In London, Ivy Mukherjee, 28, a product designer, and Shashwat Shukla, 30, a private equity investor, also started putting money into start-ups together this year to learn new skills and network with others in the industry. They said they were proceeding cautiously, with checks of $2,000 to $5,000, knowing they could lose it all.

“If we happen to make our money back, that’s good enough for us,” Mr. Shukla said.

The new angels have the potential to transform a venture capital industry that has been stubbornly clubby. They could also put pressure on bad actors in the industry who get away with things ranging from rudeness to sexual harassment, said Elizabeth Yin, a general partner at Hustle Fund, a venture capital firm. The firm also created Angel Squad and shares deals with its members.

“More competition brings about better behavior,” Ms. Yin said. (In addition to investing in start-ups, Hustle Fund sells mugs that say “Be Nice, Make Billions.”)

The angel boom has, in turn, created a miniboom of companies that aim to streamline the investing process. Allocations, the start-up run by Mr. Advani, offers group deal making. Assure, another start-up, helps with the administrative work. Others, including Party Round and Sign and Wire, help angels with money transfers or work with start-ups to raise money from large groups of investors.

AngelList, which has enabled such deals for over a decade, has steadily expanded its menu of options, including rolling funds (for people to subscribe to an angel investor’s deals) and roll-up vehicles (for start-ups to consolidate lots of small checks). Mr. Kohli said his company runs a “fund factory” that compresses a month of legal paperwork and wire transfers into the push of a button.

Still, getting access to the next hot tech start-up as a total outsider takes time.

Ashley Flucas, 35, a real estate lawyer in Palm Beach County, Fla., began investing in start-ups three years ago. She said it was a chance to create generational wealth, something underrepresented people did not typically get access to.

“It’s the same people doing deals with each other and sharing in the wealth, and I’m thinking, how do I break into that?” said Ms. Flucas, who is Black.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/09/technology/angel-investors-startups.html

An alternative approach might have made building power outside Washington more of a priority by expanding the ranks of union members and increasing the leverage of workers who are not union members.

In the view of Mr. Cohen, the former communications workers leader, one advantage of a large investment in organizing is that it allows the labor movement to place bets in a variety of industries and workplaces where workers are increasingly enthusiastic about unionizing, but where traditional unions don’t have a large presence — like the video game industry and other technology sectors.

Such funding can help support workers who want to help organize colleagues in their spare time, as well as a small cadre of professionals to assist them. “You have 100 people who you pay $25,000 per year, and 15 people full time, and the people can build something where they live,” Mr. Cohen said.

Stewart Acuff, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s organizing director from 2002 to 2008 and then a special assistant to its president, said the federation’s role in organizing should include more than just directly funding those efforts. He said it was essential to make adding members a higher priority for all of organized labor, as he sought to do under Mr. Trumka’s predecessor.

“We were challenging every level of the labor movement to spend 30 percent of their resources on growth,” said Mr. Acuff, who has criticized the direction of the federation under Mr. Trumka. “That didn’t just mean organizers. It meant using access to every point of leverage,” like pressuring companies to be more accepting of unions.

Mr. Acuff also said that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. must be more willing to place long bets on organizing workers that may not pay off with more members in the short term, but that help build power and leverage for workers.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/08/business/economy/afl-cio-labor-unions-trumka.html

But ultimately it came down to a simpler calculation: Mr. Biden could not ignore the call, led by Black Democrats, to reverse course.

“Every single day that we wait, thousands of people are receiving eviction notices, and some of them are being put out on the street,” said Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, who has been sleeping on the steps of the Capitol since the moratorium expired in a bid to pressure her party’s leadership. “People started sending me pictures of dockets, court dockets, that were all evictions. We cannot continue to sit back. We need this done today.”

Ms. Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, were briefed on Tuesday on the C.D.C.’s plan by Dr. Walensky, the agency’s director, and Xavier Becerra, the secretary of health and human services, according to a person familiar with the call. Ms. Pelosi hailed the idea of a new eviction moratorium as a victory for many Americans who were struggling because of the pandemic.

“Today is a day of extraordinary relief,” she said in a statement. “Thanks to the leadership of President Biden, the imminent fear of eviction and being put out on the street has been lifted for countless families across America. Help is here!”

Yet for two days it was unclear how — or whether — any help would arrive as landlords prepared to turn to housing courts to evict tenants who were behind on their rent.

At a White House meeting with Mr. Biden on Friday, Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer bluntly informed Mr. Biden they did not have the votes to pass an extension — and pressed him to take whatever action he could using his executive power, according to two Democratic congressional aides briefed on the meeting.

