With more than 30 locations in Manhattan and many customers who order salads digitally, Sweetgreen has had insight into the movements of its customers, even if they are not yet fully back to eating at their desks again.

The company has seen neighborhoods “start to really light up, like the Upper East Side and Upper West Side,” Mr. Neman said. “The true Midtown office has been the slowest to return, so we have a store in Rock Center, Bryant Park, those sorts of areas which have definitely been the slowest.”

Sweetgreen is also beginning to set up more restaurants outside the city in areas like Westchester County and around Greenwich, Conn., as well as regions of New Jersey and Long Island.

“There’s definitely some following customers in their dispersion,” Mr. Neman said. The company had been planning a suburban expansion before the pandemic, but it has accelerated those initiatives.

Although Sweetgreen said it had been insulated from some of the shocks of the past year because of its online ordering abilities and its robust delivery service, the future of work matters for its business. The company was recently valued at $1.78 billion, and, according to a report by Axios, it has confidentially filed for an initial public offering. Sweetgreen does not share its financials but has said its revenue exceeded $300 million in 2019.

Third-party research firms have found that the company is still recovering from the past year. In the New York metro market, transactions at Sweetgreen were down 20 percent in May relative to 2019, according to Earnest Research, a data analytics company that monitors millions of debit and credit card payments made in the United States.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/business/sweetgreen-return-to-office.html

The Corcoran Group’s report showed a similar increase in sales. “A year-and-a-half after the pandemic began, it’s safe to say that New York City has its mojo back,” Pamela Liebman, Corcoran’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.

Buyers over the last few months gravitated toward co-ops, a housing type that had seemed to lose some favor in recent years. Co-ops accounted for 49 percent of all deals, versus 37 percent for existing condos, according to Corcoran. And in the frenzy of the post-pandemic market, downtown seems to have benefited at the expense of uptown, according to Compass, which reported that neighborhoods like Chelsea, SoHo and the East Village accounted for 31 percent of all deals.

For Elizabeth Stribling-Kivlan, a senior managing director at Compass, one of the spring’s most heartening developments was improvement in the financial district, a neighborhood that became a veritable ghost town during the pandemic with the emptying out of office buildings. Median prices there soared 33 percent in a year, the largest increase of any neighborhood, she said.

Yes, shuttered stores, sleepy business districts and gun violence make Manhattan feel different than before, she said. But with more workers expected to return to offices this fall and beyond, the borough should soon start to resemble its old self.

“People are feeling like they want to come back there, they want to see what will come out of this,” she said. “It’s a new era for us.”

Prices, though, may have a ways to go. The price per square foot for resale apartments, which is a useful indicator because it controls for the apartment size, Mr. Miller said, actually declined this spring over a year ago, to $1,408 from $1,461, or 3.6 percent.

“Prices are still not at parity with a year ago,” he said. The overall discount that buyers are paying on list prices is at 6.4 percent, which is better than 2020 but still higher than the decade average of 4.9 percent. “There still is a Covid discount out there,” Mr. Miller said, “but it’s easing.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/02/realestate/manhattan-real-estate-sales.html

Mr. Biden’s stimulus plan will push the federal budget deficit near record highs for the fiscal year, the budget office projected, but it will eventually leave the country in slightly better fiscal shape.

The spending approved by Mr. Biden is projected to increase the deficit by $1.1 trillion for the fiscal year, which ends in September. The total deficit of $3 trillion would be the second-largest since 1945, in nominal terms and as a share of the economy, behind the 2020 fiscal year.

But the increased growth that is accompanying the larger deficit this year will slightly improve the country’s fiscal outlook over the next decade, with the total deficit falling by about 1 percent, the budget office said.

“Projected revenues over the next decade are now higher because of the stronger economy and consequent higher taxable incomes,” it wrote in its report.

