“Today’s news is a welcome reminder that we’re coming back stronger as a country and as people,” Mr. Biden said at a White House event highlighting the president’s “Made in America” efforts. He noted that before the aid plan passed, the Congressional Budget Office did not expect the unemployment rate to fall to 3.8 percent in the next decade.

The data released Friday was collected in mid-February, before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which shook up global financial markets and caused a sharp increase in energy prices. Analysts say the United States is less vulnerable than Europe to the economic effects of the crisis, but they warn that a prolonged conflict will have global repercussions that are hard to predict.

So far, at least, the labor market recovery has overcome every obstacle. Job openings are near a record high. Layoffs are at a new low. And hiring has remained strong in the ebb and flow of successive waves of the pandemic — employers have added at least 400,000 jobs every month since May, the longest such streak on record.

“This is an economy that has learned to manage very well through uncertainty,” said Robert Rosener, senior U.S. economist with Morgan Stanley. “We’ve continually been surprised by the resilience of the U.S. labor market.”

Hannah Ashford spent most of the first two years of the pandemic trying to figure out how to keep Sweet Yield Studio, her Oklahoma City dance studio, from going out of business. But in December, she hit a milestone: Enrollment for the spring semester met and then surpassed its prepandemic level for the first time.

As a result, Ms. Ashford, 30, has begun thinking about the future. She is scoping out space to add a second studio and weighing hiring more teachers to staff it. On Friday, she made an offer to a graphic designer, who accepted the job.

“It does feel good to have some room within our business to consider some of those things for the future,” she said. “It feels like we are slowly finding that stability.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/business/economy/jobs-report-february.html

In the United States, the average price for a gallon of regular gasoline jumped 11 cents on Friday, to $3.83, the biggest one-day rise since 2005, when Hurricane Katrina slammed into oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico and shut down refineries. Over the last week, the price rose 26 cents, from $3.57 a gallon, as traders feared that Russian oil exports would be blocked. A year ago, the price was $2.75.

The release of a robust employment number for the U.S. wasn’t enough to stop the selling on Friday. The government said U.S. employers added 678,000 job last month, a continuation of the rapid rebound in the labor market. The report also showed that the unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent.

The report comes as the Federal Reserve has been preparing to pull back on its economic support and raise interest rates this year in an effort to tame inflation. February’s jobs report also showed that wage growth came in flat after a series of brisk increases, which is good news for the Fed and economists who are concerned about the start of an inflationary spiral in which wage and price increases push each other higher.

Between the flat number on wage growth and the uncertainty over the ripple effects of the Ukraine conflict, “there is less pressure on the Fed to front-load rate hikes,” said Ms. Gaggar. The central bank’s chair, Jerome H. Powell, has said that interest rates will rise by a quarter point later this month.

The approach the Fed could take moving forward was echoed by Charles Evans, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, on CNBC on Friday. Mr. Evans said that the jobs report “doesn’t really change anything that Chair Powell was sort of pre-positioning the Fed for, the other day.”

Next week, investors will be monitoring the release of the Consumer Price Index, a closely watched inflation gauge released by the Department of Labor. January’s exceeded analysts forecasts and showed that prices jumped 7.5 percent over the year and 0.6 percent from the prior month.

Jeanna Smialek and Clifford Krauss contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/business/economy/stock-market-today.html

The harshest sanctions by far are ones that prevent the Central Bank of Russia from tapping into much of its $643 billion in foreign currency reserves, which has led to a steep drop in the value of the ruble. Panic has set in across Russia. Citizens are scrambling to withdraw money from banks, preferably in dollars, and some are fleeing the country.

The United States and Europe also announced new sanctions this week against oligarchs with close ties to Mr. Putin. Officials are moving to seize their houses, yachts and private jets around the world. French officials on Thursday snatched the superyacht of Igor Sechin, the chief executive of Rosneft, the Russian state oil giant.

“The sanctions have turned out to be quite unprecedented,” said Maria Snegovaya, a visiting scholar at George Washington University who has studied U.S. sanctions on Russia. “Everybody in Russia is horrified. They’re trying to think of the best way to preserve their money.”

The French finance minister, Bruno Le Maire, has used some of the harshest language yet to articulate the mission, telling a radio program on Tuesday that Western nations were “waging an all-out economic and financial war on Russia” to “cause the collapse of the Russian economy.” He later said he regretted his words.

Evidence of shock and anger among Russians — mostly anecdotal in a country with restricted speech and little public opinion polling — has raised the specter of mass political dissent, which, if strong enough, could threaten Mr. Putin’s grip on power.

Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, said on Fox News, “The best way for this to end is having Eliot Ness or Wyatt Earp in Russia, the Russian Spring, so to speak, where people rise up and take him down.”

