Auto experts say the electric F-150, known as the Lightning, must be a success if Ford is to thrive in the age of electric vehicles. Introducing this truck now is equivalent to “betting the company,” said William C. Ford Jr., the company’s executive chairman, who is a great-grandson of Henry Ford. “If this launch doesn’t go well, we can tarnish the entire franchise.”

The company has amassed about 200,000 reservations for the trucks, but it could still stumble. Production could be slowed by the global chip shortage or the surging costs of lithium, nickel and other raw materials crucial to batteries. The software that Ford has developed for the truck could be flawed, a problem that hampered sales of a new electric Volkswagen in 2020.

Ford and Mr. Farley do have some things going for them. Unlike many other electric cars, the F-150 Lightning is relatively affordable — it starts at $40,000. Tesla’s cheapest car is the compact Model 3 sedan, which starts at more than $48,000. The Lightning has tons of storage, including a giant front trunk, which is appealing to families and businesses with large truck fleets. And it helps that Tesla will not begin making its Cybertruck until next year.

And Ford is also already in the E.V. game with the Mustang Mach-E, an electric sport utility vehicle. It had sales of more than 27,000 in 2021, its first year on the market, and won favorable reviews.

Production of the F-150 Lightning is scheduled to start next Monday. Competing models from General Motors, Stellantis and Toyota — Ford’s main rivals in pickups — are at least a year away. Rivian, a newer manufacturer that Ford has invested in, has begun selling an electric truck but is struggling to increase production.

“If the Lightning launch goes well, we have an enormous opportunity,” Mr. Ford said.

‘Jimmy Car-Car’

In many ways, Mr. Farley checks most of the boxes when it comes to leading a large U.S. automaker. Like Mary T. Barra, the chief executive of G.M., whose father used to work on a Pontiac assembly line, Mr. Farley has family roots in the industry: His grandfather worked at a Ford factory. On visits to his grandfather, he would tour Ford plants and other sites important to the company’s history. As a 15-year-old, he bought a Mustang while working in California one summer and drove it home to Michigan without a license. His grandfather nicknamed him “Jimmy Car-Car.”

But like Mr. Musk, a native of South Africa who was a founder of PayPal and other companies, Mr. Farley has had a varied career and been involved in creating businesses. Born in Argentina when his father was working there as a banker, Mr. Farley, 59, also lived in Brazil and Canada when he was growing up. His career started not in the auto industry but at IBM. He spent a long stretch at Toyota. He helped the Japanese automaker overcome its reputation for making boring and economical cars by working on its fledgling Lexus luxury brand, now a powerhouse.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/18/business/economy/jim-farley-ford-lightning.html

“Eternals,” a $200 million Disney-Marvel movie, was “review bombed” in the fall because it depicted a gay superhero kissing his husband, with online trolls flooding the Internet Movie Database with hundreds of homophobic one-star reviews. In January, Disney was accused by the actor Peter Dinklage and others of trafficking in stereotypes by moving forward with a live-action “Snow White” movie — until it was revealed that the company planned to replace the seven dwarfs with digitally created “magical creatures,” which, in turn, prompted complaints by others about the “erasure” of people with dwarfism.

Disney executives tend to dismiss such incidents as tempests in teapots: trending today, replaced by a new complaint tomorrow. But even moderate online storms can be a distraction inside the company. Meetings are held about how and whether to respond; fretful talent partners must be reassured.

As Disney prepared to introduce its streaming service in 2019, it began an extensive review of its film library. As part of the initiative, called Stories Matter, Disney added disclaimers to content that the company determined included “negative depictions or mistreatment of people or cultures.” Examples included episodes of “The Muppet Show” from the 1970s and the 1941 version of “Dumbo.”

“These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now,” the disclaimers read.

The Stories Matter team privately flagged other characters as potentially problematic, with the findings distributed to senior Disney leaders, according to two current Disney executives, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information. Ursula, the villainous sea witch from “The Little Mermaid” (1989), was one. Her dark color palette (lavender skin, black legs) could be viewed through a racial lens, the Stories Matter team cautioned; she is also a “queer coded” character, with mannerisms inspired in part by those of a real-life drag queen.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/17/business/disney-politics-florida.html

To some analysts, that decision and the payments in rubles mean that Russia already is technically in default.