On Tuesday, House Democrats summoned Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen to explain what the agency was doing to help struggling renters. In a private call between Democrats and Ms. Yellen, the Treasury secretary insisted that her team was using all available tools to get rental assistance money to states and to help governments distribute those funds to landlords and renters.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/us/politics/evictions-housing-moratorium-pelosi-yellen.html

Despite a resurgent coronavirus, the economy appears to be recovering. Employers added 943,000 jobs in July, the Labor Department reported Friday, and Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, acknowledged in late July that inflation remained a real risk in the near term

“We think that some of it will fall away naturally as the process of reopening the economy moves through,” Mr. Powell said of inflation, before adding, “It could take some time.”

But the federal spending of the Trump era appears to have given his party permission to put austerity in the rearview mirror, at least for some measures.

In a statement on Thursday in response to the C.B.O. price tag, Senators Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, and Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, the two lead negotiators on the infrastructure deal, defended the bipartisan legislation as “a historic investment in our nation’s core infrastructure needs.”

That rationale reflected longstanding arguments from liberals, which Mr. Portman and Ms. Sinema decidedly are not.

“Almost every state, county and private-sector organization pays for ongoing operating expenses with ongoing revenue, and pays for physical infrastructure with debt financing,” Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said on Friday. “Anything that provides value over a long period of time should be paid for over a long period of time. This isn’t some wacky new political philosophy; it’s just smart money management.”

And because Democrats have vowed to pay for their social policy spending with tax increases and other measures, such as allowing Medicare to bargain for lower drug prices, that legislation will not increase the deficit, said Senator Chris Van Hollen, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the Senate Budget Committee.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/us/politics/infrastructure-budget-deficit.html

Look for the new numbers to become central to debates over whether expanded unemployment payments have been a factor in holding back job creation by incentivizing people not to work. Many states suspended those expanded benefits earlier in the summer, which would be reflected in the July data.

The early verdict? Maybe. The steep decline in the number of people unemployed — 782,000 people — is certainly consistent with people returning to work instead of receiving jobless benefits. But the strong and steady growth in payroll employment in May and June is not what you would expect to see if unemployment benefits (or the lack of them) were the primary driver of the labor market.

Either way, we’ll know more when state-level data is released in coming weeks.

Education employment in public and private schools contributed a combined 261,000 jobs, but not because schools went on a strange midsummer hiring binge.

In the normal seasonal pattern, many teachers and other educators fall off their schools’ payrolls at the end of the academic year, which the Labor Department’s seasonal adjustment procedures account for. But with many schools closed or in limited operation this academic year, there were fewer people losing their jobs, meaning the seasonal adjustment appears to report a misleading gain in the number of jobs.

There are still plenty of problems in the United States economy, and it would be foolish to think that a single month of data, or even a few good months in a row, signaled a healing of the scars of the pandemic recession. Among other things, the share of the adult population working remains 1.7 percentage points below its prepandemic level. And the labor force participation rate barely edged up in July.

But there’s little question, when the employment numbers are combined with other recent data, that the trends are heading in the right direction.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/upshot/jobs-report-strong.html

Though China has made large-scale purchases of U.S. goods since the trade war, the amount and composition have fallen short of its commitments to buy $200 billion worth of American goods and services in 2020 and 2021. According to analysis by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, China fell short of those purchases by 40 percent last year and is off by 30 percent this year.

“We strongly urge the administration to work with the Chinese government to increase purchases of U.S. goods through the remainder of 2021 and implement all structural commitments of the agreement before its two-year anniversary on Feb. 15, 2022,” the letter added.

While the Biden administration has questioned whether the trade deal with China was well designed, it has also signaled that it will continue to push China on what it perceives as unfair trade practices.

In June, President Biden expanded a Trump administration blacklist that blocked Americans from investing in Chinese companies that aid the country’s military or repression of religious minorities. Mr. Biden included Huawei, a Chinese telecommunications giant, on the list of banned firms. The White House also announced the formation of a trade and technology council with American and European officials, an effort to counter China’s influence by coordinating digital policies between Brussels and Washington.

“We will not hesitate to call out China’s coercive and unfair trade practices that harm American workers, undermine the multilateral system or violate basic human rights,” Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, said in prepared testimony for a Senate hearing in May. “We are working toward a strong, strategic approach to our trade and economic relationship with China.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/business/economy/biden-china-trade.html

The legislation would authorize funding to reconstruct a highway in Alaska, the home state of Senator Lisa Murkowski, a key Republican negotiator. Special funds are set aside for the Appalachian Regional Commission, a federal economic development body whose co-chairwoman is Gayle Manchin, the wife of Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, one of the bill’s principal authors and a key Democratic swing vote. Mr. Manchin also helped secure funds to clean up abandoned mine lands in states like his.

The legislation would set aside funds for individual projects across the country, including $1 billion for the restoration of the Great Lakes, $24 million for the San Francisco Bay, $106 million for the Long Island Sound and $238 million for the Chesapeake Bay.

