Mr. Biden vowed to work more closely with Europe, which he has described as a partner in efforts to combat climate change and compete against authoritarian economies like China. But he has been under pressure from American metal manufacturers and labor unions not to entirely remove the trade barriers, which have helped protect the domestic industry from a glut of cheap foreign metal.

The deal marks the final step for the Biden administration in dismantling Mr. Trump’s Trans-Atlantic trade war. In June, U.S. and European officials announced an end to a 17-year dispute over aircraft subsidies given to Airbus and Boeing. In late September, the United States and Europe announced a new partnership for trade and technology, and earlier this month they came to an agreement on global minimum taxes.

Under the new terms, the European Union will be allowed to ship 3.3 million metric tons of steel annually into the United States duty-free, while any volume above that would be subject to a 25 percent tariff, according to people familiar with the arrangement. Products that were granted exclusions from the tariffs this year would also temporarily be exempt.

The agreement will also place restrictions on products that are finished in Europe but use steel from China, Russia, South Korea and other countries. To qualify for duty-free treatment, steel products must be entirely made in the European Union.

Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, said that the deal removed “one of the biggest bilateral irritants in the U.S.-E.U. relationship.”

Metal unions in the United States praised the deal, which they said would limit European exports to historically low levels. The United States imported 4.8 million metric tons of European steel in 2018, a level that fell to 3.9 million in 2019 and 2.5 million in 2020.

In a statement, Thomas M. Conway, president of the United Steelworkers International, said the arrangement would “ensure U.S. domestic industries remain competitive and able to meet our security and infrastructure needs.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/30/business/economy/biden-steel-tariffs-europe.html

Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, has increasingly acknowledged that inflation is lasting longer than central bankers had expected. Fed officials believe inflation will fade as supply chain snarls unravel and consumer demand for goods cools, but it remains unclear when that will happen. Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, has predicted that rapid price jumps will cool by later next year.

The inflation data released on Friday confirmed what more-timely measures like the Consumer Price Index had already shown: For now, price gains remain unusually brisk. Supply chains are struggling to keep up with strong demand, thanks to virus-tied factory shutdowns, clogged ports and a shortage of transit workers, among other factors. It is hard to buy a kitchen table or a used car, and the prices of many goods have jumped sharply.

Demand has yet to drastically fade. Personal spending continued at a solid pace in September, data released on Friday showed, climbing 0.6 percent from August — slower than the prior month, but in line with what economists had expected.

Spending could moderate in the months ahead as federal stimulus dries up and households deplete savings that they built up during the pandemic. A measure of incomes that includes benefit payments decreased 1 percent last month as more-generous unemployment payments expired and other pandemic relief programs slowed or stopped payouts. The personal savings rate also fell to 7.5 percent, down sharply from recent months and roughly where it stood before the onset of the pandemic.

But just as government help wanes, labor income is climbing faster.

Americans are earning more from work, data released Friday showed: A measure of employment costs that traces wages and benefits climbed by 1.3 percent in the third quarter, more than the 0.9 percent economists had expected and the fastest pace in data since the series started in 1996.

On an annual basis, the Employment Cost Index climbed 3.7 percent, the fastest pace since 2004. Wage gains are especially rapid in service industries, which have been struggling to lure back workers as they reopen from pandemic lockdowns.

Strong wage gains could help to sustain demand and may keep inflation higher than normal, especially as companies try to remain profitable even as they pay more for labor. The Fed is closely watching wages and measures of inflation expectations, which have risen in recent weeks, as it tries to assess whether price gains might spiral out of control.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/business/economy/september-pce-inflation.html

“Our supply chains are being put to the test, with unprecedented consumer demand and pandemic-driven disruptions combining with the results of decades-long underinvestment in our infrastructure,” Pete Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, said in a statement. “Today’s announcement marks an innovative partnership with California that will help modernize our infrastructure, confront climate change, speed the movement of goods and grow our economy.”

