The pandemic-related shortages pushing consumer prices higher are poised to last longer than economists and policymakers expected, Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said on Friday — adding that while officials still expect the rate of inflation to moderate, the central bank is positioning itself to react if it does not.
Supply chain snarls that have slowed deliveries and swelled prices throughout 2021 are “likely to last longer than previously expected, likely well into next year,” Mr. Powell said at a virtual Bank for International Settlements-South African Reserve Bank conference. The same is true for upward pressure on wages, he said.
In recent months, the measure of inflation that the Fed focuses on has shown prices increasing 4 percent or more from a year earlier. The “most likely case” is still that inflation will move back down toward the central bank’s goal of 2 percent as supply chain kinks clear up and job gains improve, resolving short-term labor shortages and allowing employers to stop bidding up pay, Mr. Powell said.
But he signaled that the Fed was closely watching consumer and business expectations to ensure that people did not begin to anticipate persistently higher prices, something that could prompt them to demand higher wages and lock in longer-lasting inflation. His remarks, arguably his most cautious yet on the burst in inflation, were in line with comments by several of his colleagues in recent days, and came as a gauge of investor price predictions that economic policymakers have been monitoring carefully began to jump.
“The risk is that ongoing high inflation will begin to lead price and wage setters to expect unduly high rates of inflation in the future,” Mr. Powell said. And if inflation seemed likely to stay high, “we would certainly use our tools to preserve price stability, while also taking into account the implications of our maximum employment goal.”
Until recently, signals from the bond market — where inflation is a key consideration — had indicated little worry among investors that price gains from the reopening of the economy would turn into the kind of structural inflation that dominated the economy during the 1970s.
But there are signs that bond investors are beginning to worry that the long-lasting nature of the supply shocks could lead to price gains that last. The pace of price gains that investors expect is still nowhere near as high as it was in the 1970s, but the trend is notable.
“The longer that those issues continue, the less likely that it is that we get a near-term rollover in inflation,” said Michael Pond, a market analyst who specializes in inflation-protected bonds at Barclays.
On Friday, one measure of the bond market’s expectations for average annual inflation over the next five years, known as a “breakeven,” rose to a record high, briefly topping 3 percent. Measures of longer-run inflation expectations also rose to multiyear highs.
That shift in the market’s expectations increases pressure on the Fed during a pandemic reopening period that has already been a challenge. The central bank tries to foster maximum employment and price stability by lowering rates in times of trouble and raising them when the economy needs to be cooled down.
But those two goals are increasingly at odds. Inflation has jumped because consumer demand has surged while production lines and available workers have struggled to keep pace. At the same time, continued waves of coronavirus outbreaks have kept many would-be employees on the sidelines and held back spending on services — everything from manicures to nights out — leaving the labor market’s healing from pandemic lockdowns incomplete.
Given the vast uncertainty about what will happen next, the Fed needs to be ready to adapt, Mr. Powell said. To that end, he noted that the central bank was “on track” to begin a slowdown of its large-scale bond-buying purchases, a process that is expected to be completed by the middle of next year.
The Fed has been buying $120 billion in assets per month, and is prepared to slow those purchases as soon as next month. It is also holding its main interest rate near zero, a policy that helps to keep many types of borrowing cheap and stokes demand in the economy.
By tapering off, and eventually stopping, its bond purchases, the Fed is putting itself in a position where it could raise interest rates to slacken demand and reduce inflation next year if necessary. Fed officials would prefer not to lift rates until the asset purchases ended.
“We’re in the risk-management business, not one of absolute certainty,” Mr. Powell said when asked if he was certain that the Fed had not fallen behind the curve on inflation. “I would say our policy is well positioned to manage a range of plausible outcomes — I do think it’s time to taper, and I don’t think it’s time to raise rates. It would be premature to do so at a time when we are far below the level of jobs we had in 2020.”
Mr. Powell said that he was weighing the incomplete recovery from the pandemic on one hand and inflation pressures on the other, and that striking the right balance was critical.
When it comes to the service sector, “we want to give full time for it to come back before we start restraining demand with interest rate increases,” Mr. Powell said. At the same time, he said, inflation affects people in “groceries, and gas purchases, and things like that — we see that, we know how painful that is.”
A year after Goldman Sachs clawed back or cut compensation from its top bosses over a corruption scandal, it’s paying them multimillion-dollar bonuses to stick around.
