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    Japan’s Business Owners Can’t Find Successors. This Man Is Giving His Away.

    Hidekazu Yokoyama has spent three decades building a thriving logistics business on Japan’s snowy northern island of Hokkaido, an area that provides much of the country’s milk.Last year, he decided to give it all away.It was a radical solution for a problem that has become increasingly common in Japan, the world’s grayest society. As the country’s birthrate has plummeted and its population has grown older, the average age of business owners has risen to around 62. Nearly 60 percent of the country’s businesses report that they have no plan for what comes next.While Mr. Yokoyama, 73, felt too old to carry on much longer, quitting wasn’t an option: Too many farmers had come to depend on his company. “I definitely couldn’t abandon the business,” he said. But his children weren’t interested in running it. Neither were his employees. And few potential owners wanted to move to the remote, frozen north.So he placed a notice with a service that helps small-business owners in far-flung locales find someone to take over. The advertised sale price: zero yen.Mr. Yokoyama’s struggle symbolizes one of the most potentially devastating economic impacts of Japan’s aging society. It is inevitable that many small- and medium-size companies will go out of business as the population shrinks, but policymakers fear that the country could be hit by a surge in closures as aging owners retire en masse.In an apocalyptic 2019 presentation, Japan’s trade ministry projected that by 2025, around 630,000 profitable businesses could close up shop, costing the economy $165 billion and as many as 6.5 million jobs.Economic growth is already anemic, and the Japanese authorities have sprung into action in hopes of averting a catastrophe. Government offices have embarked on public relations campaigns to educate aging owners about options for continuing their businesses beyond their retirements and have set up service centers to help them find buyers. To sweeten the pot, the authorities have introduced large subsidies and tax breaks for new owners.Still, the challenges remain formidable. One of the biggest obstacles to finding a successor has been tradition, said Tsuneo Watanabe, a director of Nihon M&A Center, a company that specializes in finding buyers for valuable small- and medium-size enterprises. The company, founded in 1991, has become enormously lucrative, recording $359 million in revenue last year.Mr. Yokoyama plans to give away his land and equipment to a successor he has chosen.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesOne of Mr. Yokoyama’s workers.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesBut building that business has been a long process. In years past, small-business owners, particularly those who ran the country’s many decades- or even centuries-old companies, assumed that their children or a trusted employee would take over. They had no interest in selling their life’s work to a stranger, much less a competitor.More on Social Security and RetirementEarning Income After Retiring: Collecting Social Security while working can get complicated. Here are some key things to remember.An Uptick in Elder Poverty: Older Americans didn’t fare as well through the pandemic. But longer-term trends aren’t moving in their favor, either.Medicare Costs: Low-income Americans on Medicare can get assistance paying their premiums and other expenses. This is how to apply.Claiming Social Security: Looking to make the most of this benefit? These online tools can help you figure out your income needs and when to file.Mergers and acquisitions “weren’t well regarded. A lot of people felt that it was better to shut the company down than sell it,” Mr. Watanabe said. Perceptions of the industry have improved over the years, but there are “still many businesspeople who aren’t even aware that M&A is an option,” he added.While the market has found buyers for the businesses most ripe for the picking, it can seem nearly impossible for many small but economically vital companies to find someone to take over.In 2021, government help centers and the top five merger-and-acquisitions services found buyers for only 2,413 businesses, according to Japan’s trade ministry. Another 44,000 were abandoned. Over 55 percent of those were still profitable when they closed.Many of those businesses were in small towns and cities, where the succession problem is a potentially existential threat. The collapse of a business, whether a major local employer or a village’s only grocery store, can make it even harder for those places to survive the constant attrition of aging populations and urban flight that is hollowing out the countryside.After a government-run matching program failed to find someone to take over for Mr. Yokoyama, a bank suggested that he turn to Relay, a company based in Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost main island.Hay stored in a warehouse on the Yokoyama land.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesAn abandoned cowshed.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesRelay has differentiated itself by appealing to potential buyers’ sense of community and purpose. Its listings, featuring beaming proprietors in front of sushi shops and bucolic fields, are engineered to appeal to harried urbanites dreaming of a different lifestyle.The company’s task in Mr. Yokoyama’s case wasn’t easy. For most Japanese, the town where his business is situated, Monbetsu, which has around 20,000 people and is shrinking, might as well be the North Pole. The only industries are fishing and farming, and they largely go into hibernation as the days grow short and snow piles up to roof eaves. In deep winter, some tourists come to eat salmon roe and scallops and see the ice floes that lock in the city’s modest port.A street full of 1980s-era cabarets and restaurants is a snapshot of a more prosperous time when young fishermen gathered to let off steam and spend big paychecks. Today, faded posters peel off abandoned storefronts. The town’s biggest building is a new hospital.In 2001, Monbetsu constructed a new elementary school building just around the corner from Mr. Yokoyama’s company. It closed after just 10 years.In times past, the classrooms would have been filled with the grandchildren of local dairy farmers. But their own children have now mostly moved to cities in search of higher-paying, less onerous work.With no obvious successors, the farms have folded one after another. Decades-high inflation brought on by the pandemic and Russia’s war in Ukraine has pushed dozens of holdouts into early retirement.Mr. Yokoyama’s employees are skeptical about his succession plan.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesThe workers are mostly in their 50s and 60s.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesAs local farmers have aged and their profits thinned, more of them have come to depend on Mr. Yokoyama for tasks like harvesting hay and clearing snow. His days start at 4 a.m. and end at 7 in the evening. He sleeps in a small room behind his office.It would be “extremely difficult” if his business folded, said Isao Ikeno, the manager of a nearby dairy cooperative that has turned heavily to automation as workers have become harder to find.On the cooperative’s farm, 17 employees tend to 3,000 head of cattle, and Mr. Yokoyama’s company fills in the gaps. No other area businesses can provide the services, Mr. Ikeno said.Mr. Yokoyama began contemplating retirement about six years ago. But it wasn’t clear what would happen to the business.While he had taken on a little over half a million dollars in debt, years of generous economic stimulus policies have kept interest rates at rock bottom, easing the burden, and the company’s annual profit margin was around 30 percent.The ad he placed on Relay acknowledged that the job was hard, but it said that no experience was needed. The best candidate would be “young and ready to work.”Whoever was chosen would take over the debts, but also inherit all of the business’s equipment and nearly 150 acres of prime farmland and forest. Mr. Yokoyama’s children will get nothing.“I told them that if you want to take it over, I’d leave it to you, but if you don’t want to do it, I’m giving it all to the next guy,” he said.Thirty inquiries poured in. Among those who expressed interest were a couple and a representative of a company that planned to expand. Mr. Yokoyama settled on a dark horse, 26-year-old Kai Fujisawa.A friend had showed Mr. Fujisawa the ad on Relay, and Mr. Fujisawa immediately jumped in a car and showed up on Mr. Yokoyama’s doorstep, impressing him with his youth and enthusiasm.Kai Fujisawa, Mr. Yokoyama’s potential successor.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesStill, the transition hasn’t been smooth. Mr. Yokoyama is not entirely convinced that Mr. Fujisawa is the right person for the job. The learning curve is steeper than either of them had imagined, and Mr. Yokoyama’s grizzled, chain-smoking employees are skeptical that Mr. Fujisawa will be able to live up to the boss’s reputation.Most of the company’s 17 employees are in their 50s and 60s, and it’s not clear where Mr. Fujisawa will find people to replace them as they retire.“There’s a lot of pressure,” Mr. Fujisawa said. But “when I came here, I was prepared to do this for the rest of my life.” More

