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    To Tap Federal Funds, Chip Makers Will Need to Provide Child Care

    The move seeks to help more women join the work force as industry leaders complain of labor shortages.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration plans to leverage the federal government’s expansive investment in the semiconductor industry to make progress on another goal: affordable child care.On Tuesday, the Commerce Department will announce that any semiconductor manufacturer seeking a slice of nearly $40 billion in new federal subsidies will need to essentially guarantee affordable, high-quality child care for workers who build or operate a plant.Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers passed the CHIPS Act, which devoted $39 billion to directly boost U.S. semiconductor factories as part of $52 billion in subsidies for the industry, in hopes of making the nation less reliant on foreign suppliers for critical chips that power computers, video games, cars and more.Companies that receive the subsidies to build new plants will be able to use some of the government money to meet the new child care requirement. They could do that in a number of ways, in consultation with Commerce officials, who will set basic guidelines but not dictate how companies ensure workers have access to care they can afford.That could include building company child-care centers near construction sites or new plants, paying local child-care providers to add capacity at an affordable cost for workers, directly subsidizing workers’ care costs or other, similar steps that would ensure workers have access to care for their children.American employers, including manufacturers, are increasingly raising concerns that a lack of access to affordable child care is blocking millions of Americans from looking for work, particularly women. President Biden pushed Congress to address those concerns over the last two years, proposing hundreds of billions of dollars for new child care programs, but he was unable to corral support from even a majority of Senate Democrats.But Mr. Biden did convince lawmakers to approve a range of new spending programs seeking to boost American manufacturing. Now, Commerce is trying to utilize a centerpiece of those efforts, which aims to expand American semiconductor manufacturing, to make at least a small dent in his large goals for the so-called care economy.The Global Race for Computer ChipsA Ramp-Up in Spending: Amid a tech cold war with China, U.S. companies have pledged nearly $200 billion for chip manufacturing projects since early 2020. But the investments have limits.Crackdown on China: The United States has been aiming to prevent China from becoming an advanced power in chips, issuing sweeping restrictions on the country’s access to advanced technology.Arizona Factory: Internal doubts are mounting at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s biggest maker of advanced chips, over its investment in a new factory in Phoenix.CHIPS Act: Semiconductor companies, which united to get the sprawling $280 billion bill approved last year, have set off a lobbying frenzy as they argue for more cash than their competitors.It joins a growing list of administration efforts to expand the reach of Mr. Biden’s economic policies beyond their primary intent. For instance, administration officials have attached stringent labor standards and “Buy America” provisions to money from a bipartisan infrastructure law. The child care requirement will be flexible for chip makers, but it will almost certainly divert some subsidy dollars that are meant to expand factory capacity and create jobs.The Commerce Department is expected to release its application on Tuesday, allowing companies to begin making a case for federal subsidies that the industry lobbied hard to secure from Congress.The prospect of accessing those funds has already enticed domestic and foreign-owned chip makers to announce billions of dollars in plans for new investments in Arizona, central New York and elsewhere.But even as they ramp up investments, companies are complaining of difficulties in finding workers to build and operate manufacturing facilities.America’s child care industry has not fully rebounded from the pandemic recession. It is still about 58,000 workers, or 5 percentage points, short of its prepandemic peak, according to an analysis of Labor Department data by the Center for the Study of Childcare Employment at the University of California-Berkeley.Shortly before the pandemic, the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington surveyed 35 states and found more than 11 million children had a potential need for child care — yet fewer than 8 million slots were available.That shortage is particularly acute in some of the areas where manufacturers are set to begin building new chip plants spurred by the new legislation. Commerce Department officials calculate that in the Syracuse area, where Micron announced a $100 billion chip making investment last year after Mr. Biden signed the new law, the need for slots in child care facilities is nearly three times the size of the actual care capacity in the region.In Phoenix, where semiconductor manufacturing is booming, child care costs consume about 18 percent of a typical construction or manufacturing worker’s salary. That share is higher than the national average.Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, center, with Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, said that the child care requirements should help companies hire mothers, easing a labor shortage.Sarah Silbiger for The New York TimesGina Raimondo, the Commerce secretary, said in an interview that the child-care requirements should help companies cope with a tight labor market by making it easier for them to attract and retain caregivers who have been kept from working by difficulties finding care for their children.In a speech last week, Ms. Raimondo called efforts to attract more women to the work force “a simple question of math” for industries complaining of labor shortages. “We need chip manufacturers, construction companies and unions to work with us toward the national goal of hiring and training another million women in construction over the next decade to meet the demand not just in chips, but other industries and infrastructure projects as well,” she said.Only about 3 in 10 U.S. manufacturing workers are women. Ms. Raimondo said the CHIPS Act would fail if the administration did not help companies change those numbers, by bringing in women who have children.“You will not be successful unless you find a way to attract, train, put to work and retain women, and you won’t do that without child care,” Ms. Raimondo said in an interview.The Commerce requirement would represent a relatively small step toward Mr. Biden’s much larger, and as-yet unfulfilled, child care ambitions.Mr. Biden unveiled a $4 trillion economic agenda in the months after he took office. It was split into two parts. One focused on physical investments: repairing bridges and water pipes, laying broadband cable, spurring a shift to low-emission sources of energy and catalyzing new manufacturing capacity to compete on a global stage. It was a source of repeated legislative success for the president, who signed a bipartisan infrastructure bill, the CHIPS bill and a climate, health and tax bill that passed with only Democratic votes.But Mr. Biden failed to persuade centrist holdouts in his party, like Senators Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, to back most of the provisions in the second half of his agenda. Those were largely the president’s plans to invest in people: federally guaranteed paid leave; subsidized care for children, the disabled and older Americans; universal prekindergarten; free community college for all, and more.The lopsided nature of Mr. Biden’s success threatens to exacerbate existing gender disparities in the economy. Some economists warn they could hinder future economic growth. Many of Mr. Biden’s people-focused programs were deliberately aimed at boosting female participation in the work force.It could be years before Democrats have another opportunity to pass those programs. Republicans won control of the House of Representatives last fall and roundly oppose Mr. Biden on new spending proposals and the tax increases on corporations and high earners that he has called for to cover that spending. Progressive groups and liberal lawmakers largely concede there is little chance of a child care bill making its way to Mr. Biden’s desk before the 2024 election.When it became clear last year that sweeping plans to expand and subsidize child care would not make it into the climate, health and tax bill that marked the culmination of Mr. Biden’s economic efforts in Congress, Ms. Raimondo gathered aides around a conference table. She told them, she said, that “if Congress wasn’t going to do what they should have done, we’re going to do it in implementation” of the bills that did pass.Some American manufacturers have already turned to on-site care facilities to help meet workers needs. The automaker Toyota has provided 24-hour care at a factory in Kentucky since 1993 and one in Indiana since 2004.Chad Moutray, director of the Center for Manufacturing Research at the Manufacturing Institute, which is affiliated with the National Association of Manufacturers, wrote in a report late last year that child care availability is part of the reason women do not seek more jobs in manufacturing.“Women represent a sizable talent pool that manufacturers cannot ignore,” he wrote. More