David M. Solomon, the bank’s chief executive, will be awarded $30 million at the end of five years if Goldman reaches its stock price targets, Goldman said in a filing made public on Friday. John E. Waldron, the bank’s president and chief operating officer, is eligible for a $20 million bonus under the same terms. The payouts are being given to “ensure leadership continuity” as the firm seeks to grow while competition for talent increases, according to the filing.
A year ago, Goldman announced that it would claw back or cut $174 million in total pay from past and present executives — including Mr. Solomon — after the bank admitted criminal wrongdoing by its Malaysian subsidiary for its role in the looting of 1MDB, the Malaysian government’s sovereign wealth fund.
Mr. Solomon’s pay was cut to $17.5 million in 2020, down from $27.5 million in 2019, while Mr. Waldron’s compensation fell to $18.5 million, from $24.5 million, according to a separate filing in January.
While neither executive was involved in, or aware of, the illicit activity, “the board views the 1MDB matter as an institutional failure,” the company said at the time. All told, Goldman paid billions in penalties and disgorgement in Malaysia, the United States and Hong Kong for its role in the scandal.
WASHINGTON — Google said in an internal document that it had successfully “slowed down” European privacy rules in collaboration with other tech companies, according to a legal filing released on Friday.
Ahead of a 2019 meeting with other major tech companies, Google said in a memo that it had “been successful in slowing down and delaying” the European Union’s ePrivacy Regulation process and had been “working behind the scenes hand in hand with the other companies,” according to the filing.
The new details appeared in an unredacted version of a lawsuit filed by Texas and 11 other states, which argued that Google had abused its dominance over the intricate technology that delivers ads to consumers online. News organizations, including The New York Times, had asked the judge in the case to remove the redactions from the complaint.
The details offer a rare look into how major tech companies have lobbied against a growing array of proposed regulations. In recent years, lawmakers around the world have proposed laws to limit the market power of the major tech companies, restrict their use of consumer data and set new rules for how they can moderate user-generated content.
A Google spokesman said in a statement that just because the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, “says something doesn’t make it true.”
“We’ve been clear about our support for consistent privacy rules around the globe,” the spokesman said.
The lawsuit quoted “a document prepared in advance” of an August 2019 meeting “between the five Big Tech companies — including Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.”
At the time, Google was trying to stop privacy regulations at the American Federal Trade Commission and in congressional legislation, according to the complaint. The European rules have been the subject of difficult negotiations for years.
The company also expressed concerns about the actions of other tech companies engaged in the privacy debate. Google said that it had had trouble getting Facebook to “align on our privacy goals and strategy” and that the social network had “prioritized winning on reputation over its business interest in legislative debates.”
Google also worried that it was being outflanked by Microsoft on privacy issues, according to the lawsuit. In the document prepared for the meeting, the company said Kent Walker, a top Google executive, had said Google should “find alignment” with Microsoft where possible but “should be wary of their activity” and “seek to gain as much intel as possible.”
Erin Griffith (@eringriffith) and Erin Woo (@erinkwoo), two of our tech reporters, are covering the trial of Elizabeth Holmes, who dropped out of Stanford University to create the blood testing start-up Theranos at age 19 and built it to a $9 billion valuation and herself into the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire — only to flame out in disgrace after Theranos’s technology was revealed to have problems.
Follow along here or on Twitter as she is tried on 12 counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The trial is generally held Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays.
Erin Griffith
In the recording, Holmes says Theranos was growing on “cash from operations,” a.k.a. profitably, since 2006. Tolbert testifies he believed the proceeds of the 2013 fund-raise would be used for retail expansion — not R&D or tech development.
Erin Griffith
I forgot to tweet that another juror got dismissed today for cause. Kinda worried I’m bad luck, every time I come back from missing a few days of the trial, another one bites the dust.
Erin Griffith
In a third recording, Holmes describes fund-raising — in 2013 Theranos issued shares at $75 a share, up from 82 cents a share when Hall Group and Chris Lucas’s firm first invested in 2006.
Erin Griffith
In a second recording, we hear Holmes describing the way Theranos disrupts traditional phlebotomy with its finger prick tests. Tolbert testifies that that is why he invested.
