“Francis has been less than forthright with his ever-changing stories,” Ms. deSouza’s lawyers claimed in one filing.

No secret stash ever materialized. A spokeswoman for Mr. deSouza said he had disclosed the entirety of his cryptocurrency holdings at the beginning of the divorce. “As soon as Francis knew that the Bitcoin was caught up in the Mt. Gox bankruptcy, he told his ex-wife,” the spokeswoman said. “Had the Mt. Gox bankruptcy not occurred, the division of the BTC would have been entirely uncontroversial.”

Ms. deSouza declined to comment through her lawyer.

But the appeals court found that Mr. deSouza, 51, who is now the chief executive of the biotech company Illumina, had violated rules of the divorce process by failing to keep his wife fully apprised of his cryptocurrency investments.

He was ordered to give Ms. deSouza about half the total number of Bitcoins he had owned before the Mt. Gox bankruptcy, leaving him with 57 Bitcoins, worth roughly $2.5 million at today’s prices. Ms. deSouza’s Bitcoins are now worth more than $23 million.

Not all crypto divorces involve such large sums. A few years ago, Nick Himonidis, a forensic investigator in New York, worked on a divorce case in which a woman accused her husband of underreporting his cryptocurrency holdings. With the court’s authorization, Mr. Himonidis showed up at the husband’s house and searched his laptop. He found a digital wallet, which contained roughly $700,000 of the cryptocurrency Monero.

“He was like: ‘Oh, that wallet? I didn’t think I even had that,’” Mr. Himonidis recalled. “I was like, ‘Seriously, dude?’”

In another case, Mr. Himonidis said, he discovered that a husband had moved $2 million in cryptocurrency out of his account on the Coinbase exchange, a platform where people buy, sell and store digital currencies. A week after his wife filed for divorce, the man transferred the funds to digital wallets, and then left the United States.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/13/technology/divorce-bitcoin-crypto.html

In 2020, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission released a summary of an investigation into these practices at IBM, which found that there was “top-down messaging from IBM’s highest ranks directing managers to engage in an aggressive approach to significantly reduce the head count of older workers.” But the agency did not publicly release evidence supporting its claims.

The newly unsealed documents — which quote from internal company emails, and which were filed in a “statement of material facts” in the lawsuit brought by Ms. Liss-Riordan — appear to affirm those conclusions and show top IBM executives specifically emphasizing the need to thin the ranks of older workers and hire more younger ones.

“We discussed the fact that our millennial population trails competitors,” says one email from a top executive at the time. “The data below is very sensitive — not to be shared — but wanted to make sure you have it. You will see that while Accenture is 72% millennial we are at 42% with a wide range and many units falling well below that average. Speaks to the need to hire early professionals.”

“Early professionals” was the company’s term for a role that required little prior experience.

Another email by a top executive, appearing to refer to older workers, mentions a plan to “accelerate change by inviting the ‘dinobabies’ (new species) to leave” and make them an “extinct species.”

A third email refers to IBM’s “dated maternal workforce,” an apparent allusion to older women, and says: “This is what must change. They really don’t understand social or engagement. Not digital natives. A real threat for us.”

Mr. Pratt, the spokesman, said that some of the language in the emails “is not consistent with the respect IBM has for its employees” and “does not reflect company practices or policies.” The statement of material facts redacts the names of the emails’ authors but indicates that they left the company in 2020.

Both earlier legal filings and the newly unsealed documents contend that IBM sought to hire about 25,000 workers who typically had little experience during the 2010s. At the same time, “a comparable number of older, non-Millennial workers needed to be let go,” concluded a passage in one of the newly unsealed documents, a ruling in a private arbitration initiated by a former IBM employee.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/business/economy/ibm-age-discrimination.html

Research by Rebecca Diamond, an economist at Stanford University, and Enrico Moretti, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, explains the attraction. They worked out how costs affect living standards in various parts of the country.

