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Jobless Claims Fall, Providing Recent Proof of a Restoration: Dwell Updates

Shoppers in the Bronx this month. Government assistance has enabled more consumer spending, contributing to recent gains in the labor market.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Karsten Moran for The New York Times

New claims for unemployment benefits fell last week to the lowest level of the pandemic, the government reported on Thursday, offering fresh evidence of the labor market’s recovery.

A total of 566,000 workers filed first-time claims for state benefits during the week that ended April 17, the Labor Department said, a decrease of 57,000 from the previous week’s revised figure. In addition, 133,000 new claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that covers freelancers, part-timers and others who do not qualify for state benefits.

Neither figure is seasonally adjusted.

“The bigger story — even though we’re going to see volatility week to week — is that the labor market continues to heal and labor demand is coming back quite strongly in line with robust growth,” said Kathy Bostjancic, chief U.S. financial economist at Oxford Economics.

Warmer weather, more extensive coronavirus vaccination efforts and a stream of government assistance that has enabled consumer spending have all contributed to recent gains.

Encumbrances remain. The labor market is weighed down by continuing anxiety about coronavirus infections and the demands of child care when regular school schedules have been disrupted.

According to the Census Bureau’s weekly Household Pulse Survey, more than four million people who were unemployed in March said they were not working because they were afraid of catching Covid-19.

“It’s important to keep in mind that the trend is going in the right direction,” said Heidi Shierholz, director of policy at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, “but we’re still at crisis levels of unemployment claims.”

The weekly level of new claims is still near historical highs recorded before the pandemic. And there are roughly 8.4 million fewer jobs than there were in early 2020.

The long-term unemployed face particular hurdles. A new report from the California Policy Lab, a research institute based at the University of California, said some states were prematurely ending extended unemployment insurance because of the way they count claims.

Southwest Airlines earned $116 million in the first quarter after its first annual loss in half a century last year.Credit…Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

The worst appears to be over for airlines. Now, it’s just a matter of waiting for the summer travel frenzy to begin.

American Airlines and Southwest Airlines on Thursday were the last two major U.S. airlines to report financial results for the first three months of the year. American lost nearly $1.3 billion, while Southwest earned $116 million, a welcome profit after weathering its first annual loss in half a century last year.

“While the pandemic is not over, we believe the worst is behind us, in terms of the severity of the negative impact on travel demand,” Gary Kelly, Southwest’s chairman, said in a statement. “Vaccinations are on the rise, and Covid-19 hospitalizations in the United States are down significantly from their peak in January 2021. As a result, we are experiencing steady weekly improvements in domestic leisure bookings, which began in mid-February 2021.”

That sentiment is shared across the industry.

“With the momentum underway from the first quarter, we see signs of continued recovery in demand,” Doug Parker, American’s chief executive, said in a statement on Thursday. His counterpart at United Airlines issued a similarly hopeful statement this week, despite posting a loss of $1.4 billion. Last week, Delta Air Lines reported a $1.2 billion loss.

The industry has been buoyed by federal support, receiving $54 billion in grants to pay workers over the past year and another $25 billion in loans. Mr. Kelly of Southwest credited that support for the airline’s slight profit, saying that the airline would have lost $1 billion in the first quarter without it.

Southwest was also buoyed by its limited exposure to corporate and international travel, which have been slow to rebound and are lucrative parts of the business for American, Delta and United. Leisure travel within the United States, which all of the airlines serve, is almost fully recovered.

Air travel started to recover meaningfully in early March, with Transportation Security Administration data showing a steady rise in the number of people screened at airport security checkpoints relative to the same period in 2019. That surge has subsided somewhat since earlier this month, with screenings down about 42 percent over the past week compared with 2019.

Southwest said demand for travel continues to improve with summer fast approaching and customers once again feeling comfortable making travel plans further out. The airline estimates that it has about 35 percent of expected bookings in place for June and 20 percent for July.

Thomas Gottstein, the chief executive of Credit Suisse, described the loss as “unacceptable.” If not for the collapse of Archegos, the bank said it would have made a pretax profit of 3.6 billion francs.Credit…Ennio Leanza/Keystone, via Associated Press

Credit Suisse said on Thursday that it suffered a loss in the first quarter stemming from loans it made to the collapsed investment fund Archegos Capital Management, a debacle that has prompted Switzerland’s financial regulator to investigate whether the bank was doing a poor job monitoring the riskiness of its investments.

The loss of 252 million Swiss francs, about $275 million, from January through March, came after a loss of 4.4 billion francs from Archegos that wiped out a big increase in revenue. Credit Suisse also said on Thursday that it had sold bonds to investors to raise $2 billion to shore up its capital.

The bank expects additional losses from Archegos of about $655 million as it finishes winding down its exposure to the firm, Thomas Gottstein, the chief executive of Credit Suisse, said during a conference call with reporters Thursday.

The bank, based in Zurich, has suffered a series of calamities this year that have severely damaged its reputation and finances. Swiss regulators are also investigating a spying scandal and Credit Suisse’s sale of $10 billion in funds packaged by Greensill Capital. The funds were based on financing provided to companies, many of which had low credit ratings or were not rated at all. Greensill collapsed in March, and its ties to former Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain have caused a political scandal.

Mr. Gottstein promised Thursday that Credit Suisse would overhaul its systems for tracking risk to avoid future disasters. Several top executives have already left the bank as part of a management shake-up, including Lara Warner, the chief risk and compliance officer.

Credit Suisse also plans to pare back the size of a unit that serves hedge fund clients and was involved in the Archegos losses. Mr. Gottstein declined to say whether the debacle would lead to major changes at Credit Suisse’s investment bank, which has a large presence in New York.

But he suggested that Credit Suisse would not retreat from investment banking. “The underlying results show that the strategy is working,” he told reporters. “I wouldn’t say that because we had two disappointing incidents we should throw the whole strategy overboard.”

If not for the Archegos loss, Credit Suisse would have made a pretax profit of 3.6 billion francs, the bank said. Revenue for the quarter rose 30 percent to 7.6 billion francs as Credit Suisse raked in fees from lively trading on stock and bond markets.

The bank is certain to face intense official scrutiny in months to come. The Swiss regulator, known as Finma, said it would “investigate in particular possible shortcomings in risk management” at Credit Suisse. Finma also said that it would “continue to exchange information with the competent authorities in the U.K. and the U.S.A.”

Mr. Gottstein acknowledged Thursday that the bank had received inquiries from regulators in the United States and Britain, but did not give details.

He declined to confirm a report in the The Wall Street Journal that Credit Suisse’s exposure to Archegos had reached more than $20 billion before the fund collapsed in late March. Mr. Gottstein conceded that Credit Suisse was one of the banks most exposed to Archegos.

The quarterly loss, which Mr. Gottstein described as “unacceptable,” compared with a profit of 1.3 billion francs in the first quarter of 2020.

Christine Lagarde, the president of the European Central Bank, which said it would continue buying government and corporate bonds to prevent “a tightening of financing conditions.”Credit…Daniel Roland/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The European Central Bank on Thursday maintained a stimulus program intended to counteract the economic effects of the pandemic, as expected, while promising to make sure that eurozone businesses and consumers have an ample supply of credit.

Following a monetary policy meeting, the bank’s Governing Council said in a statement that it would continue buying government and corporate bonds to prevent “a tightening of financing conditions that is inconsistent with countering the downward impact of the pandemic.”

At its last meeting, in March, the bank stepped up the pace of the bond purchases, a form of printing money that helps keep market interest rates low. The bank has also been funneling money directly to commercial banks at negative interest rates, provided they lend the money to customers.

The central bank said Thursday that it had seen “a high takeup” of the money, which is essentially free to lenders.

An AirTag, which Apple introduced this week as an attachment that helps owners find lost items, and which Tile says is a copy of its trackers.Credit…Apple, via Reuters

Tile said Apple boxed out its products and then copied them. Spotify said Apple blocked it from telling customers that they could find cheaper prices outside its iPhone app. And Match Group testified that it now paid nearly $500 million a year to Apple and Google in app store fees, the dating company’s single largest expense.

That testimony came Wednesday at a Senate hearing on Apple’s and Google’s control over their app stores, held by the Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. The hearing was the latest example of the growing scrutiny of Big Tech and the increasing agreement among Democrats, Republicans and smaller companies that the world’s biggest tech companies have become too powerful.

At the hearing, representatives from Apple and Google defended their companies’ practices, saying that they don’t copy competitors, that few apps pay their commissions and that they charge the commissions to fund the security of their app stores.

Both Democratic and Republican senators were skeptical of those explanations. “Google and Apple are here to defend the patently indefensible,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut. “If you presented this fact pattern in a law school antitrust exam, the students would laugh the professor out of the classroom, because it is such an obvious violation of our antitrust laws.”

Apple and Google have long had a stranglehold on the business of mobile apps. But that position, which has earned them hundreds of billions of dollars, has increasingly led to regulatory, legal and public-relations headaches.

Federal and state lawmakers are holding hearings and considering legislation to weaken the companies’ app-store controls. The Justice Department is investigating the issue. And in a trial next month, Apple is set to face off against Epic Games, the Fortnite maker, which is suing Apple for forcing it to use Apple’s payment system in its iPhone app.

Jared Sine, the chief legal officer at Match Group, said on Wednesday that Google had called his company the previous night when his planned testimony became public. He said Google wondered why his testimony appeared to be tougher than what Match had said on a recent earnings call.

Mr. Blumenthal called that intimidation, and Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who is the subcommittee’s chairwoman, suggested that the senators would investigate.

Wilson White, a government affairs official at Google, said that Match was an important partner and that Google would never aim to intimidate the company.

“There are many, many ways they could hurt our business,” Mr. Sine said. “We’re all afraid, is the reality, Senator. We’re fortunate you’re listening to us today.”

“Well,” Ms. Klobuchar replied, “I hope the Justice Department is, too.”

Gary Gensler will have ample chances to put his imprint on the Securities and Exchange Commission as its new chairman.Credit…Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

The market may already be dictating some of the agenda for Gary Gensler, who started as chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission on Saturday.

Mr. Gensler already has a lot on his plate, Matthew Goldstein reports for The New York Times:

  • One of the first things he will probably have to weigh in on is whether to assert more control over the red-hot market for special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, those speculative businesses that have raised well over $100 billion from investors.

  • He must also decide whether the S.E.C. should do more to protect small investors, who have recently become a major force in the stock markets.

  • Then there’s Archegos Capital Management, the $10 billion fund whose implosion last month spotlighted the loosely regulated world of family offices.

“Gensler is going to be confronted with a range of enforcement issues, and he is going to have to determine what his priorities are,” said Daniel Hawke, a former chief of the S.E.C.’s market abuse unit and now a partner with the law firm Arnold & Porter.

Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of Better Markets, a nonprofit organization, said he expected Mr. Gensler to focus on reforming the rules around corporate disclosures — including seeking more transparency from companies and big investors on their risks from climate change and contributions to it, as well as diversity on company boards — because it affected much of his agenda.

“Disclosure writ large will be a common thread through all the issues,” Mr. Kelleher said. “The S.E.C. is fundamentally a disclosure agency, and through better disclosure, you are supposed to be able to empower investors and enable enforcement.”

Arrival says its microfactories should produce vans that cost a lot less than other electric models and even today’s diesel vehicles.Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times

Arrival, a small electric vehicle company, is creating highly automated “microfactories” where its delivery vans and buses will be assembled by multitasking robots, breaking from the approach pioneered by Henry Ford and used by most of the world’s automakers.

The advantage, according to Arrival, is that its microfactories will cost about $50 million rather than the $1 billion or more required to build a traditional factory, Neal E. Boudette reports for The New York Times.

“The assembly line approach is very capital-intensive, and you have to get to very high production levels to make any margin,” said Avinash Rugoobur, Arrival’s president and a former General Motors executive. “The microfactory allows us to build vehicles profitably at really any volume.”

The company is also replacing most steel parts used in vehicles with components made from advanced composites, a mix of polypropylene, a polymer used to make plastics, and fiberglass. These parts are to be held together by structural adhesives instead of metal welds.

The use of composites, which can be produced in any color, would eliminate three of the most expensive parts of an auto plant — the paint shop, the giant printing presses that stamp out fenders and other parts, and the robots that weld metal parts into larger underbody components. Each typically costs several hundred million dollars.

The company, which is based in London and is setting up factories in England and the United States, says this method should yield vans that cost a lot less than other electric models and even today’s standard, diesel-powered vehicles.

A wind farm off Blackpool, England, operated by Orsted. Shares in renewable energy companies rose Thursday as nations made commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.Credit…Phil Noble/Reuters

Shares in renewable energy companies rose as President Biden’s two-day climate summit began on Thursday, designated as Earth Day. Mr. Biden is expected to announce that the United States will intend to cut greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by the end of the decade.

