The central bank’s planned moves would be a rapid pace of change compared to the last time they increased interest rates, from 2015 to the end of 2018. Then, officials shrank the balance sheet only gradually and pushed up interest rates glacially, once per quarter at fastest.

Borrowing costs have already begun to rise as investors adjust to the Fed’s more rapid-fire plans. Markets expect six or seven quarter-point interest rate increases this year. The rate on a 30-year mortgage has climbed from about 2.9 percent last fall — when the Fed began its policy pivot — to 3.9 percent now.

The Fed’s policy changes “will bring inflation down over time, while sustaining a recovery that includes everyone,” Ms. Brainard said, adding that as the Fed signals that it will raise rates, “the market is clearly aligned with that.”

Yet with inflation rapid, wage growth strong and signs of taut labor market conditions plentiful, some Fed officials worry that the central bank needs to move even more quickly.

Ms. Bowman, for instance, said she was still open to half-percentage point increase in March — something her colleague James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, has also suggested.

“I will be watching the data closely to judge the appropriate size of an increase at the March meeting,” Ms. Bowman said.

But Mr. Bullard, who has repeatedly said he would prefer to see rates rise by a full percentage point of rate increases by July, has also noted that he would defer to the chair, Jerome H. Powell, on the size of the initial increase. And other members of the Fed’s policy-setting committee have suggested that they do not think starting with a half-point increase is necessary, suggesting that a smaller increase may be more likely.

“There’s really no kind of compelling argument that you have to be faster right in the beginning,” Mr. Williams, president of the powerful Federal Reserve Bank of New York, told reporters last week.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/business/economy/fed-interest-rates.html

That means an invasion could have a dual effect — slowing economic activity and raising prices.

In the United States, the Federal Reserve is already confronting the highest inflation in 40 years, at 7.5 percent in January, and is expected to start raising interest rates next month. Higher energy prices set off by a conflict in Europe may be transitory but they could feed worries about a wage-price spiral.

“We could see a new burst of inflation,” said Christopher Miller, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an assistant professor at Tufts University.

Also fueling inflation fears are possible shortages of essential metals like palladium, aluminum and nickel, creating another disruption to global supply chains already suffering from the pandemic, trucker blockades in Canada and shortages of semiconductors.

The price of palladium, for example, used in automotive exhaust systems, mobile phones and even dental fillings, has soared in recent weeks because of fears that Russia, the world’s largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets. The price of nickel, used to make steel and electric car batteries, has also been jumping.

It’s too early to gauge the precise impact of an armed conflict, said Lars Stenqvist, the chief technology officer of Volvo, the Swedish truck maker. But he added, “It is a very, very serious thing.”

“We have a number of scenarios on the table and we are following the developments of the situation day by day,” Mr. Stenqvist said Monday.

The West has taken steps to blunt the impact on Europe if Mr. Putin decides to retaliate. The United States has ramped up delivery of liquefied natural gas and asked other suppliers like Qatar to do the same.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/business/economy/ukraine-russia-economy.html

Smaller tech companies, given their financial constraints, might have to choose whether to invest in physical spaces or embrace a more flexible strategy. Twitter has continued to add offices in Silicon Valley, and video game developers like Electronic Arts and Epic Games have expanded in places like Canada and North Carolina. But others have cut back.

Zynga, a gaming company, offered up its 185,000-square-foot San Francisco headquarters for sublease last summer because it decided that shrinking its physical office and moving would make life easier for employees, said Ken Stuart, vice president of real estate at Zynga. Its new building in San Mateo, Calif., will be less than half the size.

“The reality is that people are frustrated by the commute and getting into the city, and also people feel like they can do better work by being hybrid,” Mr. Stuart said.

By contrast, the largest tech giants “have so much money that it doesn’t matter,” said Anne Helen Petersen, a co-author of “Out of Office,” a recent book about the remote-work era. Because of their huge budgets, Ms. Petersen suggested, such companies can continue constructing offices without worrying about how much money they stand to lose if the buildings become obsolete.

“They’re hedging their bets,” Ms. Petersen said. “If the future’s going to be fully distributed, ‘we’ll be setting up an apparatus for that.’ If the future’s going to rubber-band back to everyone back to the office, the way it was in 2020, ‘we’ll go back to that.’”