Workers without a four-year college degree earn little in the Cookeville commuting zone — their income puts them among the poorest 10 percent of households in hundreds of commuting zones across the country. After adjusting for the local cost of living, however, their purchasing power rises to the top 10 percent.

They can live more comfortable lives than if they moved to a bigger city, like Nashville or Knoxville. According to Ms. Diamond and Mr. Moretti’s work, which is based on data from 2014, the household income of a typical worker who never finished high school in Cookeville is about $43,000. In New York it is $58,000; in San Francisco, $62,000.

Still, adjusting for the local cost of living, the workers in San Francisco and New York could afford much less — roughly what someone with an income of $37,000 could buy in a city like Cleveland, which ranks in the middle of the national income distribution. The Cookeville workers, by contrast, live as if they were making $46,000 in Cleveland.

Big cities are not that good a deal for even highly educated workers. They do earn much higher wages in New York than in Cookeville — indeed, the college educated reap a bigger pay premium if they work in bigger cities than their less-educated peers. But according to the researchers, all the extra wages are eaten up by higher costs.

It’s mostly about housing. Last November, the typical home in Cookeville cost $217,303, according to Zillow. That’s one-fourth of the median price of a home in Los Angeles and one-sixth of the price in San Francisco. Median rent in Jackson County is $548 per month.

Housing costs are putting a big dent in the case for urban America. “If you are trying to raise people’s standard of living you want to move them away from big cities not towards them,” said Jesse Rothstein, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley. He wrote a research paper with David Card, his colleague at Berkeley, and Moises Yi of the Census Bureau that pours more cold water on the supposed advantages of America’s megalopolises.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/business/economy/small-town-living-standard.html

During the pandemic, grocery store workers have been recognized as essential to keeping society going, but they have also faced health risks. At least 50,600 grocery workers around the country have been infected with or exposed to the coronavirus, and at least 213 have died from the virus, according to the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union.

Ms. Manning was hospitalized for Covid-19 last summer. She blames herself for her grandmother’s subsequent death from the virus in August.

“She was one of the people that would help me the most, if I was short on a bill or needed help, to pick my daughter up from school,” she said. But when her grandmother was in critical condition, Ms. Manning said, she was told that she couldn’t take more time off after being sick with Covid-19.

The illness and the company’s response were jarring, given that corporate workers had the flexibility to work from home, she said, adding that she ultimately took disability leave for a stretch.

Kroger has one of the country’s starkest gaps between a chief executive’s compensation and that of the median employee. Rodney McMullen, Kroger’s chief executive since 2014, earned $22.4 million in 2020, while the median employee earned $24,617 — a ratio of 909 to 1. The average C.E.O.-to-worker pay ratio in the SP 500 is 299 to 1, with grocery chains like Costco (193 to 1) and Publix (153 to 1) lower than that.

These disparities have fomented outrage among employees, who are also dealing with issues like fights over masks and theft and violence in stores.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/12/business/kroger-grocery-stores-workers-pay.html

“What people seem to not understand is that when that truck isn’t moving, they make no money,” Ms. Walker said, noting that drivers with certain types of cargo, such as some hazardous materials, are limited to crossing on the Ambassador Bridge.

The slowdown in Canadian trade will disproportionately affect New York, Michigan and Ohio, said Arthur Wheaton, the director of labor studies at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. At the same time, he added, the protests were “certainly raising concerns for all U.S. manufacturers.”

“There is already a shortage of truck drivers in North America, so protests keeping truckers off their routes exacerbates problems for an already fragile supply chain,” Mr. Wheaton said.

Carmakers had hoped that shortages of computer chips and other components would ease this year, allowing them to concentrate on the long-term: the transition to electric vehicles.

A larger fear for many elected officials and business executives is that the scene at the Ambassador Bridge could inspire other protests. The Department of Homeland Security warned in an internal memo that a convoy of protesting truckers was planning to travel from California to Washington, D.C., potentially disrupting the Super Bowl and President Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1.

