Oil refiners are required to blend some ethanol into gasoline under a pair of laws, passed in 2005 and 2007, intended to reduce the use of oil and the creation of greenhouse gases by mandating increased levels of ethanol in the nation’s fuel mix every year. However, since passage of the 2007 law, the mandate has been met with criticism that it has contributed to increased fuel prices and has done little to reduce greenhouse gas pollution.

A study last month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that corn-based ethanol was at least 24 percent more carbon-intensive than gasoline when emissions from land-use changes to grow corn, along with processing and combustion, were included.

“Corn ethanol is a greater emitter of greenhouse gases than gasoline,” said Jason Hill, a professor of bioproducts and biosystems engineering at the University of Minnesota.

“This will actually work in the opposite direction of the administration’s climate goals rather than being a benefit,” Mr. Mills said.

A White House senior administration official on Monday pushed back on that study, arguing that “a number of analyses” have that shown corn-based ethanol cuts greenhouse gas emissions more than 40 percent compared with gasoline.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/business/economy/biden-ethanol-gas.html

“We thought it was not right and not fair, so we approached them to see if they were interested in us representing them,” said Stefanie Frey, the union’s director of organizing and mobilization. Frey said that the productions were so similar that some of the nonunion performers have been asked to teach performers in the union production, and that some have moved from the nonunion production to the union production. “It’s an obvious group of people getting exploited,” she said.

Jennifer Ardizzone-West, the chief operating officer at NETworks Presentations, the company that is producing the nonunion “Waitress” tour, declined to offer an immediate reaction, saying, “Until we see the actual filing, it is premature for me to comment.”

Tours are an important, and lucrative, part of the Broadway economy. During the 2018-19 theater season — the last full season before the pandemic — unionized touring shows grossed $1.6 billion and were attended by 18.5 million people, according to the Broadway League. Similar statistics are not readily available for nonunion tours, but Frey said, “The nonunion tour world has grown over the last 15 years.”

Equity is in the process of hiring two additional organizers as it seeks to expand its efforts, according to a union spokesman, David Levy, who noted recent successful efforts to organize some employees at REI, Starbucks and Amazon. The National Labor Relations Board said last week that the number of union election petitions has been increasing dramatically.

Frey said the long pandemic shutdown of theaters had also contributed to a new interest in organizing in the theater industry. “Workers are feeling a little bit more of their power and want to fight for what they deserve in a different way,” she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/12/theater/waitress-actors-equity-union.html

Mr. Smoke’s predictions — and worries — are more grim than what many economists are penciling into their forecasts.

Alan Detmeister, a senior economist at UBS and former chief of the Federal Reserve Board’s wages and prices section, said he expected a 15 percent decline in used car prices by the end of the year, with new car prices falling 2.5 to 3 percent.

Those estimates are predicated on an increase in supply.

“This is a huge wild card in the forecast,” Mr. Detmeister said. But even if production doesn’t pick up, “it is extremely unlikely that we’ll see the kind of increases we saw last year,” he added, referring to prices.

Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights, a research firm, said he was still expecting improved supply and slower demand to help the used car market come into balance. While used car prices may rise for a few months as households spend tax refunds on automobiles, he expects the increase to be modest in part because they already nearly match new car prices.

“I would be shocked if the used car market really accelerated,” he said. New car prices are a more complicated story, he added: “There, we have legitimately serious inventory problems.”

Automakers are struggling to ramp up production. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has created shortages in electrical components needed for cars, prompting SP Global Mobility to cut its 2022 and 2023 forecasts for U.S. production. More critically, the chips needed to power everything from dashboards to diagnostics remain in short supply. Ford Motor and General Motors temporarily shut down some U.S. factories last week because of supply issues, and the industry broadly cannot ship as many cars as customers want to buy.

