The White House continues to support Ms. Raskin. Michael Gwin, an administration spokesman, said she had “earned widespread support in the face of an unprecedented, baseless campaign that seeks to tarnish her distinguished career in public service and her commitment to upholding the highest ethical standards any administration has ever put forward.”

But the controversy surrounding her nomination could prove uncomfortable for Democrats, who are trying to prevent regulators from so frequently leaving the government to advise the sort of companies they once policed.

“The Republicans do this all the time because they are seen as the party of business,” said Meredith McGehee, a longtime Washington ethics expert. “The vulnerability is that here you have a Democrat who’s in this position that’s in conflict with the rhetoric of the Democratic Party.”

The issue centers on a wonky but increasingly important corner of finance.

Ms. Raskin started on the board of Reserve Trust, a Colorado-based trust company that now calls itself a financial technology firm, shortly after leaving a top role at the Treasury Department in 2017. From 2010 to 2014, she served as a Fed governor.

When she joined the board, the Kansas City Fed had recently rejected the firm’s first application for a so-called master account with the central bank. Such accounts allow firms to tap the Fed’s payment infrastructure, enabling them to carry out services for clients without relying on an external partner. They are hot commodities, and nonbank financial firms often strive but struggle to qualify for them.

To qualify for the account, the firm changed its business model and reapplied in 2017.

Dennis Gingold, a founder of Reserve Trust who was a longtime acquaintance of Ms. Raskin’s and who has donated to the political campaigns of her husband, Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, said in an interview that he had helped to bring Ms. Raskin to the company.

Mr. Gingold said Ms. Raskin had called the Fed about the master account at his behest, because he was worried that the central bank was not giving the reapplication a fair consideration. From his Washington office, she phoned Esther George, the Kansas City Fed president. The call lasted two minutes and was “insignificant,” Mr. Gingold said, noting that Ms. Raskin simply “asked that the decision be made on the facts.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/business/economy/sarah-bloom-raskin-biden-fed.html

“Russia’s flagship Urals blend was one of the first to break through the $100-per-barrel mark this year,” said Louise Dickson, senior oil market analyst at Rystad Energy, a research and consulting firm. “But the country’s incursion into Ukraine has now made it one of the most toxic barrels on the market.”

The invasion has prompted several major Western oil companies — BP, Shell and Exxon Mobil — to halt their involvement in oil and gas projects in Russia.

As European refiners buy more oil from places like Saudi Arabia, Russian companies are increasingly trying to sell their crude to refineries in China and other Asian countries by offering them discounts.

Most of Russia’s roughly five million barrels of daily oil exports go to Europe. About 700,000 barrels a day are consumed in the United States, roughly 4 percent of the U.S. market.

Several Scandinavian refiners, including Neste Oyj of Finland and Preem of Sweden, have said they halted purchases of Russian oil.

“Due to the current situation and uncertainty in the market, Neste has mostly replaced Russian crude oil with other crudes, such as North Sea oil,” said Theodore Rolfvondenbaumen, a Neste spokesman. As the company watches future sanctions and “potential countersanctions,” he said, it is preparing “for various options in procurement, production and logistics.”

Energy experts say the international oil trade could be rejiggered in ways that are similar to what happened in 1956 when Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt and closed the Suez Canal. For a time, oil tankers were rerouted around Africa. Similarly, over the next few months Russian oil once shipped to Europe could go to China.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/business/energy-environment/russia-oil-price.html

While the White House spent last year downplaying popping prices, arguing that they would fade with the pandemic as roiled global supply chains righted themselves, nearly a full year of high inflation readings have proved too much to ignore. Climbing costs are eating away at paychecks and helping to drive Mr. Biden’s poll numbers to the lowest point so far in his presidency.

“I don’t think that it is going to go away in a way that is going to save the incumbent party by November,” said Neil Dutta, an economist at Renaissance Macro Research. “Even though the labor market is quite strong, it’s not enough to keep pace with the shock people are feeling with respect to inflation.”