In Tempe, the two-floor WeWork co-working space at the Watermark, one of the premier office spaces, was buzzing with activity on a recent afternoon. Upstairs, Amazon has rented an entire floor.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/technology/big-tech-offices.html

That means an invasion could have a dual effect — slowing economic activity and raising prices.

In the United States, the Federal Reserve is already confronting the highest inflation in 40 years, at 7.5 percent in January, and is expected to start raising interest rates next month. Higher energy prices set off by a conflict in Europe may be transitory but they could feed worries about a wage-price spiral.

“We could see a new burst of inflation,” said Christopher Miller, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and an assistant professor at Tufts University.

Also fueling inflation fears are possible shortages of essential metals like palladium, aluminum and nickel, creating another disruption to global supply chains already suffering from the pandemic, trucker blockades in Canada and shortages of semiconductors.

The price of palladium, for example, used in automotive exhaust systems, mobile phones and even dental fillings, has soared in recent weeks because of fears that Russia, the world’s largest exporter of the metal, could be cut off from global markets. The price of nickel, used to make steel and electric car batteries, has also been jumping.

It’s too early to gauge the precise impact of an armed conflict, said Lars Stenqvist, the chief technology officer of Volvo, the Swedish truck maker. But he added, “It is a very, very serious thing.”

“We have a number of scenarios on the table and we are following the developments of the situation day by day,” Mr. Stenqvist said Monday.

The West has taken steps to blunt the impact on Europe if Mr. Putin decides to retaliate. The United States has ramped up delivery of liquefied natural gas and asked other suppliers like Qatar to do the same.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/business/economy/ukraine-russia-economy.html

The legal limbo has created new and unexpected financial strains for Black farmers, many of whom have been unable to make investments in their businesses given ongoing uncertainty about their debt loads. It also poses a political problem for Mr. Biden, who was propelled to power by Black voters and now must make good on promises to improve their fortunes.

The law was intended to help remedy years of discrimination that nonwhite farmers have endured, including land theft and the rejection of loan applications by banks and the federal government. The program designated aid to about 15,000 borrowers who receive loans directly from the federal government or have their bank loans guaranteed by the U.S.D.A. Those eligible included farmers and ranchers who have been subject to racial or ethnic prejudice, including those who are Black, Native American, Alaskan Native, Asian American, Pacific Islander or Hispanic.

After the initiative was rolled out last year, it met swift opposition.

Banks were unhappy that the loans would be repaid early, depriving them of interest payments. Groups of white farmers in Wisconsin, North Dakota, Oregon and Illinois sued the Agriculture Department, arguing that offering debt relief on the basis of skin color is discriminatory, suggesting that a successful Black farmer could have his debts cleared while a struggling white farm could go out of business. America First Legal, a group led by the former Trump administration official Stephen Miller, filed a lawsuit making a similar argument in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas.

Last June, before the money started flowing, a federal judge in Florida blocked the program on the basis that it applied “strictly on racial grounds” irrespective of any other factor.

The delays have angered the Black farmers that the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress were trying to help. They argue that the law was poorly written and that the White House is not defending it forcefully enough in court out of fear that a legal defeat could undermine other policies that are predicated on race.

Those concerns became even more pronounced late last year when the government sent thousands of letters to minority farmers who were behind on their loan payments warning that they faced foreclosure. The letters were sent automatically to any borrowers who were past due on their loans, including about a third of the 15,000 socially disadvantaged farmers who applied for the debt relief, according to the Agriculture Department.

Leonard Jackson, a cattle farmer in Muskogee, Okla., received such a letter despite being told by the U.S.D.A. that he did not need to make loan payments because his $235,000 in debt would be paid off by the government. The letter was jarring for Mr. Jackson, whose father, a wheat and soybean farmer, had his farm equipment foreclosed on by the government years earlier. The prospect of losing his 33 cows, house and trailer was unfathomable.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/21/us/politics/black-farmers-debt-relief.html

Mr. Silbar, the real estate agent, has sold it twice in the past three years. The first time, in November 2019, he represented a buyer who offered $168,000 and got it with zero drama. This year it went back on the market, and Mr. Silbar listed it for $250,000. Fourteen offers and a bidding war later, it closed at $300,000.