“While there are currently no indications of planned violence,” the memo, which was dated Tuesday, said, “if hundreds of trucks converge in a major metropolitan city, the potential exists to severely disrupt transportation, federal government operations, commercial facilities and emergency services through gridlock and potential counter protests.”

Mr. Chiodo, the Canadian union leader, said that “the people who are demonstrating are doing it for the wrong reasons. They want to get back to the way things were before the pandemic, and in reality they are shutting things down.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/business/economy/canada-protests-cars-automobiles.html

“My concern is that they overdo it — being too sensitive to wage growth,” Ryan Sweet, who leads real-time economics at Moody’s Analytics, said before the report. “This is not going to be easy.”

Much like policymakers, companies have expressed uncertainty about when today’s rapid price gains will fade.

“I wish I could forecast when this inflation is going to slow down,” Brian Niccol, Chipotle Mexican Grill’s chief executive, told Bloomberg News in an interview this week. “But unfortunately, we’re not getting a sign that it’s going to slow down.”

The economy has been challenging to predict in the aftermath of state and local lockdowns meant to control the pandemic, and as the virus continues to disrupt ordinary economic patterns. On one hand, job openings are plentiful and workers seem to have newfound power in negotiating better pay and conditions. On the other, the rapidity of price increases has come as a constant surprise.

Krystle Brown, 33, and her husband embody many of the hopes and challenges of a complicated economic moment marked by a strong job market and rocketing inflation. They recently bought a condominium in Salem, Mass., driven in part by the belief that if they did not buy now prices would only climb higher.

They will be able to afford their mortgage payment more easily because Ms. Brown, a visual artist, recently got a new and better-paying job. She had been working two — as a cake decorator and a marketing director at a gallery — making about $42,000 a year combined. Now, she’s a marketing assistant at an art museum, making about $50,000 per year.

But even with the higher salary, the couple does not earn a lot for their area, and inflation is making things harder. Groceries cost more, and the rapid run-up in car prices has put Ms. Brown’s hopes of buying a hybrid or electric vehicle on ice.

“There are so many different elements to it,” she said. “And they interact.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/10/business/economy/inflation-cpi-january-2022.html

But she has at times spoken about monetary policy. In a 2015 article in The Detroit Free Press, she noted that it was difficult to be both reactive to incoming economic data and completely predictable. Locking in a preset pace of rate increases, she said, could set the market up for tumult if conditions changed.

“The Fed wants to avoid surprising the market,” she said in the article.

In a 2019 interview with Yahoo News, Ms. Collins said that the Fed should reassess how it was approaching the economy at a time when the link between unemployment and inflation was not as clear as expected.

“The Fed is not in the business of making dramatic changes” to how it operates outside of crises, Ms. Collins said, but she noted that the Fed could in the future think about raising its inflation target above 2 percent.

“Some of us think that being a little bit bolder there would be helpful,” she said.

That could be relevant now, at a time when the Fed is trying to set policy against a virus-stricken and uncertain backdrop. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, has emphasized that the central bank will be “humble” and “nimble.”

Ms. Collins was selected by directors on the Boston Fed’s board and approved by the Fed’s Board of Governors in Washington. Ms. Collins will replace Eric S. Rosengren, who retired as the Boston Fed’s president last year following a trading scandal, citing health concerns.

Ms. Collins has an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/09/business/economy/boston-fed-president-susan-collins.html

The Trump administration imposed metal tariffs on dozens of countries in 2018, saying a glut of foreign steel and aluminum threatened to put U.S. manufacturers out of business and posed a national security threat. President Donald J. Trump did lift or scale back the tariffs on certain countries, including Mexico and Canada, in return for trade concessions, but many governments remained subject to the levies.

Wendy Cutler, the vice president of the Asia Society Policy Institute, said imposing national security-related tariffs on a close U.S. ally like Japan “never made sense, and was an unfortunate chapter in U.S. trade history.”

“By putting the steel matter finally behind us, it opens the door for stepped-up cooperation on a range of pressing regional and global economic and trade issues,” she said.