Mr. Graham added: “So I’m hoping somebody in Russia will understand that he’s destroying Russia, and you need to take this guy out by any means possible,” reiterating his Twitter post on Thursday calling for an assassination of Mr. Putin.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/us/politics/russia-sanctions-ukraine.html

Remote work is often favored by established employees who know their manager, are comfortable in their role and want to balance work with family responsibilities or other personal obligations. For those just starting their careers, working in isolation can make fitting into an organization — and eventually progressing up its ranks — more difficult.

Companies have become more open to remote work during the pandemic. Now, as they plan for what work will look like going forward, they’re paying more attention to what it means to build a career without the traditional opportunities for networking, mentorship and visibility that come with a full-time physical office, Corinne Purtill reports for The New York Times.

Prithwiraj Choudhury, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who focuses on the changing geography of work, said he had seen three common practices at companies that managed remote work successfully. These companies:

• Took the time to compile information and practices in handbooks or guides that employees can consult from anywhere.

• Paired remote workers with mentors outside their department so that they could speak frankly without endangering team relationships.

• And created what he called the “virtual water cooler.”

In one study, Mr. Choudhury and his colleagues randomly assigned some interns at a global bank to take part in one-on-one video meetings with senior executives. Others met virtually with fellow interns, and some were assigned no extra meetings at all. Those assigned to meet with the senior employees had better performance reviews at the end of the summer and were more likely to receive job offers.

Managed effectively, remote work can lead to more in-depth conversations, Mr. Choudhury said.

Among the employees most likely to prefer remote work are women and people of color, who even before the pandemic often reported feeling underrepresented and isolated in the workplace. Going remote without proper support can create a vicious cycle that exacerbates that sense of alienation while also decreasing the chance that those workers will be pulled in for career- and morale-boosting projects.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/business/economy/remote-work-is-changing-how-climbing-the-career-ladder-works.html

There are good reasons for the European Union to believe that economic ties would bind potential combatants more closely together, said Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations. The proof was the European Union itself. The organization’s roots go back to the creation after World War II of the European Coal and Steel Community, a pact among six nations meant to avert conflict by pooling control of these two essential commodities.

“The idea was that if you knit together the French and German economies, they wouldn’t be able to go to war,” Mr. Haass said. The aim was to prevent World War III.

Scholars have attempted to prove that the theory worked in the real world — studying tens of thousands of trade relations and military conflicts over several decades — and have come to different conclusions.

In terms of the current crisis, Mr. Haass argued, in some ways the economic benefits were not mutual enough. “The Germans needed Russian gas much more than Russia needs exports, because they can make up for lost revenue with higher prices,” he said.

“That’s where Europe handled the relationship all wrong,” Mr. Haass added. “The leverage wasn’t reciprocal.”

Despite its huge land mass, nuclear arsenal and energy exports, Russia is otherwise relatively insulated from the global economy, accounting for 1.7 percent of global output. And since Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014, Mr. Putin has moved to isolate the economy even more to protect against retaliation.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/04/business/economy/ukraine-russia-global-economy.html

The goal is to allow factories and businesses to catch up so shoppers are no longer competing for a limited stock of goods and services, creating shortages that enable companies to raise prices without scaring voracious buyers away.

“What we hope to achieve is bringing the economy to a level where supply and demand are in sync,” Mr. Powell said.

Asked whether the nation might be on the cusp of a wage-price spiral, in which wages and inflation feed on each other, Mr. Powell struck a cautious tone.

“That is a serious concern, and one that we monitor carefully,” he said. He noted that wage increases had been very quick — especially for lower-paid workers — and that whether they became problematic would depend on how persistent they proved to be.

“The big thing we don’t want is to have inflation become entrenched and self-perpetuating,” he said. “That’s why we’re moving ahead with our program to raise interest rates and get inflation under control.”

Mr. Powell underlined that the Fed’s plans for policy would be “nimble” in response to uncertainty coming from Ukraine. Economists have said the conflict is likely to push up gas and other commodity prices, further elevating inflation — already, oil prices have shot higher. But at the same time, a combination of higher fuel costs and wavering consumer sentiment could be a drag on economic growth.

But Mr. Powell made clear, repeatedly, that getting price gains back in line was key.

“We need to deliver price stability; we’re not currently doing that,” he later added, calling the central bank “very highly motivated to get the economy back to a place where we have inflation under control, but also a strong economy and a strong labor market.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/business/economy/federal-reserve-powell-inflation.html

The United States, Europe and its allies are not launching missiles or sending troops to push back against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so they have weaponized the most powerful nonmilitary tool they have available: the global financial system.

Over the past few days, they have frozen hundreds of billions of dollars of Russian assets that are held by their own financial institutions, removed Russian banks from SWIFT, the messaging system that enables international payments, and made many types of foreign investment in the country exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.

The impact of this brand of supercharged economic warfare was immediate. By Thursday, the value of the Russian ruble reached a record low, despite efforts by the Bank of Russia to prop up its value. Trading on the Moscow stock market was suspended for a fourth day, and financial behemoths stumbled. Sberbank, Russia’s largest lender, was forced to close its European subsidiaries after running out of cash. At one point, its shares on the London stock exchange dropped to a single penny.