“If Russia doesn’t pay on time, doesn’t pay in the currency in the contract, that’s a default — it’s crystal clear,” said Timothy Ash, a senior sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management. “For all intents and purposes, Russia is already in default.”

Defaults have been tied up in courts before. Argentina notably defaulted in 2014 after negotiations with hedge funds that refused to accept reduced payments broke down and a federal judge in the United States ruled that it could not make its regular payments on bonds without also paying the hedge fund holdouts. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Argentina’s appeal in the case.

Russia’s case is unique because of the sanctions, and it is expected to argue that its ability to make payments in the currencies in its bond contracts has been constrained because it cannot access all of its reserves.

Mr. Ash suggested that it would be difficult for Russia to find a court that is sympathetic with Russia’s position.

“A U.S. court is never going to rule against O.F.A.C.,” Mr. Ash said, referring to U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers the sanctions.

But Mr. Samples suggested that, given Russia’s global pariah status, creditors could struggle to pursue Russian assets even if they win a favorable judgment in court.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/16/business/russia-debt-default.html

This makes it a good time to be a seller — assuming you don’t need to buy. Christopher J. Waller, a governor at the Fed, is living this out.

“I sold my house yesterday in St. Louis to an all-cash buyer, no inspection,” Mr. Waller said in panel discussion on Monday. “But I’m trying to buy a house in D.C., and now I’m on the other side, going: ‘This is insane.’”

He noted that the sharp rise in mortgage rates over recent months should have an effect on what happens with housing.

The recent lack of new building was not for lack of interest. Members of the millennial generation, now in their late 20s to early 40s, are in their prime home buying years. Their desire to buy houses and start families has collided with scant supply, leading to an increase in prices.

Shutdowns in the early months of the pandemic slowed home building, but housing starts have been on an upswing lately. New home completions remain low, however, because the tight labor market and supply chain disruptions have homebuilders scrambling to find wood, dishwashers, garage doors — and workers.

The prices, the lack of supply, the feeling that the only way to win a bidding war is to waive contingencies and inspections: All of this has worn out buyers like Armando Villanueva, a 34-year-old accountant in Whittier, Calif. Looking to trade up from an 800-square-foot two-bedroom house to a larger home for future children, Mr. Villanueva and his wife spent the last few months of 2021 putting in offer after offer — and losing each time. They stretched their budget from $700,000 to $800,000. They removed loan contingencies in hopes of being more competitive. Through two-dozen offers, it still wasn’t enough.

Finally, as the year neared its end, they offered $825,000 on a home listed for $750,000. It went for close to $1 million.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/16/business/economy/housing-market-interest-rates-prices.html

“I intend to support President Biden’s nominee for this important role at the Fed,” Ms. Warren said in a statement.

Mr. Barr has indicated he will sign on to an ethics pledge that could help ease concerns about his ties to the financial technology industry, said a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. The pledge, which Ms. Warren has asked all Fed nominees to sign, includes a promise not to work in or for financial companies for four years after leaving office.

Senator Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat and chair of the Banking Committee, said in a statement, “I will support this key nominee, and I strongly urge my Republican colleagues to abandon their old playbook of personal attacks and demagoguery.”

The ranking Republican on the committee, Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania, indicated reservations. “Michael Barr has defended Dodd-Frank’s big-bank bailout mechanism, which enshrined into law taxpayer bailouts of banks,” Mr. Toomey said in a statement. “He was also the primary author of the unconstitutional and unaccountable C.F.P.B. For these and other reasons, I have concerns about his nomination, but I look forward to meeting and discussing these and other matters.”

Ian Katz, managing director at the research and advisory firm Capital Alpha, on Friday put Mr. Barr’s chance of confirmation at 60 percent, because he is more moderate than Ms. Raskin and a known entity to the banking industry. Republicans might still roundly oppose him, though, so Mr. Katz said his confirmation was no “slam dunk.”

If he does not garner Republican votes, Mr. Barr will need to maintain full Democratic support to pass the Senate.

Mr. Barr completes Mr. Biden’s slate of candidates for the central bank’s five open positions.

