It will most likely take a while for the backlog of eviction cases in many states to result in the displacement of renters. But tenant groups in the South, where fast-track evictions are common, are bracing for the worst.

In recent days, Mr. Biden’s team has been mapping out strategies to deal with the likely loss of the moratorium, with a plan to focus its efforts on a handful of states — including South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia and Ohio — that have large backlogs of unpaid rent and few statewide protections for tenants.

The administration had at first concluded that a Supreme Court ruling in June had effectively forbidden it from imposing a new moratorium after an earlier one expired at the end of July. While the administration had prevailed in that ruling by a 5-to-4 vote, one member of the majority, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, wrote that he believed the moratorium to be unlawful and that he had cast his vote to temporarily sustain it only to allow an orderly transition. He would not support a further extension without “clear and specific congressional authorization (via new legislation),” he wrote.

Congress did not act. But after political pressure from Democrats, a surge in the pandemic and new consideration of the legal issues, the administration on Aug. 3 issued the moratorium that was the subject of the new ruling.

The administration’s legal maneuvering might have failed, but it bought some time for tenants threatened with eviction. In unusually candid remarks this month, President Biden said that was part of his calculus in deciding to proceed with the new moratorium, which was set to expire Oct. 3.

Congress declared a moratorium on evictions at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, but it lapsed in July 2020. The C.D.C. then issued a series of its own moratoriums, saying that they were justified by the need to address the pandemic and authorized by a 1944 law. People unable to pay rent, the agency said, should not be forced to crowd in with relatives or seek refuge in homeless shelters, spreading the virus.

The last moratorium — which was put in place by the C.D.C. in September and expired on July 31 after being extended several times by Congress and Mr. Biden — was effective at achieving its goal, reducing by about half the number of eviction cases that normally would have been filed since last fall, according to an analysis of filings by the Eviction Lab at Princeton University.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/us/eviction-moratorium-ends.html

Using a broader range of evidence from both the United States and Europe, two political scientists at the University of Connecticut, Lyle Scruggs and Salil Benegal, found that a decline in climate concern in that period was driven significantly by worse economic conditions, which increased worry about more immediate issues. In times of scarcity, people tend to think less of policies with long-term payoffs.

“The state of the economy affects people’s sensitivity to the future versus the present,” Professor Scruggs said. “Historically climate change has fallen into the same camp as a lot of other environmental issues, where people’s answers tend to wax and wane with the economy.”

If a central bank can achieve consistent prosperity, this research suggests, it may change some political dynamics on aggressive climate action. Prosperity could support branches of government that have more explicit responsibility for curtailing greenhouse gases, building out clean energy capacity, or helping communities adapt to more extreme weather.

Not everyone who studies public opinion on climate agrees.

Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, attributes the decline in concern about climate change in the early 2010s not to the weak economy, but to widening political polarization and a pivot of conservative media toward climate change denialism.

“What we saw was a symbiotic relationship between conservative media, conservative elected officials and the conservative public,” he said. “That drove the shift. It wasn’t the economy.”

A paper published this summer by Michael T. Kiley, a Fed staff member, analyzed how temperature variations affect economic performance. It concluded that climate change may not change the typical rate of growth in the economy over time, but could make severe recessions more common. A major crop failure, for example, would lower G.D.P. directly and could simultaneously create economic ripple effects such as bank failures.

And Lael Brainard, a Fed governor and potential Biden appointee to become the next chair, has emphasized that the unpredictable nature of climate change could make obsolete the historical models on which economic policy is based.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/upshot/fed-climate-change-analysis.html

At Delta, the surcharge is one of several new requirements for unvaccinated workers. Starting immediately, those employees will have to wear masks indoors. In about two weeks, they will be subjected to weekly coronavirus tests. Then, on Sept. 30, unvaccinated employees will lose protections intended to cover pay for work missed while having to quarantine.

The airline, which is based in Atlanta, its biggest hub, has a lot of employees in a state with a relatively low vaccination rate. Just over half of Georgia’s adult population is fully vaccinated, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Delta’s decision not to require the vaccine may also help it to avoid criticism from Georgia’s conservative lawmakers, who have punished it in the past. In 2018, the state legislature voted to repeal a tax break on jet fuel after Delta ended a discount for members of the National Rifle Association, but the governor later ordered state officials to stop collecting the tax, effectively restoring the break. Lawmakers threatened to start collecting it again this year after Delta opposed new voting restrictions in the state.