The announcement comes as President Biden and lawmakers try to push through Congress their own major infrastructure plan, which includes money for ports and other transportation initiatives. Progressive lawmakers in the House have resisted throwing their support behind the bipartisan infrastructure bill as leverage while negotiations continue over a separate $1.85 trillion economic and environmental bill.

David S. Kim, the secretary of the California State Transportation Agency, said it was the first time California had worked with the federal government to issue loans for infrastructure projects on such a broad scale.

“Our supply-chain infrastructure is outdated,” Mr. Kim said. “Now’s the time to modernize it and prepare our system for what will be huge growth and huge demand for years to come.”

The partnership comes after Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed an executive order last week directing state agencies to identify longer-term solutions to alleviate congestion at California ports, which he said were “key” to the country’s supply chain. Mr. Newsom said the new agreement would help accelerate upgrades to the state’s infrastructure system.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/us/politics/california-ports-supply-chain.html

The Biden administration projects the international plans would raise $350 billion over a decade.

Narrowing the tax gap.

White House and Treasury Department officials have spent months pushing a proposal to narrow the $7 trillion gap in taxes that are owed by individuals and businesses but not collected. The administration initially wanted to invest $80 billion in additional enforcement staffing at the I.R.S. and require banks to hand over more information about the finances of their customers.

Under the new proposal, the I.R.S. would get more money to ramp up audits of people making more than $400,000. However, the new bank reporting proposal — which the Treasury has called critical to its ability to hunt down hidden revenue — was conspicuously absent. A lobbying campaign from banks prompted huge blowback from lawmakers, including Senator Joe Manchin III, a West Virginia Democrat whose vote is critical to passing the overall package.

Treasury officials and a group of Senate Democrats are continuing to negotiate with Mr. Manchin on narrowing the proposal in a way that he could support.

As it stands, the plan to bolster I.R.S. enforcement is projected to raise $400 billion over a decade, down from the $700 billion in the original proposal.

Reducing the deficit, maybe.

Mr. Biden said on Thursday that his plans were “fiscally responsible” and claimed that the proposals, if enacted, would reduce the country’s budget deficit.

The $2 trillion of proposed tax increases would more than offset the $1.85 trillion in spending on housing, child care and climate initiatives. However, nonpartisan scorekeepers such as the Congressional Budget Office have in the past offered less rosy projections of what Biden administration proposals might actually raise in revenue.

Additional I.R.S. enforcement personnel will take years to get up to speed, and audits could be less effective without the additional bank information the Treasury Department is seeking.

Some Democratic lawmakers are also still fighting for the inclusion of provisions that could actually cost money, including a partial or temporary restoration of SALT, the state and local tax deduction that Republicans capped in 2017. Last-minute additions such as that could add to the cost of the overall package.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/us/politics/biden-tax-plan-increases.html

Officials still expect the factors forcing inflation higher to abate as the virus fades and supply chains return to normal, Mr. Powell noted, but he signaled wariness and a recognition that getting back to business as usual could take time.

At 360 Painting, a residential and commercial painting company with 120 franchises across the country, business soared during the pandemic as homeowners looked to freshen up their houses during lockdown. Demand has stayed strong this year, but the company is facing an unexpected challenge: a shortage of paint.

“In 25 years of home service work and painting work, I’ve never seen anything like this where you go into a paint store and they’re out of paint,” said Dave Rychley, the company’s president.

At first, Mr. Rychley said, he expected the problem to be brief. But as it has dragged on, the company has had to adjust, warning customers to expect delays and pushing them to choose paint colors early to make sure they can secure supplies in time. Franchisees have also been raising prices.

“If we’re paying more for a gallon of paint, we’re going to pass that on to the customer at some level,” Mr. Rychley said.

The company is also facing another supply shortage: labor. For many franchisees, Mr. Rychley said, finding skilled workers is even harder than finding paint.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/business/economy/us-3q-gdp-report.html

For many employees, the reluctance to return comes down to the commute.

