Many people who have served in top government jobs do stick around, commenting favorably on how their former team is doing. Others, like the former Treasury secretaries Timothy F. Geithner and Steven Mnuchin, fade out of the limelight. Few remain as front and center as Mr. Summers, or as apolitical and provocative.

Mr. Summers could turn out to be right, and is already taking a partial victory lap after the Fed increased its 2021 inflation forecasts. Most Fed officials now expect to raise rates by the end of 2023, a nod to faster-than-expected price gains. Mr. Summers has welcomed those developments, while seeing them as too little.

But he could yet be proved wrong, since part of the increase in prices was broadly expected and much of the rest came from categories affected by reopening wiggles, like airplane tickets and used cars. If price gains fall back into line after a bout of pandemic weirdness, there’s little reason for them to be destabilizing or problematic, from the Fed’s perspective.

Whether or not Mr. Summers turns out to be the sage of Scottsdale and Brookline, his staying power is perhaps best understood as a statement about what he represents: the belief that government spending has real if hard-to-know boundaries, and that trying to measure economic and practical limits can lead to better policymaking.

Those ideas are out of vogue among progressives, who embrace deficit spending and assessments of policy success that put more weight on the risk of underreacting. But Mr. Summers’s continued resonance in Washington — his words shaping policy debates that he is no longer, technically, integral to — shows that going out of fashion isn’t the same as going extinct.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/business/economy/larry-summers-washington.html

Emails indicate that Mr. Powell spoke with Mr. Fink on March 23, hours after the Fed announced its corporate bond program.

“Larry Fink is available to speak today regarding the project you will be working on together,” an email from Mr. Fink’s assistant directly to Mr. Powell said. “Please let us know if there is a convenient time for you.”

“Now is good,” Mr. Powell replied.

The call does not appear on the Fed chair’s official schedule from that March. Those calendars generally track scheduled events, and may have missed meetings in early 2020 when staff members were frantically working on the market rescue and the Fed was shifting to work from home, a central bank spokesman said.

Mr. Powell’s calendars did show that he talked to Mr. Fink in March, April and May, and he has previously answered questions about those discussions.

“I can’t recall exactly what those conversations were, but they would have been about what he is seeing in the markets and things like that, to generally exchanging information,” Mr. Powell said at a July news conference, adding that it wasn’t “very many” conversations. “He’s typically trying to make sure that we are getting good service from the company that he founded and leads.”

BlackRock’s connections to Washington are not new. It was a critical player in the 2008 crisis response, when the New York Fed retained the firm’s advisory arm to manage the mortgage assets of the insurance giant American International Group and Bear Stearns.

Several former BlackRock employees have been named to top roles in President Biden’s administration, including Brian Deese, who heads the White House National Economic Council, and Wally Adeyemo, who was Mr. Fink’s chief of staff and is now the No. 2 official at the Treasury.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/business/economy/fed-blackrock-pandemic-crisis.html

The import ban focuses on one company and not all polysilicon products from Xinjiang, but it could roil the market for solar panels in the United States. Hoshine and its subsidiaries supply at least some metallurgical-grade silicon to the world’s eight largest polysilicon producers, who together account for 90 percent of the global market, according to Johannes Bernreuter, a polysilicon market analyst at Bernreuter Research.

Some U.S. solar companies have begun tracking and reshuffling their supply chains in anticipation of the administration’s move, but they may need to take additional steps to prove to customs officials that any imported panels do not contain material from Hoshine.

And some analysts said that the move on Thursday could be a prelude to further restrictions down the road. “In our view, today’s action may only be the first step toward broader limits” on solar products from Xinjiang, Kevin Book, an analyst at ClearView Energy Partners, wrote in a research note.

The move could prove a boon to domestic solar manufacturers like FirstSolar, which does not use polysilicon in its panels and recently said that it would double production in the United States by opening a third plant in Ohio by the middle of 2023. But U.S. manufacturers still account for only a small fraction of the solar market.

John Smirnow, general counsel and vice president of market strategy at the Solar Energy Industries Association, said the group supported the administration’s efforts on the issue of forced labor and was encouraging solar companies to shift away from materials produced in Xinjiang.