The Fed is expected to raise interest rates from near-zero at its meeting this month and officials have signaled that they will then make a series of increases throughout the year as they try to put a lid on inflation.

The central bank sets policy independently of the White House, and the Biden administration avoids talking about monetary policy out of respect for that tradition. But the timing could be politically tricky. The Fed could prompt an economic pullback that coincides with this autumn’s election season, creating a double whammy for the Democrats in which central bank policy is slowing down job market progress even as inflation has yet to fully fade.

That might be especially true if conflict in Ukraine sends fuel prices higher, further stoking inflation and making consumers expect rapid price increases to continue, some economists said.

“The Fed has to be more aggressive on inflation,” said Diane Swonk, the chief economist at Grant Thornton. “It could bleed into the unemployment rate by the end of the year.”

Mr. Furman said that he thought it was more likely that the Fed’s actions would not inflict too much pain this year, though they might begin to squeeze the job market in 2023. And Mr. Dutta speculated that the Russian invasion of Ukraine could slow the central bank down somewhat, at least in the near-term.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/us/politics/inflation-biden-state-of-the-union.html

And if the conflict is prolonged, it could threaten the summer wheat harvest, which flows into bread, pasta and packaged food for vast numbers of people, especially in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. Food prices have already skyrocketed because of disruptions in the global supply chain, increasing the risk of social unrest in poorer countries.

On Tuesday, the global shipping giant Maersk announced that it would temporarily suspend all shipments to and from Russia by ocean, air and rail, with the exception of food and medicine. Ocean Network Express, Hapag-Lloyd and MSC, the world’s other major ocean carriers, have announced similar suspensions.

Russia accounts for about a fifth of the global trade in natural gas, and both Russia and Ukraine are major exporters of wheat, barley, corn and fertilizer.

“The war just makes the worldwide situation for commodities more dire,” said Christopher F. Graham, a partner at White and Williams.

Jennifer McKeown, the head of global economics service at Capital Economics, said the global economy appeared relatively insulated from the conflict. But she said shortages of materials like palladium and xenon, used in semiconductor and auto production, could add to current difficulties for those industries. Semiconductor shortages have halted production at car plants and other facilities, fueling price increases and weighing on sales.

“That could add to the shortages that we’re already seeing, exacerbate those shortages, and end up causing further damage to global growth,” she said.

International companies are also trying to comply with sweeping financial sanctions and export controls imposed by Europe, the United States and a number of other countries that have clamped down on flows of goods and money in and out of Russia.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/business/economy/ukraine-russia-supply-chains.html

Most of Russia’s roughly five million barrels of daily oil exports go to Europe. About 700,000 barrels a day are consumed in the United States, roughly 4 percent of the U.S. market.

Several Scandinavian refiners, including Neste Oyj of Finland and Preem of Sweden, have said they halted purchases of Russian oil.

“Due to the current situation and uncertainty in the market, Neste has mostly replaced Russian crude oil with other crudes, such as North Sea oil,” said Theodore Rolfvondenbaumen, a Neste spokesman. As the company watches future sanctions and “potential countersanctions,” he said, it is preparing “for various options in procurement, production and logistics.”

Energy experts say the international oil trade could be rejiggered in ways that are similar to what happened in 1956 when Britain, France and Israel attacked Egypt and closed the Suez Canal. For a time, oil tankers were rerouted around Africa. Similarly, over the next few months Russian oil once shipped to Europe could go to China.

“The trade-off could take six to eight weeks,” said Michael Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research, who is an occasional adviser to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries. “For a week or two, things could be unsettled.”

Mr. Lynch said the decision by European buyers to move away from Russian oil would give China and its president, Xi Jinping, more sway and influence in the energy market and with Mr. Putin.