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    Why Japan’s Sudden Shift on Bond Purchases Dealt a Global Jolt

    The world has relied on ultralow interest rates in Japan. What will happen if they rise?Japan is the world’s largest creditor. At the end of 2021, it held roughly $3.2 trillion in foreign assets, 30 percent more than No. 2 Germany. As of October, it owned over a trillion dollars of U.S. government debt, more than China. Japanese banks are the world’s largest cross-border lenders, with nearly $4.8 trillion in claims in other countries.Late last month, the world got an unexpected reminder of how integral Japan is to the global economy, when the country’s central bank unexpectedly announced that it was adjusting its stance on bond purchases.To those unversed in the intricacies of monetary policy, the significance of Japan’s decision to raise the ceiling on its 10-year bond yields may not have been immediately clear. But for the finance industry, the surprising change raised expectations that the days of rock-bottom Japanese interest rates could be numbered — potentially further squeezing global credit markets that were already tightening as the world economy slows.Since this summer, the Bank of Japan has been an outlier, keeping its interest rates ultralow even as other central banks raced to keep up with the Federal Reserve, which has ratcheted up lending costs in an effort to tame high inflation.As global rates have diverged from those in Japan, the value of the yen has fallen as investors sought better returns elsewhere. That has put pressure on the Bank of Japan to shift the world’s third-largest economy away from its decade-long commitment to cheap money, a policy known as monetary easing.Japan’s deep integration into global financial networks means that there is a lot of money riding on the timing of any move away from that policy, and investors have spent years fruitlessly waiting for a sign.As of mid-December, the overwhelming expectation was that the bank would hold off on any changes until next spring, when Haruhiko Kuroda, the Bank of Japan’s governor and an architect of its current policies, is set to step down.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

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    Wave of Job-Switching Has Employers on a Training Treadmill