Workers in the New York region had the longest average one-way commute in the country at about 38 minutes, according to 2019 census data. About 23 percent of workers in the region commuted at least an hour each way.

In June, Tom Hebner, a vice president at NeuraFlash, a consulting firm, relocated to a co-working space operated by Serendipity Labs in Ridgewood, N.J., where he lives. He said he was reminded of the benefits whenever he visits the company’s New York City office, a round trip that can take up to three hours.

“I’m the only guy in the suburbs who can walk to work,” said Mr. Hebner, who works at the Ridgewood location every day with three other NeuraFlash employees.

John Arenas, the chief executive of Serendipity Labs, said that when he founded the company a decade ago, his pitch for co-working spaces in the suburbs failed to take off because the corporate world strictly adhered to a five-day workweek in a central office.

Since the pandemic hit, Mr. Arenas said, more than half of his revenue now comes from companies that pay for employees to work from a co-working location in the suburbs as a perk.

Savills, a real estate firm, has found through surveys of its corporate clients that many employees relocated to the suburbs during the pandemic, prompting companies to seek out Manhattan office spaces near transit hubs, like Pennsylvania Station. But it has also led employees to demand more flexibility to work from home.

Offering co-working spaces as a perk could risk creating a fractured work culture where employees feel disconnected from the main office and more willing to switch jobs, said Rebecca Humphrey, an executive vice president at Savills.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/28/nyregion/co-working-space-suburbs.html

Mr. Grinberg, a tax law professor at Georgetown University who worked in the Treasury Department during the Bush and Obama administrations, was initially viewed with skepticism by some progressives, who noted that in 2016 and 2017, he lamented America’s “singularly high corporate tax rate” during congressional hearings and called for the rate to be slashed in favor of a consumption tax.

But in early 2020, Mr. Grinberg wrote in a Foreign Affairs essay that European digital services taxes could open a dangerous front in the Trump administration’s tariff wars and warned that the “decay of the century-long international tax order is likely to accelerate” without a deal. Later that year, Mr. Grinberg alerted Mr. Biden’s campaign advisers on how their international tax proposals meshed with the stalled discussions of a global minimum tax. After the election, he joined Mr. Biden’s transition team.

Ms. Kysar, a professor at the Fordham School of Law and a tax treaty expert, has been a vocal critic of the 2017 Republican tax overhaul. In 2018, she told the Senate Finance Committee that the law’s international tax provisions “fundamentally botched general business taxation.” Ms. Kysar had collaborated on research with David Kamin, deputy director of the White House’s National Economic Council, who helped recruit her to join the transition team and administration.

With the Treasury Department working remotely, Mr. Grinberg and Ms. Kysar spent months juggling Zoom meetings with officials from finance ministries around the world and fielding calls with tax directors from America’s largest companies, which have been anxious about what the agreement will mean for their tax bills.

Working from their basements in Washington and Connecticut, they regularly exchanged emails in real time during negotiations, but they had never met until they traveled to a gathering of finance ministers in Venice in July. At such summits, they would often employ a divide and conquer approach, with Ms. Kysar joining Ms. Yellen in meetings with her counterparts and Mr. Grinberg negotiating separately with Irish tax officials.

The final months of negotiations centered on the United States and Ireland, but with moving parts falling in and out of place from Peru to India, which threatened to back out of the deal shortly ahead the announcement.

Ms. Yellen’s approach with Ireland was to cajole more than to pressure.

“Where once upon a time this tax advantage may have been important to Ireland, Ireland has built a really strong economy with a very well educated labor force,” Ms. Yellen said. “It is an extremely attractive base for American multinationals to choose as their E.U. headquarters.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/27/us/politics/global-minimum-tax-deal.html

During a CNN town hall last week, Mr. Biden conceded the limits of his power, saying, “I don’t have a near-term answer” for bringing down gas prices, which he does not expect to begin dropping until next year.