Mr. Biden’s rescue plan included direct payments of $1,400 each to low- and middle-income Americans, $350 billion to help states and municipalities patch what were expected to be budget shortfalls and hundreds of billions of dollars to accelerate vaccines and more widespread coronavirus testing. It also extended supplemental federal payments of $300 a week to unemployed workers through September, a benefit that Republican governors across the country have ended early as business owners complain of difficulties finding workers.

The budget office cited those benefits as “dampening the supply of labor,” along with workers’ health concerns. It said the expiration of the benefits, along with less worry about contracting the virus, would help bolster employment growth in the second half of this year.

Inflation, which has been a big topic in Washington, is projected to moderate in the months to come. The office forecast inflation rising above recent trends to hit 2.6 percent for the year, which is stronger growth than the February projection, yet officials see those price pressures subsiding in the second half of the year, as a variety of supply constraints ease in areas like lumber and automobiles.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/01/business/economy/united-states-deficit.html

The central bank’s 18 policy officials roundly say that the economy’s path is extremely hard to predict as it reopens from a once-in-a-century pandemic. But how they think about inflation after a string of strong recent price reports — and how they feel the Fed should react — varies.

Inflation has spiked because of statistical quirks, but also because consumer demand is outstripping supply as the economy reopens and families open their wallets for dinners out and long-delayed vacations. Bottlenecks that have held up computer chip production and home-building should eventually fade. Some prices that had previously shot up, like those for lumber, are already starting to moderate.

But if the reopening weirdness lasts long enough, it could cause businesses and consumers to anticipate higher inflation permanently, and act accordingly. Should that happen, or if workers begin to negotiate higher wages to cover the pop in living costs, faster price gains could stick around.

“A new risk is that inflation may surprise still further to the upside as the reopening process continues, beyond the level necessary to simply make up for past misses to the low side,” Mr. Bullard said in a presentation last week. The Fed aims for 2 percent inflation as an average goal over time, without specifying the time frame.

Other Fed officials have said today’s price pressures are likely to ease with time, but have not sounded confident that they will entirely disappear.

“These upward price pressures may ease as the bottlenecks are worked out, but it could take some time,” Michelle Bowman, one of the Fed’s Washington-based governors, said in a recent speech.

The Fed’s top leadership has offered a less alarmed take on the price trajectory. Mr. Powell and John C. Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, have said it is possible that prices could stay higher, but they have also said there’s little evidence so far to suggest that they will.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/30/business/economy/inflation-federal-reserve.html

The challengers argued that the moratorium was not authorized by the law the agency relied on, the Public Health Service Act of 1944.

The 1944 law, the challengers wrote, was concerned with quarantines and inspections to stop the spread of disease and did not bestow on the agency “the unqualified power to take any measure imaginable to stop the spread of communicable disease — whether eviction moratoria, worship limits, nationwide lockdowns, school closures or vaccine mandates.”

The C.D.C. argued that the moratorium was authorized by the 1944 law. Evictions would accelerate the spread of the coronavirus, the agency said, by forcing people “to move, often into close quarters in new shared housing settings with friends or family, or congregate settings such as homeless shelters.”

The case was complicated by congressional action in December, when lawmakers briefly extended the C.D.C.’s moratorium through the end of January in an appropriations measure. When Congress took no further action, the agency again imposed moratoriums under the 1944 law.

In its Supreme Court brief, the government argued that it was significant that Congress had embraced the agency’s action, if only briefly.

Last month, Judge Dabney L. Friedrich of the Federal District Court in Washington ruled that the agency had exceeded its powers in issuing the moratorium.

“The question for the court,” she wrote, “is a narrow one: Does the Public Health Service Act grant the C.D.C. the legal authority to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium? It does not.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/us/politics/supreme-court-eviction-ban.html

Now, there are higher prices for base materials like steel and aluminum. There are suppliers being forced to raise wages sharply to keep assembly lines operating. There are semiconductor manufacturers stretched too thin to provide enough computer chips to make as many cars as consumers wish to buy. There have even been shortages of resin, needed in the plastics that are part of a car, caused by Texas winter storms this year. And adding to it all, there are logjams of shipping capacity for materials imported from overseas.