“The fact is, we do not have transparency into supply chains in the Xinjiang region, and there is too much risk in operating there,” he said. “For that reason, in October, we began calling on solar companies to leave the region, and we provided them a traceability protocol to help ensure there is not forced labor in the supply chain.”

The Biden administration has pursued a strategy of pressing the Chinese government on areas of contention, such as Xinjiang, while seeking to cooperate on global priorities like climate change. The ban on importing some solar energy products — important for reducing fossil fuel use — will test how far Beijing is willing to go along with that bifurcated approach, and the Chinese government may hit back through its growing arsenal of retaliatory powers.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/24/business/economy/china-forced-labor-solar.html

But it would leave large swaths of the president’s economic proposals — including much of his spending to combat climate change, along with investments in child care, education and other types of what administration officials call “human infrastructure” — for a potential future bill that Democrats would try to pass through Congress without any Republican votes using a procedural mechanism known as reconciliation.

Progressive Democrats in the House and the Senate, along with liberal activists, have complained publicly in recent weeks that Mr. Biden’s negotiations with Republicans toward a bipartisan deal risked stranding much of the agenda that he campaigned on, including efforts to increase worker pay and speed the transition to a low-carbon future.

Moderate Democrats, including crucial swing votes for Mr. Biden like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have pushed the president to continue bipartisan talks. So have business groups, who have told Republican lawmakers privately that their best chance of blocking Democrats from raising tax rates on businesses and high earners is to cut a deal with Mr. Biden on an infrastructure bill that raised revenues in another way.

Mr. Biden dispatched aides to Capitol Hill repeatedly in recent days to meet with the centrist group of senators and hammer out disagreements over their initial framework, which was never formally made public without White House approval.

“I would call this a much sturdier framework,” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. He added, “We wouldn’t be going to the White House” if lawmakers did not believe the outline had a broad base of support.

Three of Mr. Biden’s aides — Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council; Steve Ricchetti, a top adviser to the president; and Louisa Terrell, the director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs — met with the bipartisan group twice on Wednesday before joining a meeting with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California later in the evening.

That meeting was intended to focus not only on the bipartisan talks, but plans to push some, if not all, of Mr. Biden’s agenda through both chambers using the fast-track budget reconciliation process that would allow Democrats to bypass Republican opposition. It lasted past 9 p.m.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/us/politics/biden-infrastructure-plan.html

Mr. Biden dispatched aides to Capitol Hill on Tuesday for discussions that his press secretary, Jen Psaki, said had yielded progress but no agreement. Top White House officials are set to meet on Wednesday evening with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California. Those discussions will center on infrastructure negotiations as well as a separate effort to move a large chunk of the president’s $4 trillion economic agenda through the Senate without any Republican votes using a procedural mechanism known as reconciliation.

Among those expected to attend the meeting are Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council; Steve Ricchetti, a top adviser to Mr. Biden; Louisa Terrell, the director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs; Shalanda Young, the acting director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Susan E. Rice, who leads the White House Domestic Policy Council, according to an official familiar with the plans.

Democratic leaders in Congress are preparing to move a sweeping, multitrillion-dollar bill through the reconciliation process to avoid the need for Republican votes and approve spending on physical infrastructure, education, emissions reduction, child care, paid leave, antipoverty efforts and more. But centrist Democrats in the Senate — along with Mr. Biden — have said repeatedly that they want to strike a deal with Republicans on what would be a pared-down version of the president’s plan to rebuild roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects.

The bipartisan group has not reached public agreement on how to finance the spending. Moderates in both parties insist that any deal be paid for with new revenues. Mr. Biden has offered $4 trillion in potential revenue sources, all concentrated on increasing the tax burden on businesses and high earners. Republicans have countered with hundreds of billions of their own, including increased taxes for drivers and repurposing previously borrowed money from the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill that Mr. Biden signed into law this year.

