Evelyn Reynolds

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    Airlines Hoping for More Boeing Jets Could Be Waiting Awhile

    The Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to limit Boeing’s production of 737 Max planes could hurt airlines that are struggling to buy enough new aircraft.Boeing hoped 2024 would be the year it would significantly increase production of its popular Max jets. But less than a month into the year, the company is struggling to reassure airline customers that it will still be able to deliver on its promises.That’s because the Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday that it would limit the plane maker’s output until it was confident in Boeing’s quality control practices. On Jan. 5, a panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 body shortly after takeoff, terrifying passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight and forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing at Portland International Airport in Oregon. Almost immediately, the F.A.A. grounded some Max 9s.Since then, details have emerged about the jet’s production at Boeing’s facility in Renton, Wash., that have intensified scrutiny of the company’s quality control. Boeing workers opened and then reinstalled the panel about a month before the plane was delivered to Alaska Airlines.The directive is another setback for Boeing, which had been planning to increase production of its Max plane series to more than 500 this year, from about 400 last year. It also planned to add another assembly line at a factory in Everett, Wash., a major Boeing production hub north of Seattle.As part of the F.A.A.’s announcement on Wednesday, it also approved inspection and maintenance procedures for the Max 9. Airlines can return the jets to service once they have followed those instructions. United Airlines said on Thursday that it could resume flying some of those planes as soon as Friday.The move is another potential blow to airlines. Even though demand for flights came roaring back after pandemic lockdowns and travel restrictions eased, the airlines have not been able to take full advantage of that demand. The companies have not been able to buy enough planes or hire enough pilots, flight attendants and other workers they need to operate flights. A surge in the cost of jet fuel after Russia invaded Ukraine also hurt profits.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    Taking on Trump, Biden Promotes ‘Infrastructure Decade’ in Wisconsin

