Mr. Sullivan said there will be “a significant roster of countries” joining the framework when Mr. Biden kicks it off on Monday, but administration officials have not identified which countries. Japan, which has signaled that it would rather the United States rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership, will nonetheless embrace the new framework as the best it can get at the moment, as will South Korea. Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines have indicated interest in joining, while India and Indonesia have expressed some reservations.

Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh of Vietnam said this month that it was still not clear what the new framework would mean in concrete terms. “We are ready to work alongside the U.S. to discuss, to further clarify what these pillars entail,” he said at a forum held by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The Financial Times reported that the administration had diluted the language of the organizing statement to entice more countries to join. Some countries are concerned that the United States will force labor and environmental standards on them without the trade-offs of better trading terms, which are off the table because of liberal opposition within Mr. Biden’s party.

“There’s a reason that the original T.P.P. was derailed,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said at a hearing last month. “It would have off-shored more jobs to countries that use child labor and prison labor and pay workers almost nothing. Let me be clear: The I.P.E.F. cannot be T.P.P. 2.0.”

Mr. Emanuel said the administration would describe the new framework process as a “consultation to negotiation,” as he put it. “We have to have an approach that respects countries where they are,” he said. “Meaning where Japan is or where Australia is, is not necessarily where Vietnam or Thailand or the Philippines are.”

Moreover, he said, the administration wanted a framework that could survive beyond Mr. Biden’s presidency, unlike the Trans-Pacific Partnership. “We have an interest in saying we are still a player in the Pacific, and China has an interest in saying the U.S. is on its way out,” Mr. Emanuel said.

Mr. Biden’s visit to the Samsung semiconductor facility immediately after disembarking from Air Force One served as a reminder of how critical the region is to his immediate priority of unsnarling the supply chain problems that have hurt American consumers back home.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/asia/samsung-biden-asia-economy.html

Neel Somani, 24, quit his job as a quantitative researcher at Citadel, a hedge fund, in February to work on a project that connected Luna’s underlying blockchain to Ethereum, another crypto system.

In April, Mr. Somani joined Terra Hacker House, a monthlong program in a Chicago office sponsored by Terraform Labs and its investors, designed to incubate projects built on Mr. Kwon’s technology. Within a few weeks, Mr. Somani lined up $10 million in commitments for venture funding that valued his project, Terranova, at $65 million. He was close to hiring three employees, he said, and had 40 customers excited about the idea.

After Luna and TerraUSD tumbled, Mr. Somani and his fellow hackers initially thought Mr. Kwon and his partners could turn things around. But by last Tuesday, Mr. Somani realized it was over, and felt relieved he hadn’t yet accepted the funding. He lost around $20,000 of Luna, he said, which didn’t bother him since he has made money on other risky stock and crypto bets.

Over the last week, the desks at the hacker house have emptied. A Telegram group called Rebuilding Terra, with nearly 200 members, has been actively discussing how to salvage projects and funds.

Mr. Somani is sanguine. “For those of us who are crypto builders, the feast and famine mentality comes really naturally, and that’s maybe what attracted us to the community,” he said.

On Thursday, he plans to pitch his now-obsolete technology at the hacker house’s demo day. Most other groups have left the program, he said, so he expects less competition for a $50,000 first-place prize.

“It’s in U.S. dollars,” he said. “I asked.”

Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/18/technology/terra-luna-cryptocurrency-do-kwon.html

But few people, if anyone, expected those programs to continue. And while it is possible to make a rough estimate about how much fading fiscal support is helping with the inflation situation, as Moody’s did, a range of economists have said that it is hard to know how much it matters for inflation with precision.

The tie between budget deficits and inflation is also more complex than Mr. Biden’s statements suggest.

Deficits, which are financed by government borrowing, are not inherently inflationary: Whether they push up prices hinges on the economic environment as well as the nature of the spending or cutback in revenue that created the budget shortfall.

Policies that reduce the deficit could be inflationary, for instance. A big, broadly distributed stimulus that gives direct cash aid to low- and middle-income households could be more than offset in a budget by revenue from large tax increases on the wealthy. But shuffling much of that money to people who are likely to spend it quickly could cause demand to outstrip supply, leading to inflation. Alternatively, spending that would enlarge deficits — like debt-financed investments in energy infrastructure — could reduce inflation over time if the program improves efficiency, expands capacity or makes production cheaper.