In cars, “production remains below prepandemic levels, and an expected sharp decline in prices has been repeatedly postponed,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said during a speech last month. He noted that while supply chain relief in general seemed likely to come over time, the timing and scope were uncertain.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/10/business/economy/cars-inflation.html

Gulzira Auelkhan, an ethnic Kazakh who fled Xinjiang for Texas, said in the hearing that she had been imprisoned for 11 months in Xinjiang alongside ethnic Kazakhs and Uyghurs who were subject to torture and forced sterilization. She also spent two and a half months working in a textile factory making school uniforms for children and gloves, which her supervisors said were destined for the United States, Europe and Kazakhstan, she said through a translator.

It is already illegal to import goods made with slave labor. But for products that touch on Xinjiang, the law will shift the burden of proof to companies, requiring them to provide evidence that their supply chains are free of forced labor before they are allowed to bring the goods into the country.

Supply chains for solar products, textiles and tomatoes have already received much scrutiny, and companies in those sectors have been working for months to eliminate any exposure to forced labor. By some estimates, Xinjiang is the source of one-fifth of the world’s cotton and 45 percent of its polysilicon, a key material for solar panels.

But Xinjiang is also a major provider of other products and raw materials, including coal, petroleum, gold and electronics, and other companies could face a reckoning as the law goes into effect.

In the hearing on Friday, researchers and human rights activists presented allegations of links to forced labor programs for Chinese manufacturers of gloves, aluminum, car batteries, hot sauce and other goods.

Horizon Advisory, a consultancy in Washington, claimed in a recent report based on open-source documents that the Chinese aluminum sector had numerous “indicators of forced labor,” like ties to labor transfer programs and the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, which has been a target of U.S. government sanctions for its role in Xinjiang abuses.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/business/economy/china-forced-labor.html

At a speech in London last week, Mr. Adeyemo touted the ability of sanctions to change behavior, describing the measures as a part of the equation that adversaries such as Russia need to consider when they violate international norms.

“The idea that you can violate the sovereignty of another country and enjoy the privileges of integration into the global economy is one our allies and partners will not tolerate,” Mr. Adeyemo said at the Chatham House, a think tank.

Yet even the United States, which is not reliant on Russian energy, has wrestled with how far to go with its penalties.

Within the Treasury Department, officials have been in an ongoing debate about how far to push the sanctions without creating unintended consequences that would rattle the financial system and inflame inflation, which is soaring across much of the world.

The impact on the U.S. economy has been a top priority, and Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, has expressed concern about measures that would amplify inflation. The sanctions on Russia have already led to higher prices for gasoline, and officials are wary that they could bring spikes in food and car prices as Russian wheat and mineral exports are disrupted.

“Our goal from the outset has been to impose maximum pain on Russia, while to the best of our ability shielding the United States and our partners from undue economic harm,” Ms. Yellen told lawmakers on Wednesday.

As officials considered how to target the ruble, Ms. Yellen, a former Federal Reserve chair, argued against just imposing a ban on foreign exchange transactions, which would prevent Russia from buying dollars. She suggested instead that immobilizing Russia’s foreign reserves — savings that are held in U.S. dollars, euros and other liquid assets — while creating exemptions for Russia to accept payment for certain energy transactions would be the most effective way to inflict pain on Russia’s economy while minimizing the impact on the U.S. and its allies.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/us/politics/russia-sanctions-effectiveness-adeyemo.html

According to a profile kept by Bloomberg, Mr. Levy has racked up 26 unique media mentions so far this year, after 26 in all of 2021 and 15 in 2020. Suddenly, every economist and economics writer seems to be a trade analyst, trying to suss out what might happen to supplies and prices.

“Normally, when one does forecasting, you look at past experiences,” Mr. Levy said. “That changed with the pandemic.”

The revolution started in the toilet paper aisle. At the onset of the pandemic, consumers abruptly started to shop differently. Nobody needed coffee to go or manicures; everyone wanted new home-office furniture.

As the government sent out repeated stimulus checks and offered more generous unemployment insurance and families spent more time at home, Americans spent the money on goods rather than the services that consumed a big chunk of their budgets before the pandemic. Even as the aid has faded and business has returned to something approaching normal, demand for things has remained unusually strong.