    The president made the trip to promote a $1 billion infrastructure project, contrasting his performance with the chaotic “Infrastructure Week” plans of former President Donald J. Trump.Consumer confidence is up. Fears of a recession are abating. The economy is growing. And a corroded bridge in Wisconsin is receiving more funding.It is a wintry mix of positive news for President Biden, who traveled to the shores of a bay near Lake Superior on Thursday to stand at the foot of the Blatnik Bridge, a structure that his administration said would have failed by 2030 without a $1 billion infusion provided by the bipartisan infrastructure law that Mr. Biden championed.The president was there to talk infrastructure and the economy, and to contrast his performance with that of his predecessor and likely challenger in the general election , former President Donald J. Trump.“The economic growth is stronger than we had during the Trump administration,” Mr. Biden, dressed in a casual pullover sweater, said as he addressed Wisconsinites assembled at Earth Rider Brewery in Superior, Wis. “We obviously have more work to do, but we’re making real progress.”As the president spoke, Mr. Trump was taking the stand in a defamation trial in New York, offering a striking split-screen comparison that the Biden campaign has welcomed.Mr. Biden and his advisers believe projects like the Blatnik, taking place in the backyards of Americans living in battleground states like Wisconsin, could be enough to bolster optimism and overcome pervasive skepticism about the state of the economy.In his event, Mr. Biden talked about the $6.1 billion that had been invested in Wisconsin and the $5.7 billion in Minnesota, located just over the bridge, which supports agriculture, shipping and forestry industries in the upper Midwest. The Blatnik, which spans the St. Louis Bay and connects the ports of Superior and Duluth, Minn., had corroded and been clogged with construction and detours.“For decades people talked about replacing this bridge, but it never got done,” Mr. Biden said. “Until today.”Bipartisan law or not, no Republican lawmakers assembled to greet Mr. Biden. (“I’m sorry to say the vast majority voted against it,” Mr. Biden said, a number that includes Rep. Tom Tiffany, a Republican representing the district where the bridge is located.)“The economic growth is stronger than we had during the Trump administration,” Mr. Biden said.Michael A. McCoy for The New York TimesThe Democratic governors of both Wisconsin and Minnesota showed up. “This would not have happened without Biden,” Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin told attendees.Several other Democrats, including Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota and Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, accompanied the president as he observed the bridge and, later, met with people at a taproom next to the brewery. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota sipped a glass of beer as she mingled next to Mr. Biden.Even without no-show Republicans, who are quickly closing ranks around Mr. Trump, there are other headwinds to overcome.Mr. Biden has faced low approval ratings on the economy. And he has been criticized by other Democrats over whether it was smart of him to adopt Bidenomics as a namesake effort to take credit for an economy that Americans have repeatedly signaled they don’t feel excited about.On Thursday, Mr. Biden did not seem to be feeling any qualms. In the brewery, he stood in front of a pole that had letters spelling “Bidenomics,” and assailed Mr. Trump for “hollowed-out communities, closing down factories, leaving Americans behind.”For his part, Mr. Trump has attacked Mr. Biden on just about everything, but has also falsely claimed that low employment numbers under the Biden administration are not real.Elsewhere in the Midwest, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen took rare aim at Mr. Trump during a speech in Chicago.“Our country’s infrastructure has been deteriorating for decades,” Ms. Yellen said on Thursday. “In the Trump administration, the idea of doing anything to fix it was a punchline.”There was truth to her comment. During Mr. Trump’s presidency, he would often veer away from infrastructure-related speeches to attack his enemies. In his first Infrastructure Week-themed event in 2017, he accused James B. Comey, whom he had fired as F.B.I. director, of committing perjury and of leaking to the news media. He later proposed a $2 trillion infrastructure package without specifics on how he’d get the money. The phrase “Infrastructure Week” became a running joke in Washington.In November 2021, Mr. Biden signed a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill into law.“Instead of infrastructure week, America is having an infrastructure decade,” Mr. Biden said on Thursday, referring to the work his administration has done.In a show of how significant Wisconsin will be ahead of the election in November, Mr. Biden traveled there just three days after Vice President Kamala Harris began a nationwide tour for reproductive rights in an event outside Milwaukee. Wisconsin is a battleground state where his campaign is focusing on courting Black voters, young voters and any voters who might help him wrest the state’s 10 electoral votes from Mr. Trump.Though Mr. Trump was in court, the Republican National Committee released a statement criticizing Mr. Biden for making the trip and blaming Bidenomics for economic problems.“With staggering inflation and negative economic growth, Wisconsinites are feeling the brunt of Joe Biden’s failures,” the group’s chairman, Ronna McDaniel, said in a statement. “Try as he might, it’s too little, too late to impress workers and families who are living paycheck to paycheck thanks to Bidenomics.”Alan Rappeport More

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    Yellen Hits Trump Over Handling Of Economy

    The Treasury Secretary acknowledged that consumer prices, which have weighed on economic sentiment, continue to be too high.Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen criticized the Trump administration’s economic policies, while praising the Biden administration for successfully navigating the pandemic.Yuri Gripas for The New York TimesTreasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen defended the Biden administration’s economic agenda on Thursday, drawing sharp contrasts with the policies of the Trump administration as President Biden begins to make the general election argument that he has been a stronger steward of the economy than his predecessor.The comments from Ms. Yellen came after new data released on Thursday bolstered that message: The United States economy grew at a healthy clip over the past year, surpassing 3 percent and defying expectations of a recession. The strong numbers coincided with an effort by the White House to amplify the president’s economic record and dispatch his top economic advisers around the country to make the case that his strategy is working.Biden administration officials are trying to convince a skeptical public that, while they may feel pessimistic about the economy, its performance is delivering gains to average Americans. Officials are expected to spend the coming months highlighting the investments that Mr. Biden has directed toward infrastructure, domestic manufacturing and clean energy projects.In a speech at the Economic Club of Chicago, Ms. Yellen argued that the Biden administration had successfully navigated challenging headwinds caused by the pandemic and led a recovery that has outpaced those in the rest of the world. She also suggested that the Biden administration needed more time to tackle affordability issues, such as improving access to child care and housing.“Our economic agenda is far from finished,” Ms. Yellen said.The Treasury secretary also took the rare step of directly criticizing the policies of Mr. Biden’s predecessor and likely opponent, former President Donald J. Trump. Pointing to Mr. Trump’s repeated pledges to rebuild America’s roads and bridges, she recalled how those promises went unfulfilled.“Our country’s infrastructure has been deteriorating for decades,” Ms. Yellen said. “In the Trump administration, the idea of doing anything to fix it was a punchline.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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    U.S. Economy Grew at 3.3% Rate in Latest Quarter