Ahead of the virtual summit with dozens of world leaders, Britain has also sped up its own climate change targets. On Tuesday, it set a new target of cutting emissions by nearly 80 percent by 2035, compared with 1990 levels. On Wednesday, the European Union agreed to a new target to reduce net emissions at least 55 percent by the end of the decade.

“As governments around the world look to kick-start their recoveries as well as reach climate goals, green spending has become one avenue for doing so,” strategists at UBS Global Wealth Management wrote in a note. “We think the sustainable investment universe will continue to expand rapidly.”

Shares in Orsted, a Danish wind energy company, rose 3.4 percent on Thursday, ending a eight-day streak of losses. Shares in Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy jumped nearly 6 percent. First Solar shares rose in premarket trading, extending a gain of 5.4 percent from Wednesday. The iShares Global Clean Energy exchange-traded fund, which has $5.6 billion in assets, rose 2 percent on Wednesday and kept climbing in premarket trading.

  • U.S. stock futures were little changed. The Stoxx Europe 600 index rose 0.5 percent.

  • Credit Suisse shares plunged 6 percent on Thursday after the Swiss bank said it suffered a loss in the first quarter after billions of francs were lost because of loans made to investment fund Archegos Capital Management

  • The euro rose 0.2 percent against the dollar before the European Central Bank announces its latest monetary policy decisions. Economists are not expecting a change after the bank ramped up the pace of its bond buying program at its previous meeting in March.

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Business

Retail Gross sales Soar and Jobless Claims Drop in New Indicators of Restoration: Reside Updates

Shoppers in New York City on Tuesday. Retail sales surged last month, and the latest jobless claims report also provided fresh signs of economic revival.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Gabby Jones for The New York Times

Jobless claims fell last week to their lowest level of the pandemic and the latest data on retail sales blew past expectations, renewing confidence in a dynamic economic revival.

About 613,000 people filed first-time claims for state unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, a decrease of 153,000 from the previous week.

In addition, 132,000 filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that covers freelancers, part-timers and others who do not routinely qualify for state benefits. That was a decline of 20,000 from the previous week.

Neither figure is seasonally adjusted. On a seasonally adjusted basis, new state claims totaled 576,000.

“We’re gaining momentum here, which is just unquestionable,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at the accounting firm Grant Thornton. But she cautioned that the jobless claims levels, while good news, were still extraordinarily high compared to what they were before the pandemic.

“You’re still not popping champagne corks,” she said. “I will breath again — and breath easy again — once we get these number back down in the 200,000 range.”

In another sign of the recovery underway, retail sales surged in March, the Commerce Department said Thursday, as Americans spent their latest round of government stimulus checks and the continued roll out of coronavirus vaccines lured more people back into stores.

The 9.8 percent increase last month was a strong comeback from the nearly 3 percent drop in February.

With the pandemic’s end seemingly in sight, the economy is poised for a robust comeback. But weekly applications for unemployment claims have remained stubbornly high for months, frustrating the recovery even as businesses reopen and vaccination rates increase. They have also been a volatile economic indicator, temporarily dipping to their lowest level of the pandemic in mid-March before rising again in recent weeks.

“The job market conditions for job seekers have really improved extremely quickly between January and now,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at the job site ZipRecruiter. “But there are still huge barriers to returning to work.”

Jobless claims for the next few months could remain significantly elevated as the labor market adjusts to a new normal.

Concerns about workplace safety persist, especially for workers on the younger end of the spectrum who have only just become eligible for vaccinations. Many children are still attending schools remotely, complicating the full-time work prospects for their caregivers.

But there is hope on the horizon as those barriers begin to fall. President Biden moved up the deadline for states to make all adults eligible for vaccination to April 19, and every state has complied. Students who have been learning remotely will begin to return to the classroom in earnest.

“This was the deepest, swiftest recession ever, but it’s also turning into the fastest recovery,” Ms. Pollak said. “And I don’t think we should lose sight of that just because some of the measures are a little stubborn.”

Retail sales surged in March, the Commerce Department said on Thursday, as Americans spent their latest round of government stimulus checks and the continued roll out of coronavirus vaccines lured more people back into stores.

The 9.8 percent increase last month was a strong comeback from the nearly 3 percent drop in February, when previous stimulus money had dissipated and a series of winter storms made travel difficult across much of the United States.

The rebound in March sales shows how, a year after the nation’s economy locked down to prevent the spread of the virus, consumer spending remains highly dependent on government support. It also reflects that many areas of consumption frozen by the pandemic have bounced back. Sales of clothing and accessories rose 18 percent, while restaurants and bars saw a 13 percent increase.

President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which was signed into law last month, provides direct payments of $1,400 to lower-income Americans. Many of these checks began arriving in households toward the end of last month, when economists saw signs that spending was ramping up again, such as increased hotel occupancy and travel through airports.

Economists at Morgan Stanley had predicted that core retail sales would jump 6.5 percent in March, driven by the stimulus checks that started arriving in people’s bank accounts around March 17. The investment bank said 30 percent of consumers tend to spend their checks within the first 10 days, suggesting that many other consumers have yet to spend their checks, which could strengthen April sales.

More broadly, American consumers are also feeling increasingly optimistic as more people become vaccinated and venture out more frequently. One measure of consumer confidence, tabulated by the Conference Board, said confidence increased about 20 points in March from February, fueled by increased income and stronger business and employment expectations.

Kevin Durant of the Brooklyn Nets was an early investor in Coinbase and stands to reap a big profit from the company’s market debut.Credit…Elsa/Getty Images

Heavy trading volume greeted the highly anticipated market debut of Coinbase on Wednesday, which ended the day worth some $86 billion. The cryptocurrency company’s coming-out party made some insiders very rich, opened up new possibilities for cementing its position in the blockchain economy and blazed a trail for other crypto companies to follow its lead onto the public markets, the DealBook newsletter writes.

The stake held by Brian Armstrong, Coinbase’s co-founder and chief executive, is now worth roughly $13 billion. Shares held by its other co-founder, Fred Ehrsam, are worth about $6.7 billion. (Andreessen Horowitz’s stake is worth $11.2 billion, while Union Square Ventures’ holding is worth $5.3 billion.) Other investors who stand to collect big paper profits — if they held on to their shares — include the National Basketball Association star Kevin Durant, the rapper Nas and Alexis Ohanian, a co-founder of Reddit.

The market listing makes it easier for Coinbase to negotiate mergers and acquisitions. “We want to be able to have a public mark on our stock price because it helps us do more and more M.&A.,” Emilie Choi, the company’s chief operating officer, told the technology site Protocol. “There’s so much innovation happening in the crypto ecosystem, and we can’t possibly do it all in-house.” But the listing also brings more scrutiny of the company’s internal culture, which has included accusations of unfair treatment of Black and female employees and poor customer service.

Coinbase could lead the way for others. The tech investor Ron Conway called Coinbase “the Google for the crypto economy.” As crypto goes mainstream, others with similarly big ambitions may follow Coinbase onto the public markets, including rival markets like Binance, the biggest crypto exchange, and Gemini, the company founded by the Winklevoss twins. Exchange-traded funds that hold Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies directly also haven’t yet been approved by the S.E.C., but proponents believe that could happen soon.

Coinbase has come a long way since its humble beginnings. Here’s Mr. Armstrong’s original Hacker News post from March 2012 looking for a co-founder for his crypto venture, which drew dismissive comments like, “Because bitcoin worked out so well. Have fun with that, dude.” Bitcoin was worth about $5 then; it’s more than $60,000 now.

Bank of America and Citigroup were aided by the release of the cash cushions they had set aside during the economic downturn last year to absorb potential losses.Credit…Carlo Allegri/Reuters

Profit at both Bank of America and Citigroup jumped for the first three months of this year, bouncing back from the lows of the early stages of the pandemic in 2020, as they reduced their loss cushions to reflect an improving economy.

Citigroup more than tripled its profit from a year ago, reporting earnings of $7.9 billion even as its sales fell 7 percent, to $19.3 billion. Bank of America doubled its profit to $8.1 billion from $4 billion. Its revenue of $22 billion was flat.

Like JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo, which reported first-quarter results on Wednesday, both banks were aided by the release of the cash cushions they had set aside during the economic downturn last year to absorb potential losses. Citi released $3.9 billion of the reserve it had built up to absorb loan losses, whereas Bank of America’s provision for losses decreased $6.6 billion.

“It’s been a better than expected start to the year, and we are optimistic about the macro environment,” said Jane Fraser, who became Citi’s chief executive last month. “This is the healthiest we have seen the consumer emerge from a crisis in recent history.” Similarly, Bank of America’s chief, Brian Moynihan, noted that “progress in the health crisis and the economy point to an accelerating recovery.”

During a call Thursday morning with analysts and investors, Mr. Moynihan noted that March had been a record month for consumer spending by Bank of America customers.

Low interest rates, which have been a central feature of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to shore up the economy, dogged both companies. At Citi, investment banking and stock trading were areas of strength, rising 46 percent and 26 percent from the prior year.

At Bank of America, investment-banking fees for advising corporations on deals hit a record $2.2 billion, a 62 percent rise, thanks partly to a doubling of activity in stock underwriting deals, including initial public offerings. Global markets revenue rose 17 percent, which was primarily attributable to gains in the sales and trading of bonds and related products.

As part of its earnings release, Citi announced that would exit the consumer market in 13 countries in Asia and Europe, including Australia, China, India, and Russia, reflecting a desire to focus on the bank’s more profitable geographies. In those areas, “we don’t have the scale we need to compete,” Ms. Fraser said.

By: Ella Koeze·Data delayed at least 15 minutes·Source: FactSet

Stocks on Wall Street climbed on Thursday, with shares lifted by a new round of earnings reports and as economic data from the United States added to signs of a budding economic recovery.

The S&P 500 climbed about 0.7 percent, putting it on track for a record, while the Nasdaq composite rose by more than 1 percent. European stock indexes also rose. The Stoxx Europe 600 index increased about 0.3 percent, for a third straight day of gains in record territory.

The gains came after the U.S. government reported that jobless claims fell last week to their lowest level of the pandemic, and the latest data on retail sales blew past expectations.
About 613,000 people filed first-time claims for state unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday, a decrease of 153,000 from the previous week.

Separately, the Commerce Department said that retail sales surged 9.8 percent in March, a strong comeback from the nearly 3 percent drop in February, when previous stimulus money had dissipated and a series of winter storms made travel difficult across much of the United States.

Other signs of recovery came as companies reported earnings. Executives at Bank of America and Citigroup both joined their counterparts at other large financial firms in sounding an optimistic tone about the outlook for the economy. Shares of Citigroup rose more than 1.5 percent after its earnings report, while Bank of America’s stock fell slightly.

“It’s been a better-than-expected start to the year, and we are optimistic about the macro environment,” said Jane Fraser, who became Citi’s chief executive last month. “This is the healthiest we have seen the consumer emerge from a crisis in recent history.”

And Delta reported that it has stemmed daily operating losses, a sign that its planes are fuller and fares are returning to more normal levels. Its shares were lower, however, after the company said that in the first three months of the year, it lost $1.2 billion as revenue plunged from a year earlier.

After a bumper market debut, Coinbase shares rose 3 percent in early trading. On Wednesday, the cryptocurrency exchange ended its first day of trading at $328.28 a share, valuing the company at nearly $86 billion — more than 10 times its last valuation as a private company.

Despite the economic optimism, yields on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes dropped sharply to 1.58 percent. On Wednesday, Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, reiterated the central bank’s intention of keeping monetary policy accommodative for a long time. He said the bank would probably slow its bond-buying program “well before” it lifts its policy interest rate.

”Delta is accelerating into the recovery with our brand stronger and more trusted than ever before,” the airline’s chief executive, Ed Bastian said.Credit…Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

Airlines are still racking up big losses even as ticket sales begin to recover.

Delta Air Lines said on Thursday that it lost $1.2 billion in the first three months of the year and its revenue fell about 60 percent, to $4.2 billion, from the first quarter of 2019.

But the airline said it was optimistic that business would soon improve.

“A year after the onset of the pandemic, travelers are gaining confidence and beginning to reclaim their lives,” Ed Bastian, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Delta is accelerating into the recovery with our brand stronger and more trusted than ever before.”

The airline said it stemmed daily operating losses last month, a sign that its planes are fuller and fares are returning to more normal levels. Well over one million travelers have been screened at airport security checkpoints each day for more than a month, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

“If recovery trends hold, we expect positive cash generation for the June quarter and see a path to return to profitability in the September quarter as the demand recovery progresses,” Mr. Bastian said.