The senators who spearheaded the original framework spent much of Tuesday huddling with Mr. Deese, Mr. Ricchetti and Ms. Terrell to iron out the details of an outline to provide for $1.2 trillion over eight years, of which $579 billion is new funding, and how to finance it.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/us/politics/biden-infrastructure-plan.html

But Mr. DeBruycker hasn’t made a dollar in profit on his cattle-feeding operation in four years, and he doesn’t believe it’s because of a simple imbalance in supply and demand. Cattle feeders typically buy cattle from ranchers when the animals are under one year old and feed them until they reach their slaughter weight of around 1,500 pounds. Then they sell them to the packing plant.

“Sometimes I’ve lost $400 to $500 a head, sometimes only $20 to $30 a head,” Mr. DeBruycker said. “I get capitalism, and I have a good understanding of the ag markets, but here the true supply-demand curve is broken because the middlemen, the meatpackers, are manipulating the supply.”

One outcome of the consolidation has been the closure of packing plants around the country and, therefore, a reduction in the number of cattle slaughtered each year. In 2007, an average of more than 527,000 steers and heifers were slaughtered each week. In 2019, before the pandemic set in and disrupted operations, the weekly average was fewer than 500,000, according to a report by Derrell S. Peel, an agricultural economist with Oklahoma State University.

Some critics also say the Big Four are reducing competition in the cash market for cattle in parts of the country by buying not at auction or in an open negotiation but rather through undisclosed arrangements they have with massive feedlot operators. The lack of competition in open markets, critics say, has led to a lack of transparency in pricing. Proposed Senate legislation would force the meatpackers to buy more cattle in live markets.

Another outcome of the consolidation has been sharp drops in slaughtering when a single Big Four plant shuts down, even briefly. In August 2019, a fire swept through a Tyson beef facility in Holcomb, Kan., which processed more than 6,000 cattle per day. It remained closed for several months, severely limiting capacity in the United States.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/business/beef-prices.html

Amazon did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Tuesday.

In an opinion column this month for Salon, Randy Korgan, a Teamsters official from Southern California who has been the national director for Amazon since the position was created last year, wrote that the union would bypass traditional workplace elections conducted by the National Labor Relations Board.

Instead, Mr. Korgan wrote, the union will focus on building support from both Amazon workers and from other warehouse and delivery workers and community members, and it aims to bring the company to the bargaining table by orchestrating strikes, boycotts, protests and other actions.

Amazon defeated a conventional campaign organized by a retail workers union at a warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., this year, after which a number of union leaders suggested that a shift to the strategies highlighted by Mr. Korgan might be more fruitful. Those union leaders pointed out that federal labor law gives employers large advantages during election campaigns — allowing companies to hold mandatory anti-union meetings, for example — and that the government cannot fine employers who violate the law. (The retail workers union is challenging the results of the election at the Bessemer warehouse, accusing Amazon of intimidating workers.)

Support for the approach is far from unanimous within the labor movement, however.

In an interview after the election in Alabama, Stuart Appelbaum, the head of the retail workers union that oversaw the campaign, said seeking to win union elections at Amazon warehouses should remain a focus. “If you want to build real power, you have to do it with a majority of workers,” Mr. Appelbaum said at the time.

The Teamsters union holds its convention every five years and uses it to set the priorities that the union will pursue until the next convention. The resolution states that momentum for the Amazon campaign has been building since the union’s last convention in 2016.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/business/economy/amazon-union-teamsters.html

The reason for the surge in Mongolia, Mr. Batbayar said, is that the country reopened too quickly, and many people believed they were protected after only one dose.

“I think you could say Mongolians celebrated too early,” he said. “My advice is the celebrations should start after the full vaccinations, so this is the lesson learned. There was too much confidence.”

Some health officials and scientists are less confident.

Nikolai Petrovsky, a professor at the College of Medicine and Public Health at Flinders University in Australia, said that with all of the evidence, it would be reasonable to assume the Sinopharm vaccine had minimal effect on curbing transmission. A major risk with the Chinese inoculation is that vaccinated people may have few or no symptoms and still spread the virus to others, he said.

“I think that this complexity has been lost on most decision makers around the world.”

In Indonesia, where a new variant is spreading, more than 350 doctors and health care workers recently came down with Covid-19 despite being fully vaccinated with Sinovac, according to the risk mitigation team of the Indonesian Medical Association. Across the country, 61 doctors died between February and June 7. Ten of them had taken the Chinese-made vaccine, the association said.