    The rise in turnover since the pandemic started has a cost in productivity: “It’s taking longer to get stuff out the door.”One after another, employees at the New Hampshire manufacturer W.H. Bagshaw said goodbye.One went to a robotics company in nearby Boston. Another became an electrician’s apprentice. In all, 22 workers have left W.H. Bagshaw in the past two years — no small matter for a company that has a work force of fewer than 50. That level of departures was also far from normal: In 2019, the company lost just one or two employees; the turnover rate in 2022 was over 30 percent.W.H. Bagshaw, which makes precision machined parts for the aerospace and medical industries, was mostly able to replace the workers who left — but at a cost. Hiring employees and bringing them up to speed could include teaching them how to operate complex, multi-axis turning machines. That took time and energy, preventing the company from running at full capacity.Production slowed. The number of on-time deliveries to customers slipped.“It’s taking longer to get stuff out the door,” said Adria Bagshaw, the company’s vice president.A hallmark of the pandemic era has been the surge in employee turnover. Since 2021, an extraordinary number of Americans have been quitting their jobs — some flexing their power in a white-hot labor market, others re-evaluating their priorities amid a destabilizing pandemic.In November 2021, more than 4.5 million workers voluntarily left their jobs, according to government data, the most in the two decades that the government has been keeping track. That number has slowly been declining in recent months, but it is still far higher than before the pandemic. The churn has been particularly high in low-wage sectors such as leisure and hospitality, where intense competition for labor led workers to pursue better-paying opportunities.All that turnover has taken a toll on productivity — for individual companies, and perhaps for the economy as well.Economists say the wave of job-switching could be one factor in the weak productivity growth that the U.S. economy has experienced in recent years. Early on, some experts expected the pandemic to unleash productivity by forcing companies to embrace new technologies and ways of working. Instead, productivity has fallen slightly over the past two years.“All that turnover, all that hiring, all that training you have to do — that takes away from your day job,” said Sarah House, an economist at Wells Fargo. “So it’s essentially less output at the end of the day.”At W.H. Bagshaw, the perpetual need to train employees has been a central reason for the production slowdown.“Anytime we bring in a new hire, they’re not productive on Day 1 — usually they’re shadowing someone for a few weeks or months,” Ms. Bagshaw said. “You’re investing in someone for the future. Whoever is doing the training, they’re slowed down from their normal productivity.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesEconomists have been surprised by recent strength in the labor market, as the Federal Reserve tries to engineer a slowdown and tame inflation.Retirees: About 3.5 million people are missing from the U.S. labor force. A large number of them, roughly two million, have simply retired.Delivery Workers: Food app services are warning that a proposed wage increase for New York City workers could mean higher delivery costs.A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?: Employees seeking wage increases to cover their costs of living amid rising prices could set off a cycle in which fast inflation today begets fast inflation tomorrow.Disabled Workers: With Covid prompting more employers to consider remote arrangements, employment has soared among adults with disabilities.Productivity — in its simplest form, the value of the goods and services that a typical employee can produce in an hour of work — is notoriously difficult to measure accurately. But it is one of the most important measures of the health of an economy, particularly during a period of rapid inflation. Productivity is what allows the economic pie to grow: If workers can produce more in the same amount of time, then their employers can afford to pay them more per hour without either raising prices or cutting into profits.When productivity stagnates, however, pay becomes a zero-sum game: If workers want to make more money, then the money has to come from somewhere else.“Really the issue at the heart of everything — from inflation to growth to companies and head count — it’s about productivity, and that turnover concern is huge,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist for ADP, a payroll processing firm.Sobeyda Rodriguez, a machine operator at W.H. Bagshaw in Nashua, N.H.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesW.H. Bagshaw makes parts for the aerospace and medical industries.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesIn the past two years, 22 workers have left W.H. Bagshaw, which has a work force of fewer than 50.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesOrdinarily, economists consider turnover good for productivity. A healthy amount of job-switching allows workers to find the most suitable jobs, and employers to find the employees who will be the best fit. Over time, the most productive firms — which can afford to pay the most — will tend to attract the most productive workers, lifting the economy as a whole. In the years before the pandemic, many economists fretted about the declining rate of turnover, which they worried was a sign of an increasingly stagnant, even ossifying labor market.But the impact of the Great Resignation is complicated: Too much turnover all at once can create its own problems.For nearly two years, companies have complained that they are caught in an unending cycle of hiring and training workers, only to see them leave in a matter of weeks or months. Constant recruiting and training drains management resources, and new hires often do not stick around long enough for that investment to pay off. Veteran employees are often asked to pick up the slack, leading to burnout.These challenges have been on vivid display in the hospitality industry, which experienced much-higher-than-normal turnover rates in this period.“A lot of restaurants are in survival mode, and survival mode creates a vicious circle,” said Dominic Benvenuti, an owner of Boston Pie, which owns more than two dozen Domino’s locations in New England.Store managers can’t hire enough workers, Mr. Benvenuti said, so they demand too much from new employees too quickly, sending them out on deliveries or putting them to work in the kitchen without sufficient training. When those workers inevitably fail, they quit, compounding the labor shortage and continuing the cycle.“They are thrown into such chaos and stress that it overwhelms them, and they leave,” he said. “It is never-ending if someone doesn’t end it.”The solution, Mr. Benvenuti said, is to focus on training and to recognize that new hires won’t be as productive as 10-year veterans right away. But that is easier said than done when customers are calling to ask why their pizzas are late.There may be some relief in sight for businesses. The turnover rate has declined somewhat since its peak at the end of 2021, and many employers, both public and private, expect that trend to continue this year. That could give companies a chance to focus on tasks neglected during the pandemic chaos, like training employees and updating business processes.But some workplace experts say higher-than-normal turnover rates are likely to persist, particularly in white-collar industries where remote work has become more common. For employees who work from home some or all of the time, job hunting no longer requires manufacturing an excuse to be out of the office or worrying about a boss finding a résumé on the office printer.“It’s just easier to switch jobs now,” Ms. Richardson said. “Back in the old days, you had to meet at a Starbucks, and if you ran into another employee who was at that same Starbucks that was five blocks away from the closer Starbucks, you knew they were on a job interview.”Now, she said, “if you’re working from home, you can do a whole day’s interview from the comfort of your living room and no one’s the wiser.”Many economists say it is still possible that the pandemic-era increase in turnover will be beneficial for productivity, even if that isn’t the case yet. People who thrive working from home will gravitate toward companies that embrace remote work; people who do better in person will be snapped up by companies that require employees to come into the office. Industries that remade themselves to survive the pandemic — like restaurants, retailers and hotels — will figure out which changes will work in the long term, and which employees are well-suited to the new way of doing business.“You’re investing in someone for the future,” said Adria Bagshaw, W.H. Bagshaw’s vice president.M. Scott Brauer for The New York TimesThe pandemic’s disruption contributed to a surge in entrepreneurial activity, a key driver of the kind of innovation that could lead to a more productive economy. The dynamics have also spurred many companies to re-evaluate or adapt long-held practices to increase efficiency.“There’s an enormous amount of experimentation going on right now, and it’s showing up in so many different ways,” said John Haltiwanger, a University of Maryland economist who studies job turnover.“I think it will be healthy, but not immediately,” he added. “There’s a long-term payoff to this, but it could literally take years, not months, for this to kick in.”When Rahkeem Morris started the company HourWork several years ago, his goal was to help fast-food companies and other businesses hire more efficiently. But last year, the company pivoted to a new focus: retention.A fast-food worker typically takes six months to reach full productivity, Mr. Morris said, but at many companies, the typical employee in the industry leaves after just 75 days. HourWork now offers a service to help store owners keep in touch with staff members by text message and to analyze their responses to identify issues that could be causing employees to quit — an approach the company says can reduce turnover, particularly among new hires.Mr. Morris, who worked in fast food as a teenager before getting degrees from Cornell and Harvard Business School, said companies had long tried to deal with staffing shortages by focusing on recruitment. He likened that approach to trying to fill a leaky bucket — if companies do not also try to keep their workers, no amount of recruiting will solve their problem.The Great Resignation, however, may finally have led companies to rethink that approach.“We’re starting to see the tide shift and the sentiment around that change,” Mr. Morris said. “Fixing the leaky-bucket problem will get these restaurants to full productivity.” More

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    U.K. Rail Strike May Scuttle Post-Holiday Plans to Return to Work