The airline said it expected revenue in the current quarter to be down about 50 to 55 percent compared with the same period in 2019. It expects to fly about 68 percent as many people in the quarter as it did in 2019.

The airline said ticket sales for domestic flights had recovered to 85 percent of 2019 levels, though lucrative corporate and international travelers have yet to come back in meaningful numbers. Delta will officially lift its ban on the sales of middle seats next month, allowing it to earn more from each flight.

“In the June quarter, we expect significant sequential improvement in revenue as leisure demand accelerates into the peak summer period and we add capacity,” Glen Hauenstein, Delta’s president, said in the statement.

Delta is the first major U.S. airline to report first-quarter results. United Airlines and American Airlines are scheduled to do so next week.

Instagram is developing a service for children as a way to keep those under 13 off its main platform.Credit…Jenny Kane/Associated Press

An international coalition of 35 children’s and consumer groups called on Instagram on Thursday to scrap its plans to develop a version of the popular photo-sharing app for users under age 13.

Instagram’s push for a separate children’s app comes after years of complaints from legislators and parents that the platform has been slow to identify underage users and protect them from sexual predators and bullying.

But in a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook — the company that owns the photo-sharing service — the nonprofit groups warned that a children’s version of Instagram would not mitigate such problems. While 10- to 12-year-olds with Instagram accounts would be unlikely to switch to a “babyish version” of the app, the groups said, it could hook even younger users on endless routines of photo-scrolling and body-image shame.

“While collecting valuable family data and cultivating a new generation of Instagram users may be good for Facebook’s bottom line,” the groups, led by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood in Boston, said in the letter to Mr. Zuckerberg, “it will likely increase the use of Instagram by young children who are particularly vulnerable to the platform’s manipulative and exploitative features.”

The coalition of nonprofit groups also includes the Africa Digital Rights’ Hub in Ghana; the Australian Council on Children and the Media; the Center for Digital Democracy in Washington; Common Sense Media in San Francisco; the Consumer Federation of America; and the 5Rights Foundation in Britain.

Stephanie Otway, a Facebook spokeswoman, said that Instagram was in the early stages of developing a service for children as part of an effort to keep those under 13 off its main platform. Although Instagram requires users to be at least 13, many younger children have lied about their age to set up accounts.

Ms. Otway said that company would not show ads in any Instagram product developed for children younger than 13, and that it planned to consult with experts on children’s health and safety on the project. Instagram is also working on new age-verification methods to catch younger users trying to lie about their age, she said.

“The reality is that kids are online,” Ms. Otway said. “They want to connect with their family and friends, have fun and learn, and we want to help them do that in a way that is safe and age-appropriate.”

The Thomson Reuters offices in Times Square. The company’s media organization will begin charging for access to its website.Credit…Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Reuters will begin charging for access to its website as it tries to capture a slice of the digital subscription business.

The company, one of the largest news organizations in the world, announced the new paywall on Thursday, as well as a redesigned website aimed at a “professional” audience wanting business, financial and general news.

After registration and a free preview period, a subscription to Reuters.com will cost $34.99 a month, the same as Bloomberg’s digital subscription. The Wall Street Journal’s digital subscription costs $38.99 a month, while The New York Times costs $18.42 monthly.

Reuters.com attracts 41 million unique visitors a month. Months of audience research showed that those readers were divided in two separate groups: those wanting breaking news and professionals looking for context and analysis about how news affected their industry, Josh London, chief marketing officer at Reuters, said in an interview.

Reuters will roll out new sections on its website for subscribers in coming weeks that include coverage of legal news, sustainable business, energy, health care and the auto industry. It also plans to introduce industry-specific newsletters.

Mr. London described the new website as “the largest digital transformation at Reuters in a decade.” He declined to provide specifics on digital subscription goals but said that it represented “a major opportunity for us.”

Arlyn Gajilan, the digital news director at Reuters, said she expected to expand the digital team working on the revamped website.

On Monday, Reuters announced that Alessandra Galloni, a global managing editor, would become its next editor in chief. Ms. Galloni, who will be the first woman to helm the news agency in its history, starts her new role on Monday. She takes over from Stephen J. Adler, who retired after running Reuters for a decade.

Ms. Gajilan said that Ms. Galloni had been closely involved in the new direction of Reuters.com.

“She’s a very strong advocate for all things digital at Reuters,” Ms. Gajilan said.

Dan Rozycki, president of the Transtec Group in Texas, is looking at alternatives for his semiconductor supplies.Credit…Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

Shortages of semiconductors, fueled by pandemic interruptions and production issues at multibillion-dollar chip factories, have sent shock waves through the economy. Questions about chips are reverberating among both businesses and policymakers trying to navigate the world’s dependence on the small components.

Most attention has focused on temporary closings of big U.S. car plants. But the chips are in everything from cash registers and kitchen appliances, and the problem is affecting many other sectors, particularly the server systems and PCs used to deliver and consume internet services that became crucial during the pandemic, Don Clark reports for The New York Times.

“Every aspect of human existence is going online, and every aspect of that is running on semiconductors,” said Pat Gelsinger, the new chief executive of the chip maker Intel who attended the meeting with the president on Monday. “People are begging us for more.”

The chip shortage potentially affects just about any company adding communications or computing features to products. Many examples were described in 90 comments filed by companies and trade groups to a supply chain review by President Biden, including a laundry list of needs from industry giants like Amazon and Boeing.

Dan Rozycki is the president of a small engineering firm, that sells small sensors used to monitor construction sites to ensure concrete is hardening properly. His firm is for now among the lucky chip users. It planned ahead and has enough chips to keep making the roughly 50,000 sensors it supplies each year to construction sites. But his distributor has warned him it might not be able to deliver more of them until late 2022, he said.

“Is that going to halt those projects?” Mr. Rozycki asked. He is scouring the market for other distributors that might have the two needed chips in stock. Other possibilities include redesigning the sensors to use different chips.

  • A former editor at Vanity Fair has been working to create a new digital publication, in which writers will share in subscription revenue — Vanity Fair meets Substack. The new company behind the publication, Heat Media, hopes to unveil it in the coming months, four people with knowledge of the matter said. The start-up is partly the brainchild of Jon Kelly, a former editor at Vanity Fair. One of the backers is the private equity firm TPG, which would take three seats on the Heat Media board, the people said. Another investor is 40 North, a related investment arm of Standard Industries, a global industrials company, the people said. Heat Media has raised around $7 million so far, according to the people.

  • Kimberly Godwin, a veteran CBS News executive, was named the next president of ABC News on Wednesday, making her the first Black woman to lead a major broadcast network’s news division. Ms. Godwin succeeds James Goldston, who announced his departure from ABC in January. She will begin in her job in early May. Ms. Godwin most recently served as CBS’s executive vice president of news.

Categories
Business

Jobless claims will provide a gauge of the pandemic’s financial toll.

Jobless claims will offer a gauge of the pandemic’s economic toll.

With the seemingly end of the pandemic, the economy is facing a dynamic revival. One measure, however, has continued to thwart the resurgence: the number of weekly jobless claims that have been stubbornly high for months, even as businesses reopen and vaccination rates rise.

After the new claims hit a pandemic low in mid-March, initial claims for state unemployment benefits have risen as the impact of the pandemic continues to affect the economy. Last week, the Ministry of Labor announced that a total of 741,000 workers had applied for state unemployment benefits for the first time.

The Department of Labor will publish its latest weekly unemployment claims report on Thursday. If the number of applications falls, confidence in the upturn in the labor market will increase again after the recent bump. However, if it does increase, there will be a strong indication of the ongoing strain on the workforce from the pandemic.

In any case, unemployment claims could remain much higher for the next few months than they were before the pandemic as the labor market adapts to a new normal.

“The labor market conditions for job seekers improved very quickly between January and now,” said Julia Pollak, labor economist at the ZipRecruiter construction site. “But there are still major barriers to getting back to work.”

Workplace safety concerns remain particularly among workers who have not yet been vaccinated. Many children still attend schools remotely, making full-time job prospects difficult for their caregivers.

But there is hope on the horizon when these barriers begin to fall. President Biden extended the deadline for states to qualify all adults for vaccination to April 19, and every state has complied. Students who have learned from a distance return to class in earnest.

“This has been the deepest and fastest recession ever, but it will also be the fastest rebound,” said Ms. Pollak. “And I don’t think we should lose sight of that just because some of the measures are a bit persistent.”

Categories
Business

State Jobless Claims Climb, Exhibiting Continued Stress on Labor Market: Stay Updates

Essen im Freien in einem Restaurant in Philadelphia letzte Woche. Wirtschaftswissenschaftler rechnen mit einer Verbesserung des Arbeitsmarktes, da sich die Einführung von Impfstoffen beschleunigt und immer mehr Staaten die Geschäftsbeschränkungen aufheben.

Folgendes müssen Sie wissen:

Anerkennung…Hannah Beier für die New York Times

Der Arbeitsmarkt bleibt herausfordernd. Die Regierung berichtet am Donnerstag, dass die ersten Ansprüche auf staatliche Arbeitslosenunterstützung letzte Woche gestiegen sind.

Insgesamt 741.000 Arbeitnehmer haben letzte Woche erstmals Anträge auf staatliche Arbeitslosenunterstützung gestellt, was einer Zunahme von 18.000 entspricht, teilte das Arbeitsministerium mit. Es war der zweite wöchentliche Anstieg in Folge, nachdem neue Ansprüche ein Pandemietief erreicht hatten.

Gleichzeitig wurden 152.000 neue Anträge auf Pandemic Unemployment Assistance gestellt, ein Bundesprogramm für Freiberufler, Teilzeitbeschäftigte und andere Personen, die nicht routinemäßig Anspruch auf staatliche Leistungen haben. Das war ein Rückgang von 85.000.

Keine der Zahlen ist saisonbereinigt.

Die Ansprüche stiegen zu Beginn des Jahres auf über eine Million, haben es aber getan seitdem gesunken, unterstützt durch die Verbreitung von Impfungen, die Lockerung der Beschränkungen für Unternehmen in vielen Staaten und die Ankunft von Konjunkturfonds.

Die meisten Personen erhielten in den letzten Wochen Zahlungen in Höhe von 1.400 US-Dollar als Teil des Hilfspakets der Biden-Regierung in Höhe von 1,9 Billionen US-Dollar, und die Mittel sollten die Verbraucherausgaben in den kommenden Monaten stützen.

Am Freitag berichtete die Regierung, dass die Arbeitgeber im März 916.000 Arbeitsplätze geschaffen haben, doppelt so viel wie im Februar und am meisten seit August. Die Arbeitslosenquote sank auf 6 Prozent, den niedrigsten Stand seit Beginn der Pandemie. Fast 350.000 Menschen sind wieder erwerbstätig.

Trotzdem gibt es viel zu tun.

Selbst nach dem Beschäftigungszuwachs im März sind in der Wirtschaft 8,4 Millionen Arbeitsplätze weniger als im Februar 2020. Ganze Sektoren wie Reisen und Freizeit sowie Restaurants und Bars erholen sich erst allmählich von den Millionen von Arbeitsplatzverlusten, die sich daraus ergaben Ankunft der Pandemie.

Die Stimmzettel in der Gewerkschaftsfahrt in einem Amazonas-Lagerhaus in Bessemer, Alabama, werden voraussichtlich ab Donnerstagnachmittag oder Freitagmorgen von Hand gezählt.Anerkennung…Charity Rachelle für die New York Times

Die Gewerkschaft, die Arbeiter in einem Amazonas-Lagerhaus in Alabama vertreten will, gab am späten Mittwoch bekannt, dass 3.215 Stimmzettel abgegeben wurden – oder etwa 55 Prozent der rund 5.800 wahlberechtigten Arbeiter.

Die Stimmzettel werden nach Angaben der Retail Wholesale and Department Store Union voraussichtlich ab Donnerstagnachmittag oder Freitagmorgen im Büro des National Labour Relations Board in Birmingham von Hand gezählt. Hunderte von Stimmzetteln werden angefochten, hauptsächlich von Amazon, sagte die Gewerkschaft.

Die Stimmenzählung wird in einem Videokonferenzaufruf an eine kleine Anzahl von Außenstehenden, einschließlich Journalisten, sowie an Vertreter der Gewerkschaft und des Unternehmens gezeigt.

Gewerkschaftswahlen werden in der Regel persönlich abgehalten, aber die Arbeitsbehörde entschied, dass die Wahlen per Post durchgeführt werden sollten, um die Risiken während der Pandemie zu minimieren. Die Stimmzettel wurden Anfang Februar an die Arbeitnehmer verschickt und waren vor dem 30. März bei der Agentur fällig. Seitdem hatten Amazon und die Gewerkschaft die Möglichkeit, zu prüfen, ob bestimmte Arbeitnehmer wahlberechtigt waren.