“It’s almost like a patient who’s fighting cancer and heart disease and diabetes all at the same time,” Mr. Burris said. The power that automakers usually hold to dissuade suppliers from increasing prices is breaking down, he said, amid the urgency to obtain supplies.

And as automakers throttle production, there have been unusual dynamics in the retail side of the market.

The inability of automakers to produce at full speed, combined with strong consumer demand, shows up in both obvious (prices are higher than usual) and less obvious ways, said Ivan Drury, senior manager for insights at Edmunds, a publisher of auto industry information. In the past, the “manufacturer’s suggested retail price” was generally a mere suggestion, with dealers negotiating actual sale prices $2,000 to $3,000 below that level for an average car. Now, new cars are typically selling at or only slightly below the suggested retail price, he said.

And dealers are resorting to other techniques that restrict sales. With inventories lean, buyers seeking a particularly in-demand car may need to commit to buying it before it has arrived on the lot, sight unseen. Some dealers, he said, will refuse to sell to people from outside the dealer’s area, to ensure that the buyer will generate continuing service revenue.

Things are even more wild in the used-car market, where the down-and-up last 16 months for the rental car industry, among other factors, has caused a severe shortage and steep price increases. Used cars and trucks were a major source of overall consumer price inflation in April and May.

Mr. Drury doesn’t expect that to change anytime soon. According to Edmunds data, the average trade-in value of a car was still rising through the first three weeks of June, up an additional 2.9 percent after increasing a combined 21 percent in April and May.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/29/upshot/markets-work-but-untangling-global-supply-chains-takes-time.html

In 2016, toward the end of the Obama administration, the American lumber industry petitioned the government to impose duties on Canadian softwood lumber imports in response to what it contended were unfair trade practices. The proceedings continued under the Trump administration, which in 2017 imposed duties of 20.2 percent for most Canadian producers. The rate was lowered to 9 percent last year.

The status of the long-running dispute took on a new urgency as the price of lumber soared over the past year. The National Association of Home Builders estimated in April that higher lumber costs had added nearly $36,000 to the price of an average newly constructed single-family home. A benchmark for the price of framing lumber set a record high of $1,515 per thousand board feet in May, four times the price at the beginning of 2020, before beginning to plummet. Last week, the price stood at $930, still more than double its level at the start of 2020, according to Fastmarkets Random Lengths, the trade publication that publishes the benchmark.

“As an economist, it is very hard to understand why we’re taxing something we don’t produce enough of,” said Robert Dietz, the chief economist for the National Association of Home Builders.

On the other side of the issue are U.S. lumber producers. The U.S. Lumber Coalition, an industry group, has argued that strong demand, not duties, is driving lumber prices and that the duties make up only a small portion of the total cost of lumber for new homes.

The coalition credits the duties with strengthening the U.S. lumber industry, saying in a statement that American sawmills had expanded capacity in recent years, producing an additional 11 billion board feet of lumber since 2016. “More lumber being manufactured in America to meet domestic demand is a direct result of the trade enforcement, and the U.S. industry strongly urges the administration to continue this enforcement,” the coalition said.

Dustin Jalbert, a senior economist at Fastmarkets, a price reporting firm, attributed the chaotic lumber market and high prices in large part to effects from the pandemic. At the start of the pandemic, he said, sawmills “assumed the worst” and curbed production, only for the housing market to rebound and for demand to soar.

Mr. Jalbert said the duties stemming from the U.S.-Canada dispute were not a major reason for the high prices. “In terms of the short-term pricing situation, it’s lower down the list in terms of the factors that are driving the record prices that we’ve seen in the market,” he said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/business/economy/lumber-prices-canadian-trade.html

Consider information technology, which offers some of the best-paid jobs in the country. African Americans earn around one in 10 bachelor’s degrees in computer science nationwide. By contrast, they account for only 2.6 of every 100 computer workers in the region around San Francisco, including Silicon Valley.