Erin Griffith
We’re going until 4 p.m. today but I doubt we get to three let alone four witnesses. Tolbert testifies about the clip we just heard and his impression of what he thought Theranos was actually doing. (Blood testing machines — not a central lab.)
The federal budget deficit reached $2.8 trillion for 2021, the second-highest total on record but an improvement from the prior year as an economy starting to recover from the coronavirus pandemic bolstered tax revenue.
Official figures released on Friday showed that the budget shortfall in the 12 months that ended on Sept. 30 — the government’s fiscal year — was not as severe as the White House projected earlier this year. The Biden administration attributed the improvement to the $1.9 trillion relief package passed by Congress and the rollout of the vaccines, which has accelerated the reopening of the economy.
The budget deficit was down from the record $3.1 trillion that the United States recorded in the 2020 fiscal year, as the pandemic gripped the economy.
This year, tax revenue rose to $4 trillion, as wealthier individuals and corporations paid more in taxes than expected. Government outlays grew to $6.8 trillion, as relief payments, rental assistance money, and funds for states and cities were distributed across the country.
Annual budget deficits previously peaked at around $1.4 trillion in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. They were declining before picking up during the first three years of the Trump administration and then soaring last year as the government pumped out trillions of dollars to support the economy.
The Congressional Budget Office projects that the 2022 deficit will ease to $1.15 trillion and continue to decline over the next few years before rising again later in the decade. But those projections depend on what spending policies lawmakers are able to enact.
The Biden administration is negotiating with lawmakers in Congress over about $2 trillion in additional spending on social and climate initiatives and debating how to pay for those programs.
The Biden administration also faces another deadline in early December to raise or suspend the statutory limit on how much debt the federal government can carry. Republicans and Democrats are already girding for another standoff over how that should be accomplished. Republicans claim that raising the borrowing cap would be the fiscally responsible thing to do, while Democrats note that doing so allows the government to pay bills it already has incurred.
Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said in a statement on Friday that the budget numbers were proof that the economy was recovering and a sign that President Biden’s economic plans are working.
“While the nation’s economic recovery is stronger than those of other wealthy nations, it is still fragile,” Ms. Yellen said.
Ms. Yellen has argued that because interest rates are so low, the United States can afford to take on additional debt to make investments to build and fix infrastructure and protect the environment. She said on Friday that doing so would improve the “long-run fiscal and economic health” of the United States.
A government watchdog said on Friday that the Federal Aviation Administration had failed to provide sufficient oversight of aircraft maintenance by American Airlines.
The inspector general of the Transportation Department said in a report that it had found dozens of examples of the F.A.A. taking American’s explanation for maintenance lapses at face value, accepting flawed analyses and sometimes even closing cases before the airline had addressed problems.
The findings echo criticism the agency has faced since two Boeing 737 Max planes crashed in late 2018 and early 2019, killing a total of 346 people and spawning numerous investigations. In particular, the F.A.A. has been accused of relying too heavily on Boeing and airline employees to carry out some oversight functions that it doesn’t have the resources to fully conduct on its own.
The inspector general found that American inadequately identified the root cause of maintenance lapses in 92 percent out of 185 cases reviewed at random. F.A.A. inspectors are responsible for working with airlines on such investigations to ensure that such problems are accurately identified and investigated to prevent them in the future.
In 50 of those cases, American never identified a root cause of the maintenance lapses. In one instance, for example, the airline never explained why aircraft parts were found on top of a recycling bin without any indication of whether they were usable.
In the remaining 121 cases, American blamed human error, which the F.A.A. itself has said is an insufficient explanation, according to the report. In one case, mechanics overlooked a maintenance step while working on a cabin door and American simply reported that it was a supervisor’s fault for failing to catch it. In another, a mechanic signed off on a series of maintenance steps that weren’t required for a given repair, with American reporting that he provided no explanation for the mistake. The F.A.A. never pushed for more information, the report found.
The agency had discovered some of the issues identified in Friday’s report on its own. “The F.A.A. agrees with many of the recommendations in the report and is taking steps to address them,” it said in a statement.
The F.A.A. said it agreed outright with five of the seven recommendations the inspector general laid out in the report, including improved training for its inspectors and improving processes to avoid closing cases before they have been fully resolved. The agency said it partly agreed with the other two recommendations — that it require airlines to provide written analyses and that it improve its data collection tool to let inspectors carry out more detailed reviews.