Wenn die öffentliche Zählung abgeschlossen ist, wird die Agentur die formellen Ergebnisse bekannt geben, wenn die Gewinnspanne für eine Seite größer ist als die Anzahl der umstrittenen Stimmzettel.

Wenn der Spielraum enger ist, kann es zwei bis drei Wochen dauern, bis die NLRB eine Anhörung abhält, um die angefochtenen Stimmzettel zu sortieren und von beiden Seiten Beweise dafür zu erhalten, ob sie gezählt werden sollten.

Der zweite Stausee von Baoshan. Während der Regenzeit im letzten Jahr landete kein einziger Taifun.Anerkennung…Ein Rong Xu für die New York Times

Beamte nennen Taiwans Dürre die schlimmste seit mehr als einem halben Jahrhundert. Und es stellt die enormen Herausforderungen dar, die mit dem Hosting der Halbleiterindustrie der Insel verbunden sind, die ein zunehmend unverzichtbarer Knotenpunkt in den globalen Lieferketten für Smartphones, Autos und andere Grundpfeiler des modernen Lebens ist.

Chiphersteller verwenden viel Wasser, um ihre Fabriken und Wafer zu reinigen, die dünnen Siliziumscheiben, aus denen die Chips bestehen. Raymond Zhong und Amy Chang Chien berichten für die New York Times. Im Jahr 2019 verbrauchten die Anlagen der Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company in Hsinchu nach Angaben des Unternehmens 63.000 Tonnen Wasser pro Tag oder mehr als 10 Prozent der Versorgung aus zwei lokalen Lagerstätten.

In den letzten Monaten hat die Regierung:

Die umfassendste Maßnahme war jedoch die Einstellung der Bewässerung, die 183.000 Morgen Ackerland betrifft, rund ein Fünftel von Taiwans bewässertem Land.

Die taiwanesische Öffentlichkeit scheint entschieden zu haben, dass der Reisanbau sowohl für die Insel als auch für die Welt weniger wichtig ist als Halbleiter. Die Regierung subventioniert die Erzeuger für die Einkommensverluste. Der 55-jährige Chuang Cheng-deng befürchtet jedoch, dass die vereitelte Ernte die Kunden dazu bringen wird, andere Lieferanten zu suchen, was Jahre mit schwachen Erträgen bedeuten könnte.

Das Ikea-Geschäft in Franconville, Frankreich, in dem die Mitarbeiter überwacht wurden, zeigten Dokumente.Anerkennung…Elliott-Werte für die New York Times

Die Staatsanwaltschaft beschuldigt den französischen Arm von Ikea, dem schwedischen Einrichtungsgiganten, und einigen seiner ehemaligen Führungskräfte, in einem Strafverfahren, das die Aufmerksamkeit der Öffentlichkeit in Frankreich erregt hat, von 2009 bis 2012 ein „Spionagesystem“ entwickelt zu haben.

Das angebliche Schnüffeln wurde verwendet, um Mitarbeiter und Gewerkschaftsorganisatoren zu untersuchen, die im Urlaub befindlichen Arbeitnehmer zu untersuchen und Kunden einzuschätzen, die Rückerstattungen für verpfuschte Bestellungen beantragen, berichtet Liz Alderman für die New York Times. Ein ehemaliger Militäragent wurde angeheuert, um einige der geheimeren Operationen durchzuführen.

Insgesamt werden 15 Personen belastet. Ein Urteil einer Jury ist für den 15. Juni geplant.

Der Fall erregte 2012 Empörung, nachdem die E-Mails an die französischen Nachrichtenmedien durchgesickert waren und Ikea sofort mehrere Führungskräfte in seiner französischen Einheit entlassen hatte, darunter auch seinen Geschäftsführer. Es gibt keine Hinweise darauf, dass in einem der anderen 52 Länder, in denen der globale Einzelhändler ein frisches Bild von stilvoller Sparsamkeit mit schwedischen Fleischbällchen serviert, eine ähnliche Überwachung stattgefunden hat.

Die Anwälte der Opfer beschrieben eine methodische Operation, die auf zwei Wegen verlief: eine, die Hintergrund- und Strafkontrollen von Bewerbern und Arbeitnehmern ohne deren Wissen beinhaltete, und eine andere, die sich an Gewerkschaftsführer und -mitglieder richtete.

Der Anwalt von Ikea, Emmanuel Daoud, bestritt, dass in den französischen Geschäften von Ikea eine systemweite Überwachung durchgeführt worden sei. Er argumentierte, dass jegliche Verletzung der Privatsphäre die Arbeit einer einzelnen Person gewesen sei, Jean-François Paris, dem Leiter des Risikomanagements der französischen Einheit.

E-Mails und Quittungen zeigten, dass Herr Paris einen Großteil der Arbeit an Jean-Pierre Fourès übergab, der Hunderte von Bewerbern überwachte und Informationen aus sozialen Medien und anderen Quellen sammelte, um die Überprüfung und Einstellung zu beschleunigen. Er führte auch Hintergrundprüfungen bei ahnungslosen Kunden durch, die sich wegen großer Rückerstattungen mit Ikea verhedderten. Er bestand darauf, dass er beim Sammeln von Hintergrundmaterial nie gegen das Gesetz verstoßen hatte.

Die Überwachung umfasste Berufstätige. In einem Fall wurde Herr Fourès beauftragt, zu untersuchen, ob der stellvertretende Direktor für Kommunikation und Merchandising von Ikea France, der sich ein Jahr lang krank hatte und sich von Hepatitis C erholt hatte, die Schwere ihrer Krankheit vorgetäuscht hatte, als Manager erfuhren, dass sie nach Marokko gereist war.

Ein Karnevalskreuzfahrtschiff legte letztes Jahr in Long Beach, Kalifornien, an. Die Kreuzfahrtlinie hat gedroht, ihre Schiffe außerhalb der US-Häfen zu bewegen.Anerkennung…Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

  • Carnival Cruise Line, der größte Kreuzfahrtanbieter in den USA, ist optimistisch, dass mehrere seiner in den USA ansässigen Linien bis Juli in Betrieb sein werden, teilte das Unternehmen am Mittwoch mit, als es seine Finanzdaten für das erste Quartal meldete. Das Buchungsvolumen für zukünftige Karnevalskreuzfahrten war im ersten Quartal 2021 um etwa 90 Prozent höher als im Vorquartal, was „sowohl die erhebliche aufgestaute Nachfrage als auch das langfristige Potenzial für Kreuzfahrten widerspiegelt“, so Arnold Donald, Geschäftsführer der Carnival Corporation , sagte die Muttergesellschaft der Kreuzfahrtgesellschaft in einer Erklärung am Mittwoch. Das Unternehmen meldete für das erste Quartal 2021 einen Nettoverlust von 2 Milliarden US-Dollar.

  • Gewerkschaften, die Mitarbeiter von zwei bekannten Podcasting-Unternehmen von Spotify, dem Audiostreaming-Riesen, vertreten, gaben am Mittwoch bekannt, dass sie ihre ersten Arbeitsverträge ratifiziert haben. Die größere der beiden Gewerkschaften mit 65 Mitarbeitern befindet sich bei The Ringer, einer Website für Sport- und Popkultur mit einem Podcasting-Netzwerk. Die zweite Gewerkschaft der Podcast-Produktionsfirma Gimlet Media beschäftigt knapp 50 Mitarbeiter. Die beiden Gruppen gehörten zu den ersten in der Podcasting-Branche, die sich gewerkschaftlich organisiert haben, und beide werden von der Writers Guild of America, East, vertreten.

Ein Anerkennung…Nam Y. Huh / Associated Press

  • Die S & P 500-Futures stiegen am Donnerstag und deuteten auf einen Anstieg zu Beginn des Wall Street-Handels hin, einen Tag nachdem der Referenzindex am Vortag einen weiteren Rekord aufgestellt hatte. Die Anleger warten auf den neuesten wöchentlichen Bericht über Arbeitslosenansprüche, der ein neues Maß für eine sich stärkende Wirtschaft darstellen könnte.

  • Die europäischen Märkte waren überwiegend höher und die asiatischen Aktien hatten einen überwiegend positiven Tag. Die Öl-Futures waren niedriger und die Renditen für Staatsanleihen gaben nach.

  • Die Anleger am Mittwoch wurden von den Bemerkungen im Protokoll der Sitzung der Federal Reserve im vergangenen Monat beflügelt, wonach Richtlinien, die die Märkte und Unternehmen durch die Pandemie unterstützt haben, nicht entfernt werden sollten.

  • Die politischen Entscheidungsträger der Fed haben erklärt, dass sie “erhebliche weitere Fortschritte” bei der Erreichung ihrer Beschäftigungs- und Inflationsziele sehen wollen, bevor sie die akkommodierenden Maßnahmen zurückfahren.

  • Wöchentliche Zahlen zu Arbeitslosenansprüchen, die später am Donnerstag veröffentlicht werden sollen, stehen angesichts des wachsenden Vertrauens in Bezug auf Einstellungen in der US-Wirtschaft. Der Lohnbericht für März zeigte einen beeindruckenden Zuwachs von 916.000 Arbeitsplätzen. Aber trotz dieser Verbesserung sind in der Wirtschaft immer noch 8,4 Millionen Arbeitsplätze weniger als im Februar 2020.

  • Die Anleger gehen auch näher auf den Unternehmenssteuerplan von Präsident Biden ein, der darauf abzielt, in 15 Jahren bis zu 2,5 Billionen US-Dollar aufzubringen. Es beinhaltet eine strenge neue Mindeststeuer auf globale Gewinne und das Vorgehen gegen Unternehmen, die versuchen, Gewinne offshore zu verlagern.

  • In Europa war der Handel mit dem Stoxx Europe 600 um 0,4 höher, nachdem er am Mittwoch zum Handelsschluss ein Rekordhoch erreicht hatte. In Großbritannien war der FTSE 100 ebenfalls um 0,4 Prozent höher. In Asien beendete der Hang Seng in Hongkong den Tag um 1,2 Prozent höher.

  • In New York stiegen die S & P 500-Futures um 0,3 Prozent, nachdem der Index am Mittwoch um 0,2 Prozent gestiegen war.

  • Die Öl-Futures rutschten ab, da steigende Coronavirus-Infektionen die Prognosen der Ölnachfrage belasten. Brent-Rohöl, die globale Benchmark, fiel um 0,2 Prozent auf 63 USD pro Barrel, und die US-Benchmark West Texas Intermediate fiel um 0,5 Prozent auf 59,47 USD pro Barrel.

  • Die Renditen 10-jähriger Schatzanweisungen gingen um mehr als 2 Basispunkte auf 1,64 Prozent zurück.

Categories
Business

Unemployment Claims Up a Bit; Manufacturing Features

Unemployment Claims Up a Bit; Manufacturing Gains

A year after they shot up for the first time, unemployment claims could finally return to earth.

More than 714,000 people applied for state unemployment benefits last week, the Ministry of Labor said on Thursday. That was a little more than the week before, but still below the lowest weekly totals since the pandemic began.

In addition, 237,000 people applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that covers people who are not eligible for government benefit programs. That number has also decreased.

Unemployment claims are still high in historical comparison and are well above the norm before the pandemic, when around 200,000 people applied for benefits every week. Applications have only improved gradually – even after the recent declines, the weekly number is slightly lower than last autumn. In total, some 18 million people receive unemployment benefits, many through programs that extend benefits beyond the 26 weeks offered in most states.

However, economists are optimistic that further improvements are imminent as vaccine rollouts accelerate and more states lift restrictions on doing business. Fewer companies are laying off workers and hiring has increased, meaning people who lose their jobs are more likely to find new ones quickly.

“We were finally able to see that the number of unemployment claims was falling because enough jobs were created to make up for the layoffs,” said Julia Pollak, labor economist at the ZipRecruiter construction site.

There are other signs that the economic recovery is picking up momentum. The Institute of Supply Management announced Thursday that its production index, a closely watched measure of the industrial economy, hit its highest level since 1983 in March. The report’s employment index also rose sharply, a sign that manufacturers are likely to be more hiring to meet rising demand.

Economists will get a more complete, if less timely, picture of the labor market on Friday when the Department of Labor releases data on recruitment and unemployment in March. Forecasters polled by FactSet expect the report to show US employers created more than 600,000 jobs in the last month, most since October.

Even better numbers are probably ahead of us. The March data was collected earlier this month, before most states expanded access to vaccines and before most Americans received $ 1,400 checks from the federal government under the newly passed relief package. Those forces should translate into even faster job growth in April, said Jay Bryson, Wells Fargo’s chief economist.

“If you can’t get a barn burner in March, you will likely get one in April,” he said.