“I don’t see anything that’s going to happen in the meantime that’s going to significantly reduce gas prices,” he said.

Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday that she expects improvement in the overall inflation rate “by the middle to end of next year, second half of next year.”

With an American public that had gone nearly 40 years without seeing — or worrying — about inflation, the issue provides an opening for the opposition. Republicans have turned price spikes into a weapon against Mr. Biden’s economic policies, warning that more spending would exacerbate the pain for everyday Americans.

“It’s everywhere,” said Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, in an interview. “You can’t live your life without seeing your paycheck buy less.”

White House officials have monitored inflationary pressure for months. They remain convinced, as they were in April, that price increases will not spiral out of control and force abrupt interest-rate increases from the Federal Reserve that could slam the brakes on growth.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/26/business/economy/biden-inflation.html

As it happens, the most valuable currency for any associate are hours spent working on client business, which are both a measure of productivity and a way for young lawyers to learn their trade.

At most large firms, associates have formal quotas for billable hours, typically 1,800 to 2,000 per year. Those who want to be promoted tend to focus on accumulating these hours, which they track with time-keeping software, sometimes monomaniacally. (At Dickinson Wright, the required minimum is 1,850 hours for the first few years.)

The catch is that few first-year associates enter a firm with work awaiting them. For this, they are largely at the mercy of the senior associates and partners who dispense it.

And how, exactly, does one land assignments from these colleagues? It turns out there is no more reliable way than, well, showing up.

“People give work to people they think of,” said Amanda Newman, a senior associate in Dickinson Wright’s Phoenix office, who serves as a liaison between associates and management. “If they’re seeing you every day, they think of you.”

Or as Ms. Singh, the first-year associate, put it, alluding to a recent assignment: “It was 9 a.m., I was here. Jim’s like, ‘Are you doing anything?’”

‘It’s Good to Have Face Time’

By late September, attendance was ticking up, and I began to make out a core group of officegoers. One pillar of the group was Mr. Cornell, who was braving a commute that ranged from 30 minutes to over two hours through morning traffic and had spent weeks mulling a return to public transit.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/22/business/economy/law-firm-return-to-office.html

But the recent rally seemed find its footing two weeks ago. On Oct. 6, word broke that Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, was willing to offer a temporary reprieve allowing Congress to raise the debt ceiling. The market turned on a dime from its morning slump, finishing the day in positive territory. That week turned out to be the market’s best since August.

Once done as a matter of course in Washington, raising the debt ceiling has been an increasingly contentious issue in recent years — with sometimes serious implications for the market. In August 2011, a rancorous battle over the debt ceiling sent share prices tumbling sharply as investors began to consider the prospect that the United States could actually default on its debts.

But the recent deal on the ceiling — even though it only pushed a reckoning into December — suggested to investors that there’s little appetite in Washington for a replay of a decade ago.

“I think that let some pressure out of the system,” said Alan McKnight, chief investment officer of Regions Asset Management. “What it signaled to the markets was that you can find some area of agreement. It may not be very large. But at least they can come together.”

With the impasse broken, the rally gained strength. Last Thursday, the SP 500 jumped 1.7 percent — its best day in roughly seven months — as financial giants like Morgan Stanley and Bank of America reported stellar results.

Potential progress on a deal in Washington has only brightened investors’ outlook.

“Democrats are now moving in the same direction, and hard decisions are being made,” wrote Dan Clifton, an analyst with Strategas Research, who monitors the impact of policy on financial markets, in a note to clients on Wednesday.

On Thursday, analysts spotlighted the news that the White House and congressional Democrats were moving toward dropping corporate tax increases they had wanted to include in the bill, as they hoped to forge a deal that could clear the Senate. A spending deal without corporate tax increases would be a potential boon to profits and share prices.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/21/business/economy/stock-market-record.html