The numbers were enough to make Kenneth Mak, Singapore’s director of medical services, question the use of Sinovac. “It’s not a problem associated with Pfizer,” Mr. Mak said at a news conference on Friday. “This is actually a problem associated with the Sinovac vaccine.”

Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates were the first two countries to approve the Sinopharm shot, even before late-stage clinical trial data was released. Since then, there have been extensive reports of vaccinated people falling ill in both countries. In a statement, the Bahraini government’s media office said the kingdom’s vaccine rollout had been “efficient and successful to date.”

Still, last month officials from Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates announced that they would offer a third booster shot. The choices: Pfizer or more Sinopharm.

Reporting was contributed by Khaliun Bayartsogt, Andrea Kannapell, Ben Hubbard, Asmaa al-Omar and Muktita Suhartono. Elsie Chen and Claire Fu contributed research.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/business/economy/china-vaccines-covid-outbreak.html

Vail Resorts was one of the first to capitalize on the new legislation with its Epic Discovery summer program, introduced at Vail Mountain and Breckenridge in Colorado, and Heavenly in California, starting in 2016. Zip lines, alpine slides, ropes courses and more, along with educational components, aim to let visitors immerse themselves in the mountain environment. Since then, many other resorts have followed suit. This June, for example, Telluride, in southwestern Colorado, introduced its first canopy tour, with zip lines, aerial bridges and rappels.

The approach has been working. Some would even say too well. “Now at most mountain destinations in the West, and at many in the Northeast, the summer occupancy is as high or higher than during the winter months,” said Tom Foley, the senior vice president for business operations and analytics for Inntopia, a resort marketing and e-commerce firm. (He adds that lodging prices, however, still lag behind winter’s peak rates.)

Even resorts that long had infrastructure in place have benefited. Vermont’s Killington introduced its bike park (which sits on a combination of state and private land) 30 years ago. But from 2016 to 2018, visits surged to 30,000 from 12,000, said the resort spokeswoman, Courtney DiFiore. She attributed the growth to new beginner and intermediate trails, more programming for children and an all-season pass option.

This year, resorts expect summer visitation to ramp up several notches, in reaction to the pandemic. “It’s unreal how much demand there is for Jackson right now,” said the ski area spokeswoman, Anna Cole. “Jackson by nature is outdoors and pretty distanced, and people want to get in their cars and drive,” she said. “We fit the bill on all fronts.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/travel/summer-travel-ski-resorts.html

“It’s gone from feeling super lonely and now it’s feeling pretty normal,” Mr. Gray added.

Wall Street and the banking sector are pillars of the city’s economy, and they have been among the most aggressive industries in prodding employees to go back to the office. James Gorman, the chief executive of Morgan Stanley, told investors and analysts this month that “if you want to get paid in New York, you need to be in New York.”

Many firms, including Blackstone and Morgan Stanley, have huge real estate holdings or loans to the industry, so there is more than civic pride in their push to get workers to return. Technology companies like Facebook and Google are increasingly important employers as well as major commercial tenants, and they have been increasing their office space. But they have been more flexible about letting employees continue to work remotely.

Google, which has 11,000 employees in New York and plans to add 3,000 in the next few years, intends to return to its offices in West Chelsea in September, but workers will only be required to come in three days a week. The company has also said up to 20 percent of its staff can apply to work remotely full time.

The decision by even a small slice of employees at Google and other companies to stay home part or all of the week could have a significant economic impact.

Even if just 10 percent of Manhattan office workers begin working remotely most of the time, that translates into more than 100,000 people a day not picking up a coffee and bagel on their way to work or a drink afterward, said James Parrott, an economist with the Center for New York City Affairs at the New School.

“I expect a lot of people will return, but not all of them,” he said. “We might lose some neighborhood businesses as a result.”

The absence of white-collar workers hurts people like Danuta Klosinski, 60, who had been cleaning office buildings in Manhattan for 20 years. She is one of more than about 3,000 office cleaners who remain out of work, according to Denis Johnston, a vice president of their union, Local 32BJ of the Service Employees International Union.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/20/business/economy/new-york-city-economy-coronavirus.html