Like last year, the biggest risk to the economy is the coronavirus itself. Virus cases are picking up again in large parts of the country as states have begun to relax restrictions. If that uptrend turns into a full blown new wave of infections, it could force some states to reverse course, which could slow the recovery, Bryson warned.

But few economists expect a repeat of last winter, when a jump in Covid-19 cases reversed the recovery. More than a quarter of adults in the United States have received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine, and more than two million people are vaccinated every day. This should allow economic activity to continue to recover.

Nevertheless, Ms. Pollak warned that the labor market would not return to normal overnight. Even as many companies resume normal operations, others are finding that the pandemic has permanently disrupted their business model.

“There are still a lot of business closings and layoffs pending,” she said. “The effects of this pandemic are still affecting this economy.”

Categories
Business

Jobless Claims Tick Up, Exhibiting a Lengthy Highway to Restoration: Stay Updates

The Forecast Salon in Birmingham, Ala. A pickup in business activity nationwide has fed hopes that workers’ prospects are improving. 

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Wes Frazer for The New York Times

A year after they first rocketed upward, jobless claims may finally be returning to earth.

More than 714,000 people filed for state unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was up slightly from the week before, but still among the lowest weekly totals since the pandemic began.

In addition, 237,000 people filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that covers people who don’t qualify for state benefits programs. That number, too, has been falling.

Jobless claims remain high by historical standards, and are far above the norm before the pandemic, when around 200,000 people a week were filing for benefits. Applications have improved only gradually — even after the recent declines, the weekly figure is modestly below where it was last fall.

But economists are optimistic that further improvement is ahead as the vaccine rollout accelerates and more states lift restrictions on business activity. Fewer companies are laying off workers, and hiring has picked up, meaning that people who lose their jobs are more likely to find new ones quickly.

“We could actually finally see the jobless claims numbers come down because there’s enough job creation to offset the layoffs,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at the job site ZipRecruiter.

But Ms. Pollak cautioned that benefits applications would not return to normal overnight. Even as many companies resume normal operations, others are discovering that the pandemic has permanently disrupted their business model.

“There are still a lot of business closures and a lot of layoffs that have yet to happen,” she said. “The repercussions of this pandemic are still rippling through this economy.”

Shoppers in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. Germany and other countries have cut their value-added taxes to encourage consumer spending.Credit…Lena Mucha for The New York Times

The European Central Bank’s chief economist argued on Thursday that fears of a big rise in inflation are overblown, a sign that the people who control interest rates in the eurozone are likely to keep them very low for some time to come.

The comments — by Philip Lane, an influential member of the central bank’s Governing Council whose job includes briefing other members on the economic outlook — are an attempt to calm bond investors who are nervous that the end of the pandemic will lead to high inflation.

Fueling their fears, inflation in the eurozone rose to an annual rate of 1.3 percent in March from 0.9 percent in February, according to official data released on Wednesday, the fastest increase in prices in more than a year.

Market-based interest rates have been rising because investors worry that President Biden’s $2 trillion stimulus program will provoke a broad increase in prices for years to come. The interest rates that prevail on bond markets ripple through the financial system and can make mortgages and other types of borrowing more expensive, creating a drag on economic growth.

Despite big monthly swings in inflation during the last year, the average had been remarkably stable at an annual rate of about 1 percent, Mr. Lane wrote in a blog post on the central bank’s website on Thursday. That is well below the European Central Bank’s target of 2 percent.

“The volatility in inflation over 2020 and 2021 can be attributed to a host of temporary factors that should not affect medium-term inflation dynamics,” Mr. Lane wrote.

That is another way of saying that the European Central Bank is not going to panic about short-lived fluctuations in inflation and put the brakes on the eurozone economy anytime soon.

On the contrary, Mr. Lane’s analysis suggests that the European Central Bank will continue trying to push inflation toward the 2 percent target. In March, the central bank said it would increase its purchases of government and corporate bonds to try to keep a lid on market-based interest rates.

Mr. Lane said it was no surprise to see “considerable volatility in inflation during the pandemic period.” He attributed the ups and downs to quirky factors that are not likely to recur.

Germany and some other countries cut their value-added taxes to encourage consumer spending, then raised them again later. The price of fuel fluctuated wildly. People spent almost nothing on travel, but increased spending on home exercise equipment or products that they needed to work from home. That affected the way inflation is calculated and made the annual rate look higher, Mr. Lane said.

“The medium-term outlook for inflation remains subdued,” he wrote, “and closing the gap to our inflation aim will set the agenda for the Governing Council in the coming years.”

Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi oil minister, has argued that increasing oil output too fast would be risky.Credit…via Reuters

OPEC and its allies, including Russia, are meeting by videoconference Thursday to discuss whether to ease production curbs on oil as countries around the world try to expand from pandemic lockdowns.

Analysts say recent events will support the views of Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi oil minister, who has argued for caution in increasing supply, noting the risks of swamping the market. But other outcomes are possible at the meeting of the group known as OPEC Plus, including modest increases and even cuts in oil production,

France’s reimposition of a national lockdown, announced Wednesday, underlines persistent doubts about the pace of recovery from the pandemic, as have rising case numbers in the United States.

After modest increases when the Suez Canal was recently blocked by a cargo ship, oil prices were rising again on Thursday, with Brent crude, the global benchmark, more than 1 percent higher, to more than $63 a barrel.

“All signs seemingly point to the group maintaining current production levels,” Helima Croft, head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, an investment bank, wrote in a note to clients on Wednesday.

Yet pressure may also come to increase supply. Members of the OPEC Plus group are withholding an estimated eight million barrels of a day, or about 9 percent of current global consumption. As the global economy recovers, it will become increasingly difficult for the Saudis to persuade others to restrain supplies.

By: Ella Koeze·Data delayed at least 15 minutes·Source: FactSet

Wall Street’s rally continued on Thursday as tech shares extended their gains. Shares in Europe and Asia were also higher, as traders focused on optimism about the economic recovery.

The S&P 500 rose 0.8 percent in early trading, on track for a record close, while the Nasdaq composite gained 1.8 percent.

Bond yields pulled further back from their recent 14-month high. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note fell to 1.69 percent.

Adding to the optimism about the economy, a measure of manufacturing activity rose to its highest since 1983, the Institute for Supply Management said.

New data released on Thursday showed a slight rise in claims for unemployment benefits, though the data from the week before showed claims at the lowest since the start of the pandemic. On Friday, the Labor Department will publish its monthly jobs report for March.

  • On Wednesday, President Biden laid out a $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which included money for a range of activities, including repairing roads and bridges, building affordable housing and caregiving facilities, and expanding access to broadband. It would be paid for by an increase in corporate taxes, undoing some of the cut by his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump.

  • The infrastructure plan also includes spending about $50 billion on the semiconductor industry, where a global shortage in chips has disrupted car manufacturing. Shares in Micron Technology, an Idaho-based chip maker, rose nearly 5 percent in premarket trading.

  • The plan includes $174 billion to encourage the manufacture and purchase of electric vehicles. Tesla shares rose 2.4 percent in early trading and ChargePoint Holdings, which has a large network of electric-vehicle charing stations, rose as much as 14 percent, adding to a 19 percent increase on Wednesday.

  • Most European stock indexes were higher even as more lockdowns were announced in the region. In France, restrictions have been expanded to more regions and schools will close for several weeks. In Italy, business closures will extend until the end of April. But a series of reports published on Thursday showed manufacturing activity picking up in Europe.

  • Oil prices rose ahead of a meeting between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, at which they are set to decide production quotas for May. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, climbed 2.7 percent to just above $60 a barrel.

  • QuantumScape, a California-based start-up working on a technology that could make batteries cheaper, said it had reached a technical requirement that would clear the way for a $100 million investment by Volkswagen. QuantumScape’s shares jumped 16 percent in early trading.

  • On Friday, markets will be closed in the United States, Europe and some other countries for Good Friday.

The occupancy rate in nursing homes in the fourth quarter of 2020 was down 11 percentage points from the first quarter, but there are hurdles to staying out of facilities.Credit…Amr Alfiky/The New York Times

The pandemic has intensified a spotlight on long-running questions about how communities can do a better job supporting seniors who need care but want to live outside a nursing home.

The coronavirus had taken the lives of 181,000 people in U.S. nursing homes, assisted living and other long-term care facilities through last weekend, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation — 33 percent of the national toll.

The occupancy rate in nursing homes in the fourth quarter of 2020 was 75 percent, down 11 percentage points from the first quarter, according to the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care, a research group. The shift may not be permanent, but this much is clear: As the aging of the nation accelerates, most communities need to do much more to become age-friendly, said Jennifer Molinsky, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard.

“It’s about all the services that people can access, whether that’s the accessibility and affordability of housing, or transportation and supports that can be delivered in the home,” she said.

But there are hurdles for those who wish to stay out of a facility, Mark Miller reports for The New York Times:

  • A major shortage of age-friendly housing in the United States will present problems for seniors who wish to stay in their homes. By 2034, 34 percent of households will be headed by someone over 65, according to the Harvard center. Yet in 2011, just 3.5 percent of homes had single-floor living, no-step entry and extra-wide halls and doors for wheelchair access, according to Harvard’s latest estimates.

  • Medicare does not pay for most long-term care services, regardless of where they happen; reimbursement is limited to a person’s first 100 days in a skilled nursing facility. Medicaid, which covers only people with very low incomes, has long been the nation’s largest funder of long-term care. From its inception, the program was required to cover care in nursing facilities but not at home or in a community setting. “There’s a bias toward institutions,” said Judith Solomon, a senior fellow specializing in health at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Adam Bouhmad, second from right, has helped low-income families in Baltimore get affordable internet service through his Waves project.Credit…Jared Soares for The New York Times

A year after the pandemic turned the nation’s digital divide into an education emergency, President Biden is making affordable broadband a top priority, comparing it to the effort to spread electricity across the country. His $2 trillion infrastructure plan, announced on Wednesday, includes $100 billion to extend fast internet access to every home.

The money is meant to improve the economy by enabling all Americans to work, get medical care and take classes from wherever they live. Although the government has spent billions on the digital divide in the past, the efforts have failed to close it partly because people in different areas have different problems. Affordability is the main culprit in urban and suburban areas. In many rural areas, internet service isn’t available at all because of the high costs of installation.

“We’ll make sure every single American has access to high-quality, affordable, high speed internet,” Mr. Biden said in a speech on Wednesday. “And when I say affordable, I mean it. Americans pay too much for internet. We will drive down the price for families who have service now.”

Longtime advocates of universal broadband say the plan, which requires congressional approval, may finally come close to fixing the digital divide, a stubborn problem first identified and named by regulators during the Clinton administration. The plight of unconnected students during the pandemic added urgency.

“This is a vision document that says every American needs access and should have access to affordable broadband,” said Blair Levin, who directed the 2010 National Broadband Plan at the Federal Communications Commission. “And I haven’t heard that before from a White House to date.”

Some advocates for expanded broadband access cautioned that Mr. Biden’s plan might not entirely solve the divide between the digital haves and have-nots.

The plan promises to give priority to municipal and nonprofit broadband providers but would still rely on private companies to install cables and erect cell towers to far reaches of the country. One concern is that the companies won’t consider the effort worth their time, even with all the money earmarked for those projects. During the electrification boom of the 1920s, private providers were reluctant to install poles and string lines hundreds of miles into sparsely populated areas.

Taxpayers who received unemployment benefits last year — but who filed their federal tax returns before a new tax break became available — could receive an automatic refund as early as May, the Internal Revenue Service said on Wednesday.

The latest pandemic relief legislation — signed into law on March 11, in the thick of tax season — made the first $10,200 of unemployment benefits tax-free in 2020 for people with modified adjusted incomes of less than $150,000. (Married taxpayers filing jointly can exclude up to $20,400.)

But some Americans had already filed their tax returns by March and have been waiting for official agency guidance. Millions of U.S. workers filed for unemployment last year, but the I.R.S. said it was still determining how many workers affected by the tax change had already filed their tax returns.

On Wednesday, the I.R.S. confirmed that it would automatically recalculate the correct amount of benefits subject to taxation — and any overpayment will be refunded or applied to any other outstanding taxes owed. The first refunds are expected to be issued in May and will continue into the summer.

The I.R.S. said it would begin processing the simpler returns first, or those eligible for up to $10,200 in excluded benefits, and then would turn to returns for joint filers and others with more complex returns.

There is no need for those affected to file an amended return unless the calculations make the taxpayer newly eligible for additional federal credits and deductions not already included on the original tax return, the agency said. Those taxpayers may want to review their state tax returns as well, the I.R.S. said.

People who still haven’t filed and expect to do so electronically can simply answer the questions asked by their online tax preparer, which will factor in the new tax break when they file. The agency provided an updated worksheet and additional guidance in March for taxpayers that prefer paper.

Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets, demonstrated above in 2017, will equip soldiers with night vision, thermal vision and audio communication.Credit…Elaine Thompson/Associated Press

Microsoft said Wednesday that it would begin producing more than 120,000 augmented reality headsets for Army soldiers under a contract that could be worth up to $21.9 billion.

The HoloLens headsets use a technology called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, which will equip soldiers wearing them with night vision, thermal vision and audio communication. The devices also have sensors that help soldiers target opponents in battle.

The deal is likely to create waves inside Microsoft, where some employees have objected to working with the Pentagon. Employees at other big tech companies, like Google, have also rejected what they say is the weaponization of their technology.

But Microsoft has long courted Defense Department work, including a $10 billion contract to build a cloud-computing system. Amazon had been seen as a front-runner to win the contract, but the Defense Department chose Microsoft.

Amazon claimed that President Donald J. Trump had interfered in the process because of his feud with Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive and the owner of The Washington Post. A legal fight over the contract is still active.

Soldiers have tested the Microsoft headsets for two years, the company said. The Army said the devices would be used in combat and training.

Microsoft said its testing of the headsets had helped the Defense Department’s “efforts to modernize the U.S. military by taking advantage of advanced technology and new innovations not available to military.”

The devices will “provide the improved situational awareness, target engagement and informed decision-making necessary” to overcome current and future adversaries, the Army said in a news release.

In 2018, Microsoft won a $480 million bid to make prototypes of the headsets. The Army said Wednesday that the new contract to produce them on a larger scale was for five years, with the option to add up to five more years.

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Business

As we speak’s Enterprise Information: Reside Updates on United Airways and Unemployment Claims

An outdoor seating area at a Bronx restaurant. The hospitality industry has been hit especially hard by job losses during the pandemic.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Michael Young for The New York Times

While vaccination efforts have gathered speed and restrictions on activities have receded in many states, the job market is showing signs of life.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits fell last week to 657,000, a decrease of 100,000 from the previous week, the Labor Department reported Thursday. It was the lowest weekly level of initial state claims since the pandemic upended the economy a year ago.

On a seasonally adjusted basis, new state claims totaled 684,000.

In addition, there were 242,000 new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program covering freelancers, part-timers and others who do not routinely qualify for state benefits, a decrease of 43,000.

Unemployment claims have been at historically high levels for the past year, partly because some workers have been laid off more than once. Much of the drop last week was accounted for by a decline in new claims in Ohio and Illinois, but economists said the overall trend was encouraging.

“This is definitely a positive signal and a move in the right direction,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist for High Frequency Economics. “We would expect to see further improvements as vaccines roll out and restrictions are lifted.”

Between the state and federal programs, the total number of new jobless claims was just under 900,000 after being stuck above one million a week.

Although the pace of vaccinations, as well as passage of a $1.9 trillion relief package this month, has lifted economists’ expectations for growth, the labor market has lagged behind other measures of recovery.

Still, the easing of restrictions on indoor dining areas, health clubs, movie theaters and other gathering places offers hope for the millions of workers who were let go in the last 12 months. And the $1,400 checks going to most Americans as part of the relief bill should help spending perk up in the weeks ahead.

Diane Swonk, chief economist at the accounting firm Grant Thornton, said she hoped for consistent employment gains but her optimism was tempered by concern about the longer-term displacement of workers by the pandemic.

“The numbers are encouraging, but no one is jumping the gun and hiring up for what looks to be a boom this spring and summer,” she said. “There is a reluctance to get ahead of activity.”

“We’ve passed the point where you can just flip a switch and the lights come back on,” she added. “We need to see a sustained increase in hiring, which I think we will see, but the concern is that it won’t be so robust. It takes longer to ramp up than it does to shut down.”

Most of United’s new flights will connect cities in the Midwest to tourist destinations.Credit…Sebastian Hidalgo for The New York Times

United Airlines plans to add more than two dozen new flights starting Memorial Day weekend, the latest sign that demand for leisure travel is picking up as the national vaccination rate moves higher.

Most of the new flights will connect cities in the Midwest to tourist destinations, such as Charleston, Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach in South Carolina; Portland, Maine; Savannah, Ga.; and Pensacola, Fla. United also said it planned to offer more flights to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and South America in May than it did during the same month in 2019.

The airline has seen ticket sales rise in recent weeks, according to Ankit Gupta, United’s vice president of domestic network planning and scheduling. Customers are booking tickets further out, too, he said, suggesting growing confidence in travel.

“Over the past 12 months, this is the first time we are really feeling more bullish,” Mr. Gupta said.

Airports have been consistently busier in recent weeks than at any point since the coronavirus pandemic brought travel to a standstill a year ago. Well over one million people were screened at airport security checkpoints each day over the past two weeks, according to the Transportation Security Administration, although the number of screenings is down more than 40 percent compared with the same period in 2019.

Most of the new United flights will be offered between Memorial Day weekend and Labor Day weekend aboard the airline’s regional jets, which have 50 seats. The airline said it would also add new flights between Houston and Kalispell, Mont.; Washington and Bozeman, Mont.; Chicago and Nantucket, Mass.; and Orange County, Calif., and Honolulu.

All told, United said it planned to operate about 58 percent as many domestic flights this May as it did in May 2019 and 46 percent as many international flights. Most of the demand for international travel has been focused on warm beach destinations that have less-stringent travel restrictions.

“That is one of the strongest demand regions in the world right now,” Mr. Gupta said. “A lot of the leisure traffic has sort of shifted to those places and it’s actually seen a boom in bookings.”

Delta Air Lines issued a similar update last week, announcing more than 20 nonstop summer flights to mountain, beach and vacation destinations. Both airlines have said in recent weeks that they have made substantial progress toward reducing how much money they are losing every day.

“Institutions that focus on diversity and do it well are the successful institutions in our society,” said Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair.Credit…Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said on Thursday that the central bank was trying to make its economic employee base more racially diverse and he was not satisfied with its progress toward that goal so far.

“It’s very frustrating, because we have had for many years a strong focus on recruiting a more diverse cadre of economists,” Mr. Powell said while speaking on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” after being asked about a New York Times story on the Fed’s lack of Black economists. “We’re not at all satisfied with the results.”

Only two of the 417 economists, or 0.5 percent, at the Fed’s board in Washington were Black, according to data the Fed provided to The Times earlier this year. By comparison, Black people make up 13 percent of the country’s population and 3 to 4 percent of the U.S. citizens and permanent residents who graduate as Ph.D. economists each year.

Across the entire Fed system — including the Board of Governors and the 12 regional banks — 1.3 percent of economists identified as Black. The Fed has been making efforts to hire more broadly, Mr. Powell said, including by working with historically Black colleges.

“It’s a very high priority,” Mr. Powell said of hiring more diversely. “Institutions that focus on diversity and do it well are the successful institutions in our society.”

The Fed chair was also asked about how he would rate the central bank’s sweeping efforts to rescue the economy as markets melted down at the start of the coronavirus outbreak last year. In addition to cutting its policy interest rate to near zero and rolling out an enormous bond-buying program, the Fed set up a series of emergency lending programs to funnel credit to the economy.

Rolled out over a frantic few weeks, the programs included ones that the Fed had never tried before to backstop corporate bond and private company loan markets.

“I liken it to Dunkirk,” Mr. Powell said, referring to the rapid evacuation of British and Allied forces from France in World War II. “Just get in the boats and go.”

Despite the speed of the decision-making, Mr. Powell said that he looked back on the results as positive.

“Overall, it was a very successful program,” he said. “It served its purpose in staving off what could have been far worse outcomes.”

Esther George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said she expected inflation to “firm,” given time.Credit…Ann Saphir/Reuters

Esther George, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, says that although the outlook for growth has improved as vaccinations increase and the government rolls out relief packages, the path of the pandemic remains a major question hanging over the U.S. and global economies.

“We’re not out of this yet,” Ms. George said in an interview on Wednesday. “It’s hard to know what the dynamics will be on the other side.”

Ms. George said she was focused on labor force participation as a sign of the job market’s strength more than the headline unemployment rate, which has fallen to 6.2 percent from a 14.8 percent peak but misses many people who aren’t looking for new jobs after losing theirs during the pandemic. Participation, the share of people working or looking, remains a hefty two percentage points below its prepandemic levels.

“That might be the thing I really watch in the coming months,” she said.

Ms. George expects inflation to “firm,” but that the process is likely to take a while, she said, and it is “too soon to say” whether it will end with a more meaningful rise. Some prominent economists have begun to warn that prices, which have been low for decades, could rise rapidly as the government spends big and the Fed keeps rates at rock bottom to support the economic recovery.

“Wages are a very telling factor in a story about inflation,” Ms. George said.

Many economists look for faster growth in compensation as a signal that inflation is sustainable, not just driven by short-lived supply constraints or temporary quirks in the data.

Ms. George’s colleagues, including Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, have been clear that they expect prices to move higher this year but will not necessarily see that as an achievement of their inflation goal. The Fed redefined its target last year and now aims for 2 percent annual price gains, on average, over time.

Ms. George did not venture a guess of when the Fed will hit its three criteria for raising interest rates: full employment, 2 percent realized price gains and the expectation of higher inflation for some time. Some Fed officials expect to raise rates next year or in 2023, but most of them expect the initial increase to come even later.

Dan Gilbert, the chief executive of Quicken Loans, which has been based in Detroit since 2010.Credit…Tony Dejak/Associated Press

Dan Gilbert, the Quicken Loans founder, has spent more than a decade putting billions into downtown Detroit. Now he’s broadening his scope.

The Gilbert Family Foundation and the Rocket Community Fund, the philanthropic arm of Quicken Loans’ Rocket Mortgage company, announced on Thursday a $500 million investment in Metro Detroit, to be spent over the next 10 years. The first $15 million will be put toward paying off property tax debt of low-income homeowners who qualified for Detroit’s Pay As You Stay initiative.

Quicken Loans has been based in Detroit since 2010, and Mr. Gilbert and his real estate firm, Bedrock, have spent billions buying and redeveloping properties there. Those efforts have been praised for revitalizing a downtown area of roughly seven square miles, but also criticized by some who contend they did not do enough to help those who live in the rest of the city.

“We feel like we’ve made Detroit into a tech boomtown,” said Mr. Gilbert. But he acknowledged that some may have felt left behind. “This can bridge that,” he said.

Mr. Gilbert added that his focus outside of Detroit’s city center stems from his work on President Barack Obama’s Blight Removal Task Force in 2014 as the city was emerging from bankruptcy. “Property taxes was the No. 1 issue that was causing the blight foreclosures,” he said.

Detroit’s housing crisis dates to “racial covenants” in the 1920s. In the mid-2000s, the city became a center of risky lending that defined the financial crisis, with subprime lending accounting for three-fourths of the mortgages in the city. (Quicken Loans settled a lawsuit with the Justice Department for its own lending practices during that time, but admitted no wrongdoing.)

The economic crisis that followed toppled a city already grappling with a dwindling population and shrinking revenue. Those who paid for the recovery were largely low-income housing owners — in many cases Black — whom the city was also accused of overtaxing. Poverty rates ascended and city services deteriorated as a result.

The investment announced on Thursday is an effort to address the lingering effects of the crisis. Twenty thousand families qualify for the tax-relief program, said Mr. Gilbert’s wife, Jennifer, who founded the Gilbert Family Foundation with her husband.

“By preserving that wealth, we also preserve opportunities for intergenerational wealth transfer,” she said. “The stability of the home allows for people to then focus on other economic opportunities that allow them to thrive.”

After the first $15 million of the initiative is spent paying back taxes of low-income homeowners, the remaining funds will be focused on, among other things, home repair and narrowing the digital divide.

The community will be vital for input, including those who qualify for the initial tax relief. “We can learn a lot about where we want to invest next and how best we can positively impact them and their lives,” Ms. Gilbert said.

A Nike store in Beijing on Thursday. Nike shares fell in premarket trading after it was criticized on Chinese social media over a statement it made about reports of forced labor in Xinjiang.Credit…Greg Baker/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Stocks on Wall Street dropped on Thursday even as the latest weekly data showed that state unemployment claims fell to the lowest level since the start of the pandemic.

The S&P 500 index and Nasdaq composite both fell less than half a percent in early trading.

Stock trading has grown choppy lately as investors weigh news of rising Covid-19 cases and new lockdowns, or the rollback of efforts to reopen economies, against mounting signs of economic recovery as more people are vaccinated and the effects of the $1.9 trillion stimulus package emerge.

On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that initial claims for unemployment benefits fell last week to 657,000, a decrease of 100,000 from the previous week. On a seasonally adjusted basis, new state claims totaled 684,000.