It also includes $66 billion in new funding for rail to address Amtrak’s maintenance backlog, along with upgrading the high-traffic Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston. For Mr. Biden, an Amtrak devotee who took an estimated 8,000 round trips on the line, it is a step toward fulfilling his promise to inject billions into rail.

Unspent pandemic funds and tougher scrutiny of cryptocurrency help pay for the plan.

With Republicans and some moderate Democrats opposed to adding to the nation’s ballooning debt, the legislation includes a patchwork of financing mechanisms, though some fiscal hawks have called many of them insufficient.

To pay for the legislation, lawmakers have turned partly to $200 billion in unused money from previous pandemic relief programs enacted in 2020.

That includes $53 billion in expanded jobless benefit money that can be repurposed since the economy recovered more quickly than projections assumed, and because many states discontinued their pandemic unemployment insurance payments out of concern that the subsidies were dissuading people from rejoining the work force.

The bill claws back more than $30 billion that was allocated — but had not been spent — for a Small Business Administration disaster loan program, which offers qualified businesses low-interest loans and small grants. That program has been stymied by shifting rules and red tape, and has disbursed cash far more slowly than Congress (and many applicants) expected.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/02/us/politics/infrastructure-bill.html

“I just, I can’t wrap my head around that,” she said. “That just doesn’t sound like a sustainable future to me.”

Mr. Waller, by contrast, suggested that there is little a central bank digital offering could do that the private sector cannot and that the potential benefits of a digital dollar are likely overstated, while the risks are substantial. He added that the United States need not worry about the U.S. dollar being supplanted by China’s digital offering.

“I am left with the conclusion that a C.B.D.C. remains a solution in search of a problem,” Mr. Waller said on Thursday, referring to a central bank digital currency. He also voiced concerns that a central bank currency would give the Fed too much information about private citizens.

Mr. Waller is not alone in his skepticism. Randal K. Quarles, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, has also sounded dubious about the need for a central bank digital currency, painting the idea as a passing fad. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, has at times questioned whether such an offering is necessary, but he has more recently stressed that it is important to investigate the idea and has called himself “legitimately undecided.”

Supporters of central bank digital currency say that it is critical for the United States to stay on top of the technology, even if it is not yet clear what benefits such currencies will offer in practice. Some suggest that a Fed digital dollar could prevent stablecoins — private digital assets backed by a bundle of currencies or other assets — from becoming dominant and creating a big financial stability risk.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/business/economy/fed-digital-currency.html

Germany recently allowed the expiration of a rule excusing firms from declaring bankruptcy if they can’t pay their bills. Debt repayment holidays for companies that took cheap government-backed loans will soon wind down in most eurozone economies.

And after repeated extensions, state-backed job retention schemes, which have cost European Union countries over €540 billion, are set to end in September in Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and Ireland, and become less generous in neighboring countries in all but the hard-hit tourism and hospitality sectors.

Aid programs that helped cushion income losses for 60 million people at the height of the crisis continue to pay for millions of workers on standby. Businesses and the self-employed have access to billions in low-interest loans, state-funded grants and tax holidays.

Meanwhile, employees have begun returning to offices, shops and factory floors. Global automakers are working to adapt to supply-chain issues. Small retailers are offering click-and-collect sales, and cafes are providing takeout service.

Governments are betting that the growth momentum will be enough to wean their economies off life support.

“We can’t use public money to make up for losses in the private sector forever,” said Guntram Wolff, the director of Bruegel, an economic research institution based in Brussels. “That’s why we need to find a strategy for exiting.”

Governments are looking to reallocate more spending toward areas of the economy that promise future growth.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/business/europe-coronavirus-economy.html

Some of the nation’s largest employers, for months reluctant to wade into the fraught issue of whether Covid-19 vaccinations should be mandatory for workers, have in recent days been compelled to act as infections have surged again.

On Tuesday, Tyson Foods told its 120,000 workers in offices, slaughterhouses and poultry plants across the country that they would need to be vaccinated by Nov. 1 as a “condition of employment.” And Microsoft, which employs roughly 100,000 people in the United States, said it would require proof of vaccination for all employees, vendors and guests to gain access to its offices.

Last week, Google said it would require employees who returned to the company’s offices to be vaccinated, while Disney announced a mandate for all salaried and nonunion hourly workers who work on site.

Other companies, including Walmart, the largest private employer in the United States, and Lyft and Uber, have taken a less forceful approach, mandating vaccines for white-collar workers but not for millions of frontline workers. Those moves essentially set up a divide between the employees who work in offices and employees who deal directly with the public and, collectively, have been more reluctant to get the shots.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/business/vaccine-mandate-employees-microsoft.html