Then came the Delta variant. Despite keeping their countries largely sealed off, the virus found its way in. And when it did, it spread quickly. In the summer, South Korea battled its worst wave of infections; hospitals in Indonesia ran out of oxygen and beds; and in Thailand, health care workers had to turn away patients.

With cases surging, countries quickly shifted their vaccination approach.

Sydney, Australia, announced a lockdown in June after an unvaccinated limousine driver caught the Delta variant from an American aircrew. Then, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who had previously said vaccination “was not a race,” called in July on Australians to “go for gold” in the country’s inoculation drive.

He moved to overcome a supply shortage, compounded by the slow regulatory approval. In August, Australia bought one million Pfizer doses from Poland; this month, Mr. Morrison announced a purchase of a million Moderna shots from Europe.

When the Delta outbreak emerged, fewer than 25 percent of Australians over the age of 16 had received a single shot. In the state of New South Wales, which includes Sydney, 86 percent of the adult population has now received a first dose, and 62 percent of adults are fully vaccinated. The country expects to fully inoculate 80 percent of its population over the age of 16 by early November.

“There was great community leadership — there were people from across the political divide who came out to support vaccination,” said Greg Dore, an infectious-disease expert at the University of New South Wales. “It really helped us turn around a level of hesitancy that was there.”

Many governments have used incentives to encourage inoculations.

In South Korea, the authorities eased restrictions in August on private gatherings for fully vaccinated people, allowing them to meet in larger groups while maintaining stricter curbs for others. Singapore, which has fully vaccinated 82 percent of its population, previously announced similar measures.

Researchers there have also analyzed the pockets of people who refuse to be inoculated and are trying to persuade them.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/business/economy/asia-covid-vaccinations.html

Some Democrats have complained this week that the president has not engaged in talks to their satisfaction. He welcomed groups of progressives and moderates to the White House last week, for example, but met with each separately, as opposed to holding a group negotiating session.

And efforts by Mr. Biden and his team to pressure Mr. Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, another Democratic holdout on the reconciliation bill, appear to have fallen flat. Officials have been working for days to persuade the pair to specify how much they would be willing to spend on the package, calculating that such a commitment would allay the worries of progressives now refusing to support the infrastructure bill.

“Joe Biden is the only president in American history to have passed a relief package of the significance of the American Rescue Plan with zero margin for error in the Senate and three votes to spare in the House,” said Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the White House, referring to the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package that became law in March. “He knows how to make his case, he knows how to count votes, and he knows how to deliver for the American middle class.”

Both Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin visited the White House on Tuesday, but after their meetings, neither they nor White House officials would enumerate the contours of a bill they could support. Top White House officials also trekked to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to huddle privately with Ms. Sinema for more than two hours.

“The president felt it was constructive, felt they moved the ball forward, felt there was an agreement, that we’re at a pivotal moment,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters on Tuesday, characterizing the meetings. “It’s important to continue to finalize the path forward to get the job done for the American people.”

Mr. Biden held conversations with various lawmakers throughout the day on Wednesday and planned to continue them on Thursday, White House officials said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/us/politics/debt-limit-spending-bill.html

The joint appearance of some of the world’s most powerful economic officials, sponsored by the European Central Bank, came during a turbulent week in financial markets. While stocks were rebounding on Wednesday morning, they had fallen sharply on Tuesday as government bond yields rose. Investors have been shaken by a political standoff over the debt ceiling in the United States, problems in China’s heavily indebted property sector, the reality that global central banks are preparing to dial back economic support and the possibility that recent rapid price gains might last.

The burst in inflation has swept Europe and the United States this year as consumer demand booms but factory shutdowns and shipping snarls keep many goods in short supply. Central bankers have consistently argued that those price increases will prove temporary. As businesses adjust to the postpandemic recovery, they say, supply-chain kinks will unravel. And while consumers have been spending down savings stockpiled during the pandemic and padded by government stimulus, those will not last forever.

But economic officials have increasingly acknowledged that while they expect the inflationary pop to be temporary, it may last longer than they initially anticipated.

