Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement on Wednesday that the sanctions barred Mr. Malofeev from paying or receiving services from American citizens, or from conducting transactions with his property in the United States.

“He systematically flouted those restrictions for years,” Mr. Williams said.

Mr. Malofeev, who is believed to be in Russia, remains at large, the Justice Department said. Mr. Garland said the department had seized “millions of dollars” from a U.S. financial institution that are believed to trace back to Mr. Malofeev.

The Justice Department also said it was taking steps to counter nefarious activity online, including disrupting a bot network organized by the Russian government’s military intelligence agency.

Mr. Garland also announced the seizure of Hydra Market, a Russian-language darknet market that processed sales of drugs, forged passports and other documents, and stolen financial data. The department said that it believed the market accounted for 80 percent of cryptocurrency transactions on the dark web, and that roughly $5.2 billion in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies had been seized with help from German authorities.

The announcement came in tandem with new sanctions imposed by the United States and its allies on Wednesday targeting some of Russia’s largest banks.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/06/us/politics/justice-department-russian-oligarch-charged.html

Economists, however, are notoriously terrible at predicting recessions. So it makes sense to focus instead on where the recovery is right now, and on the forces that are threatening to knock it off course.

Growth will slow. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Last year was the best year for economic growth since the mid-1980s, and the best for job growth on record. Those kinds of explosive gains — enabled by vaccines and fueled by trillions of dollars in government aid — were not likely to be repeated this year.

In fact, some slowdown is probably desirable. The rapid rebound in consumer spending, especially on cars, furniture and other goods, has overwhelmed supply chains, driving up prices. Demand for workers is so strong that jobs are going unfilled despite rising wages. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, said recently that the labor market had gotten “tight to an unhealthy level.”

Some economists, particularly on the left, took issue with that claim, arguing that the hot labor market was good for workers. But even most of them said the recent pace of job growth was unsustainable for long.

“We have torn back toward normal at a really fast pace, and it would be unrealistic to think that could continue,” said Josh Bivens, the director of research at the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank. Even slower wage growth, he said, wouldn’t worry him, as long as pay increases didn’t fall further behind inflation.

But some economists cautioned against rooting for a slowdown in a rare moment when low-wage workers were seeing substantial pay increases, and unemployment was falling for vulnerable groups. The unemployment rate among Black Americans fell to 6.2 percent in March, but was still nearly double that of white Americans.

“The recovery from my perspective is fairly robust, and so why not enjoy this right now?” said Michelle Holder, president of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a progressive think tank. She said that while economists were right to be concerned about high inflation, “I don’t think similar voices were this bent out of shape about high unemployment.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/05/business/economy/recession-economy.html

That has revived the value of the ruble, but as several analysts have pointed out, the currency’s newfound stability has come not because the marketplace suddenly found faith in the Russian economy but because of the extraordinary government interventions.

Mr. Putin’s demand that gas purchases be paid in rubles looked like another one of those interventions. Still, the insistence was puzzling. Russia could just as easily take the ongoing influx of euros and dollars paid by foreign governments and convert them to rubles.

Mr. Putin, of course, may revel in putting European governments in an uncomfortable position or flexing his power, but his demands may also reflect difficulties at home.

For example, he may not be able to ensure compliance with his mandate that companies, including the natural gas producer Gazprom, repatriate 80 percent of the dollars and euros they earn and sell them to Russian banks.

The problem is that “the government cannot enforce this rule,” said Michael S. Bernstam, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. The “companies are cheating.”

“The only people the Russian government can trust is Western companies buying Russian natural gas and other commodities,” he added.

Aside from currency woes, Russia is struggling economically in other ways.

The country is already facing a deep recession, and several analysts estimate that the economy could shrink by as much as 20 percent this year. An SP Global survey of purchasing managers at Russian manufacturing companies showed severe declines in production, employment and new orders in March, as well as sharp price increases.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/02/business/economy/russia-ukraine-sanctions-gas.html

The Lobby, a brunch-focused restaurant in a tall yet homey late-19th-century building in downtown Denver, almost went out of business in 2020 before being rescued largely by emergency federal aid to small companies. Now, on any given weekend, it offers the sights, smells and sounds of an economic revival starting to get fully comfortable: a packed house of diners chatting away, leaning into each others’ ears in a way unimaginable 18 months ago.

The restaurant’s co-owner, Christian Batizy, is in a bullish mood about his business and the local economy overall. “We’re probably currently 25 percent above our best year,” said Mr. Batizy, who opened the spot in 2009.

“Those of us that made it through the pandemic have come out to an economy where people are a little more willing to spend money out,” he said, adding: “The gap between restaurant prices and cooking at home is closing with grocery store prices having gone up so much.” The cost of food at home increased faster last year than the cost of dining out, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Consumer prices, which increased by 7.9 percent in the 12 months through February, the largest increase since 1982, have become deeply politicized. Republicans blame Mr. Biden for rising prices, a message that is expected to heat up as the midterm elections near.

“Wages just can’t keep up with President Biden’s raging inflation, which is accelerating,” Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a statement on Friday. “Americans should brace for even higher prices ahead.”