“If China wants to, they can use the power of their purse to either humiliate Putin by denying him a customer or to elevate him by bailing him out financially,” he said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/business/energy-environment/russia-oil-price.html

The unemployment rate has fallen swiftly and now stands at 4 percent — down from a 14.7 percent peak in May 2020. Economists in a Bloomberg survey expect the February rate, which will be released on Friday, to be down to 3.9 percent. That progress has come much more quickly than many economists, including officials at the Federal Reserve, had anticipated. Meanwhile, job openings have surged and companies are paying up to attract workers.

The question is how much of the progress owes to the administration’s policies. Some of it probably can be attributed to them: By pumping money into the economy and stoking consumer demand, the $1.9 trillion aid package Democrats passed last year has created more need for employees and has probably goosed hiring.

But strong demand has been a double-edged sword: It has also collided with constrained supply chains to push prices higher, and inflation is eroding wage gains, even as average hourly earnings pick up at the fastest pace in decades across a range of measures, especially for rank-and-file workers and those with less education.

In fact, price gains have been so quick that pay has often failed to keep up with them in recent months, on average.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/business/economy/biden-jobs-state-of-the-union.html

The carve-out means that energy payments will continue to flow, mitigating risks to global energy markets and Europe, which is heavily reliant on Russian oil and gas exports. U.S. officials said that they want energy prices to remain steady and that they do not want a spike in prices to benefit Mr. Putin, however they noted that they are considering measures that would restrict Russia from acquiring technology that it needs to be an energy production leader in the long term.

The measures announced on Monday were born from lessons that the United States learned since imposing sanctions on Russia following its annexation of Crimea in 2014. A senior Biden administration official said that Mr. Putin began amassing international reserves after 2014 to blunt the impact of future sanctions and that the United States, in preparing to exert new pressure on Russia’s economy, determined during months of preparation with European allies that it would need to target Russia’s central bank directly.

“The U.S. and other Western economies have deployed a set of highly potent financial weapons against Russia with remarkable speed,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economics professor and former International Monetary Fund official. “Cutting off access to global financial markets and to a country’s war chest of international reserves held in currencies of Western economies amounts to a crippling financial blow, especially to an economy like Russia’s that relies to such a large extent on export revenues.”

The sanctions also replicate some of the economic warfare that the United States has used against Iran in recent years, which included sanctions on its central bank and blocking its financial institutions from the SWIFT financial messaging system.

On Saturday, the European Commission, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United States said they would remove some Russian banks from SWIFT, essentially barring them from international transactions, and impose new restrictions on Russia’s Central Bank to prevent it from using its large international reserves to sidestep sanctions.

Biden administration officials said on Monday that the full list of Russian banks that are being cut off from SWIFT is still being finalized in coordination with European countries.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/28/us/politics/us-sanctions-russia-central-bank.html

“It’s a really very, very good constructive pricing environment that we’ve seen right now, probably the best in recent memory,” Richard J. Kramer, the chief executive at Goodyear, said on a Feb. 11 earnings call.

The company does look to its competitors as it makes its price increases — but they, too, are charging more.

“There are nine competitors that we tend to track, and seven out of the nine have announced price increases in the first quarter, and one of the ones who hadn’t raised prices right at the end of last year,” Darren Wells, its chief financial officer, said on the call. Goodyear saw profit margins expand last year, driven in part by price increases.

Sizing Up Beef Costs

The restaurant family that includes Outback Steakhouse, Bloomin’ Brands, is planning to raise prices about 5 percent across its brands to cover rising labor and food costs — and, by pairing that with efficiency improvements, it is managing to increase its profits.

“It became clear that the 3 percent pricing we previously discussed was not enough to offset the increased inflationary pressures our industry is facing,” said Christopher Meyer, the chief financial officer at Bloomin’ Brands, speaking of the last quarter. “Given that we had not taken a material menu price increase since 2019, we are confident that 5 percent is appropriate.”

Mr. Meyer noted that operating inflation was 4.9 percent and labor inflation was 8.9 percent in the final quarter of 2021, but that the company had managed to increase its profits through improving efficiency by simplifying its menu and by cutting food waste.