In a statement, American said it welcomed the report.
“Nothing is more important than the safety of our customers and team members,” the airline said. “In addition to the F.A.A., we are in constant communication with other regulators and welcome their review and feedback.”
The inspector general started the review in May 2018 at the request of lawmakers on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. The lawmakers also asked the inspector general to look into the agency’s oversight of Allegiant Air, a review that reached a similar conclusion in 2019.
Shares of Snap, the parent company of the social media app Snapchat, tumbled more than 20 percent on Friday, a day after the company released quarterly results that fell below its guidance for the quarter by $3 million.
Revenue for Snap’s most recent quarter was $1.067 billion, a 57 percent increase from the same period last year.
Snap said its business had been affected by recent privacy changes in Apple’s iOS mobile operating system that prevented tracking by some advertisers. The company said that it had expected some disruption from the changes but that the challenges for advertisers had been more severe than expected.
The company said it was building new tooling and measurement solutions for advertisers to adapt to Apple’s privacy changes.
Advertisers were also under pressure from the pandemic and supply chain disruptions, which limited their spending, Snap said.
Shares for other social media companies also fell on Friday, with Facebook sliding more than 5 percent and Twitter dropping nearly 4 percent. Facebook is expected to report its financials on Monday, followed by Twitter on Tuesday.
Snap said its daily active users continued to grow. The company reported 306 million active users in the quarter, a 23 percent increase from the previous year. Snap lost $72 million, in the period, a 64 percent decrease from the previous year.
“We’re now operating at the scale necessary to navigate significant headwinds, including changes to the iOS platform that impact the way advertising is targeted, measured, and optimized, as well as global supply chain issues and labor shortages impacting our partners,” Snap’s chief executive, Evan Spiegel, said in a statement.
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Wall Street retreated from record territory on Friday, led lower by technology stocks, after the Federal Reserve chair signaled that the central bank was prepared to act if inflation persisted longer than expected.
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The S&P 500 fell 0.1 percent. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite tumbled 0.8 percent.
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Technology stocks fell in part after the social network Snap reported on Thursday that its revenue was hurt by recent privacy changes in Apple’s iOS mobile operating system that prevented tracking by some advertisers. Snap dropped as much as 26.7 percent, and shares of the largest social networks were also sharply lower. Facebook shares fell 5.1 percent, and Twitter dropped 4.8 percent.
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Technology stocks are also particularly sensitive to the prospect of higher interest rates, and the decline in the sector picked up pace after Jerome H. Powell, speaking at a conference on Friday, said that the Fed could do more to contain inflation if it needed.
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The Fed is already expected to begin winding down its large-scale bond purchases starting next month, but it is holding its main interest rate at near-zero, a policy that helps to keep many types of borrowing cheap and stokes demand in the economy.
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“We want to give full time for it to come back before we start restraining demand with interest rates,” Mr. Powell said. At the same time, he said, inflation affects people in “groceries, and gas purchases, and things like that — we see that, we know how painful that is.”
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The retreat on Wall Street came a day after the S&P 500 rose to a record in its seventh straight day of gains. Sentiment in the stock market has improved this month as talks among Democrats in Washington over a major spending package have shown progress. Big companies, including Tesla and Netflix, also reported strong earnings for their latest quarter.
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European stock indexes rose, with the Stoxx Europe 600 up 0.5 percent.
HONG KONG — China Evergrande, the troubled property giant that is teetering on the edge of collapse, appears to have bought itself a little more time.
On Friday, the world’s most indebted property developer made an $83.5 million interest payment to bondholders, according to Securities Times, an official newspaper. The outlet, which is backed by People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s official newspaper, didn’t offer further details.
The payment came with just one day left on a 30-day grace period to avoid a default. The company gripped global financial markets a month ago when it skipped a payment to foreign bondholders, raising the prospect that it could leave global investors with billions of dollars in losses and cause ripples within China’s property market, a key component of the country’s economic growth engine.
Evergrande did not respond to a request for comment. Lawyers representing the bondholders declined to comment.
Weighed down by more than $300 billion of debt, the property developer has been trying to sell off parts of its vast empire to raise enough cash to pay off creditors who are circling.
This week, one of those deals — largely seen as a last-ditch lifeline — fell through. The deal would have allowed Evergrande to raise some $2.6 billion in exchange for a stake in its property services company, providing much-needed cash to begin dealing with a long line of creditors looking to get their money back.