In the United States, consumer price inflation came in at 5.3 percent in August, and the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge — the personal consumption expenditures, or P.C.E., index — grew 4.2 percent in the year through July. August P.C.E. data is slated to be released on Friday.

Consumer prices are expected to peak “slightly above” 4 percent later this year in Britain, double the central bank’s target.

Elsewhere in Europe, inflation is also high, though the jump has not been as large. Euro-area inflation came in at 3 percent in August, the highest reading in roughly a decade. But price gains there are expected to slow more materially over the coming years than in Britain and the United States.

Japan is a notable outlier among developed economies, with slow demand and inflation near zero. Weak inflation leaves central banks with less room to help the economy in times of trouble, and can fuel a cycle of economic stagnation, making it a problem.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/business/central-bankers-supply-chains-inflation.html

WASHINGTON — President Biden and his aides mounted an all-out effort on Wednesday to salvage Mr. Biden’s economic agenda in Congress, attempting to forge even the beginnings of a compromise between moderates and progressives on a pair of bills that would spend trillions to rebuild infrastructure, expand access to education, fight climate change and more.

Mr. Biden canceled a scheduled trip to Chicago, where he was planning to promote Covid-19 vaccinations, in order to continue talking with lawmakers during a critical week of deadlines in the House. One crucial holdout vote in the Senate, Kyrsten Sinema, a centrist from Arizona, was set to visit the White House on Wednesday morning, a person familiar with the meeting said.

Ms. Sinema was one of the Democratic champions of a bipartisan bill, brokered by Mr. Biden, to spend more than $1 trillion over the next several years on physical infrastructure like water pipes, roads, bridges, electric vehicle charging stations and broadband internet. That bill passed the Senate this summer. It is set for a vote this week in the House. But progressive Democrats have threatened to block it unless it is coupled with a more expansive bill that contains much of the rest of Mr. Biden’s domestic agenda, like universal prekindergarten and free community college, a host of efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and tax breaks for workers and families that are meant to fight poverty and boost labor force participation.

Ms. Sinema and another centrist in the Senate, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, have expressed reservations over the scope of that larger bill and balked at the $3.5 trillion price tag that Democratic leaders have attached to it. Moderates in the House and Senate, led by Ms. Sinema, have resisted many of the tax increases on high earners and corporations that Mr. Biden proposed to offset the spending and tax cuts in the bill, in order to avoid adding further to the budget deficit.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/29/business/economy/biden-agenda-sinema-manchin.html

Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio and the head of the Senate Banking Committee, pointed out that there had never been a Black woman on the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors in Washington, while also referring to reporting from earlier this year that showed a dearth of Black economists at the central bank.

He asked if Mr. Powell believed that the central bank should have a Black woman on its Board of Governors.

“I would strongly agree that we want everyone’s voice heard around the table, and that would of course include Black women,” Mr. Powell said. “We of course have no role in the selection process, but we would certainly welcome it.”

Lisa Cook, a Michigan State University economist, and William Spriggs, chief economist of the labor union AFL-CIO, are often raised as possible candidates for governor positions or leadership roles. Both are Black. Lael Brainard, a white woman who is currently a Fed governor, is frequently raised as a possible replacement for Mr. Powell if he is not renominated, and Sarah Bloom Raskin, a white woman who is a former top Fed and Treasury official, is often suggested as a replacement for Mr. Quarles.

Mr. Powell, as he noted, has no formal role in selecting his future colleagues at the Fed Board.

He and his colleagues at the Fed Board will, however, have a chance to weigh in on who will take over two newly open positions around the Fed’s decision-making table. The central bank has 19 total officials at full strength, seven governors and 12 regional bank presidents.

Robert S. Kaplan, the Dallas Fed president, and Eric S. Rosengren, the Boston Fed president, both announced their imminent retirements on Monday, amid widespread criticism of the fact that they were trading securities in 2020 — during a year in which the Fed unrolled a widespread market rescue in response to the pandemic.

