As part of his plans to address climate change, Mr. Biden wants Americans to drive millions of new electric vehicles and get more of their energy from renewable sources like wind and solar power. But experts have long pointed out that the shift to cleaner energy will require vast supplies of critical minerals, many of which are currently produced and processed overseas.

Most of the world’s lithium, a key ingredient in the batteries that power electric vehicles, is mined in Australia, China, Chile and Argentina. China dominates global production of rare earth minerals such as neodymium, used to make magnets in wind turbines. It has also largely cornered the market in lithium-ion batteries, accounting for 77 percent of the world’s capacity for producing battery cells and 80 percent of its raw-material refining, according to BloombergNEF, an energy research group.

The United States lags far behind other countries in manufacturing many clean energy technologies, leaving it heavily reliant on imports.

The Biden administration has vowed to bring back more of that manufacturing and mining, but progress has been slow. In the United States, companies are racing to unlock lithium supplies in states like Nevada and North Dakota, though those efforts face opposition because of their environmental effects. The country also has only one mine that produces rare earth minerals, in Mountain Pass, Calif.

As part of its announcement on Tuesday, the Biden administration said it would work to identify new domestic sites where such critical minerals could be mined with environmental safeguards, asking Congress to increase funding for a mapping program at the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Energy Department announced that it would offer loans for companies that could sustainably refine, process and recycle rare earths and other materials used in electric vehicles. The agency on Tuesday will also release a plan to develop a domestic supply chain for lithium-ion batteries.

The Energy Department has $17.7 billion in authority to issue loans under the Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing Loan Program, which Congress created in 2007 and used in 2010 to support the electric-vehicle manufacturer Tesla in its early days. In its announcement, the agency said it would seek to offer loans to manufacturers of advanced battery technology that established factories in the United States. It also announced a new policy in which future funding of new clean-energy technologies would require recipients to “substantially manufacture those products in the United States.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/us/politics/biden-supply-chain.html

Nearly a decade ago, a government-ordered review found that Britain’s so-called high streets — the retail bedrocks of the country’s town and city centers, comparable to America’s main streets — had reached a “crisis point.” Since then things have only gotten worse, as lockdowns and a surge in online shopping over the last year in response to the pandemic have accelerated the downward spiral of brick-and-mortar retailing. In 2020, a record number of shops closed.

To rescue high streets, an unlikely combination of vested interests are coming together. Giant asset managers and landlords are taking risks to revive their downtrodden investments, shoppers and businesses are reappearing from the pandemic newly interested in their local areas, and town officials are ready to spend heavily to spread confidence.

Enough confidence for Ms. Dean, and others, to bet their livelihoods on the high streets’ revival.

Wild Roots is one of 10 recently opened businesses on Kingland Crescent that are operating rent-free as part of a redevelopment project by the property’s owner, the giant London-based asset manager Legal General Investment Management, a unit of the country’s largest corporate pension manager with more than 1 trillion pounds in assets. For two years, the businesses do not have to pay rent or a type of local property tax known as business rates.

“Poole really needs this,” said Ms. Dean, who decided to pursue her love of greenery after being laid off from her events manager job in the first six months of the pandemic. The property had been empty for six years; she was handed the shop’s keys in December.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/business/can-the-pandemic-rescue-britains-shopping-areas-this-town-hopes-so.html

In the math of global economics, a foreign tourist staying in the United States is essentially purchasing an American services export. Travel exports were only $18 billion in the first four months of 2021, down from $67 billion in the same period of 2019.

Meanwhile, flush American consumers have shifted their spending away from services and toward goods. In the first four months of the year, imports of consumer goods were 29 percent higher than in 2020, a $57 billion jump.

“The only thing people could consume was goods,” said Constance Hunter, chief economist at KPMG. “You couldn’t have a wedding, you couldn’t go to a baseball game. So what did people buy? They bought goods, and that’s much more of a global market than services.”

In effect, the United States and China are acting as the drivers of the global economy, while most of the rest of the world is further behind in recovery from the pandemic.

In the I.M.F.’s World Economic Outlook published in April, the United States’ 2021 G.D.P. was forecast to be 3 percent above its 2019 level, while China was forecast to be 11 percent above its 2019 level. But the euro area and Japan were each on track to have economies 2 percent smaller than in 2019, with Britain, Canada, Brazil and Mexico also forecast to be in negative territory.