There’s more to come. Inflation, which is already high in Russia, is likely to accelerate along with shortages, especially of imported goods like cars, cellphones, laptops and packaged medicines. Companies around the world are pulling investments and operations out of Russia.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/business/economy/russia-sanctions-global-economy.html

“The labor market is extremely tight,” Mr. Powell said. He added that “employers are having difficulties filling job openings, an unprecedented number of workers are quitting to take new jobs and wages are rising at their fastest pace in many years.”

But that strong progress has been partly obscured by the quickly-increasing prices, which are chipping away at wages for many workers. Average hourly earnings growth has struggled to keep up with price increases in recent months.

President Biden called fighting high prices his “top priority” in his State of the Union address on Tuesday night. But while the White House has suggested changes that it and Congress could make to help to bring more supply into the economy — be it improving ocean shipping or fostering more domestic manufacturing — they would probably take time. When it comes to controlling inflation by slowing down demand, the Fed has primary responsibility.

“Inflation is too high, we understand that, and we’re working on it — it’s going to take some time, but we’re going to get it back under control,” Mr. Powell said. “By the way, we’re seeing this everywhere in the world. We’re seeing it more in the United States, because our economy is stronger, but we’re seeing it everywhere in the world.”

It is the case that pandemic-era price increases have proved surprisingly quick across much of the world.

Fed and White House officials, along with most private-sector economists, expected the pickup in the United States to slow down promptly last year. Instead, waves of coronavirus infections kept factories shut down, shipping routes remained clogged, consumer demand remained abnormally tilted toward goods and away from services, and costs continued to climb.

Now, as the price increases broaden beyond pandemic-affected goods and begin to push up rent and other service costs, officials are intently focused on bringing inflation down.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/business/jerome-powell-interest-rates.html

Union supporters said they had not previously faced resistance when making such requests.

Many union supporters were also skeptical that 10 workers at the Elmwood store had asked to scale back their hours in ways that posed an unusual challenge for management. A recording of a meeting between Ms. Fleischer and her manager, provided to a reporter by the union, seemed to indicate that the number was lower.

“There’s your shift and a couple other people that really, with the hours that I — I just, I don’t have the quite the availability,” the manager told Ms. Fleischer. If fewer workers had sought significant reductions in availability, that would presumably be easier to accommodate.

The manager appeared to acknowledge in the recording that the refusal to grant the reduction in hours was a break with her previous approach. “There’s certain things that I have to take care of as well, that maybe I didn’t do the right way before, but I have to get on board,” the manager said.

Mr. Montanye, a graduate student at the University at Buffalo, said that he had worked at Starbucks since 2018 and at the Elmwood store for roughly one year, and that he had frequently adjusted his hours. He said he typically worked nearly full time during winter and summer breaks and only one or two days a week while school was in session. His managers had never taken issue with these requests, he added.

But at an initial meeting on Feb. 13, he said, his manager told him that his current schedule of one day a week no longer met the store’s “needs” and that he would have to provide 15 or 20 hours of weekly availability to stay on the schedule. At a follow-up meeting over the weekend, he said, the manager told him to decide this week whether he could provide the additional availability. He may seek a leave of absence instead.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/business/economy/starbucks-union-buffalo.html

Ford’s reorganization is one of the most sweeping taken by a traditional automaker in preparation for the transition to electric vehicles. Mr. Farley said the plan had come together after he and other top Ford executives noticed stark differences in the two business areas.

In making gas-powered vehicles, Ford must focus on reducing costs and generating the profits it needs to fund its E.V. plans. Over the next four years, Ford aims to trim costs for its internal-combustion models by $3 billion, with some cuts coming through job reductions, Mr. Farley said.

The electric business, in contrast, will have to spend heavily to develop software and technologies and to ramp up production quickly to achieve economies of scale. Ford aims to produce two million electric vehicles a year by 2026.

“For Ford to win against the new players and the other manufacturers, we have to focus more than we do today,” Mr. Farley said. “You can’t have people work on both at the same time.”

The E.V. group will be known as Ford Model e. Mr. Farley will serve as its president. Doug Field, a former Apple and Tesla executive hired by Ford in September, will lead its vehicle, software and digital systems development.

The internal-combustion business, known as Ford Blue, will be led by Kumar Galhotra, who was president of Ford’s North American operations.

Ford plans to begin breaking out the profits and losses of the two groups in 2023, and expects the electric business to become profitable within four years. Mr. Farley said the group would most likely have 2,000 to 5,000 employees. In addition to developing electric models, it will engineer new types of assembly lines to build them and manage Ford’s sourcing of key components like motors and inverters and raw materials such as lithium and rare earth metals.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/business/economy/ford-model-e.html