The world’s ships, ports and factories fell behind early in the pandemic, and they have been unable to fully catch up. The situation has only been intensified by unanticipated disruptions like a giant cargo ship’s getting stuck in the Suez Canal. The Ever Given spent six immobile days, drawing global attention to the precariousness of supply chains and ocean commerce — and increasing demand for experts who could explain it.

“That was a turning point in freight fame,” Mr. Buchman recalled fondly.

For Mr. Levy and his colleagues, the situation was not funny, per se — the blockage was poised to cause problems for customers — but it did spark a flurry of memes in Flexport’s internal Slack messaging channels. (One that sticks in his memory was a photo of the stranded ship superimposed with the words “I told you not to listen to the Waze directions.”)

Ever Given stands as a symbol of a larger phenomenon in the pandemic economy: Disruptions keep surfacing, throwing an already struggling system even further out of whack. The mismatch between supply and demand has stoked inflation, which has surprised policymakers both because it has been so rapid and because it has proved long-lasting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/08/business/economy/pandemic-freightos-supply-chain.html

The critics typically acknowledge that the campaigns helped galvanize support for higher wages even if they fell short of unionizing workers. Defenders say the goal is to have an impact on a company- or industrywide scale rather than a few individual stores. They point to certain developments, like a pending California bill that would regulate fast-food wages and working conditions, as signs of progress.

In other cases, workers themselves have perceived the limitations of established unions and the advantages of going it alone. Joseph Fink, who works at an Amazon Fresh grocery store in Seattle with roughly 150 employees, said the workers there had reached out to a few unions when seeking to organize in the summer but decided that the unions’ focus on winning recognition through National Labor Relations Board elections would delay resolution of their complaints, which included sexual harassment and health and safety threats.

When the workers floated the idea of staging protests or walkouts as an alternative, union officials responded cautiously. “We received the response that if we were to speak up, assert our rights publicly, we’d be terminated,” Mr. Fink said. “It was a self-defeating narrative.”

The workers decided to form a union on their own without the formal blessing of the N.L.R.B., a model known as a “solidarity union,” whose roots precede the modern labor movement.

For workers who do seek N.L.R.B. certification, doing so independent of an established union also has advantages, such as confounding the talking points of employers and consultants, who often paint unions as “third parties” seeking to hoard workers’ dues.

At Amazon, the strategy was akin to sending a conventional army into battle against guerrillas: Organizers said the talking points had fallen flat once co-workers realized that the union consisted of fellow employees rather than outsiders.

“When a worker comes up to me, they look at me, then see I have a badge on and say, ‘You work here?’ They ask it in the most surprising way,” said Angelika Maldonado, an Amazon employee on Staten Island who heads the union’s workers committee. “‘I’m like, ‘Yeah, I work here.’ It makes us relatable from the beginning.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/07/business/economy/amazon-union-labor.html

“The asset freezes on the additional banks aren’t nothing, but this isn’t the most significant tranche we’ve seen to date,” said Daniel Tannebaum, a partner at Oliver Wyman who advises banks on sanctions.

Other American agencies are joining the effort to exert pressure on Russia.

In a news conference on Wednesday, officials from the Justice Department and the F.B.I. also announced a series of actions and criminal charges against Russians, including the takedown of a Russian marketplace on the dark web and a botnet, or a network of hijacked devices infected with malware, that is controlled by the country’s military intelligence agency.

Justice Department officials also celebrated the seizing of the Tango, a superyacht owned by the Russian oligarch Viktor F. Vekselberg, and charged a Russian banker, Konstantin Malofeev, with conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions. Mr. Malofeev is one of Russia’s most influential magnates and among the most prominent conservatives in the country’s Kremlin-allied elite. (The indictment renders his surname as Malofeyev.)

At the hearing, Ms. Yellen told lawmakers that she believed Russia should be further isolated from the geopolitical system, including being shut out of international gatherings such as the Group of 20 meetings this year, and should be denounced at this month’s meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. She added that the United States might not participate in some G20 meetings that are being held in Indonesia this year if Russians attended.