That is unfortunate for the people in those places experiencing sluggish recoveries, but is probably helping to keep supply shortages in many sectors from being even worse. Already, a shortage of semiconductors has held back production of automobiles; shortages of building materials have suppressed housing construction; and a shortage of shipping containers has sent prices skyrocketing for moving goods across oceans.

“If everybody was stimulating simultaneously, and everybody was enjoying peak growth simultaneously, you could see more congestion,” said Nathan Sheets, chief economist at PGIM Fixed Income and a former top international economist at the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/upshot/pandemic-economy-trade.html

For some goods, prices are indeed rising. Paper manufacturers have raised bulk volume prices for products like napkins and toilet paper four times this spring. Soybeans for tofu are becoming costlier.

But for now, Chinese manufacturers, rather than consumers, are feeling the price increases. Wholesale prices in China were almost 7 percent higher in April than a year earlier, when the pandemic was holding down prices. Costlier iron ore from Australia and corn from the United States account for much of that rise.

China’s cabinet announced subsidies a week ago for small businesses to help them afford spiraling costs for commodities. New limits have been imposed on the trading of commodities for future delivery to discourage speculation. Export taxes have been raised on some kinds of steel to keep more of the metal inside China.

At a cabinet meeting on May 19, Premier Li Keqiang ordered officials to “resolutely crack down on monopoly and hoarding in accordance with laws and regulations, and strengthen market supervision.”

Government measures may slow but not stop wholesale price increases. Companies stuck with rising costs for raw materials eventually find ways to raise prices or else just suspend production. Paper producers, trapped between surging costs for raw pulp and a variety of pressures not to raise paper prices, have shut down some of their factories for maintenance this spring.

So far, price increases don’t appear to be trickling down to China’s consumers. One reason is that the Chinese domestic economy has not yet fully recovered from the pandemic. Lackluster consumer spending means fewer households are bidding up the prices of goods like pork chops, which have become a little cheaper lately, and even men’s underwear, for which prices have not changed.

Vendors at a covered market in Shanghai said on a recent afternoon that they saw no sign yet of rising food prices. Egg and beef prices, for example, were little changed.

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

To determine if inflation is more than a temporary matter, Ms. Yellen is monitoring two key metrics: inflation expectations and wage increases for low-paid workers. Rising pay for the lowest-wage workers could potentially lead to “an inflationary trend” if there is broad excess demand for workers in the labor market, she warned.

“We don’t want a situation of prolonged excess demand in the economy that leads to wage and price pressures that build and become endemic,” Ms. Yellen said. “Looking at wage increases, you can have a wage price spiral, so you need to be careful.”

She added: “I do not see that happening now.”

At the G7 meeting, Ms. Yellen raised eyebrows when she said that inflation could remain higher for the rest of the year, with rates around 3 percent. However, in the interview, she said that the comment was misinterpreted. She said that she expected inflation rates to be elevated for the next few months but then settle down to be consistent with the 2 percent rate that is the Federal Reserve’s long-term target.

“I don’t see any evidence that inflation expectations are getting out of control,” Ms. Yellen said.

Critics have suggested that the Biden administration’s extension of pandemic unemployment insurance is fueling the labor shortage by encouraging workers to stay at home and collect generous benefits. At least 20 states have moved to cut off benefits early to encourage people to go back to work.

Ms. Yellen said the difference in how states were handling jobless benefits could shed new light on the dynamic, but that she still saw no evidence that the supplement was slowing job creation. She pointed to a lack of child care and positions that were permanently lost because of the pandemic as the more probable reason that employers in some sectors were struggling to find staff.

“We wanted to support people,” Ms. Yellen said. “This isn’t something that should be in place forever.”

Although the economy is improving, Ms. Yellen said that seven million jobs that were lost since the pandemic still had not been restored. Some of them might never come back.

“We’re not in a tight labor market at this point,” she said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/business/economy/yellen-global-tax-rate.html

“Employers always complain about not being able to find the job seeker they want at that moment at the price they are willing to pay, whether it’s the best economy in 50 years or a terrible economy,” he said.

The problem with prematurely ending jobless benefits, he said, is that “such a broad brush policy also punishes people who are also desperately looking for work.”

That’s the situation that Amy Cabrera says she faces in Arizona. Since she was furloughed last summer, Ms. Cabrera, 45, has been living off about $500 a week in unemployment benefits, after taxes — roughly half the $50,000 salary in her previous job conducting audits in the meetings and events department at American Express.