In 2022, he said, the company expects beef inflation “in the mid-to-high teens” and wage inflation “in the high single-digit range.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/27/business/economy/price-increases-inflation.html

Biden administration officials said on Saturday that there would be new restrictions by the United States and its allies against selling rubles to Russia, undercutting the country’s ability to support its currency in the face of new sanctions on its financial sector. That, in turn, could cause inflation — and while administration officials did not say so explicitly, they are clearly hoping that could fuel protests against Mr. Putin’s rule in Russia.

“We know that Russia has been taking steps since 2014 to sanctions-proof its economy, in part through the stockpiling of foreign exchange reserves,” said Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security. “The central bank sanctions will limit their ability to leverage this asset, along with constraining their ability to conduct monetary policy of any sort to manage the economic damage from other sanctions.”

The United States and its allies also announced steps to put pressure on Russia’s elites, including creating a task force that the White House said would “identify, hunt down and freeze the assets of sanctioned Russian companies and oligarchs — their yachts, their mansions and any other ill-gotten gains that we can find and freeze under the law.”

The idea is to strike those who are closest to Mr. Putin and undermine their ability to live in both Russia and the West. In another new move, the United States and its allies said they would seek to limit the sale of so-called golden passports that allow wealthy Russians who are connected to the Russian government to become citizens of Western nations and gain access to their financial systems.

While the steps are some of the harshest taken yet, the announcement falls short of a blanket cutoff of Russia from SWIFT, which some officials see as a nuclear option of sorts. Such a move would have essentially severed Russia from much of the global financial system.

And some experts say that it may only drive Russia to expand the alternative to the SWIFT system that it created several years ago when it began trying to “sanction-proof” its economy. But Russia’s equivalent system is primarily domestic; making it a competitor to SWIFT, officials say, would require teaming up with China.

The moves on Saturday came on the same day that Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced that his government was approving a transfer of antitank weapons to the Ukrainian military, ending his insistence on providing only nonlethal aid, such as helmets.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/26/us/politics/eu-us-swift-russia.html

“If they don’t comply with the U.S., they’re in trouble with the U.S., but if they don’t comply with China, they could also face penalties in China,” he said.

Of course, collecting fines from companies that are unwilling to pay and monitoring whether businesses comply with the rules could be difficult, Mr. Chorzempa added. “It’s already proving difficult to monitor the things that are already controlled, and if you expand that list, that’s going to be a real challenge to verify what’s going to Russia,” he said.

The Biden administration’s export controls apply to goods produced in any country as long as they use U.S. technology — including chip makers like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and the Shanghai-based Semiconductor Manufacturing Industry Corporation.

Both of those companies continue to rely on the United States for certain components and manufacturing technology, said Gabriel Wildau, a managing director at Teneo, a consulting firm. If they continue supplying to Russia, SMIC and other Chinese companies could be cut off from U.S. technology, the same kind of penalty that crippled Huawei. On Friday, Taiwan Semiconductor said it was committed to complying with the export controls.

“If Beijing is viewed as Moscow’s enabler, pressure will rise in the U.S. Congress to extend these restrictions,” Mr. Wildau wrote in a note to clients. Beijing would also face the risk that other major technology exporters, like Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands, “would adopt Washington’s tougher line,” he said.

China’s state-owned banks could also face risks for continuing to lend to Russia. China and Russia have been settling more of their trade using the renminbi and the ruble. Beijing has also been trying to develop the digital use of its currency as an alternative to the dollar, which could help Russia limit the effect of financial sanctions.

But Chinese banks are still deeply reliant on the U.S. dollar. While major Chinese banks already appeared to be pulling back their financing for Russia, Mr. Wildau said, Beijing could choose to support Russia using smaller state-owned banks that don’t do a lot of international business that requires the use of the dollar.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/26/business/china-russia-ukraine.html