“I’ll fall back on the typical economist answer and say: It depends,” said Andrew Patterson, a senior international economist at Vanguard.

The last time the federal government had a budget surplus was 2001. Since 1970, there have only been four years in which the U.S. government taxed more than it spent. Over that period, there have been times of both high and low inflation.

“There’s no simple-minded deficit-to-inflation link — you have to look at both the demand and the supply side of the economy,” said Glenn Hubbard, a professor of finance and economics at Columbia University who headed the Council of Economic Advisers under President George W. Bush. The existence or absence of high inflation has more to do with imbalances in the real economy than with complex budget math. “If aggregate demand grows much faster than aggregate supply, you will see inflation,” he said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/business/economy/biden-deficits-inflation.html

Last year, global auction sales of paintings by artists under 40 soared to $259.5 million, a 177 percent increase on 2020, according to data provided by Artprice, a French-based auction analytics company.

Eager to jump on this fast-moving bandwagon, Sotheby’s has come up with a new format called “The Now” sales, focusing on works by the most coveted names of the moment. On paper, this 23-lot offering was meant to be the warm-up act for the main sale of works by established contemporary artists, but with so much attention — and money — being focused on younger names, for many, this was the evening’s main event.

Like hungry chicks in a nest, banks of Sotheby’s staff members screamed telephone bids as Lot 1, the 2020 painting “Falling Woman,” by the New York-based artist Anna Weyant, set the tone. Estimated at $150,00 to $200,000, it sold to an online bidder for $1.6 million, beating the record $1.5 million set for the artist at Christie’s last week.

Female artists and artists of color continued to be the dominant forces in the market for works by younger contemporaries. Sotheby’s proudly announced before “The Now” sale that, for the first time, female artists outnumbered men at one of its auctions.

Capitalizing on Simone Leigh’s representation of the United States at the Venice Biennale (where one of her sculptures also won a Golden Lion award), Sotheby’s included the life-size mixed media female head “Birmingham,” from 2012. This triggered another feeding frenzy of phone competition, the hammer finally falling at a record $2.2 million, 10 times the presale upper estimate.

Complex, multilayered paintings of the Los Angeles-based Christina Quarles have impressed critics and visitors at the Biennale’s central exhibition. This acclaim appeared to supercharge her market, with the 2019 canvas “Night Fell Upon Us Up On Us” soaring to a record $4.5 million. The previous auction high for her works had been $685,500.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/arts/design/spring-auction-sales-sothebys.html

Ivan Khokhlov, who co-founded 12Storeez, a clothing brand that evolved from a showroom in his apartment in Yekaterinburg to a major company with 1,000 employees and 46 stores, is contending with the problem firsthand.

“With every new wave of sanctions, it becomes harder to produce our product on time,” Mr. Khokhlov said. The company’s bank account in Europe was still blocked because of sanctions shortly after the invasion, while logistical disruptions had forced him to raise prices.

“We face delays, disruptions and price increases,” he said. “As logistics with Europe gets destroyed, we rely more on China, which has its own difficulties too.”

Hundreds of foreign firms have already curtailed their business in or withdrawn altogether from Russia, according to an accounting kept by the Yale School of Management. And the exodus of companies continued this week with McDonald’s. The company said that after three decades, it planned to sell its business, which includes 850 restaurants and franchises and employs 62,000 people in Russia.

“I passed the very first McDonald’s that opened in Russia in the ’90s,” Artem Komolyatov, a 31-year-old tech worker in Moscow, said recently. “Now it’s completely empty. Lonely. The sign still hangs. But inside it’s all blocked off. It’s completely dead.”

Nearby two police officers in bulletproof vests and automatic rifles stood guard, he said, ready to head off any protesters.

In Leningradsky railway station, at one of the few franchises that remained open on Monday, customers lined up for more than an hour for a last taste of McDonald’s hamburgers and fries.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/business/economy/russia-economy.html

While U.S. officials say they do not want to immediately take large amounts of Russian oil off the market, they are trying to push countries to wean themselves off those imports in the coming months. A U.S. ban on sales of critical technologies to Russia is partly aimed at crippling its oil companies over many years. U.S. officials say the market will eventually adjust as the Russian industry fades.