    The increase in gross domestic product, while slower than in the previous period, showed the resilience of the recovery from the pandemic’s upheaval.The U.S. economy continued to grow at a healthy pace at the end of 2023, capping a year in which unemployment remained low, inflation cooled and a widely predicted recession never materialized.Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, grew at a 3.3 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. That was down from the 4.9 percent rate in the third quarter but easily topped forecasters’ expectations and showed the resilience of the recovery from the pandemic’s economic upheaval.The latest reading is preliminary and may be revised in the months ahead.Forecasters entered 2023 expecting the Federal Reserve’s aggressive campaign of interest-rate increases to push the economy into reverse. Instead, growth accelerated: For the full year, measured from the end of 2022 to the end of 2023, G.D.P. grew 3.1 percent, up from less than 1 percent the year before and faster than the average for the five years preceding the pandemic. (A different measure, based on average output over the full year, showed annual growth of 2.5 percent in 2023.)“Stunning and spectacular,” Diane Swonk, chief economist at KPMG, said of the latest data. “We’ll take the win.” More

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    ECB’s Lagarde responds to scathing staff survey: ‘I’m very proud and honored to lead the institution’

    European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said Thursday she was proud to lead the institution, after her performance was criticized in a union-run survey.
    Lagarde said that the ECB’s own surveys suggested people were happy to work at the central bank and had a sense of mission.
    “What keeps me going is those answers,” she told reporters at the January monetary policy briefing.

    European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde looks on as she attends the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, at the European Parliament, in Brussels, Belgium September 25, 2023. 
    Yves Herman | Reuters

    President Christine Lagarde on Thursday said she was “proud and honored” to leead the European Central Bank, after her leadership was slammed in a union-run survey of staff.
    She was responding to a question about the findings, published by ECB union IPSO earlier this week, in which more than half of respondents rated her performance so far as “very poor” or “poor.”

    The survey’s qualitative responses suggested some staff believed she had created a negative atmosphere at the central bank, and that she spends “too much time on topics unrelated to monetary policy,” IPSO said.
    Appearing unfazed, former politician and lawyer Lagarde said that the ECB conducted its own surveys in a “way that we can trust.” These showed a majority of respondents say they are happy to work at the institution, would recommend working there to a friend, and felt a mission associated to their work.
    The surveys are conducted by around 60% of employees, and also cover wages, respect in the workplace and workplace satisfaction, she said.

    “We pay great attention to these technically sound responses and we act upon them, and we will continue to do so. What keeps me going is those answers,” Lagarde told reporters in a briefing following the ECB’s January monetary policy meeting.
    “And I’m extremely proud of the staff of the ECB, and I’m very proud and honored to lead the institution, because we are driven by mission. Delivering price stability, but serving the Europeans, and we will continue doing that,” she continued.

    IPSO’s survey was completed by around 1,100 people. The ECB has more than 5,000 employees and trainees.
    The union said the responses “generally” described Lagarde as being “an autocratic leader” who does not necessarily act according to the values she proclaims.
    She was rated significantly more poorly than her predecessors Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi, it said.
    An ECB spokesperson called the survey “flawed” and said it included topics that were not specific to the presidency and outside of IPSO’s remit. They also said it could have been filled out multiple times by the same person.