“It’s not an idle threat,” said Charles Bullock III, a professor of political science at the University of Georgia. “Doing this is probably more in keeping with where the Republican leadership would be,” he said of Delta’s approach on vaccination.

American Airlines and Southwest Airlines, both based in Texas, have also not required vaccines. But United Airlines, which is based in Chicago, said this month that it would require vaccines, starting on Sept. 27.

United’s chief executive, Scott Kirby, has lamented the dozens of letters he has had to write to families of employees who died from the virus. “We’re determined to do everything we can to try to keep another United family from receiving that letter,” he and Brett Hart, United’s president, told employees this month.

One industry that has achieved high employee vaccination rates is Nevada’s casinos. State regulators allowed casinos to operate at full capacity once at least 80 percent of employees had received at least one shot of a coronavirus vaccination, a threshold some big properties achieved. Last week, MGM Resorts went further and said Covid vaccination would be a condition of employment for all salaried employees and new hires.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/26/business/delta-insurance-fee-unvaccinated.html

Several states, including Texas, have been particularly effective in ramping up their aid distribution systems, officials said. But many others — especially New York, Florida, Tennessee, Ohio and South Carolina — have been sluggish, making tenants especially vulnerable to displacement once the moratorium is lifted, they said.

But there are signs that things might be changing: New York released only a minuscule portion of its funding by Aug. 1, but has spent about $200 million in the last few weeks, according to a spokesman for the state agency that disburses the aid.

Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, who was sworn in this week, has said speeding up the system is one of her top priorities.

States that have not used much of their money by the end of September could see their funds reallocated to other states that have been able to distribute it more effectively.

It will take local housing courts weeks to clear the backlog of eviction cases delayed by the moratorium. But many owners, especially small landlords, have rejected the federal aid, arguing that evicting nonpaying tenants is not only their right but the most effective way of ensuring their revenue is not interrupted in the future.

Last week, Wally Adeyemo, deputy Treasury secretary, traveled to Hyattsville, Md., to talk to landlords, tenants and administrators of a rental assistance program that has had success by using self-reported applications and census data to determine eligibility.

Administration officials, worried that a new moratorium could be struck down at any time, are also turning to state courts — which adjudicate tenant-landlord disputes — to help deliver aid, by pressuring landlords to accept federal payments instead of proceeding with evictions, and educating tenants, who often have no legal representation in court, on their right to apply for assistance.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/us/politics/eviction-rental-assistance.html

Even with those efforts, the initial clash over advancing the budget this week was resolved with a flurry of calls from Mr. Biden, top White House officials and senior Democrats to the competing factions in the House.

Congressional leaders say they have spent months laying the groundwork so that their party can move quickly toward consensus. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California told colleagues in a letter on Wednesday that “we have long had an eye to having the infrastructure bill on the president’s desk by the Oct. 1,” the date when many provisions in the bipartisan package are slated to go into effect.

Committee leaders have been instructed to finish their work by Sept. 15, and rank-and-file lawmakers have been told to make their concerns and priorities known quickly as they maneuver through substantive policy disagreements, including whether it should be as much as $3.5 trillion and the scope of Mr. Biden’s proposed tax increases.

“I’m sure everybody’s going to try their best,” said Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the House Budget Committee chairman. “Some committees will have it rougher than others.”

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has been releasing discussion drafts of proposals to fund the $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation spending — the larger bill that Democrats plan to move without any Republican support — including raising taxes on high earners and businesses. On Wednesday, he provided granular details of a plan to increase taxes on the profits that multinational companies earn and book overseas.

“I’m encouraged by where we are,” Mr. Wyden said in an interview.

Democratic leaders and the White House have pushed analyses of their proposals that speak to core liberal priorities; on Wednesday, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, released a report suggesting the two bills combined would “put our country on the path to meet President Biden’s climate change goals of 80 percent clean electricity and 50 percent economywide carbon emission reduction by 2030.”