    Public sympathy for striking nurses and other health workers is particularly strong, posing a challenge for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has promised to confront trade unions.The winter holiday season across most of Britain ends on Tuesday, but the return to work for millions of Britons comes on the same day as yet another train strike, promising a commute as unpredictable as the country’s increasingly erratic rail network.Britain begins the new year just as it ended the old one, in the middle of a wave of labor unrest that has involved as many as 1.5 million workers so far, concentrated in the public sector and formerly state-owned businesses. Nurses in England, Northern Ireland and Wales walked out twice last month; ambulance crews have staged their largest work stoppage in decades; and border agents, postal staff and garbage collectors have taken similar action in a “winter of discontent.”With wages lagging galloping inflation, many, including nurses, plan to stop work again this month, leading some British news outlets to raise fears of a de facto general strike that could bring the country to a grinding halt.Yet while months of disruption have eroded some sympathy for rail workers, with the public roughly split over train strikes, support for health workers, whose tireless efforts during the coronavirus pandemic were widely lauded as heroic, remains buoyant.“January will be the test: Will the British public shift?” said Steven Fielding, an emeritus professor of political history at the University of Nottingham. He added that while further rail strikes might prompt a long-predicted backlash against the unions, “It’s remarkable how much it hasn’t happened.”Sympathy for strikes by nurses and ambulance workers has been stoked by a sense than Britain’s National Health Service is overwhelmed.Andrew Testa for The New York TimesThat is not for want of effort by Britain’s conservative tabloids. One newspaper nicknamed Mick Lynch, the combative leader of a rail union, “The Grinch,” accusing him of wrecking Christmas, spoiling office parties and hampering family reunions. In the city of Bristol, one pub canceled a rail workers’ Christmas party in retaliation for strikes thought to have hurt the hospitality trade.But in general, support for the strikers has stayed strong, according to a YouGov opinion poll last month, which showed 66 percent of respondents supported striking nurses and 28 percent opposed them, 58 favoring firefighters with 33 against, and 43 percent in favor of rail workers with 49 opposed. Another poll, by Savanta ComRes, found the same percentage in support of further rail strikes, but only 36 percent opposed.Even many Britons who support the governing Conservative Party say they believe that health workers have a case, a reflection both of the popularity of the country’s National Health Service and concerns about its ability to cope with huge pressures. And, underscoring a growing sense of malaise, another poll recorded a majority agreeing with the statement that “nothing in Britain works anymore.”That may pose a challenge for Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak, who insists that agreeing to raises could embed inflation, which he sees as the real enemy of working people. Instead, he promises new, and as yet unspecified, laws to restrict labor unrest, while critics of trade unions argue rail workers are risking their futures as commuters stay away from a network already suffering from the growth of working from home.“It’s difficult for everybody because inflation is where it is, and the best way to help them and everyone else in the country is for us to get a grip and reduce inflation as quickly as possible,” Mr. Sunak told a parliamentary committee in December, when asked about the plight of striking workers.Nurses striking in London last month. A poll last month found 66 percent of respondents in favor of the strike, with 28 percent opposed.Maja Smiejkowska/ReutersNews reports suggest that an agreement to end the rolling series of rail strikes could be close, but despite holding the purse strings over the employers of rail staff, the government has resisted direct involvement in negotiations.The wave of strikes comes amid Britain’s cost-of-living crisis and follows years of constrained public spending, and unions say they are responding to a decade of neglect of vital services.“I think the fact that this comes after 10 to 12 years of austerity has affected the public mood and is maybe what’s helping the unions and their members not to lose public support,” said Peter Kellner, a polling expert. “The evidence so far is that public opinion hasn’t materially shifted. I don’t see any particular reason why it should, especially with the health service,” he added.At King’s Cross Station in London last week, there were certainly signs of annoyance among commuters at the disrupted services.“Most of the time my train is canceled or delayed,” said Daisy Smith, an airline worker from London who was waiting to travel to York, about two hours north of the capital. “It is ridiculous that they are on strike.”King’s Cross Station in London last week. Britons have long found their train service unreliable.Hollie Adams/Getty ImagesBut Ms. Smith said she sympathized with the strikers, believed they deserved a pay rise and was frustrated by the standoff. “The government needs to do something about it,” she said, adding that the dispute had been allowed to fester for months.Andrew Allonby, a public-sector worker who was traveling home to Newcastle, in northeast England, said he, too, supported the strikers.“I know there is no money around, but there has got to be a line,” he said, referring to reports that some health workers were relying on donated groceries. “Nurses having to go to food banks is ridiculous.”Public sympathy is being driven by a widespread feeling that the health system is understaffed and overwhelmed. One senior doctor made headlines by warning that as many as 500 patients a week could be dying because of long delays in emergency rooms across the country. And on Monday the vice president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine said many emergency departments were in a state of crisis.Pay levels for nurses are recommended by an independent body whose suggestion of a 4.3 percent increase, issued before much of last year’s inflation was evident, had been accepted by the government.That is well short of the 19 percent demanded by nurses, but ministers have refused to budge, pointing to a 3 percent annual raise for nurses in 2021, when the pay of many others was frozen for the year.Britain’s health secretary, Steve Barclay, raised hackles last month by saying that striking ambulance unions had made a “conscious choice to inflict harm on patients” — a statement described by Sharon Graham, general secretary of the union Unite, as a “blatant lie.”Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has promised new laws to restrict labor unrest.Kin Cheung/Associated PressMark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, told the broadcaster Sky News, “We have had 10 years where our pay has not kept pace with inflation.” He added that 40,000 government staff members used food banks and that 45,000 of them were so poor they had to claim welfare payments.Dawn Poole, a striking border force officer at London’s Heathrow International Airport and representative of the union, said that rising food and energy costs, combined with a hike in mortgage interest rates, had been the final straw for already-struggling staff.“We have had people selling houses to downsize or struggling to pay the rent,” she said. Mr. Sunak’s tough stance is a gamble. If the strikes collapse, that could build his reputation as a leader able to stand firm and administer tough measures to stabilize the economy. It could also bolster his leadership within a fractious Conservative Party, where standing up to trade unions is associated with former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who came to power in 1979 after labor unrest also known as the winter of discontent and faced down striking miners.Mrs. Thatcher, however, prepared for her standoff with the miners, ensuring that coal stocks were high and confronting them at a time when unions were widely seen as too powerful.Inflation in Britain has been running at an annual rate of over 10 percent.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockBy contrast, today’s unions appear to be more in sync with the popular mood, analysts say, because Britons know that well before the strikes, their railways were unreliable and their health service was creaking under acute pressure.“The argument that ‘We’re on strike to save the National Health Service,’ which is what the nurses have been saying, resonates with what people know from their own experience,” said Professor Fielding.Mr. Kellner, the polling expert, said he believed that the government should separate the nurses and ambulance crews from other strikers.“As long as the health workers are on strike, the other unions have some degree of cover,” he said. “If in a month’s time we are where we are now, with nothing settled, I think the government will be in a really bad position.”In the meantime, rail travelers must decide whether to even try to head to the office this week. As one rail operator warned: “Until Jan. 8, only travel by train if absolutely necessary.” More

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    Russia’s War on Ukraine Worsens Global Starvation