    —CNBC’s SiIvia Amaro contributed to this article. More

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    The U.S. economy grew at blistering 3.3% pace in Q4 while inflation pulled back

    GDP, a measure of all the goods and services produced, increased at a 3.3% annualized rate in the fourth quarter of 2023. Wall Street had been looking for a 2% gain.
    The U.S. economy for all of 2023 accelerated at a 2.5% annualized pace, well ahead of the Wall Street outlook at the beginning of the year for few if any gains and better than the 1.9% increase in 2022.
    A strong pace of consumer spending helped drive the expansion, as did government spending.
    There also was progress on inflation. Core prices for personal consumption expenditures rose 2% for the period, while the headline rate was 1.7%.

    The economy grew at a much more rapid pace than expected while inflation eased in the final three months of 2023, as the U.S. easily skirted a recession that many forecasters had thought was inevitable, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.
    Gross domestic product, a measure of all the goods and services produced, increased at a 3.3% annualized rate in the fourth quarter of 2023, according to data adjusted seasonally and for inflation.

    That compared with the Wall Street consensus estimate for a gain of 2% in the final three months of the year. The third quarter grew at a 4.9% pace.

    In addition to the better than expected GDP move, there also was some progress on inflation.
    Core prices for personal consumption expenditures, which the Federal Reserve prefers as a longer-term inflation measure, rose 2% for the period, while the headline rate was 1.7%.
    On an annual basis, the PCE price index rose 2.7%, down from 5.9% a year ago, while the core figure excluding food and energy posted a 3.2% increase annually, compared with 5.1%.
    The two components together added up to “supersonic Goldilocks, because it’s really a strong number yet inflation hasn’t shown up,” said Beth Ann Bovino, chief economist at U.S. Bank. “Everybody wanted to have fun. People bought new cars, a lot of recreation spending as well as taking trips. We’ve been expecting a soft landing for some time. This is just one step in that direction.”

    The U.S. economy for all of 2023 accelerated at a 2.5% annualized pace, well ahead of the Wall Street outlook at the beginning of the year for few if any gains and better than the 1.9% increase in 2022.
    As had been the case through the year, a strong pace of consumer spending helped drive the expansion. Personal consumption expenditures increased 2.8% for the quarter, down just slightly from the previous period.
    State and local government spending also contributed, up 3.7%, as did a 2.5% increase in federal government expenditures. Gross private domestic investment rose 2.1%, another significant factor for the robust quarter.
    The chain-weighted price index, which accounts for prices as well as changes in consumer behavior, increased 1.5% for the quarter, down sharply from 3.3% in the previous period and below the Wall Street estimate for a 2.5% acceleration.
    “This year has been like Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots, and the economy is knocking the blocks off the economists, always outperforming,” said Dan North, senior economist with Allianz Trade Americas. Fed Chair Jerome Powell “has got to have a smirk on his face this morning. Again, he’s defying the economists’ predictions with strong growth and inflation clearly coming under control.”
    Markets showed only a modest reaction to the report. Stock futures gained slightly while Treasury yields moved lower. Futures markets continued to reflect the likelihood that the Fed will enact its first rate cut in May, though the CME Group’s FedWatch gauge put the odds of a March cut at 47.4% around 10 a.m. ET.
    “It was a great report, but you didn’t see the market move much because GDP is backward-looking. It told us what happened in October and November and December,” North said. “It’s great for historical patterns, but it doesn’t really tell us much about where we’re headed.”
    In other economic news Thursday, initial jobless claims totaled 214,000, an increase of 25,000 from the previous week and ahead of the estimate for 199,000, according to the Labor Department. Continuing claims rose to 1.833 million, an increase of 27,000.
    The GDP report wraps up a year in which most economists were almost certain the U.S. would enter at least a shallow recession. Even the Fed had predicted a mild contraction due to banking industry stress last March.
    However, a resilient consumer and a powerful labor market helped propel the economy through the year, which also featured an ongoing pullback in manufacturing and a Fed that kept raising interest rates in its battle to bring down inflation.
    As the calendar turns a page to a new year, hopes have shifted away from a recession as markets anticipate the Fed will start cutting rates while inflation continues to drift back to its 2% goal.
    Concerns remain, however, that the economy faces more challenges ahead.
    Some of the worries center around the lagged effects of monetary policy, specifically the 11 interest rate hikes totaling 5.25 percentage points that the Fed approved between March 2022 and July 2023. Conventional economic wisdom is that it can take as long as two years for such policy tightening to make its way through the system, so that could contribute to slowness ahead.
    Other angst centers around how long consumers can keep spending as savings dwindle and high-interest debt loads accrue. Finally, there’s the nature of what is driving the boom beyond the consumer: Government deficit spending has been a significant contributor to growth, with the total federal IOU at $34 trillion and counting. The budget deficit has totaled more than half a trillion dollars for the first three months of fiscal 2024.
    There also are political worries as the U.S. enters the heart of the presidential election campaign, and geopolitical fears with violence in the Middle East and the continuing bloody Ukraine war.
    Correction: The price index for personal consumption expenditures rose 2.7% on an annual basis, down from 5.9% a year ago. An earlier version mischaracterized the figures.
    Don’t miss these stories from CNBC PRO: More