Russia’s oil industry is already under pressure. The United States banned Russian oil imports in March, and the European Union hopes to announce a similar measure soon. Its foreign ministers discussed a potential embargo in Brussels on Monday. The Group of 7 industrialized nations, which includes Britain, Japan and Canada, agreed this month to gradually phase out Russian oil imports and their finance ministers are meeting in Bonn, Germany, this week to discuss details.

“We very much support the efforts that Europe, the European Union, is making to wean itself off of Russian energy, whether that’s oil or ultimately gas,” Antony J. Blinken, the secretary of state, said in Berlin on Sunday when asked about future energy sanctions at a news conference of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. “It’s not going to end overnight, but Europe is clearly on track to move decisively in that direction.”

“As this is happening, the United States has taken a number of steps to help,” he added.

But Russian oil exports increased in April, and soaring prices mean that Russia has earned 50 percent more in revenues this year compared to the same period in 2021, according to a new report from the International Energy Agency in Paris. India and Turkey, a NATO member, have increased their purchases. South Korea is buying less but remains a major customer, as does China, which criticizes U.S. sanctions. The result is a Russian war machine still powered by petrodollars.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/us/politics/russia-ukraine-oil-sanctions.html

“If I could’ve left at 62, I would’ve left at 62, but I can’t,” she said. “Not all of us made that money where I could move down to Florida and get a $400,000 house.”

The fastest inflation in decades has added to the pressure on people of all ages to return to work. More recently, so has the turmoil in financial markets, which has taken a bite out of retirement savings.

But even some people who could retire are choosing to return to work as the pandemic ebbs.

When the Long Island fitness studio where she worked as a spinning instructor shut down early in the pandemic, Jackie Anscher lost both a job and a part of her identity. In an interview with The New York Times that summer, she described what seemed at the time like an abrupt end to her career as “a forced retirement.”

But after spending the beginning of the pandemic reorganizing her life and re-evaluating her priorities, Ms. Anscher, 60, has begun teaching spin classes again as a substitute instructor at a local gym, and she is looking for a more regular gig. Her husband is already retired — “he’s been waiting for me to go fishing,” she said — and the couple could afford for her to stop working. But she isn’t ready to hang up her cycling shoes.

“I liked what I had. I loved who I was in front of the room,” she said. “It’s about my mental health. For me, it’s about preserving me.”

Older workers weren’t any more likely than younger workers to leave the labor force early in the pandemic. But economists had reason to think they might be slower to return. Unemployed workers in their 50s and 60s typically have a harder time finding jobs than their younger counterparts, because of ageism and other factors. And unlike after the 2008-9 recession, when depressed housing prices and high debt levels left many people with little choice but to keep working, in this crisis prices of both homes and financial assets kept rising, providing a financial cushion to some people nearing retirement age.

The share of Americans reporting that they were retired did rise sharply in the spring of 2020. But retirement is not an irreversible decision. And research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City has found that at the pandemic’s onset, there was a steep drop in the number of people leaving retirement to return to work, attributable at least partly to fear of the virus and a lack of job opportunities, swelling the ranks of the retired.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/19/business/economy/older-workers-labor-force.html

Russian gas shipments “underpin the competitiveness of our industry,” Martin Brudermüller, the chief executive of the chemical giant BASF, said at the company’s annual general meeting last month.

While calling to decrease its dependence, Mr. Brudermüller nevertheless warned that “if the natural gas supply from Russia were to suddenly stop, it would cause irreversible economic damage” and possibly force a stop in production.

The fallout from a gas embargo has been the subject of spirited debate among German economists and policymakers, with analyses ranging from manageable to catastrophic. The flow of energy is just one of several supply concerns in the industrial sector.

Rising food prices are another matter causing anxiety among finance ministers. The Treasury Department is expected to release a report later this week laying out plans by the World Bank and other international financial institutions to combat food shortages.

The interruption of wheat exports from Ukraine and Russia, which together account for 28 percent of global exports, along with supply chain disruptions, a severe drought in India that has caused it to ban shipments of grain and Covid-related lockdowns in China, are also causing food prices to spiral and increasing global hunger, particularly in Africa and the Middle East.

The question for both American and European policymakers is how to corral leaping prices without sending their economies into recession. The Federal Reserve has begun raising interest rates to tame inflation in the United States, and its chair, Jerome H. Powell, has acknowledged that bringing prices down without seriously hurting the overall economy will be a challenge.