The trade barriers pleased many domestic metal makers and unions, which said they were necessary to preserve American industry and compete with a glut of cheap foreign metal from countries like China. But the tariffs have upset both foreign allies and many American companies that use imported steel and aluminum to make cars, washing machines, beer cans and other products, and that were forced to pay higher prices for their inputs.

Kevin Dempsey, the chief executive of the American Iron and Steel Institute, an industry group, said the agreement with Japan would prevent another import surge that would undermine American industry and employment in the steel sector.

“We appreciate the Biden administration’s continued recognition that the American steel industry is critical to our national and economic security and to efforts to build a more sustainable U.S. economy,” he said, adding that “proper implementation and enforcement” of the deal would be essential.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/business/economy/us-japan-steel-tariffs.html

The president’s task force will submit a second report describing progress on its recommendations and proposing additional ones in six months.

Union officials and labor experts consider Mr. Biden to be among the most pro-labor presidents ever. He moved quickly to oust Trump appointees viewed as unsympathetic to labor and to undo Trump-era rules that weakened protections for workers, and signed legislation that secured tens of billions of dollars to stabilize union pension plans.

Mr. Biden has occasionally used his bully pulpit to urge employers not to undermine workers’ labor rights or bargaining positions, as when he warned against coercing workers who were weighing unionizing during a prominent union election at Amazon last year. He later called Kellogg’s plan to permanently replace striking workers “an existential attack” on its union members.

Last week, Mr. Biden signed an executive order requiring so-called project labor agreements — agreements between construction unions and contractors that set wages and working conditions — on federal construction projects worth more than $35 million, a move that the White House estimates could affect nearly 200,000 workers. He previously signed an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 per hour from $10.95.

But despite Mr. Biden’s backing, and polls showing widespread public support for unions, the rate of union membership nationwide remains stuck at a mere 10 percent, its lowest in decades.

The Protecting the Right to Organize Act, or PRO Act, which Mr. Biden supports, would make it easier to unionize by preventing companies from holding mandatory anti-union meetings and imposing financial penalties on employers that retaliate against workers seeking to unionize. It passed the House in March but remains a long shot in the Senate. Democrats may seek to pass some of its provisions along party lines this year.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/07/business/economy/biden-union-membership.html

The problem is that the alternative to a Fed response is, at the moment, not obvious. The Biden administration’s attempts at tamping down price increases — longer port hours, release of strategic petroleum reserves, calling out corporate price gouging — have mostly tinkered around the edges of the issue.

Those kinds of precise moves to counter inflation are what M.M.T. economists would recommend, though. Ms. Kelton laid out other suggestions M.M.T. economists have made in a recent blog post. Among them: Medicare for All, cutting the Pentagon budget, repealing some tariffs and unclogging the ports.

Not exactly “easy peasy,” to borrow a phrase of hers.

“M.M.T. was already pretty marginal,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard economist, noting that, in his view, most policymakers and prominent academics ignored it already. Even if policy in the pandemic effectively embraced the idea that you do not have to pay for your spending, that idea, he said, was also Keynesian.

And the M.M.T crowd, while dismissing the Fed’s role, has not come up with a clear and obviously workable idea for how to stem inflation, he argued, adding, “If you were open-minded, this would discredit it still further.”

In Washington, the suite of ideas has clearly been dealt a setback. Deficit concerns have returned. Mr. Biden’s sweeping policy agenda has not passed because Senator Joseph Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat and member of his own party, has opposed it on concerns about government debt and inflation.

Despite that, some of M.M.T.’s proponents are still sounding celebratory.

“We’ve won the debate on the intellectual level — there are no flaws,” Mr. Wray said.

Flaws or not, there are questions.

Questions like: “Did Congress ‘experiment’ with MMT, and does the run-up in inflation mean that MMT has ‘failed’?”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/business/economy/modern-monetary-theory-stephanie-kelton.html