After reporting that the deal had failed, Evergrande warned that “in view of the difficulties, challenges and uncertainties,” it faced, it could not guarantee it would “be able to meet its financial obligations.”
Evergrande shares were up more than 4 percent on the Hong Kong stock market on Friday, one day after they plummeted more than 12 percent as the market digested the news of a failed bid. Some of its bonds traded below 25 cents on the dollar.
Until the report from Securities Times on Friday, many market watchers were betting that Evergrande would miss the bond payment, effectively triggering a default.
Evergrande’s financial crisis is testing the resolve of Chinese officials who were once quick to step in to save struggling giants like Evergrande. They have pledged to clean up China Inc.’s mountain of debt and end the property sector’s binge-borrowing habits.
“Anything that smacks of ‘saving Evergrande’ risks creating moral hazard that runs against the anti-leverage campaign,” said Arthur Kroeber, head of research at the economic research firm Gavekal Dragonomics.
The country’s corporate sector has $27 trillion worth of debt, more than any other country in the world, according to the Institute of International Finance. By comparison, that is the total amount of debt held by the United States government.
Yet if the authorities let Evergrande fail, they could hurt some of the estimated more than one million Chinese home buyers who have bought apartments from the company and are waiting for them to be built and delivered. A collapse could also slam construction workers and subcontractors who are waiting to be paid.
Beyond the company itself, the authorities risk sending a chill through China’s property market and beyond, shaking the confidence of households to buy everything from home appliances to cars.
As Evergrande has struggled to sell its properties, many of the nation’s home buyers have been put off from buying property. Evergrande this week reported that its own sales of new apartments dropped by 97 percent over September and part of October compared with the previous year, a period that is typically the peak selling season for Chinese property developers.
Across China, new home prices fell for the first time in more than six years in September compared with the previous month, according to data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics. Evergrande’s financial troubles have already spilled over to other developers, three of which have defaulted on their own debt in recent days.
Even as Evergrande appeared to appease some investors and narrowly avert a default on one bond payment on Friday, it will need to come up with more money to meet deadlines for other debt payments in the coming days and weeks.
“China Evergrande needs access to funding in order for its business to operate,” said Daniel Anderson, a Hong Kong-based partner of the law firm Ropes & Gray. If the company can’t find the money to make future payments, it still risks a default.
“A default would give holders of those defaulted bonds the right to accelerate,” Mr. Anderson said, “which could trigger defaults under other bonds and indebtedness.”
An earlier version of this article misidentified the institute that estimated that China’s corporate sector carries $27 trillion worth of debt. It is the Institute of International Finance, not the International Institute of Finance.
The Federal Reserve outlined new rules on Thursday governing the types of financial securities that policymakers can own and how they can trade them, reports Jeanna Smialek, who covers the Fed for The New York Times.
Senior Fed officials will not be allowed to hold individual stocks or other securities and will instead be limited to purchasing diversified investment vehicles like mutual funds. Trading activity will be limited in general, and during periods of heightened financial market stress the Fed will declare official trading blackouts.
READ MORE about the new rules the Fed is putting in place →
The new policies are a response to an ethics scandal in which two regional reserve bank officials resigned after scrutiny of trades they made in 2020, a year in which the central bank took extraordinary steps to rescue financial markets amid the pandemic.
Robert S. Kaplan traded millions of dollars’ worth of individual stocks while he was head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and Eric S. Rosengren bought and sold securities tied to real estate while running the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.
Those disclosures have caused journalists and academics to re-examine previously reported trades by Fed officials who sit on its board in Washington.
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More than 1,800 sexual assaults occurred during Lyft rides in 2019, the company said on Thursday in its first-ever safety report on sexual and physical assaults, fatal crashes and other serious incidents.
The 1,807 sexual assaults during Lyft rides in 2019, the most recent year for data in the report, were a 64 percent increase from 2017, the company said. But because the number of rides rose even faster, safety improved overall, Lyft said, with the incident rate of sexual assaults declining 19 percent during that period.
Lyft’s safety report had been long awaited in the ride-hailing industry, as the company is facing lawsuits from victims of sexual assaults that occurred during rides. It committed to releasing its sexual assault statistics in 2019, when Uber released a similar report.
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