Mr. Powell addressed that scandal on Tuesday, pledging to lawmakers that the Fed would change its ethics rules and saying that the Fed was looking into the trading activity to make sure it was in compliance with those rules and with the law.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-jerome-powell-fed-chair.html

For weeks, Ms. Yellen has been quietly pressing lawmakers to put politics aside and ensure that the United States can continue to meet its fiscal obligations. She has been in touch with Wall Street chief executives and former Treasury secretaries as she looks to keep markets calm and find allies who can help her make the case to recalcitrant Republicans, who believe Democrats must deal with the debt limit on their own.

“It is imperative that Congress swiftly addresses the debt limit,” Ms. Yellen said. “The full faith and credit of the United States would be impaired, and our country would likely face a financial crisis and economic recession.”

The debt limit is traditionally addressed on a bipartisan basis, but Republicans are refusing to join Democrats in passing legislation to lift the borrowing cap. Republicans argue that Democrats have the votes to lift the debt limit on their own and that they should do so. Democrats argue that Republicans are playing a dangerous political game.

In a tense exchange with Senator John Kennedy, Republican from Louisiana, Ms. Yellen said it was possible that Democrats could lift the debt limit on their own but that Republicans were shirking their responsibility by refusing to cover debts they helped incur.

“It is very important to recognize that raising the debt ceiling is about paying bills that Congress has incurred in the past,” Ms. Yellen said, noting that deficits have been run under Democratic and Republican administrations “It’s a shared responsibility.”

Mr. Kennedy, who was unconvinced, said that Democrats just wanted to tie Republicans to their big spending plans and that a crisis could be averted by Democrats.

“Easy, peasy. Finished. Let’s go have a cocktail,” Mr. Kennedy told Ms. Yellen.

Ms. Yellen also told lawmakers that the economy, while strengthening, is still in a “fragile” state.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/28/business/economy/yellen-powell-senate.html

Faced with losing more money with each additional ton of coal they burn, some power plants have closed for maintenance in recent weeks, saying this was needed for safety reasons. Many other power plants have been operating below full capacity, and have been leery of increasing generation when that would mean losing more money, said Lin Boqiang, dean of the China Institute for Energy Policy Studies at Xiamen University.

China’s main economic planning agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, also ordered 20 large cities and provinces in late August to reduce energy consumption for the rest of the year. The regulators cited a need to make sure that the cities and provinces met full-year targets set by Beijing for their carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.

Besides coal, hydroelectric dams supply much of the rest of China’s power, while wind turbines, solar panels and nuclear power plants play a growing role.

China’s difficulty in keeping the lights on and the faucets running poses a challenge for Xi Jinping, the country’s top leader, and the Chinese Communist Party. They have taken a triumphalist stance this year, emphasizing China’s success in quickly eliminating outbreaks of the coronavirus and in winning the release of a senior Huawei executive, Meng Wanzhou, in a dispute with the United States and Canada.

But Mr. Xi risks getting tagged for problems as well as successes. He has moved strongly to quell any opposition within the Communist Party and has extended its reach into more sectors of Chinese life. If people in China begin to point fingers, there are few others to blame.

China’s economic rebound from the coronavirus has been driven in large part by heavy investment in infrastructure as well as the rise in exports. Overall industrial use consumes 70 percent of the electricity in China, led by the mostly state-owned producers of steel, cement and aluminum.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/business/economy/china-electricity.html

But the controversy has pushed him into a delicate position. His own term as Fed chair expires early next year, and the White House is actively considering whether to reappoint him. A scandal at his central bank is sure to draw questions from senators when he testifies this week, and could even hurt his reappointment chances.

As chair, Mr. Powell has also focused on shoring up public support in the central bank and explaining its role. He holds frequent news conferences, aims to speak in simpler language, and championed a series of “Fed Listens” events where top central bank officials meet and hear from community members whom they might not otherwise interact with — from community college students to local food pantry staff.

The 2020 trading disclosures, which are shaping up to be the most headline-grabbing scandal the central bank has faced in years, risk chipping away at the widespread trust he has been working to build.

Responses to Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Rosengren’s trading disclosures have been swift, and scathing. The group Better Markets had been calling for the Fed to fire both presidents if they did not resign. Other progressive groups had called for at least one of them to be ousted, and ethics watchdogs have said that the rules that had enabled their trades needed to be revisited.