Frustration with inflation, in spite of plentiful jobs, cuts across backgrounds, income levels and worldviews. Much of the hiring in the coming months “will be for lower-wage service workers,” said Robert Frick, an economist at Navy Federal Credit Union. “Unfortunately, those workers are hurt most by high inflation, especially for necessities like gas and food.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/business/economy/jobs-report-march-2022.html

Standing outside the N.L.R.B. office in Brooklyn where the ballots were tallied, Christian Smalls, a former Amazon employee who started the union, popped a bottle of champagne before a crowd of supporters and press. “To the first Amazon union in American history,” he cheered.

Derrick Palmer, who packs boxes at the warehouse and co-founded the union, said he expected other facilities to follow Staten Island. “This will be the first union,” he said, “but moving forward, that will motivate other workers to get on board with us.”

One question facing the labor movement and other progressive groups is the extent to which they will help the Amazon Labor Union, an upstart, independent group, withstand potential challenges to the result and negotiate a first contract, such as by providing resources and legal talent.

“The company will appeal, drag it out — it’s going to be an ongoing fight,” said Gene Bruskin, a longtime organizer who helped notch one of labor’s last victories on this scale, at a Smithfield meat-processing plant in 2008, and has informally advised the Staten Island workers. “The labor movement has to figure out how to support them.”

Sean O’Brien, the new president of the 1.3 million-member International Brotherhood of Teamsters, said in an interview on Thursday that the union was prepared to spend hundreds of millions of dollars unionizing Amazon and to collaborate with a variety of other unions and progressive groups.

“We’ve got a lot of partners in labor,” Mr. O’Brien said. “We’ve got community groups. It’s going to be a large coalition.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/technology/amazon-union-staten-island.html

In addition to increasing wages to retain employees, Todd Heyne, the chief construction officer at Allo Communications, a cable company based in Lincoln, said management decided that easing in-person work requirements could expand the pool of available workers. That led the company to allow many of its customer service representatives and technical support employees to train and work farther afield as it prepares to expand beyond Nebraska and Colorado.

Not all problem-solving is easy. The added labor costs come on top of supply chain pressures that have increased the price of crucial materials like fiber optic cable by as much as 30 percent. Vendors are often charging 20 percent more for their contracted tasks. As a result, the company has taken steps like hiring its own trucking staff.

In the end, “combined with some automation efficiencies, our team will see sizable wage increases with less rudimentary work,” Mr. Heyne said, reducing manual paperwork, centralizing back-end systems and doing more to fix customers’ network issues remotely. So despite the cost challenges, “I’ve never been more optimistic about where we’re sitting, our position in the market, how we compete against our competitors, and our technology,” he added. “Which is strange.”

For many, the opportunity of this economic moment is tinged with worry. They include Ashlee Bridger, a 30-year-old student at the Lincoln campus of Southeast Community College who works in administration for the nearby firm Huffman Engineering after being recruited from a job fair.

Ms. Bridger left her job as a nurse to pursue a career in human resources because she felt confident enough to bet on herself: “Of course, it was a risk. Leaving any career is.” But in the current job market, she said, “I knew I would be able to work my way up easier.”

She has also had a series of life milestones fall into place. She will graduate in May with an associate degree and will start bachelor’s degree work in the fall at Nebraska Wesleyan University. The managers at Huffman have told her that she is welcome to continue working there when her schedule allows, and that they would like to hire her in a more senior role after she completes her studies.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/business/economy/nebraska-economy-unemployment-labor.html

“These dollars are too important and too transformational to get caught up in a partisan fight,” Mr. Beshear said in an interview, adding: “These are dollars that are helping us as we emerge from Covid. We’ve got a choice to limp out of the pandemic or sprint out of the pandemic, and cutting off this aid only hurts the people that need it.”

Congress specified four broad purposes for the money: to respond to the pandemic’s health and economic impacts; to provide bonus pay to essential workers; to prevent cuts in public services; and to invest in sewer, water or broadband infrastructure. But states can also use the funds to replace lost revenues, which gives them great flexibility in spending the money.

Arkansas, for instance, has awarded $374,000 to a rape crisis center; $6.3 million to the Arkansas Coalition Against Sexual Assault; and another $6.3 million to the Arkansas Alliance of Boys Girls Clubs. But the bulk of the money has gone toward improving broadband access and addressing the needs of the health care system.

“The Omicron variant came in, cases skyrocketed, hospitals filled up and so we had to utilize a significant amount of our ARPA money for expanding hospital space, home testing and other public health response,” said Gov. Asa Hutchinson, a Republican, using the acronym for the rescue plan. “So that’s obviously the first responsibility, and then we looked at these other needs.”

Other states are using the money in ways that are only tangentially related to Covid-19, but that are permissible under guidelines issued by the Treasury Department.

Alabama devoted $400 million of its allocation, or roughly one-fifth, to building two new prisons, despite a public outcry from advocates for racial justice and civil liberties. Florida devoted $2 billion, nearly one-quarter of its $8.8 billion allotment, to highway construction — a decision that has drawn criticism from the nonpartisan Florida Policy Institute.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/us/politics/covid-relief-funds.html

The United States imported more than half its supply of at least 46 minerals in 2020, and all of its supply of 17 of them, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Many of the materials come from China, which leads the world in lithium ion battery manufacturing and has been known to shut off exports of certain products in times of political tensions, including rare earth minerals.