As Europe grapples with an emerging third wave of the pandemic, Germany has canceled a strict five-day lockdown that was set to start at the beginning of April. Chancellor Angela Merkel said she took “ultimate responsibility” for the reversal, which came after a large backlash to the plan, even from within her own party, and anger from retailers and restaurants.

“In the near term, this avoids the negative economic consequences of a lockdown,” Paul Donovan, an economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, wrote in a note. But over a longer a period of time, markets will question whether this will just delay Germany’s ability to restrain the virus and slow down the recovery, he added.

European stocks were lower Thursday. The Stoxx Europe 600 index was down 0.8 percent and the FTSE 100 in Britain fell 1 percent.

Oil prices dropped. Futures of Brent crude, the European benchmark, fell 1.5 percent to $63.45 a barrel and futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, fell 1.8 percent to about $60 a barrel.

On Wednesday, oil prices jumped more than 5 percent after a container ship got stuck in the Suez Canal, blocking one of the world’s key shipping routes, which is also an important artery for the flow of oil. On Thursday, efforts to dislodge the ship were ongoing as some 150 other ships were waiting on either side.

The company trying to move the ship warned it could take weeks. Shipping has already been heavily disrupted by the pandemic, sending freight prices soaring.

  • Nike shares dropped more than 3 percent in early trading, and H&M shares fell close to 4 percent in Stockholm after Chinese social media users called for a boycott of the companies. The two fashion retailers published statements expressing concern over reports of forced labor in Xinjiang. Nike’s statement said the company didn’t source cotton from the region, but the online attacks have called it a boycott of the region’s cotton farmers.

  • Yields on 10-year Treasury notes fell to about 1.6 percent.

“We are here to help our small businesses, and that is why I’m proud to more than triple the amount of funding they can access,” said Isabella Casillas Guzman, the Small Business Administration’s administrator.Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

Companies harmed by the coronavirus pandemic can soon borrow up to $500,000 through the Small Business Administration’s emergency lending program, raising a cap that has frustrated many applicants.

“The pandemic has lasted longer than expected,” Isabella Casillas Guzman, the agency’s administrator, said on Wednesday. “We are here to help our small businesses, and that is why I’m proud to more than triple the amount of funding they can access.”

The change to the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program — known as EIDL and pronounced as idle — will take effect the week of April 6. Those who have already received loans but might now qualify for more money will be contacted and offered the opportunity to apply for an increase, the agency said.

The Small Business Administration has approved $200 billion in disaster loans to 3.8 million borrowers since the program began last year. Unlike the forgivable loans made through the larger and more prominent Paycheck Protection Program, the disaster loans must be paid back. But they carry a low interest rate and a long repayment term.

Normally, the decades-old disaster program makes loans of up to $2 million, and in the early days of the pandemic, the agency gave some applicants as much as $900,000. But it soon capped loans at $150,000 because it feared exhausting the available funding. That limit — which the agency did not tell borrowers about for months — angered applicants who needed more capital to keep their struggling ventures alive.

The agency has $270 billion left to lend through the pandemic relief program, James Rivera, the head of the agency’s Office of Disaster Assistance, told senators at a hearing on Wednesday.

  • Tribune Publishing’s board recommended that shareholders approve a purchase offer from the hedge fund Alden Global Capital over a higher bid from a Maryland hotel executive, according to a securities filing Tuesday. Alden, Tribune’s largest shareholder, agreed last month to buy the rest of the company at $17.25 per share and take it private in a deal that would value the company at $630 million. Last week, Stewart W. Bainum Jr., a hotel magnate, made an $18.50 per share offer for the whole company.

Jane Fraser in 2019. “The blurring of lines between home and work and the relentlessness of the pandemic workday have taken a toll on our well-being,” she told Citigroup employees.Credit…Erin Scott/Reuters

Complaints of “Zoom fatigue” have emerged across industries and classrooms in the past year, as people confined to working from home faced schedules packed with virtual meetings and often followed up by long video catch-ups with friends, reports Anna Schaverien of The New York Times.

But Citigroup, one of the world’s largest banks, is trying to start a new end-of-week tradition meant to combat that fatigue: Zoom-free Fridays.

The bank’s new chief executive, Jane Fraser, announced the plan in a memo sent to employees on Monday. Recognizing that workers have spent inordinate amounts of the past 12 months staring at video calls, Citi is encouraging its employees to take a step back from Zoom and other videoconferencing platforms for one day a week, she said.

“The blurring of lines between home and work and the relentlessness of the pandemic workday have taken a toll on our well-being,” Ms. Fraser wrote in the memo, which was seen by The New York Times.

No one at the company would have to turn their video on for any internal meetings on Fridays, she said. External meetings would not be affected.

The bank outlined other steps to restore some semblance of work-life balance. It recommended employees stop scheduling calls outside of traditional working hours and pledged that when employees can return to offices, a majority of its workers would be given the option to work from home up to two days a week.

Categories
Business

Jobless Claims and Different Enterprise Information: Stay Updates

A restaurant in Seattle this month. The economy, still suffering from the pandemic, is showing signs of growth as more and more people are being vaccinated.

Here’s what you need to know:

Recognition…Ruth Fremson / The New York Times

The surge in jobless claims last March was one of the first clear warnings of the havoc the pandemic has wreaked in the American economy.

A year later this Klaxon is still booming.

Labor ministry data on Thursday morning is expected to show that more than 700,000 people first filed for state unemployment benefits last week. Hundreds of thousands more have likely applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal emergency program that covers freelancers, the self-employed, and others who are not entitled to benefits during normal times.

Last week was the 52nd straight with increased submissions. In a week last March, the number of applications increased tenfold, from less than 300,000 to around three million. They topped six million a week later when businesses across the country shut down.

The numbers have fallen significantly since then, but thanks to at least some measures they remain higher than in any previous recession. And progress has stalled: the first weekly claims under regular programs and emergency programs combined have been just over a million since last fall.

“It’s going a little bit up, it’s going down, but we really haven’t seen much progress,” said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist for Indeed careers site. “After a year I ask myself: What does it take to fix the size problem? How is this going to end? “

Most forecasters expect the labor market recovery to accelerate in the coming months as warmer weather and rising vaccination rates allow more businesses to reopen and new state aid encourages Americans to go out and spend. Federal Reserve policymakers said Wednesday they expected the unemployment rate to fall to 4.5 percent by the end of the year, a marked improvement from the 5 percent they forecast three months ago.

Ford, whose main campus is in Dearborn, Michigan, will switch to a model that will allow some employees to work from home at times.Recognition…Rebecca Cook / Reuters

Many Ford Motor employees will have to continue working remotely for at least some time after the pandemic ends.

The company announced on Wednesday that it would move to a “flexible hybrid work model” that would allow workers to stay at home to work focused and come to the office for collaboration-based activities like team building exercises.

In the United States, Ford currently has more than 30,000 employees working remotely due to the pandemic. The new system will go into effect in July when the company, which has its main campus in Dearborn, Michigan, is expected to gradually bring more employees back to the office, it said.

“Any non-location-based employee, starting with our executive team, will participate in the hybrid approach,” wrote Kiersten Robinson, the company’s chief people officer, in a handbook distributed to employees. “While we recognize that this requires different skills and resources, we see it as a great accelerator and competitive advantage for the company. This enables us to be agile and nimble and to realize the full potential of our team. “

Ford is the latest to announce that remote working will continue even after the pandemic ends.

In February, San Francisco-based Salesforce announced that the majority of the global workforce would no longer need to return to the office after the pandemic ended, and adopted a Work From Anywhere plan that would give employees flexibility in how, when, and how How offers where they work. Target has also announced it will switch to a partially removed model and lose some of its office space.

The Commerce Department said Wednesday it had issued subpoenas to several Chinese companies asking them to provide the government with more information about their use and transfer of American data to ensure confidential information is not leaked to China.

The department has not clarified which Chinese companies are affected.

“With the issuance of subpoenas today, we are taking an important step in collecting information that will enable us to take possible measures that will best protect the security of American companies, American workers, and the national security of the United States,” said Gina Raimondo, Trade Secretary. said in a statement.

“The government is determined to take a state-wide approach to ensuring that untrustworthy companies cannot misuse and abuse data and to ensure that US technology does not support the malicious activities of China or other actors,” she said.

The subpoenas are part of a review of company activities related to an information and communications technology and services industry executive order issued by the Trump administration.

The order would give the Department of Commerce extensive powers to conduct police transactions by companies in the industry that are owned by foreign nations and pose a risk to US national security. The measure, which was first adopted in May 2019, has been criticized for its vague wording and the fact that it leaves the Secretary of Commerce with so much discretion.

Wages in establishments that have successfully avoided union formation tended to be significantly higher than typical wages in their areas. At Amazon's Bessemer, Ala. Facility, workers earn nearly $ 3 less than the median income in the area.Recognition…Bob Miller for the New York Times

The latest figure for the median wage in the greater Birmingham, Alabama area was nearly $ 3 higher than Amazon’s wages in its Bessemer warehouse, although Amazon advertises that most ordinary workers there make about $ 15.50 an hour .

It is common for employers facing a union vote to stress the generosity of their wages and suggest that workers could be worse off if they unionized, reports Noam Scheiber for the New York Times.

The catch is that wages in establishments that have successfully avoided unionisation tend to be significantly higher than typical wages in their areas, which makes workers feel that they have something valuable to lose.

  • Seasoned production workers earned $ 23.50 an hour at a Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2019 when they were considering union formation.

  • The comparable figure was $ 23 at Boeing’s South Carolina facility when workers were voting on a union.

  • At the Nissan plant in Mississippi, the number at the vote there was also $ 26 in 2017.

The union lost in all three cases.

In contrast, unions have been successful when companies have kept wages low. In the first half of the 2010s, workers at several auto parts suppliers in Alabama and elsewhere in the south were unionized, often citing low wages and benefits as a nuisance.

In 2015, employees of the Commercial Vehicle Group in Piedmont, Ala., Which makes seats for trucks, voted, roughly two-to-one, to join the United Automobile Workers union. Workers at the plant complained about wages that started at $ 9.70 an hour for contract workers and started at $ 15.80 for full-time workers.

“Workers always say this: it’s about respect, appreciation,” said Gary Casteel, the former UAW second-rate officer who oversaw much of the organization in the south. “That’s not the case. It’s about the money. Everyone wants to get paid more.”

  • The Internal Revenue Service will give Americans until May 17 to file their taxes, the agency said on Wednesday. The IRS stressed that the additional time only applies to federal returns and not to state returns. Therefore, taxpayers should check with their state tax authorities about changes to the deadlines. This also does not apply to estimated tax payments that are due on April 15th and are still due on that day.

  • The latest Federal Reserve projections showed that central bank policymakers do not expect interest rates to rise until at least 2023. The Fed is also buying $ 120 billion a month in bonds – $ 80 billion worth of government bonds plus $ 40 billion worth of mortgage-backed securities in debt. Fed chairman Jerome Powell announced on Wednesday that the Fed was unwilling to even talk about when to cut back on that support. “We will look ahead carefully,” he said. “When we see that we are on the right track” then “we will say it, and we will say it so long before any decision to actually rejuvenate” is made. “

Categories
Business

Jobless Claims Drop, Fueling Optimism in an Financial Rebound: Reside Updates

Diners at a Minneapolis restaurant. Business restrictions across the country have begun to lift and vaccinations have picked up, fueling hopes of an economic resurgence.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Liam Doyle for The New York Times

New claims for unemployment dropped last week, the government reported on Thursday, fueling renewed optimism in the staying power of the economic rebound.

A total of 709,000 workers filed first-time claims for state unemployment benefits in the week that ended March 6, 47,000 lower than the week before, the Labor Department said. In addition, there were 478,000 new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program covering freelancers, part-timers and others who do not routinely qualify for state benefits, an increase of 42,000.

Neither figure is seasonally adjusted. On a seasonally adjusted basis, new state claims totaled 712,000.

New claims for state unemployment benefits had been drifting lower in recent weeks, as restrictions across the country have begun to lift — a trend that many economists expect will continue.

“The pieces are falling into place for a more substantial improvement in the labor market,” said Sarah House, a senior economist at Wells Fargo.

The Labor Department reported last week that employers added 379,000 jobs in February, an unexpectedly robust number that reinforced confidence in the strength of the economic recovery roughly one year into the pandemic-induced downturn. The gains came largely in the hard-hit leisure and hospitality industries.

Although initial jobless claims have fallen significantly since last spring, the economy has a long way to go until it reaches pre-pandemic levels. All told, there are about 9.5 million fewer jobs than there were a year ago. More than four million people have dropped out of the labor force, a group not included in the most widely cited unemployment rate.