    Moscow blocks most shipments from Ukraine, one of the world’s largest wheat producers, and its attacks on the country’s energy grid also disrupt the flow of food.ISTANBUL — Hulking ships carrying Ukrainian wheat and other grains are backed up along the Bosporus here in Istanbul as they await inspections before moving on to ports around the world.The number of ships sailing through this narrow strait, which connects Black Sea ports to wider waters, plummeted when Russia invaded Ukraine 10 months ago and imposed a naval blockade. Under diplomatic pressure, Moscow has begun allowing some vessels to pass, but it continues to restrict most shipments from Ukraine, which together with Russia once exported a quarter of the world’s wheat.And at the few Ukrainian ports that are operational, Russia’s missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid periodically cripple the grain terminals where wheat and corn are loaded onto ships.An enduring global food crisis has become one of the farthest-reaching consequences of Russia’s war, contributing to widespread starvation, poverty and premature deaths.The United States and allies are struggling to reduce the damage. American officials are organizing efforts to help Ukrainian farmers get food out of their country through rail and road networks that connect to Eastern Europe and on barges traveling up the Danube River.But as deep winter sets in and Russia presses assaults on Ukraine’s infrastructure, the crisis is worsening. Food shortages are already being exacerbated by a drought in the Horn of Africa and unusually harsh weather in other parts of the world.The United Nations World Food Program estimates that more than 345 million people are suffering from or at risk of acute food insecurity, more than double the number from 2019.“We’re dealing now with a massive food insecurity crisis,” Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, said last month at a summit with African leaders in Washington. “It’s the product of a lot of things, as we all know,” he said, “including Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.”The food shortages and high prices are causing intense pain across Africa, Asia and the Americas. U.S. officials are especially worried about Afghanistan and Yemen, which have been ravaged by war. Egypt, Lebanon and other big food-importing nations are finding it difficult to pay their debts and other expenses because costs have surged. Even in wealthy countries like the United States and Britain, soaring inflation driven in part by the war’s disruptions has left poorer people without enough to eat.A line for food aid in Kabul. An enduring global food crisis has become one of the farthest-reaching consequences of Russia’s war.Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“By attacking Ukraine, the breadbasket of the world, Putin is attacking the world’s poor, spiking global hunger when people are already on the brink of famine,” said Samantha Power, the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.The State of the WarAerial Attacks: A deadly New Year’s Eve assault is the latest strike in Russia’s three-month campaign on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, which analysts say is an effort to demoralize the Ukrainian population by plunging it into cold and darkness.A New Alliance: The United States is scrambling to stop Iran from producing drones, as officials believe the Middle Eastern nation is building a partnership with Russia.Hopes Dim for Peace Talks: Both Ukrainian and Russian officials say they are willing to discuss making peace, but their terms for sitting down at a negotiating table suggest otherwise.Clergymen or Spies?: To Ukraine’s security services, the Russian Orthodox Church poses a uniquely subversive threat — a trusted institution that is not only an incubator of pro-Russia sentiment but is also infiltrated by priests, monks and nuns who have aided Russia in the war.Ukrainians are likening the events to the Holodomor, when Joseph Stalin engineered a famine in Soviet-ruled Ukraine 90 years ago that killed millions.Mr. Blinken announced on Dec. 20 that the U.S. government would begin granting blanket exceptions to its economic sanctions programs worldwide to ensure that food aid and other assistance kept flowing. The action is intended to ensure that companies and organizations do not withhold assistance for fear of running afoul of U.S. sanctions.State Department officials said it was the most significant change to U.S. sanctions policy in years. The United Nations Security Council adopted a similar resolution on sanctions last month.But Russia’s intentional disruption of global food supplies poses an entirely different problem.Moscow has restricted its own exports, increasing costs elsewhere. Most important, it has stopped sales of fertilizer, needed by the world’s farmers. Before the war, Russia was the biggest exporter of fertilizer.Its hostilities in Ukraine have also had a major impact. From March to November, Ukraine exported an average of 3.5 million metric tons of grains and oilseeds per month, a steep drop from the five million to seven million metric tons per month it exported before the war began in February, according to data from the country’s Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food.That number would be even lower if not for an agreement forged in July by the United Nations, Turkey, Russia and Ukraine, called the Black Sea Grain Initiative, in which Russia agreed to allow exports from three Ukrainian seaports.Russia continues to block seven of the 13 ports used by Ukraine. (Ukraine has 18 ports, but five are in Crimea, which Russia seized in 2014.) Besides the three on the Black Sea, three on the Danube are operational.The initial deal was only for four months but was extended in November for another four months. When Russia threatened to leave it in October, global food prices surged five to six percent, said Isobel Coleman, a deputy administrator at USAID.“The effects of this war are hugely, hugely disruptive,” she said. “Putin is pushing millions of people into poverty.”While increases in the price of food this past year have been particularly sharp in the Middle East, North Africa and South America, no region has been immune.“You’re looking at price increases of everything from 60 percent in the U.S. to 1900 percent in Sudan,” said Sara Menker, the chief executive of Gro Intelligence, a platform for climate and agriculture data that tracks food prices.Before the war, food prices had already climbed to their highest levels in over a decade because of pandemic disruptions in the supply chain and pervasive drought.The United States, Brazil and Argentina, key grain producers for the world, have experienced three consecutive years of drought. The level of the Mississippi River fell so much that the barges that carry American grain to ports were temporarily grounded.The weakening of many foreign currencies against the U.S. dollar has also forced some countries to buy less food on the international market than in years past.Russia attacked the port of Kherson, on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, in November. Before the war, farmers shipped out 95 percent of the country’s wheat and grain exports through the Black Sea.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York Times“There were a lot of structural issues, and then the war just made it that much worse,” Ms. Menker said.U.S. officials say the Russian military has deliberately targeted grain storage facilities in Ukraine, a potential war crime, and has destroyed wheat processing plants.Many farmers in Ukraine have gone to war or fled their land, and the infrastructure that processed and carried wheat and sunflower oil to foreign markets has broken down.At a farm 190 miles south of Kyiv, 40 of the 350 employees have enlisted in the army. And the farm is struggling with other shortages. Kees Huizinga, the Dutch co-owner, said Russia’s attacks on the energy grid have led to the shutdown of a plant that provides his farm and others with nitrogen fertilizer.Other fertilizer plants in Europe were forced to shut down or slow production last year as natural gas prices soared, a result of the war. Natural gas is critical for fertilizer production.“So this year’s harvest has already been reduced,” Mr. Huizinga said in November. “And if Russians continue like this, next year’s harvest might even be worse.”He added that transportation costs have risen sharply for farmers in Ukraine.Before the war, farmers shipped out 95 percent of the country’s wheat and grain exports through the Black Sea. Mr. Huizinga’s farm paid $23 to $24 per ton to transport its products to ports and onto ships. Now, the cost has more than doubled, he said. And an alternative route — by truck to Romania — costs $85 per ton.Mr. Huizinga said Russia’s compromise on Black Sea shipments has helped, but he suspects Moscow is hobbling operations by slowing inspections. Under the arrangement, each vessel leaving one of three Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea has to be inspected by joint teams of Ukrainian, Russian, Turkish and United Nations employees once the ship reaches Istanbul.The teams look for any unauthorized cargo or crew members, and vessels heading to Ukraine need to be empty of cargo, said Ismini Palla, a spokeswoman for the U.N. office overseeing the program.U.N. data shows that the rate of inspections has dropped in recent weeks. The parties agreed to deploy three teams each day, Ms. Palla said, adding that the United Nations has requested more.“We hope that this will change soon, so that the Ukrainian ports can operate again at higher capacity,” she said. “Ukrainian exports remain a vital element in combating global food insecurity.”Ms. Palla said the parties’ decision in November to extend the agreement contributed to a 2.8 percent drop in global wheat prices.Over the last six months, food prices have retreated from highs reached this spring, according to an index compiled by the United Nations. But they remain much higher than in previous years.An uncertainty for farmers this winter is the soaring price of fertilizer, one of their biggest costs.Farmers have passed on the higher cost by increasing the price of food products. And many farmers are using less fertilizer in their fields. That will result in lower crop yields in the coming seasons, pushing food prices higher.Subsistence farms, which produce nearly a third of the world’s food, are being hit even harder, Ms. Coleman said.Food rations were distributed in Sana, Yemen. The war in that country has left its people vulnerable to food insecurity.Yahya Arhab/EPA, via ShutterstockIn a communiqué issued at the close of their meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in November, leaders of the Group of 20 nations said they were deeply concerned by the challenges to global food security and pledged to support the international efforts to keep food supply chains functioning.“We need to strengthen trade cooperation, not weaken it,” Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the World Trade Organization, said at the summit.The U.S. government spends about $2 billion per year on global food security, and it started a program called Feed the Future after the last big food crisis, in 2010, that now encompasses 20 countries.Since the start of the Ukraine war, the United States has provided more than $11 billion to address the food crisis. That includes a $100 million program called AGRI-Ukraine, which has helped about 13,000 farmers in Ukraine — 27 percent of the total — gain access to financing, technology, transportation, seeds, fertilizer, bags and mobile storage units, Ms. Coleman said.The efforts could help rebuild the country while alleviating the global food crisis — one-fifth of Ukraine’s economy is in the agriculture sector, and a fifth of the country’s labor force is connected to it.“It’s hugely important for Ukraine’s economy,” she said, “and for Ukraine’s economic survival.”Edward Wong More