To make ends meet, she has given up the lease on her car and sublet a room in the house she rents in the San Tan Valley, southeast of Phoenix. “I’m paying for my food — whatever I need to survive — and that’s it,” she said, as she sat in the used 2006 Jeep she bought so she would not be carless. Food stamps are helping pay for her meals.

But Ms. Cabrera rejected the idea that there were plenty of jobs to be had in Arizona, where the governor has moved to end the $300 federal supplement on July 10. Many positions she is qualified for, including executive administration and office management jobs, are paying $15 an hour, she said, far from enough to pay her $1,550 monthly rent and part of her son’s college tuition. Jobs in Phoenix or Tempe would require her to commute nearly two hours each way during rush hour. And because of a bad back, she can’t have a job that would require her to spend time on her feet.

“I have desperately been looking for work,” Ms. Cabrera said. Still, of the roughly 100 jobs she estimated she had applied for, she has had only one interview.

She said she didn’t know how she would live on her remaining unemployment benefits — $214 a week after taxes — when she loses the $300 supplement.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/05/business/economy/unemployment-benefits-cutoff.html

“Now’s the time to build on the foundation we’ve laid,” Mr. Biden said.

Payrolls are still 7.6 million jobs below their prepandemic level. Economic officials, including those at the Federal Reserve, had been hoping for a series of strong labor market reports this spring as vaccinations spread and the economy reopens more fully from state and local lockdowns that were meant to contain the pandemic. In April, Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, pointed approvingly to the March jobs report, which had shown payrolls picking up by nearly a million positions.

“We want to see a string of months like that,” he said.

Instead, gains have proceeded unevenly. Job openings are high and wages are rising, suggesting that at least part of the disconnect comes from labor shortages. That is surprising at a time when the unemployment rate is officially 5.8 percent, and even higher after accounting for people who have dropped out of the labor market during the pandemic.

Economists say many things could be driving the worker shortage — it takes time to reopen a large economy, and there is still a pandemic — but the trend has opened a line of attack for Republicans. They blame the enhanced unemployment benefits for discouraging people from returning to work and holding back what could be a faster recovery.

“Long-term unemployment is higher than when the pandemic started, and labor force participation mirrors the stagnant 1970s,” Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the House Ways and Means Committee, said in a news release. “It’s time for President Biden to abandon his attack on American jobs, his tax increases, his anti-growth regulations and his obsession with more emergency spending and endless government checks.”

Republican governors across the country have in recent weeks moved to end the supplemental unemployment benefits that began under President Donald J. Trump. The idea is that doing so will prod would-be workers back into jobs.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/business/economy/biden-jobs-report-jobless-benefits.html

AWM, in Aliso Viejo, Calif., offers retailers sophisticated overhead cameras that are able to track employees and customers as they walk around stores and recognize products, even down to Red Delicious versus Gala apples. Kevin Howard, its chief executive, said that the company could cut stores’ fulfillment costs by 60 percent through methods like flagging out-of-stock wares right away and directing pickers to the right items even if they were moved or misplaced.

“We dictate each aisle they should be going to because we know what product is in what aisle, then we dictate in real time, visually, the actual gondola, the shelf and the zone on the shelf of where that product lives,” Mr. Howard said.

AWM also helps retailers track “exactly who’s productive and who’s not,” Mr. Howard said. “If they went down the confection aisle and it took 12 minutes and the average picker takes four, how do we ensure we help them get to the four number? Sometimes it’s not knowing what the product is — with us, it’s usually personal time on their cellphones.”

The monitoring attached to grocery picking concerns some labor experts.

“Any of these systems saying ‘pick this now, pick this next,’ is by default tracking you,” Mr. Tilly said. “They all have clocks associated with them, and so it’s tracking you, monitoring your pace. It means if there turns out to be an error with the order, they know who did it.”

Even if the technology weren’t designed primarily for surveillance, “it’s not hard to then be tempted towards monitoring and using it for disciplining purposes,” said Françoise Carré, research director of the Center for Social Policy at the University of Massachusetts-Boston McCormack Graduate School, who has also studied how technology is changing retail jobs.

Noell Marion, an employee at Mariano’s, another Kroger-owned grocery chain, first started working at the Skokie, Ill., store through Instacart in 2019. Ms. Marion, 53, said that as a designated “veteran shopper,” she had 72 seconds for each item.