“We’re still not yet at the phase of the recovery where we’re seeing the floodgates open up,” said Daniel Zhao, senior economist with the career site Glassdoor. “I don’t think it’s quite fair to call what we’ve done so far ‘reopening’ because there’s still a lot of people who are out of work and a lot of businesses that are closed.”

But as vaccination rates climb, the weather warms up and more government help arrives, via President Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief plan, many economists expect a vibrant economic resurgence.

“We’re seeing a huge pickup in hiring,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist with the employment site ZipRecruiter. “I think for many employers, it’s becoming real, and for many job seekers it is as well.”

A tram near the euro sculpture in Frankfurt, Germany. The European Central Bank said it would ramp up its purchases of bonds in the coming months.Credit…Michael Probst/Associated Press

The European Central Bank said Thursday it would step up its purchases of government and corporate bonds in the months to come in an effort to make sure that credit in the eurozone remained cheap.

The bank’s Governing Council said that it would not raise the total size of the purchases above the amount already planned, but it would buy bonds “at a significantly higher pace than during the first months of this year.”

The bank had earlier allocated 1.85 billion euros, or $2.2 billion, to fight the effects of the pandemic and keep borrowing costs low. That sum remains unchanged, but the bank will now spend the money at a faster pace.

The action announced on Thursday sends a strong signal to financial markets, which have been testing the central bank’s commitment to keep lending costs low in the eurozone while governments, corporations and individuals struggle through the pandemic.

Interest rates have been rising because investors, worried that inflation could pick up as economies around the world recover, have been less willing to buy bonds at the same exceptionally low rates as before.

Soon after the announcement, yields on 10-year German government bonds fell four basis points, from about minus 0.32 percent to minus 0.36 percent. That is still higher than earlier this year, when they were minus 0.6 percent.

Christine Lagarde, the bank’s president, promised in January to maintain favorable lending conditions. Easy credit, she said, “will support consumer spending, it will support investment spending, and ultimately it will help achieve our mandate of price stability.”

Bond yields feed into the broader economy because they set a benchmark for the rates that businesses pay for commercial loans and that individuals pay for mortgages and car loans.

“Yields in real or nominal terms were never lower than they are today before mid-2019,” Carl Weinberg, chief economist at High Frequency Economics in Stony Field, N.Y., said in a note ahead of Thursday’s decision. “By any conceivable metric, interest rates are indeed supporting bank lending and economic recovery, and that will continue to be the case for a while.”

Senator Amy Klobuchar is the chairwoman of the Senate antitrust subcommittee, which will examine modernizing century-old antitrust laws.Credit…Pool photo by Greg Nash

Congress will take up antitrust issues in full force this week, holding the first in a series of hearings about the power of Big Tech and corporate concentration across the economy.

At 10 a.m. on Thursday, the Senate antitrust subcommittee will examine modernizing century-old antitrust laws. Senator Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat and chairwoman of the subcommittee, is expected to start with a broad survey of economic problems. The committee has called witnesses from academia, a corporate law firm and nonprofit think tanks.

“I want to start big and talk about consolidation across so many industries,” Ms. Klobuchar said in an interview. She said she also planned to outline specific problems, including the behavior of tech companies like Google and Facebook, which have gobbled up competition and have also threatened to leave Australia because of regulations that would force them to pay publishers more for their content.

“Tech competition disrupts things and we don’t want less disruption, we want more disruption and disrupters,” Ms. Klobuchar said.

On Friday, the House antitrust subcommittee will hold a hearing on how online platforms have harmed journalism and newsrooms. Witnesses in that hearing will include leading lobbyists for the broadcast and newspaper industries as well as Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft.

Representative David Cicilline, the Democratic chairman of the committee, and Representative Ken Buck, the Republican ranking member, joined numerous other lawmakers on Wednesday in introducing a bill called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. The bill would allow small news organizations to band together to collectively bargain for fees from online platforms that host their news. A similar law in Australia recently set off a battle between the Australian government and Google and Facebook.

Mr. Smith of Microsoft has recently come to support publishers who want to negotiate as a group. He said recently that the spate of disinformation around the U.S. election and subsequent Capitol riots highlighted the importance of preserving news organizations — particularly local news — while misinformation is spread via online platforms like Facebook and Google.

A prototype of General Electric’s Haliade-X wind turbine in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Its blades will be manufactured in England, the company said.Credit…Ilvy Njiokiktjien for The New York Times

General Electric said it planned to build the football-field-long blades for its new offshore wind turbines at a plant in northeastern England.

The new factory will be in the Teesside region, an area that was recently named by the British government as a so-called freeport, with tax benefits and other business incentives. The plant will open in 2023 and create 750 jobs, according to a statement from G.E. late Wednesday.

Ben Houchen, the Tees Valley mayor, is working to rejuvenate the region by attracting investment in clean energy, including offshore wind power and a carbon-capture development. The new plant will produce blades for a large wind farm called Dogger Bank offshore in the North Sea.

Although Britain has become the world’s largest market for offshore wind turbines, some critics point out that most of the turbines are manufactured elsewhere, including Denmark and Germany. Blade factories are eagerly sought by local authorities, because they employ large numbers of people.

The blades, which will be about 350 feet long, will go on top of G.E.’s Haliade-X turbines, a prototype of which is being tested in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The new turbine has already set off a race among manufacturers to build bigger machines.

Adam Aron, AMC’s chief, said the distribution of vaccines would be the company’s “real salvation.”Credit…Cristobal Herrera-Ulashkevich/EPA, via Shutterstock

Adam Aron, the chief executive and president of AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theater chain, called the past year “the most challenging market conditions in the 100-year history of the company,” when presenting year-end earnings on Wednesday that included the loss of $4.6 billion.

Yet Mr. Aron struck an optimistic note about his company’s outlook for the year ahead based on the reduction in coronavirus cases, the reopening of theaters and the slate of blockbuster movies set to arrive beginning in May. He pointed specifically to Disney’s “Black Widow,” Universal’s “F9” and Paramount’s “Top Gun: Maverick.”

He added that “the real salvation” of AMC would be the jump in vaccinations both domestically and around the world.

“The most important person in the entire movie business,” Mr. Aron said, is not employed by “a studio nor any movie theater circuit,” but is Albert Bourla, the chief executive of Pfizer.

“He and his colleagues and those of Moderna and J&J have given us our newfound fortitude,” he added.

AMC lost $946 million in the quarter ending Dec. 31, even as theaters started to open back up after being closed for months.

At year’s end, 78 percent of the company’s U.S. operations had reopened with limited seating capacity. Internationally, 90 percent of the company’s theaters resumed operating in October, only to have to close again in the fourth quarter owing to a resurgence of the virus.

AMC said it shut down 60 low-performing theaters in 2020: 48 in the United States and 12 internationally. It also spent the year renegotiating its terms with studios, specifically Universal and Warner Bros., as they sent more films to their streaming platforms with theaters closed.

“Over the past several years, AMC has indicated that it is willing to be the most experimental movie circuit around with respect to window strategies,” Mr. Aron said, adding that the deals have to be good for AMC shareholders. “I continue to be optimistic that having been partners for a century, we can adjust our business relationships so they support both streaming and theatrical releases and do so, not at our expense.”

President Biden is expected to sign his $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill on Friday.Credit…Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

Wall Street futures were pointing upward, and global markets were higher, as investors on Thursday were relieved by relatively modest inflation data in the United States and looking forward to the stimulus coming from President Biden’s $1.9 trillion pandemic relief bill, which won final congressional approval on Wednesday.

The enormous piece of spending, one of the largest infusions of federal aid since the Great Depression, will provide another round of direct payments to millions of American, extend federal jobless benefits and provide millions for small businesses, state and local governments and schools. Mr. Biden is expected to sign it Friday.

  • Futures were pointing to a 0.7 percent rise on the S&P 500 when trading begins later in the day, and a 1.8 percent rise on the Nasdaq.

  • European markets were mostly higher, with the Stoxx Europe 600 up 0.2 percent, the Dax in Germany unchanged and the FTSE 100 in Britain 0.3 percent lower. Asian markets ended the day higher, with the Nikkei in Japan up 0.6 percent and the Shanghai Composite in China gaining 2.4 percent.

  • The Labor Department released data on Wednesday that showed inflation remained tame: Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, the Consumer Price Index rose 0.1 percent in February. The news seemed to calm some concerns about an overheating economy, and on Thursday the 10-year Treasury yield was lower.

  • The European Central Bank will conclude a two-day meeting on Thursday with a statement on interest rates and any changes it plans to make in its bond purchasing program. The bank’s president, Christine Lagarde, has said in recent weeks she is carefully watching bond yields creep up, and the bank could announce it is increasing the pace of its purchases in the bond market, a way the bank can keep interest rates lower.

  • Oil futures, which have meandered in recent days, gained a bit. Brent crude, the global benchmark, was up 0.8 percent after briefly touching $69 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate crude, the U.S. benchmark, gained 1.1 percent, at about $65.20 a barrel.

Categories
Politics

Cuomo refuses to resign over sexual harassment claims in New York

Cuomo refuses to resign over sexual harassment claims in New York

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo refused to resign Wednesday despite saying he regrets three women who claim he sexually molested them.

An emotional cuomo also urged the public to on hold as New York Attorney General Letitia James oversees an investigation into allegations made by women, two of whom had previously worked as his aides.

“I now understand that I acted in a way that made people feel uncomfortable,” said the embattled Democrat in his first public comments on the women’s allegations. “It was unintentional.”

“And I really apologize deeply for it,” he said. “I feel terrible about it.”

“I certainly never plan to offend, hurt or hurt anyone,” said Cuomo. “This is the last thing I ever want to do.”

When asked directly whether he would resign midway through his third term, Cuomo said, “I will not resign.”

“I work for the people of New York,” he added. “I’m going to do the job that the people of the state chose me to do.”

In addition to the sexual harassment scandal, Cuomo has received widespread criticism in recent weeks for covering up statistics on Covid deaths in nursing homes and bullying lawmakers and others from the state.

The governor said he would “fully cooperate with the harassment investigation by any attorney or attorneys that James will appoint”. These lawyers have the power to compel witnesses, including Cuomo, to answer their questions.

“I ask New Yorkers to wait for the attorney general’s facts before forming an opinion,” said Cuomo.

The 63-year-old governor was first accused last week by former adjutant Lindsey Boylan of kissing her without her consent and jokingly suggested a game of strip poker on an official flight. Cuomo’s office strongly declined Boylan’s account at the time of posting on Medium.com.

Within days, another former aide, Charlotte Bennett, 25, told the New York Times that Cuomo had asked her questions last year, including whether she “had ever been with an older man,” whether she was in their relationships being monogamous and other personal questions that made her uncomfortable.

Bennett said it was clear that Cuomo was seeking a sexual relationship with her.

On Monday, the Times published claims by another woman, Anna Ruch, who said that Cuomo, whom she did not know, put his hand on her bare lower back at a wedding. The governor then told her she was “aggressive” when, according to Ruch, he put his hands around her face.

Ruch, who previously worked in the White House during the Obama administration, said Cuomo then asked if he could kiss her.

A photo of an uncomfortable looking Ruch with Cuomo on his face accompanied this article.

Bennett on Monday beat up Cuomo for his “predatory behavior” and asked other women to come forward if they had similar complaints about his behavior.

Ruch’s report increased the number of people who have urged Cuomo to resign, including New York Democratic MP Kathleen Rice.

On Wednesday, Cuomo spoke to reporters for the first time about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and related developments in New York. Then he turned to the sexual harassment scandal that had plagued him since last week.

“I want New Yorkers to hear from me directly,” he said. “Firstly, I fully support a woman’s right to speak up and I think that should be encouraged in every way.”

After apologizing for making the women uncomfortable, Cuomo said, “I’m embarrassed and it’s not easy to say, but that’s the truth.”

“I want you to know … I’ve never touched anyone inappropriately,” said the governor. “I never knew then that I was making someone feel uncomfortable.”

“And I never plan to offend, hurt, or hurt anyone.”

“I learned an important lesson from an incredibly difficult situation for myself and other people,” said Cuomo.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused someone. I never meant to, and I’ll be better for the experience.”

While interviewing reporters, Cuomo later said, “You can find hundreds of pictures of me kissing people, men, women. It’s my usual and customary way of greeting.”

“By the way, it was my father’s way of greeting people,” he said, referring to his late father, Mario Cuomo, who himself was governor.

Cuomo tried last weekend to see who would investigate Boylan’s and Bennett’s allegations, saying that a former federal judge would do the job.

The governor then sought the state chief magistrate to work with James to oversee the investigation.

Cuomo’s efforts sparked a political backlash, and James explicitly opposed the deal. The governor gave in quickly and his office said James would handle the probe himself.