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    U.S. Pours Money Into Chips, but Even Soaring Spending Has Limits

    In September, the chip giant Intel gathered officials at a patch of land near Columbus, Ohio, where it pledged to invest at least $20 billion in two new factories to make semiconductors.A month later, Micron Technology celebrated a new manufacturing site near Syracuse, N.Y., where the chip company expected to spend $20 billion by the end of the decade and eventually perhaps five times that.And in December, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company hosted a shindig in Phoenix, where it plans to triple its investment to $40 billion and build a second new factory to create advanced chips.The pledges are part of an enormous ramp-up in U.S. chip-making plans over the past 18 months, the scale of which has been likened to Cold War-era investments in the Space Race. The boom has implications for global technological leadership and geopolitics, with the United States aiming to prevent China from becoming an advanced power in chips, the slices of silicon that have driven the creation of innovative computing devices like smartphones and virtual-reality goggles.Today, chips are an essential part of modern life even beyond the tech industry’s creations, from military gear and cars to kitchen appliances and toys.Across the nation, more than 35 companies have pledged nearly $200 billion for manufacturing projects related to chips since the spring of 2020, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association, a trade group. The money is set to be spent in 16 states, including Texas, Arizona and New York on 23 new chip factories, the expansion of nine plants, and investments from companies supplying equipment and materials to the industry.The push is one facet of an industrial policy initiative by the Biden administration, which is dangling at least $76 billion in grants, tax credits and other subsidies to encourage domestic chip production. Along with providing sweeping funding for infrastructure and clean energy, the efforts constitute the largest U.S. investment in manufacturing arguably since World War II, when the federal government unleashed spending on new ships, pipelines and factories to make aluminum and rubber.“I’ve never seen a tsunami like this,” said Daniel Armbrust, the former chief executive of Sematech, a now-defunct chip consortium formed in 1987 with the Defense Department and funding from member companies.Sanjay Mehrotra, Micron Technology’s chief executive, at Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, N.Y., in October. The company is building a new manufacturing site nearby.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesWhite House officials have argued that the chip-making investments will sharply reduce the proportion of chips needed to be purchased from abroad, improving U.S. economic security.Kenny Holston for The New York TimesPresident Biden has staked a prominent part of his economic agenda on stimulating U.S. chip production, but his reasons go beyond the economic benefits. Much of the world’s cutting-edge chips today are made in Taiwan, the island to which China claims territorial rights. That has caused fears that semiconductor supply chains may be disrupted in the event of a conflict — and that the United States will be at a technological disadvantage.More on ChinaA Messy Pivot: As Beijing casts aside many Covid rules after nationwide protests, it is also playing down the threat of the virus. The move comes with its own risks.Space Program: Human spaceflight achievements show that China is running a steady space marathon rather than competing in a head-to-head space race with the United States.A Test for the Economy: China’s economy is entering a delicate period when it will face unique challenges, amid the prospect of rising Covid cases and wary consumers.New Partnerships: A trip by the Chinese leader Xi Jinping to Saudi Arabia showcased Beijing’s growing ties with several Middle Eastern countries that are longstanding U.S. allies and signaled China’s re-emergence after years of pandemic isolation.The new U.S. production efforts may correct some of these imbalances, industry executives said — but only up to a point.The new chip factories would take years to build and might not be able to offer the industry’s most advanced manufacturing technology when they begin operations. Companies could also delay or cancel the projects if they aren’t awarded sufficient subsidies by the White House. And a severe shortage in skills may undercut the boom, as the complex factories need many more engineers than the number of students who are graduating from U.S. colleges and universities.The bonanza of money on U.S. chip production is “not going to try or succeed in accomplishing self-sufficiency,” said Chris Miller, an associate professor of international history at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and the author of a recent book on the chip industry’s battles.White House officials have argued that the chip-making investments will sharply reduce the proportion of chips needed to be purchased from abroad, improving U.S. economic security. At the TSMC event in December, Mr. Biden also highlighted the potential impact on tech companies like Apple that rely on TSMC for their chip-making needs. He said that “it could be a game changer” as more of these companies “bring more of their supply chain home.”U.S. companies led chip production for decades starting in the late 1950s. But the country’s share of global production capacity gradually slid to around 12 percent from about 37 percent in 1990, as countries in Asia provided incentives to move manufacturing to those shores.Today, Taiwan accounts for about 22 percent of total chip production and more than 90 percent of the most advanced chips made, according to industry analysts and the Semiconductor Industry Association.The new spending is set to improve America’s position. A $50 billion government investment is likely to prompt corporate spending that would take the U.S. share of global production to as much as 14 percent by 2030, according to a Boston Consulting Group study in 2020 that was commissioned by the Semiconductor Industry Association.“It really does put us in the game for the first time in decades,” said John Neuffer, the association’s president, who added that the estimate may be conservative because Congress approved $76 billion in subsidies in a piece of legislation known as the CHIPS Act.Still, the ramp-up is unlikely to eliminate U.S. dependence on Taiwan for the most advanced chips. Such chips are the most powerful because they pack the highest number of transistors onto each slice of silicon, and they are often held up a sign of a nation’s technological progress.Intel long led the race to shrink the number of transistors on a chip, which is usually described in nanometers, or billionths of a meter, with smaller numbers indicating the most cutting-edge production technology. Then TSMC surged ahead in recent years.But at its Phoenix site, TSMC may not import its most advanced manufacturing technology. The company initially announced that it would produce five-nanometer chips at the Phoenix factory, before saying last month that it would also make four-nanometer chips there by 2024 and build a second factory, which will open in 2026, for three-nanometer chips. It stopped short of discussing further advances.Morris Chang, founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, at the company’s site in Phoenix in December. The company said it would triple its investment there to $40 billion.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesAt the TSMC event last month, President Biden highlighted the potential impact on tech companies that rely on TSMC for their chip-making needs.Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York TimesIn contrast, TSMC’s factories in Taiwan at the end of 2022 began producing three-nanometer technology. By 2025, factories in Taiwan will probably start supplying Apple with two-nanometer chips, said Handel Jones, chief executive at International Business Strategies.TSMC and Apple declined to comment.Whether other chip companies will bring more advanced technology for cutting-edge chips to their new sites is unclear. Samsung Electronics plans to invest $17 billion in a new factory in Texas but has not disclosed its production technology. Intel is manufacturing chips at roughly seven nanometers, though it has said its U.S. factories will turn out three-nanometer chips by 2024 and even more advanced products soon after that.The spending boom is also set to reduce, though not erase, U.S. reliance on Asia for other kinds of chips. Domestic factories produce only about 4 percent of the world’s memory chips — which are needed to store data in computers, smartphones and other consumer devices — and Micron’s planned investments could eventually raise that percentage.But there are still likely to be gaps in a catchall variety of older, simpler chips, which were in such short supply over the past two years that U.S. automakers had to shut down factories and produce partly finished vehicles. TSMC is a major producer of some of these chips, but it is focusing its new investments on more profitable plants for advanced chips.“We still have a dependency that is not being impacted in any way shape or form,” said Michael Hurlston, chief executive of Synaptics, a Silicon Valley chip designer that relies heavily on TSMC’s older factories in Taiwan.The chip-making boom is expected to create a jobs bonanza of 40,000 new roles in factories and companies that supply them, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. That would add to about 277,000 U.S. semiconductor industry employees.But it won’t be easy to fill so many skilled positions. Chip factories typically need technicians to run factory machines and scientists in fields like electrical and chemical engineering. The talent shortage is one of the industry’s toughest challenges, according to recent surveys of executives.The CHIPS Act contains funding for work force development. The Commerce Department, which is overseeing the doling out of grant money from the CHIPS Act’s funds, has also made it clear that organizations hoping to obtain funding should come up with plans for training and educating workers.Intel, responding to the issue, plans to invest $100 million to spur training and research at universities, community colleges and other technical educators. Purdue University, which built a new semiconductor laboratory, has set a goal of graduating 1,000 engineers each year and has attracted the chip maker SkyWater Technology to build a $1.8 billion manufacturing plant near its Indiana campus.Yet training may go only so far, as chip companies compete with other industries that are in dire need of workers.“We’re going to have to build a semiconductor economy that attracts people when they have a lot of other choices,” Mitch Daniels, who was president of Purdue at the time, said at an event in September.Since training efforts may take years to bear fruit, industry executives want to make it easier for highly educated foreign workers to obtain visas to work in the United States or stay after they get their degrees. Officials in Washington are aware that comments encouraging more immigration could invite political fire.But Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, was forthright in a speech in November at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Attracting the world’s best scientific minds is “an advantage that is America’s to lose,” she said. “And we’re not going to let that happen.” More