The Biden administration has warned that a dependence on foreign materials poses a threat to America’s security, and promised to expand domestic supplies of semiconductors, batteries and pharmaceuticals, among other goods. While the United States does have some unexplored deposits of nickel, cobalt and other crucial minerals and metals, developing mines and processing sites can take many years. Two-thirds of the world’s entire production of cobalt is in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Chinese companies owned or financed 15 of the 19 largest mines as of 2020.

But bipartisan support for expanding American mining and processing of battery components has grown in recent years. In a March 11 letter to Mr. Biden, senators including Lisa Murkowski, a Republican of Alaska, and Joe Manchin III, a Democrat of West Virginia, proposed invoking the Defense Production Act to accelerate domestic production of the components of lithium-ion battery materials, particularly graphite, manganese, cobalt, nickel and lithium.

Todd M. Malan, the head of climate strategy for Talon Metals, which is developing a nickel mine in Minnesota, said Washington had reached a bipartisan consensus around providing more support for the domestic mining of electric vehicle battery minerals “driven by concern about reliance on Russia and China for battery materials as well as the energy transition imperative.”

But some domestic developments may face opposition from environmentalists in Mr. Biden’s own party.

Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat who chairs the Natural Resources Committee, said in a statement Wednesday that mining companies were “making opportunistic pleas to advance a decades-old mining agenda that lets polluters off the hook and leaves Americans suffering the consequences.”

“Fast-tracking mining under antiquated standards that put our public health, wilderness, and sacred sites at risk of permanent damage just isn’t the answer,” he added.

Dionne Searcey contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/business/economy/biden-minerals-defense-production-act.html

Companies are trying to navigate the complicated moment, gauging whether input cost increases will continue for a second year — and whether and how to pass them on to consumers.

Chewy, the pet goods retailer, recently signed a new freight contract that will cost it more this year, and in the final quarter of 2021 it also faced higher labor costs. But it is hoping that those trends do not last, or that it can offset the climbing expenses through efficiencies.

“As we close the book on 2021 and move forward in 2022, we are already seeing improvements in labor availability, inbound shipping costs and pricing, while out-of-stock levels and outbound shipping costs remain elevated,” Sumit Singh, Chewy’s chief executive, said on an earnings call this week. “Ultimately, we believe most of these challenges are not permanent in nature.”

Other companies have been expecting consumer demand to face some challenges this year, as households get past the government stimulus checks that boosted their spending ability in 2021.

“For our business in the industry we’re in, the stimulus checks are a short-term impact from last year,” Jon Barker, chief executive at Sportsman’s Warehouse, said on an earnings call this week. “And while fuel costs and inflation will certainly have an impact on disposable income for our consumer, we actually believe and are confident that our industry is more — is able to weather those changes better than most.”

Thursday’s report showed that consumer spending fell in February when adjusted for inflation, pulling back by 0.4 percent from January, a slightly bigger decline than economists expected. It is still rising before price increases are accounted for, though. Personal income also continued to rise before being adjusted for inflation, as wage growth takes over where government help is leaving off.

Household balance sheets are still in decent shape even as some support payments lapse. Many people paid down debt during the pandemic, and others are seeing pay gains that could help them sustain spending in the months ahead. Households across the income spectrum built up savings during the pandemic, partly thanks to the government relief payments.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/business/economy/pce-inflation-february.html

“It’s not just the fuel we put into pickups, tractors, combines,” said Chris Edgington, an Iowa corn farmer. “It’s a cost of transporting those goods to the farm, it’s a cost of transporting them away.”

At the start of the pandemic, diesel prices dropped steeply as the global economy slowed, factories shut down and stores closed. But beginning in early 2021 there was a sharp rebound as truck and rail traffic resumed. Prices, which increased pretty steadily last year, picked up momentum in January as Russia massed troops near Ukraine and then invaded. Low stockpiles of the fuel, particularly in Europe, have added to the price pressures.

“Diesel is the most sensitive, the most cyclical product in the oil industry,” said Hendrik Mahlkow, a researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy in Germany who has studied commodity prices. “Rising prices will distribute through the whole value chain.”

Refineries, which turn crude oil into fuels that can be used in cars and trucks, have tried to play catch-up on both sides of the Atlantic in recent months. But they have not been able to make more diesel, gasoline and jet fuel fast enough. That is in part because refineries have closed in Europe and North America in recent years and more of the world’s fuels are being refined in Asia and the Middle East.

Since January 2019, refinery capacity has declined 5 percent in the United States and 6 percent in Europe, according to Turner, Mason Company, a consulting firm in Dallas.

Europe is particularly vulnerable because it relies on Russia for as much as 10 percent of its diesel. Europe’s own diesel production is also dependent on Russia, which is a big supplier of crude oil to the continent. Some analysts say Europe may have to begin rationing diesel as early as next month unless the shortage eases.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/business/economy/diesel-economy-russia-ukraine.html