White House economists released a detailed report this week claiming the spending Mr. Biden supports, like universal prekindergarten and subsidized child care, would expand the productive capacity of the economy and help reduce price pressures in the future.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/business/economy/biden-infrastructure-bill.html

Officials have clearly linked their interest rate plans to their new framework: They said in September that they would not lift rates until the job market reached full employment. Bond buying ties back less directly, but it serves as a signal of the Fed’s continued patience.

Critics of the Fed’s wait-and-see stance have questioned whether it is wise for the Fed to buy mortgage-backed and Treasury debt at a rapid clip when home prices have soared and inflation has been taking off. Republican lawmakers and some prominent Democrats alike have worried that the Fed is being insufficiently nimble as economic conditions change.

“They chose a framework that was designed to provide a commitment to a highly dovish policy,” said Lawrence H. Summers, a Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and an economist at Harvard University. “The problem morphed into overheating being the big concern, rather than underheating.”

Inflation jumped to 4 percent in June, based on the Fed’s preferred measure. Most economists expect rapid price gains to fade as pandemic-related supply bottlenecks clear up, but it is unclear how quickly and fully that will happen.

And while there are still nearly seven million fewer jobs than there were before the pandemic, unfilled positions have jumped, wages for lower earners are taking off, and employers widely complain about being unable to hire enough workers. If labor costs remain higher, that, too, could cause longer-lasting inflation pressures.

Some Fed officials would prefer to slow bond purchases soon, and fast, so that the central bank is in a position to raise interest rates next year if price pressures do become pernicious.

Other policymakers see today’s rising prices and job openings as trends that are destined to abate. Companies will work through supply-chain disruptions, and consumers will spend away savings they amassed from government stimulus checks and months stuck at home. Workers will settle into jobs. When things return to normal, they reason, the tepid inflation of years past will probably return.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/business/economy/federal-reserve-jackson-hole-meeting.html

Officials have clearly linked their interest rate plans to their new framework: They said in September that they would not lift rates until the job market reached full employment. Bond buying ties back less directly, but it serves as a signal of the Fed’s continued patience.

Critics of the Fed’s wait-and-see stance have questioned whether it is wise for the Fed to buy mortgage-backed and Treasury debt at a rapid clip when home prices have soared and inflation has been taking off. Republican lawmakers and some prominent Democrats alike have worried that the Fed is being insufficiently nimble as economic conditions change.

“They chose a framework that was designed to provide a commitment to a highly dovish policy,” said Lawrence H. Summers, a Treasury secretary in the Clinton administration and an economist at Harvard University. “The problem morphed into overheating being the big concern, rather than underheating.”

Inflation jumped to 4 percent in June, based on the Fed’s preferred measure. Most economists expect rapid price gains to fade as pandemic-related supply bottlenecks clear up, but it is unclear how quickly and fully that will happen.

And while there are still nearly seven million fewer jobs than there were before the pandemic, unfilled positions have jumped, wages for lower earners are taking off, and employers widely complain about being unable to hire enough workers. If labor costs remain higher, that, too, could cause longer-lasting inflation pressures.

Some Fed officials would prefer to slow bond purchases soon, and fast, so that the central bank is in a position to raise interest rates next year if price pressures do become pernicious.

Other policymakers see today’s rising prices and job openings as trends that are destined to abate. Companies will work through supply-chain disruptions, and consumers will spend away savings they amassed from government stimulus checks and months stuck at home. Workers will settle into jobs. When things return to normal, they reason, the tepid inflation of years past will probably return.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/25/business/economy/federal-reserve-jackson-hole-meeting.html

Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, points out that the United States is experiencing significantly higher inflation than other countries that are facing the same supply problems. Consumer prices rose 2.2 percent in the year ended in July in the euro area, compared with 5.4 percent in the United States.

“My guess is that real wage growth is faring better right now in Europe than it is in the United States, and it’s faring better because there is less demand and thus less inflation,” Mr. Furman said.

The story is better when you look at how lower-paid workers in the United States are doing. The shortages of workers, especially in service industries, are translating into raises for people who don’t make a lot. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta shows that median hourly wages for people in the bottom 25 percent of earners have risen at a 4.6 percent rate over the last year, compared with 2.8 percent for the top 25 percent.