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    Turkey hikes interest rate again to 45% after inflation nears 65%

    Turkey’s central bank on Thursday hiked its key interest rate to 45%, in line as expected.
    Inflation in Turkey increased to 64.8% year-on-year in December, up from 62% in November.
    Meanwhile, the country’s currency, the lira, hit a new record low against the U.S. dollar earlier in January, breaking 30 to the greenback for the first time.

    Residents waiting at a bus stop under a large Turkish flag in Istanbul, Turkey, on Sunday, April 30, 2023.
    Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

    Turkey’s central bank on Thursday hiked its key interest rate by another 250 basis points to 45%.
    The hike to the benchmark one-week repo rate was in line with economists’ expectations.

    It comes amid an ongoing battle against double-digit inflation for Turkey’s monetary policymakers, with the rate hike the latest step in that effort.
    Inflation in Turkey increased to 64.8% year-on-year in December, up from 62% in November, and the country’s currency, the lira, hit a new record low against the U.S. dollar earlier in January, breaking 30 to the greenback for the first time.
    Analysts predict this will be the last hike for some time, especially with local elections approaching in March.
    “Encouragingly, the communications were relatively hawkish and suggest that policymakers recognise the need to keep interest rates high for a prolonged period if they are to have success in bringing inflation back down to single digits,” Liam Peach, senior emerging markets economist at London-based firm Capital Economics wrote in a note. “Our baseline view remains that the central bank will keep rates unchanged throughout this year.”
    The Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey itself signaled that this was likely the end of the tightening cycle, saying of its decision: “The monetary tightness required to establish the disinflation course is achieved … The current level of the policy rate will be maintained until there is a significant decline in the underlying trend of monthly inflation and until inflation expectations converge to the projected forecast range.”

    The central bank’s move is the latest in a series of interest rate increases — now eight consecutive hikes since the May 2023 elections — that have been painful for Turks, as the country grapples with a dramatically weakened currency and skyrocketing living costs.