“That includes walking the store, getting the item, getting it scanned, getting through checkout and getting it staged and ready for delivery,” she said, adding, “It never took into consideration if you had to stand in line for something if the store was busy.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/04/business/online-groceries-pickers-instacart.html

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters that the president had decided to focus in the negotiation on plans that “should be completely acceptable to a number of Republicans who said that they — they want to leave — their bottom line is they want to leave the 2017 tax law untouched.”

She later added that raising the corporate tax rate above 21 percent was still a key goal.

The discussions have unsettled some progressive Democrats, who are pushing Mr. Biden to abandon talks and move his economic plan through the budget reconciliation process, which would allow it to pass with only Democratic votes. They questioned whether a compromise struck with Ms. Capito could secure the 10 Republican votes needed to pass a bill through normal Senate procedures and argued that Republicans had done little to move closer to the White House on the amount of new spending or how to finance it.

“No Republican vote in favor of an infrastructure package should supersede our mission: to build an America that works for the people, not for massive corporations,” Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, said in a statement. “Getting Republicans on board is not necessary. Getting the American people back on their feet is.”

Republicans have complained that Mr. Biden is not willing to reduce his spending demands to a degree they could support, and they have been surprised at his continued resistance to raising gas taxes and other fees that have traditionally supported some infrastructure programs. As of Thursday afternoon, it was unclear whether Republicans would compile another counterproposal.

Both sides have a stake in prolonging the negotiations.

Mr. Biden is seeking to achieve bipartisanship or exhaust its possibilities, in part to secure votes from Democratic senators like Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who have insisted on including Republicans in the infrastructure effort.

“At any moment, it’s very possible the Republicans say, ‘Wait a minute, either we’re going do it our way or we’re not going do it at all,’” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland. The next 10 days would be critical, he said. “It’s also possible the Democrats are going to say, ‘You do it our way all, and if not we’ll go through it ourselves.’ I hope that’s not the case.”

Leading Democrats say a compromise that falls short of Mr. Biden’s ambitions could pave the way for a reconciliation bill that includes many of the spending proposals and tax increases in his broad agenda, like affordable child care, universal prekindergarten and additional efforts to fight climate change.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/business/economy/biden-infrastructure-senate-republicans.html

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters that the president had decided to focus in the negotiation on plans that “should be completely acceptable to a number of Republicans who said that they — they want to leave — their bottom line is they want to leave the 2017 tax law untouched.”

She later added that raising the corporate tax rate above 21 percent was still a key goal.

The discussions have unsettled some progressive Democrats, who are pushing Mr. Biden to abandon talks and move his economic plan through the budget reconciliation process, which would allow it to pass with only Democratic votes. They questioned whether a compromise struck with Ms. Capito could secure the 10 Republican votes needed to pass a bill through normal Senate procedures and argued that Republicans had done little to move closer to the White House on the amount of new spending or how to finance it.

“No Republican vote in favor of an infrastructure package should supersede our mission: to build an America that works for the people, not for massive corporations,” Representative Jamaal Bowman, Democrat of New York, said in a statement. “Getting Republicans on board is not necessary. Getting the American people back on their feet is.”

Republicans have complained that Mr. Biden is not willing to reduce his spending demands to a degree they could support, and they have been surprised at his continued resistance to raising gas taxes and other fees that have traditionally supported some infrastructure programs. As of Thursday afternoon, it was unclear whether Republicans would compile another counterproposal.

Both sides have a stake in prolonging the negotiations.

Mr. Biden is seeking to achieve bipartisanship or exhaust its possibilities, in part to secure votes from Democratic senators like Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who have insisted on including Republicans in the infrastructure effort.

“At any moment, it’s very possible the Republicans say, ‘Wait a minute, either we’re going do it our way or we’re not going do it at all,’” said Senator Benjamin L. Cardin, Democrat of Maryland. The next 10 days would be critical, he said. “It’s also possible the Democrats are going to say, ‘You do it our way all, and if not we’ll go through it ourselves.’ I hope that’s not the case.”

Leading Democrats say a compromise that falls short of Mr. Biden’s ambitions could pave the way for a reconciliation bill that includes many of the spending proposals and tax increases in his broad agenda, like affordable child care, universal prekindergarten and additional efforts to fight climate change.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/03/business/economy/biden-infrastructure.html