After the resignation announcements on Monday, Wall Street promptly began to assess what the departures would mean for monetary policy. Both officials have tended to worry about financial stability, and for that reason were likely to favor removing monetary policy support sooner than some of their colleagues — a stance often referred to as being hawkish.

“Their exit will take out two of the nine more hawkish Fed officials who saw a 2022 rate hike as of the September F.O.M.C. meeting last week and remove important voices on financial stability issues in particular,” Krishna Guha at Evercore ISI wrote in a note to clients shortly after the announcement.

Mr. Rosengren has been president of the Boston Fed since 2007, and his retirement was previously planned for June. The Fed’s 12 regional members rotate in and out of voting seats, and Mr. Rosengren would have had a vote on monetary policy next year. Mr. Kaplan would have voted in 2023.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/business/fed-rosengren-kaplan.html

Some regional Fed presidents, including James Bullard at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and Robert S. Kaplan at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, have suggested that the labor market may be tighter than it appears, citing data including job openings and retirements.

But Mr. Williams said on Monday that the job market still had substantial room to improve. While the unemployment rate has fallen from its pandemic high, he said the Fed was looking at more than just that number, which tracks only people who are actively looking for work. The Fed also wants the employment rate to rebound. He pointed out that a high level of job openings is not a clear signal that the job market has healed.

“Even if job postings are at a record high, job postings are not jobs,” Mr. Williams said. “These vacancies won’t be filled instantly.”

Although Mr. Williams said he had been watching the impact of school reopenings on the labor market, he said he did not think they would cause a huge surge in people returning to work this month or in October.

“It may take quite a bit longer for the labor supply to come fully back,” he said.

Ms. Brainard batted back the idea that labor force participation — the share of adults who are working or looking for jobs — might not return to its prepandemic level.

“The assertion that labor force participation has moved permanently lower as a result of a downturn is not new,” she said. A similar debate played out following the 2008 financial crisis and labor force participation ultimately rebounded, especially for people in their prime working years.

Ms. Brainard warned that Delta was slowing job market progress. Last week there were more than 2,000 virus-tied school closures across nearly 470 school districts, she said, and “the possibility of further unpredictable disruptions could cause some parents to delay their plans to return to the labor force.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/business/economy/fed-labor-market-interest-rates.html

Elsewhere in the country, the conversation has begun to move on, away from early Covid alarm and into something more guardedly speculative. What will post-pandemic life look like? How have our priorities shifted? But for vast swaths of the nation, largely untouched by doses from Pfizer and Moderna, it remains late 2020 in many ways.

“A lot of people here still don’t believe the virus is real — even when the hospitals are full, even when they have family dying,” Mr. Naughton said. “With the vaccines, one co-worker told me getting it would go against her faith. Another told me it contains baby fetuses and mercury. Someone else said it was created by Bill Gates to insert microchips to track you. I said, ‘Why would he want to track you?’”

The conversations Mr. Naughton describes may be epidemiologically out of step, but he and thousands of others seem trapped in an America-right-now vortex, a swirl of politics, belief, resentment and fear. At fast food restaurants, grocery stores, warehouses, nursing homes and anywhere else frontline workers show up each day, a deep schism has taken hold. Workers nervous about the virus find themselves at the mercy of those who aren’t.

“If I ask people to wear a mask or socially distance at work, they get mad and tell the manager. Then I have to get coached. If you get coached too many times, you lose your job,” Mr. Naughton said, referring to the company’s system for managing worker infractions. (Charles Crowson, a Walmart spokesman, did not dispute that an accumulation of coachings could lead to termination.)

Draped over this dynamic are often the stark realities of poverty, and the stresses of navigating a low-paying job in a high-pressure situation. And so an already strained situation strains further. Bitterness over masking requests, job insecurity, a run on bottled water, vaccine politics — tensions routinely boil over in his store and beyond, Mr. Naughton said.

“It wasn’t always like this. It used to be more friendly here. It’s become hostile. People are really on edge. They fight with you in the store, or with each other,” he said. “The other day a woman wanted to fight over the price of potatoes. You can even see it in how people drive, like they have a death wish.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/business/walmart-coronavirus-workers-safety.html