Ms. Yellen, whose department has been developing many of the punitive economic measures, rebutted criticism that the penalties leveled so far had not been effective, in part because there are some exceptions to allow Russia to sell energy.

“Unfortunately, many of our European partners remain heavily dependent on Russian natural gas, as well as oil, and they are committed to making the transition away from that dependence as rapidly as possible,” Ms. Yellen said. The Treasury secretary downplayed the rebound of Russia’s currency, the ruble, which cratered after the sanctions were imposed in February but has since regained its value. Ms. Yellen said that the ruble’s apparent recovery was the result of currency controls that Russia had put in place and that its exchange rate did not reflect its true value.

“The Russian economy is really reeling from the sanctions that we put in place,” Ms. Yellen said, adding, “You shouldn’t really infer anything from the value of the currency.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/business/economy/yellen-russia-sanctions.html

“It is of paramount importance to get inflation down,” Lael Brainard, a Fed governor who is the nominee to be the central bank’s vice chair, said on Tuesday. “Accordingly, the committee will continue tightening monetary policy methodically through a series of interest rate increases and by starting to reduce the balance sheet at a rapid pace as soon as our May meeting.”

Ms. Brainard’s statement that balance sheet shrinking could happen “rapidly” caught markets by surprise, sending stocks lower and rates on bonds higher. Investors also focused their attention on the minutes released on Wednesday.

The notes from the March meeting provided more details about what the balance sheet process might look like. Fed officials are coalescing around a plan to slow their reinvestment of securities, the minutes showed, most likely capping the monthly shrinking at $60 billion for Treasury securities and $35 billion for mortgage-backed debt.

That would be about twice the maximum pace the Fed set when it shrank its balance sheet between 2017 and 2019, confirming the signal policymakers have been giving in recent weeks that the plan could proceed much more quickly this time around.

Officials “generally agreed that the caps could be phased in over a period of three months or modestly longer if market conditions warrant,” the minutes showed, while outright sales of mortgage-backed securities might be up for consideration “after balance sheet runoff was well underway.”

Besides confirming a relatively quick pace of balance sheet drawdown and reaffirming Ms. Brainard’s signal that balance sheet shrinking could begin imminently, the minutes showed that “many” meeting participants “would have preferred a 50 basis point increase in the target range for the federal funds rate at this meeting.”

While they held off on a bigger increase while faced with uncertainty tied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, officials signaled that increases above a quarter-point could be appropriate if inflation remained elevated.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/business/economy/fed-minutes-march-2022.html

“Wherever one stands on student debt relief this approach is regressive, uncertainty creating, untargeted and inappropriate at a time when the economy is overheated,” wrote Lawrence H. Summers, a former Democratic Treasury secretary and economist at Harvard who has been warning about inflation risks for months. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director who now runs the American Action Forum, which describes itself as a center-right policy institute, summed it up thusly: “aaaaaaarrrrrrRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!”

Yet proponents of even stronger action argued that the moratorium was not enough — and that the affected student loans should be canceled altogether. Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts are among the lawmakers who have repeatedly pressed Mr. Biden to wipe out up to $50,000 per borrower through an executive action.

That stark divide underlines the tightrope the administration is walking as the Nov. 8 elections approach, with Democratic control of the House and the Senate hanging in balance.

“They’re buying political time,” Sarah A. Binder, a political scientist at George Washington University, said in an email. “Kicking the can down the road — with another extension, surely, before the elections this fall — seems to be the politically optimal move.”

The administration is taking a calculated risk when it comes to inflation: Student loan deferrals are unlikely to be a major factor that drives inflation higher this year, even if they do add a little extra juice to demand at the margin. At the same time, continuing the policy avoids a political brawl that could tarnish the administration and the Democratic Party’s reputation ahead of the November vote.

White House officials emphasized on Wednesday that the small amount of money the deferrals were adding to the economy each month would have only a marginal impact on inflation. But they could help vulnerable households — including those that did not finish their degrees and that have worse job prospects.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/business/economy/student-loan-pause-inflation.html