On Tuesday, Charlie Scharf, the chief executive of Wells Fargo, said during an event hosted by The Wall Street Journal that “it is going to be hard to avoid some kind of recession.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/18/us/politics/russia-finance-ministers-economy.html

“I think that lending rates might be less important right now,” said Kenneth D. Simonson, chief economist for the Associated General Contractors of America. “An increase in either credit market or bank rates isn’t sufficient to choke off demand for many types of projects.”

The tech sector, which feeds on venture capital that is more abundant in low-interest-rate environments, has drooped in recent months. Under pressure to burn less cash, some companies are looking to offshore jobs that before the pandemic they thought needed to be done on site, or at least in the country.

“We’ve seen several of our clients in the high-growth technology space quickly shift their focus to reducing cost,” said Bryce Maddock, the chief executive of the outsourcing company TaskUs, discussing U.S. layoffs on an earnings call last week. “Across all verticals, the operating environment has led to an acceleration in our clients’ demand for growth in offshore work and a decrease in demand for onshore work.”

In the broader economy, however, any near-term layoffs might occur on account of forces outside the Fed’s control: namely, the exhaustion of federal pandemic-relief spending, and a natural waning in demand for goods after a two-year national shopping spree. That could hit manufacturing and retail, as consumers contemplate their overfilled closets. Spending on long-lasting items has fallen for a couple months in a row, even before adjusting for inflation.

If spending on durable goods declines sharply, “I could easily see that creating a recession, because suppliers would be stuck with a massive amount of inventory that they wish they didn’t have, and people employed that they wish they didn’t,” said Wendy Edelberg, director of the Hamilton Project, an economic policy arm of the Brookings Institution. “Even there, it’s going to be hard to know how much was that the Fed raised interest rates, and how much was the extraordinary surge in demand for goods unwinding.”

In general, if the Fed’s path of tightening does prompt firms to downsize, that’s likely to be bad news for Black, Hispanic and female workers with less education. Research shows that while a hot labor market tends to bring in people who have less experience or barriers to employment, those workers are also the first to be let go as conditions worsen — across all industries, not just in sectors that might be hit harder by a recession.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/business/economy/interest-rates-jobs-layoffs.html

“I think the reality of turning a political commitment into binding domestic legislation is a lot more complex,” said Manal Corwin, a Treasury official in the Obama administration who now heads the Washington national tax practice at KPMG. “The E.U. has moved and gotten over most of the objections, but they still have Poland and it’s not clear whether they’re going to be able to get the last vote.”

With President Emmanuel Macron of France heading the European Union’s rotating presidency until June, his administration was eager to get a deal implemented. But at a meeting of European finance ministers in early April, Poland became the sole holdout, saying there were no ironclad guarantees that big multinational companies wouldn’t still be able to take advantage of low-tax jurisdictions if the two parts of the agreement did not move ahead in tandem, undercutting the global effort to avoid a race to the bottom when it comes to corporate taxation.

Poland’s stance was sharply criticized by European officials, particularly France, whose finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, suggested that Warsaw was instead holding up a final accord in retaliation for a Europe-wide political dispute. Poland has threatened to veto measures requiring unanimous E.U. votes because of an earlier decision by Brussels to block pandemic recovery funds for Poland.

The European Union had refused to disburse billions in aid to Poland since late last year, citing separate concerns over Warsaw’s interference with the independence of its judicial system. Last week, on the eve of Ms. Yellen’s visit to Poland, the European Commission came up with an 11th-hour deal unlocking 36 billion euros in pandemic recovery funds for Poland, which pledged to meet certain milestones such as judiciary and economic reforms, in return for the money.

Negotiators from around the world have been working for months to resolve technical details of the agreement, such as what kinds of income would be subject to the new taxes and how the deal would be enforced. Failure to finalize the agreement would likely mean the further proliferation of the digital services taxes that European countries have imposed on American technology giants, much to the dismay of those firms and the Biden administration, which has threatened to impose tariffs on nations that adopt their own levies.

“It’s fluid, it’s moving, it’s a moving target,” Pascal Saint-Amans, the director of the center for tax policy and administration at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, said of the negotiations at the D.C. Bar’s annual tax conference this month. “There is an extremely ambitious timeline.”

Countries like Ireland, with a historically low corporate tax rate, have been wary of increasing their rates if others do not follow suit, so it has been important to ensure that there is a common understanding of the new tax rules to avoid opening the door to new loopholes.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/16/us/politics/treasury-yellen-europe-global-tax.html