Even with the credentials that many African Americans have in the field, Dr. Spriggs said in an interview, “Silicon Valley says, ‘Yeah, but they are not skilled.’”

But for all the evidence of racial disparities, many economists say employers’ racial biases cannot fully explain what’s going on in the workplace. The idea that discrimination alone has determined Black workers’ lot at work — their employment and their wages — does not mesh with how American society changed over the past half-century.

Simply put, if racism is the reason that Black workers have lagged in pay, said Erik Hurst, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, how is it that they made such progress after World War II, significantly closing the wage gap with whites while segregation and other explicit barriers were still widespread? And why did this progress stop even though racial animus, by various measures, declined over the years?

The share of whites approving of interracial marriage, for example, rose to 87 percent in 2013, the last time Gallup asked the question, from 48 percent in 1965. The share of whites who said they would vote for a Black presidential candidate increased to 96 percent in 2020 from 77 percent in 1983 and 38 percent in 1958. Answers to many other questions asked by the General Social Survey, a long-running academic effort to understand the views of Americans, suggest that racial prejudice has declined over the last several decades.

Most of the gains made by African Americans in the workplace were made from the 1940s to the 1970s, when racial biases were much more prevalent across society. Then they got stuck.

“There was convergence between Blacks and whites, but then it stopped,” said Dr. Hurst, who is also ​deputy director of the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics, which sponsors a podcast I host. “The question is why.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/business/economy/black-workers-racial-pay-gap.html

She got an offer on the spot and took it.

Justin Johnson, too, already had a job when he showed up at an Express Employment Professionals office. He was working at a pet feed company, earning $14 an hour to shovel piles of mud or oats. But that week temperatures topped 90 degrees every day and were heading past 100.

“The supervisor pushed people too hard,” Mr. Johnson said. He had to bring his own water, and if it was a slow day, he got sent home early, without pay for the lost hours.

He accepted an offer to begin work the next day at a bottle packaging plant, earning $16.50.

Amy Barber Terschluse, the owner of three Express franchises in St. Louis, handles mostly manufacturing, distribution and administrative jobs. Wages, hours and a short commute are what matter most to job seekers, she said, and few would work for less than $14 an hour.

Ms. Terschluse said she had also had to educate employers, who have gotten used to low wages and the ability to dictate schedules and other conditions.

Some employers, she said, have also gotten into “a vicious cycle of replace, replace, replace.”

In industries like hospitality and warehousing, annual turnover rates can surpass 100 percent, which can pare overall growth. Mary C. Daly, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said good job matches between employers and workers produced the most productivity and engagement.

A dynamic labor market is one where the two sides negotiate over compensation, Ms. Daly said. If jobless benefits allow people to be a little more choosy because they are not destitute, she said, then “I, as an economist, predict that will be better for job matches and a better economy in the long run.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/27/business/economy/jobs-workers-unemployment-benefits.html

A slim majority of Americans say it is time for enhanced unemployment benefits to end.

The federal government is providing jobless workers with $300 a week in benefits on top of their regular unemployment payments. Those benefits are set to last until September, although 26 states — all but one led by Republicans — have cut them off early or plan to do so in coming weeks.

Critics, including many business owners and Republican politicians, argue that the extra benefits are discouraging people from looking for jobs and making it hard for businesses to find workers. Proponents, including progressive groups and many Democratic politicians, contend that the benefits are needed as the economy continues to heal and while pandemic-related risks remain.

Republican arguments seem to be resonating with the public. Just over half of Americans — 52 percent — want the extra benefits to end immediately, according to a survey of 2,600 adults conducted this month for The New York Times by the online research firm Momentive, which was previously known as SurveyMonkey. Another 30 percent want the benefits to end in September as planned. Only 16 percent want the additional benefits to continue indefinitely.

Views on the benefits are divided along partisan lines. Of Republicans, 80 percent want the extra benefits to end right away, compared with 27 percent of Democrats. But even among Democrats, most respondents don’t want the benefits to last past September.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/business/economy/unemployment-benefits-survey.html