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    What TikTok Told Us About the Economy in 2022

    From Barbiecore to revenge travel, social media trends gave us a clear picture of the forces reshaping the economy.The unemployment rate has hovered at 3.7 percent for months. But it is the TikTok-famous “quiet quitting” and live-tweeted resignations that really explained what was going on in America’s job market in 2022, a moment of renewed worker power and remarkable upheaval.While government data can tell us that the world is rapidly changing three years into the pandemic, internet trends — the ones that took off and the apps we’ve come to rely on — illustrate how people are responding to a new and evolving normal.Negroni sbagliatos catapulted into fame and onto cocktail menus, underlining the fact that people were ready to get back to spending on fancy happy hours. Instagram feeds filled with beach and mountain pictures as “revenge travel” took flight. We collectively learned what “vibe shift” means just as we realized that the economy was experiencing one.Below is a rundown of a few of the year’s more colorful memes and moments — and what they herald for 2023.Break My SoulBeyoncé imprinted the moment with her instant hit titled “Break My Soul.”Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressBetween high inflation and years of workplace flux — including pandemic firings, work-from-home burnout and most recently a plodding return to office — the economic status quo seemed like an increasingly bad deal to many Americans in 2022. Beyoncé imprinted the discontent on your favorite music app, releasing an instant hit titled “Break My Soul.” Its lyrics included “And I just quit my job, I’m gonna find new drive,” inspiring the internet to ask whether Queen B was encouraging everyone to join the Great Resignation.In fact, people felt so conflicted about work this year that they needed new words to describe it. The TikTok discourse gave us “quiet quitting,” a trend in which workers do the bare minimum. Then came “career cushioning,” discreetly lining up a backup plan while in your current job. At the same time, employers reported “worker hoarding,” in which they avoided firing people after getting burned by long months in which open jobs far outnumbered applicants. The jobs data made it clear that the labor market was out of balance, but it was social discussion that showed just how much.Money Printer Go ‘Brrrr-oke’The Federal Reserve reversed two years of rock-bottom rates this year, raising borrowing costs at the fastest pace in decades in a bid to control rapid inflation. Actual prices have been slow to react, but Reddit wasn’t. Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, formerly featured in memes that sported the tagline “money printer go brrrr” and showed him cranking out cheap and easy cash. In 2022, the memes got an update — to Shrek. Today’s memes compare Mr. Powell to the 2001 movie character Lord Farquaad, who famously declared, “Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”The crankiness on the Reddit discussion boards came as the Fed’s actions cost many investors money. Prominent cryptocurrencies tanked, and asset prices in general swooned, with stocks down about 20 percent from the start of the year. Financial markets are likely to remain on edge into 2023: Inflation is slowing but remains high, and the Fed is poised to raise rates at least slightly more to control it. The memes, in short, are likely to remain grim.Butter BoardsTikTok spent part of this year going crazy for butter boards. Sizie Cornell, via Associated PressTikTok spent part of this year going crazy for butter boards: slabs of the spread covered in flowers, fancy salt, honey or other flavorings. Was this a delayed reaction to the low-fat, no-fat fads of decades past? Evidence that influencers can make us do anything? One thing we can say for sure: It was expensive.That’s because prices for food — and especially for dairy products — have jumped sharply this year. Butter and margarine costs were 34 percent higher in November than 12 months before. Food overall was up 10.6 percent.But as the butter board’s enduring popularity underscored, people buy food even when it is getting costlier. In fact, while retailers reported that some lower-income consumers began pulling back on discretionary purchases and giving priority to necessities, spending in general has been fairly resilient despite a year and a half of rapid price increases and months of Fed rate moves.So far, inflation also remains heady, and it extends well beyond the dairy aisle. A popular price index is still 7.1 percent above its level a year ago, far faster than the typical 2 percent annual pace.BarbiecoreActor Margo Robbie in character in the film “Barbie.”Jaap Buitendijk/Warner Bros. Pictures, via Associated PressAmericans continued to shop in 2022, but what they are buying has been undergoing a quiet change. Americans had been snapping up goods like couches and clothing early in the pandemic, but they are now slowly shifting their purchases back toward services.Social media popularized over-the-top fashions in 2022, including “Barbiecore” (very pink, named for the doll and upcoming movie) and “avant apocalypse,” which paid sartorial homage to the coming end days. But another big trend of the year — buying used clothes, #thrifted — may have more accurately captured the year’s changing economic energy. Clothing store sales are slowing down, official data show, and falling outright if you subtract out apparel inflation.Have a Reservation?As the world reopened and Americans returned to spending on experiences, restaurant tables, in particular, became a hot commodity. Walk-in tables were down 14 percent compared with 2019, while tables with online reservations increased by 24 percent, according to data from the table booking