    Turkish Central Bank Governor Hafize Gaye Erkan answers questions during a news conference for the Inflation Report 2023-III in Ankara, Turkey on July 27, 2023.
    Anadolu Agency | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

    The last several years of high inflation are in large part the result of stubbornly loose monetary policy by the Ankara government. The lira is down 38% against the dollar year to date and has lost more than 80% of its value against the greenback over the last five years. 
    A new finance team was appointed in June last year, and Turkey’s central bank embarked on a sharp pivot, pulling rates higher under the supervision of Turkish Central Bank governor Hafize Erkan. The country’s benchmark interest rate has since been lifted from 8.5% to 45%. 
    Still, some observers still don’t believe it’s enough to effectively bring down inflation.
    Capital Economics expects Turkey’s inflation to drop “towards 30-35% by year-end” from 65% now, while Bartosz Sawicki, a market analyst at Conotoxia Fintech, sees it hitting close to 75% in May before starting to fall.
    “The cumulative tightening of 3650 basis points may not be enough to decisively tame Turkey’s long-standing inflation problem,” Sawicki said, which he described as being caused by “a vicious mix of loose monetary policy, deep negative real interest rates and persistent lira weakness.”Broadly, analysts expect the central bank to hold rates for the rest of the year — and no rate cuts anytime soon.
    “Inflation and inflation expectations will need to have fallen a long way before the central bank starts to cut interest rates,” Peach wrote. More

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    In a New Cannabis Landscape, a Navy Veteran Battles for Racial Equity