When Mr. Silbar got into the business, he said, his clients were “nurses and teachers,” and now they’re corporate managers, engineers and other professionals. “What you can afford in Spokane has completely changed,” he said.

The typical home in the Spokane area is worth $411,000, according to Zillow. That’s still vastly less expensive than markets like the San Francisco Bay Area ($1.4 million), Los Angeles ($878,000), Seattle ($734,000) and Portland ($550,000). But it’s dizzying (and enraging) to long-term residents.

Five years ago, a little over half the homes in the Spokane area sold for less than $200,000, and about 70 percent of its employed population could afford to buy a home, according to a recent report commissioned by the Spokane Association of Realtors. Now fewer than 5 percent of homes — a few dozen a month — sell for less than $200,000, and less than 15 percent of the area’s employed population can afford a home. A recent survey by Redfin, the real estate brokerage, showed that home buyers moving to Spokane in 2021 had a budget 23 percent higher than what locals had.

One of Mr. Silbar’s clients, Lindsey Simler, a 38-year-old nurse who grew up in Spokane, wants to buy a home in the $300,000 range but keeps losing out because she doesn’t have enough cash to compete. Spokane isn’t so competitive that it’s awash in all-cash offers, as some higher-priced markets are. But prices have shot up so fast that many homes are appraising for less than their sale price, forcing buyers to put up higher down payments to cover the difference.

A dozen failed offers later, Ms. Simler has decided to sit out the market for a while because the constant losing is so demoralizing. If prices don’t calm down, she said, she’s thinking about becoming a travel nurse. With the health care work force so depleted by Covid-19, travel nursing pays much better and, hopefully, will allow her to save more for a down payment.

“I’m not at the point where I want to give up on living in Spokane, because I have family here and it feels like home,” she said. “But travel nursing is going to be my next step if I haven’t been able to land a house.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/business/economy/spokane-housing-expensive-cities.html

Mr. Silbar, the real estate agent, has sold it twice in the past three years. The first time, in November 2019, he represented a buyer who offered $168,000 and got it with zero drama. This year it went back on the market, and Mr. Silbar listed it for $250,000. Fourteen offers and a bidding war later, it closed at $300,000.

When Mr. Silbar got into the business, he said, his clients were “nurses and teachers,” and now they’re corporate managers, engineers and other professionals. “What you can afford in Spokane has completely changed,” he said.

The typical home in the Spokane area is worth $411,000, according to Zillow. That’s still vastly less expensive than markets like the San Francisco Bay Area ($1.4 million), Los Angeles ($878,000), Seattle ($734,000) and Portland ($550,000). But it’s dizzying (and enraging) to long-term residents.

Five years ago, a little over half the homes in the Spokane area sold for less than $200,000, and about 70 percent of its employed population could afford to buy a home, according to a recent report commissioned by the Spokane Association of Realtors. Now fewer than 5 percent of homes — a few dozen a month — sell for less than $200,000, and less than 15 percent of the area’s employed population can afford a home. A recent survey by Redfin, the real estate brokerage, showed that home buyers moving to Spokane in 2021 had a budget 23 percent higher than what locals had.

One of Mr. Silbar’s clients, Lindsey Simler, a 38-year-old nurse who grew up in Spokane, wants to buy a home in the $300,000 range but keeps losing out because she doesn’t have enough cash to compete. Spokane isn’t so competitive that it’s awash in all-cash offers, as some higher-priced markets are. But prices have shot up so fast that many homes are appraising for less than their sale price, forcing buyers to put up higher down payments to cover the difference.

A dozen failed offers later, Ms. Simler has decided to sit out the market for a while because the constant losing is so demoralizing. If prices don’t calm down, she said, she’s thinking about becoming a travel nurse. With the health care work force so depleted by Covid-19, travel nursing pays much better and, hopefully, will allow her to save more for a down payment.

“I’m not at the point where I want to give up on living in Spokane, because I have family here and it feels like home,” she said. “But travel nursing is going to be my next step if I haven’t been able to land a house.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/business/economy/spokane-housing-expensive-cities.html

China is the world’s biggest consumer market, and for decades, Chinese and American business interests have described their economic cooperation as a “win-win relationship.” But gradually, as China’s economic and military might have grown, Washington has taken the view that a win for China is a loss for the United States.

