “Yes, the rent growth is there,” he said, “but it has to sustain there for a while because of the costs going up.”

Many midsize landlords are also in the business of acquiring, renovating and building apartments. Rising interest rates have made that much more difficult.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/27/business/economy/landlords-rent-inflation.html

“You can see these very pronounced negative effects of a stronger dollar,” said Maurice Obstfeld, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and an author of the study.

Then there is a pile-on effect. Even in countries where inflation is not as high, central banks feel pressure to raise interest rates to bolster their currencies and prevent import prices from skyrocketing. Last week, Argentina, the Philippines, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates, Sweden, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Britain and Norway raised interest rates.

Despite the pain a strong dollar is causing, most economists say that the global outcome would be worse if the Fed failed to halt inflation in the United States.

At the same time, the sweep of rising interest rates around the globe is causing concerns that central bankers might move too far, too fast. The World Bank warned this month that simultaneous interest rate increases are pushing the world toward a recession and developing nations toward a string of financial crises that would inflict “lasting harm.”

Clearly, the Fed’s mandate is to look after the American economy, but some economists and foreign policymakers argue it should pay more attention to the fallout its decisions have on the rest of the world.

In 1998, Alan Greenspan, a five-term Fed chair, argued that “it is just not credible that the United States can remain an oasis of prosperity unaffected by a world that is experiencing greatly increased stress.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/26/business/economy/us-dollar-global-impact.html