    “Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.Jam the towel under the door. Open the window. And hide the bong.For decades, college students have found ways to mask the pungent aroma of marijuana smoke on campuses. Wanda James, however, did not always feel a need to hide. A 1986 graduate of the University of Colorado Boulder, Ms. James would sit on the steps outside her dorm and roll joints with her friends.It would be decades before Colorado became one of the first two states in the country to legalize recreational cannabis, but on campus, James never worried.“The worst that would happen is they would tell us to put it away, or they might take it from us, and that was the end of it,” Ms. James recalled of the campus police.Fast forward 40 years: Ms. James, a former Navy lieutenant, is a member of her alma mater’s Board of Regents — and a prominent advocate of racial justice in the changing cannabis landscape.It wasn’t until after college that Ms. James realized she had been living in something of an alternate reality with her cannabis use. She learned how the United States’ marijuana laws have led to Black Americans’ being sentenced to prison at a higher rate than white Americans despite near equal usage rates, setting her on the mission to which she has dedicated her life.Ms. James, the chief executive of the Simply Pure dispensary in Denver, is licensing her company’s name to entrepreneurs in the cannabis industry who are from communities that had once been hotbeds of marijuana arrests.Rachel Woolf for The New York TimesMs. James, 60, has owned multiple cannabis businesses over the years, including a pair of dispensaries and an edible company, which has given her a platform to speak about what she believes to be racial injustices in the industry. She has been at the forefront of calling for cannabis legalization at the state and federal level. Federal scientists, in recent reports, have recommended easing restrictions on marijuana, a so-called Schedule I drug like heroin, and having it reclassified to a Schedule III drug, along with the likes of ketamine and testosterone.“Wanda is a force of nature!” said Senator John Hickenlooper, the former Colorado governor who named Ms. James to a task force that came up with recommendations on how to regulate marijuana in Colorado. Those recommendations became a model for the two dozen states that have since legalized the sale of cannabis in recreational dispensaries.But as more states have legalized the sale of recreational cannabis, prompting bigger companies to get involved in an industry that is increasingly mainstream, Ms. James is one of the few Black women in a leadership role. Several smaller cannabis businesses, mostly run by people of color and women — many of whom were caregivers who saw the benefits of medical marijuana for those they cared for — have been pushed out of the space, Ms. James said.In fact, ownership by women of cannabis companies fell to 16.4 percent in 2023 from 22.2 percent in 2022 with racial minorities accounting for just 18.7 percent of owners, according to a report from MJBiz Daily, a publication that covers cannabis-related legal and financial news.These days, Ms. James is not only pushing for wider cannabis legalization — recreational use of the plant is legal in 24 states and the District of Columbia but illegal on the federal level — but also for reform in the industry to ensure more people who look like her fill leadership roles.She believes that by becoming a dispensary owner, and now a leader in an industry with policies that have historically harmed Black and Latino Americans, she could reclaim some power for minorities targeted in communities that were hotbeds of marijuana arrests. In New York, for instance, state cannabis regulators documented a staggering 1.2 million marijuana arrests that disproportionately targeted Black and Latino Americans over 42 years.“There is so much happening in the industry to where it has not been a promising place that looks to diversity as a positivity right now,” she said. “We are trying to find out ways to help.”Ms. James grew up in rural Colorado on a ranch filled with dogs, rabbits, chickens and guinea pigs. Her father, a single parent and Air Force veteran, was a cowboy and they often rode horses together.As a businesswoman and a shaper of marijuana policy, Ms. James has been honored by the Colorado Women’s Chamber of Commerce and High Times Magazine, among other organizations.Rachel Woolf for The New York TimesThe penchant for caring for animals has continued. Ms. James has housed more than 30 dogs over the years, including some she found on the street. Like her father, she joined the military, becoming the first Black woman to complete the University of Colorado’s ROTC program. She served four years in the Navy before moving to Los Angeles, where she worked for two Fortune 100 companies. She also met her husband, Scott Durrah, then a property manager in West Hollywood and a fellow pot smoker, with whom she opened several restaurants in Colorado and California. Ms. James’s Rottweiler, Onyx, was the maid of honor at their wedding.While the couple were building their businesses, the country was feeling the long-term impact of President Ronald Reagan’s hard-line policies on cannabis. Mr. Reagan’s Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 and Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 — the year Ms. James graduated from college — “flooded the federal system with people convicted of low-level and nonviolent drug offenses,” according to the Brennan Center for Justice. In 2007, nearly 800,000 people were arrested for simple marijuana possession, the F.B.I. reported. About 80 percent of those arrested were Black. .“It was the demographic least likely to have a family friend that was an attorney and the least likely to have parents or family money to be able to get them out of the situation that night,” Ms. James said.Those statistics remained front of mind for Ms. James as she pursued cannabis business ownership and worked behind the scenes in politics.Ms. James at an election-night watch party in 2022. She has been at the forefront of campaigning for cannabis legalization at both state and federal levels.David Zalubowski/Associated PressIn 2008, Ms. James managed the successful congressional campaign of Jared Polis, a Democrat who was elected Colorado’s governor in 2018. The following year she and Mr. Durrah opened the Apothecary of Colorado, a medical cannabis dispensary, becoming the first African Americans to own a legal dispensary in the United States. They later closed the medical dispensary to open an edibles company, Simply Pure, which in 2015 became Simply Pure Denver, a recreational dispensary.“She’s a trailblazer,” said Tahir Johnson, a mentee of Ms. James. “When you think about a strong Black woman, that’s what she embodies.”As she became a businesswoman and a shaper of marijuana policy, she had a personal point of reference that she has returned to often in her work: her half brother, who served time in prison for offenses including marijuana possession.The cannabis industry “has not been a promising place that looks to diversity as a positivity right now,” Ms. James said.Rachel Woolf for The New York TimesMs. James has shared her journey in short documentaries produced by The Atlantic and Yahoo, and in 2018, she was named one of the 100 Most Influential People in the cannabis industry by High Times Magazine. She has used her platform to call for federal cannabis legalization, which would help dispensary owners inject some of the money they’ve been paying in taxes back into their businesses, increasing the likelihood of creating “generational wealth,” she said; because recreational cannabis is still illegal on the federal level, dispensary owners are unable to write off basic expenses, like staff salaries, unlike noncannabis businesses.And she’s tapping into her network to create change. Beginning with Mr. Johnson, her mentee, Ms. James is licensing the Simply Pure name to young entrepreneurs in the industry who are from communities harmed by racial disparities in marijuana arrests.Mr. Johnson said he had been arrested three times for marijuana possession, and he was “honored” Ms. James chose him to continue her legacy. He plans to open Simply Pure Trenton soon.“The fact that she’s trusted me to take on this mantle to this next phase of the organization means a lot to me,” he said. More