app OpenTable. The figures confirmed what denizens of New York and other cities could tell you (and did, in various media dissections): It was a battle to get a table in 2022 as waitstaff shortages collided with hot diner demand.OpenTable’s data show that happy hour especially surged in 2022. People are dining earlier, and, after years of missed work drinks, this is the overpriced cocktail’s comeback tour. It’s one added reason that Negronis made with Prosecco, popularized by a promotional video for the show “House of the Dragon” on HBO’s TikTok account, are having a moment.Negroni cocktails where popularized by a promotional video for the show “House of the Dragon.”Leah Nash for The New York TimesNo Room at the InnIt turns out people missed the beach just as much as they missed that 5 o’clock martini. Cue the “revenge travel.”Vacationers made up for pandemic-delayed trips en masse in 2022, and as they splurged on big adventures, air traffic rebounded sharply, getting close to its 2019 levels. Hotel revenues fully recovered. At the same time, some travel-related sectors skated by on extremely thin staffing. Employment in accommodation stands at just 83 percent of its February 2020 level. Air transport employment overall is up, but industry groups have complained of worker shortages in key areas like air traffic control.As hotels, motels and airlines struggled to operate at full capacity, room rates and fares rocketed higher and major disruptions became commonplace. Air travel service complaints were more than 380 percent above their 2019 level as of September, according to the Department of Transportation. The mismatch underscored that key parts of the American economy are struggling to reach a new equilibrium after pandemic-induced tumult, even if people want to be in #vacationmode.Peak WeddingIn some instances, pandemic trends are colliding with demographic trends — and nothing showed that more clearly than the many wedding photos that filled up Instagram feeds this year. After years of historically few ceremonies leading up to the pandemic, this was probably the biggest year for weddings since 1997, based on data and forecasts compiled by the Wedding Report, a trade publication.Always, Always, Always a BridesmaidYou might have noticed a lot of wedding invitations in 2022. It was probably the biggest year for tying the knot since 1997.

    Note: Future data represent forecastsSource: The Wedding ReportBy The New York TimesThe pop, the combined result of pandemic-delayed nuptials and a big group of marriage-age millennials, translated into booked-up venues and vendors. It has also raised questions about the economic ripple effects: Will those couples have children, sending up birth data, which already ticked up slightly in 2021? Will they buy houses? We could start to find out in 2023.GrandmillennialTikTok sensation Tariq, known for his love of corn.OK McCausland for The New York TimesAmerica’s younger generations are doing more than getting married. They have been forming their own households and buying houses in greater numbers since the start of the pandemic. In the process, they have helped to fuel strong demand for houses and popularized interior decorating trends — including “grandmillennial,” also affectionately called “granny chic” on Pinterest, in which the young-ish repurpose floral wallpaper and old-style lamps for a cozy but updated look.But many millennials, who are roughly ages 26 to 41 and in their peak home-buying years, may be losing their shot at becoming real estate influencers. As the Fed lifted interest rates to stifle rapid inflation this year, a wave of would-be homeowners began to find that the combination of heftier mortgage costs and high home prices meant they could not afford to buy. New home sales have declined notably. Fed rates are expected to continue climbing in 2023, which could make for a tough road ahead for a generation struggling to make the leap in homeownership. And after a year of serious economic changes and major policy adjustments, it’s uncertain what is coming next: A recession? A benign inflation cool-down?On the bright side, we will have social trends to help us interpret the data, and occasionally to help us find its lighter side. To quote corn kid, a precocious vegetable lover who ascended to TikTok royalty in 2022: “I can’t imagine a more beautiful thing.”Reporting was contributed by More

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    Which Electric Vehicles Qualify for Federal Tax Credits?

    Here is a partial list of electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles that will qualify for federal tax credits in 2023.The Treasury Department on Thursday published a partial list of new electric and plug-in hybrid cars that will qualify for tax credits of up to $7,500. The list is expected to be updated over the coming days and weeks.The credits will apply to sedans that cost no more than $55,000 and sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks that cost up to $80,000. In addition, only buyers who earn less than $150,000 a year as an individual or $300,000 a year as a couple can claim the credits.The list could change in March, when new rules take effect that require automakers to use battery raw materials and components from North America or a trade ally. Those rules are still being formulated, and it’s not clear exactly when they will start to apply.Here are the cars on the list, by automaker:AudiQ5 TFSI e Quattro plug-in hybridFord MotorFord Escape Plug-in HybridFord E-TransitFord F-150 LightningFord Mustang Mach-ELincoln Aviator Grand Touring plug-in hybridLincoln Corsair Grand Touring plug-in hybridNissanLeafRivianR1TR1SStellantisChrysler Pacifica plug-in hybridJeep Wrangler 4xe plug-in hybridJeep Grand Cherokee 4xe plug-in hybridTeslaModel 3Model YVolkswagenID.4VolvoVolvo S60 plug-in hybrid More