The other picks — Jerome H. Powell for another term as Fed chair, Lael Brainard for vice chair, and Lisa D. Cook and Philip N. Jefferson for seats on the Board of Governors — await confirmation. Those nominations have gotten past the Senate Banking Committee, the first step toward confirmation, and a vote before the full Senate is expected in the coming weeks.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/business/economy/michael-barr-federal-reserve.html

Some airlines have also cut flights in response to persistent staff shortages, creating greater competition and driving up fares for the flights that remain.

Carriers typically pass on to consumers as much as 60 percent of a volatile rise in the price of fuel, experts said, a process that usually takes months. This time, however, the industry has been able to pass along costs more quickly, in large part because of high demand and a shift in consumer behavior during the pandemic toward buying tickets closer to the date of travel.

“We are successfully recapturing a significant portion of the run-up in fuel,” Ed Bastian, the chief executive of Delta Air Lines, told investment analysts and reporters on a call on Wednesday. “This is occurring almost in real time, given the strong demand environment.”

Mr. Bastian said that Delta, the first major carrier to report financial results for the first three months of this year, had seen a strong rebound so far and that it was preparing for a robust spring and summer.

Delta paid an average price of $2.79 per gallon of jet fuel in the quarter, up 33 percent from the last quarter of last year. The price included a saving of 7 cents per gallon from the airline’s oil refinery outside Philadelphia. Delta said it expected the price of fuel to rise another 15 to 20 percent over the next three months, to between $3.20 and $3.35 per gallon, a range that includes an approximately 20-cent savings attributable to the refinery.

Prices for jet fuel, like gasoline and diesel, generally go up and down with crude oil.

In February, American Airlines reported that the price it paid per gallon of jet fuel had risen more than a third over the past year, from $1.48 in 2020 to $2.04 in 2021. At the time, it said that each sustained one-cent rise in the per-gallon price would increase its fuel expense for 2022 by about $40 million. This week, American estimated that it had paid $2.80 to $2.85 per gallon in the first quarter of the year.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/business/energy-environment/fuel-prices-travel-cost.html

“Once you can execute, and obviously that’s hard, it wins in the long term,” he said.

Gopuff added that it was putting a public offering on the back burner because the stock market had been volatile and it had enough cash on hand. The layoffs were part of a global restructuring, it said.

Mr. Gola and Mr. Ilishayev met as students at Drexel University in Philadelphia in 2011. In their sophomore year, they founded Gopuff for college students, offering fast late-night deliveries of junk food, condoms and smoking paraphernalia. They called themselves a “one-stop puff shop,” which led to the name Gopuff. Deliveries were available until 4:20 a.m.

To set themselves apart from DoorDash and Instacart, which connect customers to restaurants and grocery stores via their apps and rely on gig workers, Mr. Gola and Mr. Ilishayev decided Gopuff would buy goods from distributors and wholesalers and have warehouses. Its warehouse workers would be full-time employees, though its delivery drivers and bike messengers would be contractors.

Mr. Gola, who dropped out of college, and Mr. Ilishayev, who graduated from Drexel with a degree in legal studies, became co-chief executives of Gobrands, Gopuff’s parent company. To fund the business, they sold used office furniture on Craigslist and eBay. They also offered discounts on orders to attract customers and charged just $2.95 for delivery.

As Gopuff gained traction beyond Drexel students, Mr. Gola and Mr. Ilishayev expanded their product offerings and set up warehouses in Boston, Washington and Austin, Texas. Starting in 2016, the company raised money from venture firms such as Anthos Capital and, later, investors including the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank.

“We saw it in the data: customers coming back multiple times every month, very strong customer retention, customers who would stick around forever, basically,” said Jett Fein, a partner at Headline, a venture capital firm that invested in Gopuff.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/technology/gopuff-delivery.html

But some economists noted that making supply chains more resilient could carry its own costs, making products more expensive when inflation is already a major concern.

Adam S. Posen, the president of the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, said the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine might lead companies to locate at least some of their supply chains in places that were more politically stable and less strategically vulnerable. But pushing companies to duplicate production could waste taxpayer dollars and introduce inefficiencies, raising prices for consumers and lowering growth.

“At best you’re paying an insurance premium,” he said. “At worst you’re doing something for completely political reasons that’s very economically inefficient.”

Other economists have emphasized that global supply chains are not always a source of fragility — sometimes they can be a source of resilience, too.

Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said in an interview that the world had been seeing a trend toward the decentralization of manufacturing and production, in which supply chains were moving out of China into Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and other countries. That is an opportunity to diversify supply chains and bring poorer countries into the global trading system, allowing them to reap the benefits of globalization, too, she said.

Rather than reeling in supply chains to concentrate them in developed countries, she said, businesses are doing more “nearshoring” — shifting to low-cost but less-distant countries — as well as pursuing risk-mitigation strategies like building up inventory.

Ms. Rouse, the White House economic adviser, said that while it could make sense to promote increased domestic production of some critical components such as computer chips, the Biden administration was not pushing to reverse offshoring entirely.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/business/economy/biden-supply-chain.html

In 2007, the Justice Department sued the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association for fixing the rates that hospitals paid to nursing agencies for their temporary nurses, putting a cap on their wages. In settling the case, the association agreed to abandon the practice.

The pace picked up after a Justice Department lawsuit in 2010 taking aim at no-poaching agreements involving Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar and later Lucasfilm. The companies settled the case without admitting guilt or paying fines, but Adobe, Apple, Google and Intel paid $415 million to settle a subsequent class-action lawsuit.

Since then, lawsuits have been filed across the industrial landscape. Pixar, Disney and Lucasfilm paid $100 million to settle an antitrust challenge to their agreements not to hire one another’s animation engineers. In 2019, 15 “cultural exchange” sponsors designated by the State Department paid $65.5 million to settle a lawsuit claiming, among other things, that they colluded to depress the wages of tens of thousands of au pairs on J-1 visas. Since 2019 Duke University and the University of North Carolina have paid nearly $75 million to settle two antitrust cases over agreements not to recruit each other’s faculty members.

This month, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission arguing that Planned Companies, one of the largest building services contractors in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, illegally forbids its clients to hire its janitors, concierges or security guards either directly or through another firm — locking its workers in.

In perhaps the biggest case of all, in 2019 a class action was filed against the American chicken industry, growing to cover some 20 producers responsible for about 90 percent of the poultry market. The complaint accused them of exchanging detailed wage information to fix the wages of about a quarter-million employees, including hourly workers deboning chickens, refrigeration technicians and feed-mill supervisors on a salary.

Four of the chicken processors have settled, agreeing to pay tens of millions of dollars. In February, Webber, Meng, Sahl Company, one of two firms that collected wage data for the poultry companies, settled as well, offering a fairly clear window into the industry’s attempts to suppress wages.

In a declaration to the court, part of the settlement agreement, the law firm’s president, Jonathan Meng, said the chicken companies had used the firm “as an unwitting tool to conceal their misconduct.” He offered details about how poultry executives would share detailed wage information. “They wanted to know how much and when their competitors were planning to increase salaries and salary ranges,” he said, because it would allow them “to limit and reduce their salary increases and salary range increases.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/business/economy/wages-antitrust-law-us.html

“Americans’ paychecks are worth less and less each month,” Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, wrote on Twitter after the report.

While the Federal Reserve has primary responsibility for controlling inflation, the administration has taken steps to combat price increases. Mr. Biden announced on Tuesday that a summertime ban on sales of higher-ethanol gasoline blends would be suspended this year, a move that White House officials said was aimed at lowering gas prices.

The action followed the president’s decision last month to release one million barrels of oil a day from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve over the next six months.

“I’m doing everything within my powers, by executive order, to bring down the prices and address the Putin price hike,” Mr. Biden said in Iowa on Tuesday afternoon, referring to President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. Inflation had risen sharply before the war in Ukraine, though the conflict has added to the pressure on energy and commodity prices.

There are a few hopeful signs that inflation could slow in the months ahead.

The first is largely mechanical. Prices began to pop last spring, which means changes will be measured against a higher year-ago number in the months ahead.

More fundamentally, March’s data showed that prices for some goods, including used cars and apparel, moderated or even fell — though the signal was somewhat inconsistent, with furniture prices rising sharply. If rapid inflation in prices for goods does wane, it could help overall inflation subside.

“It’s very welcome to see the moderation in this category,” said Lael Brainard, a Fed governor and Mr. Biden’s nominee to be the central bank’s next vice chair, in an online appearance hosted by The Wall Street Journal. “I’ll be looking to see whether we continue to see moderation in the months ahead.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/business/economy/inflation-report-march.html