And many of the benefits of a hot economy come in the form of pulling more people into the work force and enabling them to work more hours. Employers have added an average of 617,000 jobs a month so far in 2021, versus 173,000 a month in 2011, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. If sustained, the United States is on track to return to its prepandemic employment level two years after the recession ended. Such a recovery took five years after the previous recession.

Advocates of running a hot economy emphasize that a rapid recovery is good for reducing inequality, in part by ensuring there are plenty of job opportunities so that people don’t have to be out of work for long stretches.

“We are seeing ongoing stimulus and expanded income support programs doing what they’re supposed to do,” said J.W. Mason, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute and a longtime proponent of running the economy hot. “The numbers we should really be looking at are employment growth and wage growth, especially at the low end, and those trends are positive and encouraging. They’re the numbers we would have hoped to see at the beginning of the year.”

In the late years of the last expansion, employment gains were particularly strong for racial minorities, people with low levels of education, and some others who often have a hard time getting hired.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/upshot/biden-economy-analysis-inflation.html

Overall employment remains more than half a million jobs below where it was before the pandemic, with steep losses persisting in the leisure and hospitality industries and in other blue-collar fields. Recouping those service jobs depends in part on the return of white-collar workers who have worked remotely — and have even left the city.

Many companies had aimed to bring employees back to the office shortly after Labor Day, at least part-time. But those plans have been scrapped. Facebook, which employs 4,000 people in New York, has put off a return until January, while the financial giants BlackRock and Wells Fargo are now planning a return in October.

“Data, not dates, is what drives our approach for returning to the office,” Facebook said in a statement. “We continue to monitor the situation and work with experts to ensure our return to office plans prioritize everyone’s safety.”

Boston Properties, which owns nearly 12 million square feet of space in the New York region, said about 40 percent of prepandemic occupants had returned to its buildings earlier in the summer, based on lobby badge swipes. In August, amid Delta’s rise and vacation getaways, that figure had dipped to around 30 percent, said Owen Thomas, the company’s chief executive.

“I think the return to the office is a ‘when’ question, not an ‘if’ question,” he said. “Delta is affecting the when.”

There are some “if” questions nonetheless. As remote work extends well into a second year, and as much of the contact between professionals and clients continues to be conducted online, it is less clear whether some suburban workers will ever return to the city and to their sometimes-arduous commutes.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/23/business/economy/nyc-economy-covid-delta-variant.html

There is some evidence of that in the current labor market: Data from Gusto, a provider of payroll and other services to small businesses, shows that employment among adults 25 and older has risen faster in states that cut federal benefits, while in states that kept the benefits, employment has risen faster among teenagers. That suggests employers may have turned to younger workers to fill jobs during a labor shortage.

Other recent research also finds that benefits are not the primary driver of employers’ hiring woes. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco used data from the government’s Current Population Survey to conclude that the $300 supplement “likely had small but noticeable effects on job search and worker availability in early 2021.” Jed Kolko, chief economist at the employment site Indeed, looked at more recent data from the same survey and found that the states that have cut benefits have experienced employment growth that was at most slightly faster than in states that kept the benefits.

And in a study published this summer, economists at the University of Chicago and the JPMorgan Chase Institute used data from thousands of Chase customers to study the effect of the $300 supplement. Like Mr. Dube and his co-authors, they found that the benefits had a small though measurable effect on employment.

“It’s among the factors,” said Fiona Greig, co-president of the JPMorgan Chase Institute. “It’s playing a role, but it’s not this on-off switch, where if you turn it off everyone goes back to work.”

Ms. Greig said a variety of other factors could be discouraging people from returning to work, including child care issues and concerns about the coronavirus itself. Those issues may have receded somewhat over the summer, but they could worsen again this fall if virus cases continue to rise. If people lose benefits and don’t quickly return to work, they will have to cut spending — which will hurt their families and the economy overall.

“You have to weigh the pros and the cons,” Ms. Greig said. “If these benefits get turned off, some of them may go back to work, but some of them may not, and those who do not will likely cut their spending a lot.”

Coral Murphy Marcos contributed reporting.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/20/business/economy/unemployment-benefits-economy-states.html