The decision to locate the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing has turned sponsorship, typically one of the marketing industry’s most prestigious opportunities, into a minefield.

Companies that have sponsored the Olympics have attracted censure from politicians and human rights groups, who say such contracts imply tacit support of atrocities by the Chinese Communist Party, including human rights violations in Xinjiang, censorship of the media and mass surveillance of dissidents.

“One thing our businesses, universities and sports leagues don’t seem to fully understand is that, to eat at the C.C.P.’s trough, you will have to turn into a pig,” Yaxue Cao, editor of ChinaChange.org, a website that covers civil society and human rights, told Congress this month.

The tension is playing out in other areas as well, including with regards to Xinjiang, where millions of ethnic minorities have been detained, persecuted or forced into working in fields and factories. In June, the United States will enact a sweeping law that will expand restrictions on Xinjiang, giving the United States power to block imports made with any materials sourced from that region.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/18/business/economy/china-us-olympics-sponsorships.html

China is the world’s biggest consumer market, and for decades, Chinese and American business interests have described their economic cooperation as a “win-win relationship.” But gradually, as China’s economic and military might have grown, Washington has taken the view that a win for China is a loss for the United States.

The decision to locate the 2022 Olympic Games in Beijing has turned sponsorship, typically one of the marketing industry’s most prestigious opportunities, into a minefield.

Companies that have sponsored the Olympics have attracted censure from politicians and human rights groups, who say such contracts imply tacit support of atrocities by the Chinese Communist Party, including human rights violations in Xinjiang, censorship of the media and mass surveillance of dissidents.

“One thing our businesses, universities and sports leagues don’t seem to fully understand is that, to eat at the C.C.P.’s trough, you will have to turn into a pig,” Yaxue Cao, editor of ChinaChange.org, a website that covers civil society and human rights, told Congress this month.

The tension is playing out in other areas as well, including with regards to Xinjiang, where millions of ethnic minorities have been detained, persecuted or forced into working in fields and factories. In June, the United States will enact a sweeping law that will expand restrictions on Xinjiang, giving the United States power to block imports made with any materials sourced from that region.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/18/business/economy/china-us-olympics-sponsorships.html

But some shoppers — particularly first-time buyers — may decide to wait until even higher rates help cool off prices later in the year. The largest share of home buyers are millennials ages 21 to 40, many of whom are first-time buyers, according to the National Association of Realtors.

“The spring season will be very interesting,” said Lawrence Yun, the chief economist with the Realtors association.

Ultimately, the housing market needs an increase in inventory, Mr. Yun said. “We need a supply of empty homes.” Builders have faced challenges in keeping newly built homes affordable including high lumber prices and difficulty finding construction workers.

Buyers may need to consider more affordable homes in less urban areas, Mr. Yun said. That may depend on whether homeowners expect to be able to continue working remotely.

One variable in the number of homes for sale is the winding down of mortgage forbearances granted during the pandemic. Many homeowners have been able to resume payments after their payment pause expired. But some may be unable to, forcing them to sell their homes, said Michael Fratantoni, the chief economist with the Mortgage Bankers Association. The number of borrowers in forbearance has been declining, to an estimated 705,000 homeowners at the end of 2021.

As always with real estate, conditions vary. Agents in some hot markets say a rise in interest rates may take time to affect prices because some buyers don’t need financing to purchase homes. Kyle Schelvan, an agent with the Asa Team, part of eXp Realty, in Orlando, Fla., said homes in the area often were bought by people who had sold homes elsewhere and were using their cash proceeds to buy homes in Florida. Traditional buyers sometimes must take steps they once would have considered preposterous, he said — like buying a home occupied by a renter and waiting months for the lease to expire so they can move into the property. “It’s challenging,” he said.

Here are some questions and answers about mortgage rates and the housing market:

As mortgage rates rise, should I consider an adjustable-rate home loan?

Adjustable-rate mortgages, or ARMs, offer a fixed interest rate for a certain period before switching to a variable rate. The loans earned a bad reputation in the housing crisis in 2008 because some lenders gave them to unqualified buyers who couldn’t afford the higher payments when interest rates spiked. Lingering skepticism about adjustable loans, combined with low rates on fixed-rate mortgages in recent years, has kept ARMs out of favor, said Mr. Walden at Black Knight.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/18/your-money/home-buying-mortgages.html