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    IRS Decision Not to Tax Certain Payments Carries Fiscal Cost

    The Biden administration has opted not to tax state payments to residents, a decision that could add to the nation’s fiscal woes.WASHINGTON — More than 20 state governments, flush with cash from federal stimulus funds and a rebounding economy, shared their windfalls last year by sending residents one-time payments.This year, the Biden administration added a sweetener, telling tens of millions taxpayers they did not need to pay federal taxes on those payments.That decision by the Internal Revenue Service, while applauded by some tax experts and lawmakers, could cost the federal government as much $4 billion in revenue at a time when Washington is struggling with a ballooning federal deficit and entering a protracted fight over the nation’s debt limit.The I.R.S.’s ruling came after bipartisan pressure from lawmakers and was the latest move by the agency to forgo revenue this tax season.In December, the I.R.S. delayed by a year a new requirement that users of digital wallets like Venmo and Cash App report income on 1099-K forms if they had more than $600 of transactions. That requirement, which was part of the American Rescue Plan of 2021, was projected to raise nearly $1 billion in tax revenue per year over a decade. The last-minute decision to delay it followed intense lobbying from business groups and political backlash directed at the Biden administration, which was accused of breaking its pledge not to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000.Taken together, the moves by the I.R.S. run counter to two big economic issues bedeviling Washington — rapid inflation and concerns about the government’s ability to avoid defaulting on its debt.Allowing residents to avoid paying taxes on their state rebates means more money in their pockets to spend at a moment when the Federal Reserve is trying to rein in consumer and business spending to cool rising prices. A report released on Friday showed that, despite the Fed’s efforts to slow the economy, personal spending sped up in January.Understand the U.S. Debt CeilingCard 1 of 5What is the debt ceiling? More

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    What Layoffs? Many Employers Are Eager to Hang On to Workers.

    During the height of the pandemic, hungry and housebound customers clamored for Home Run Inn Pizza’s frozen thin-crust pies. The company did everything to oblige.It kept its machines chugging during lunch breaks and brought on temporary workers to ensure it could produce pizzas at the suddenly breakneck pace.More recently, demand has eased, and Home Run Inn Pizza, based in suburban Chicago, has reversed some of those measures. But it does not plan to lay off any full-time manufacturing employees — even if that means having a few more workers than it needs during its second shift.“We have really good people,” said Nick Perrino, the chief operating officer and a great-grandson of the company’s founder. “And we don’t want to let any of our team members go.”Despite a year of aggressive interest rate increases by the Federal Reserve aimed at taming inflation, and signs that the red-hot labor market is cooling off, most companies have not taken the step of cutting jobs. Outside of some high-profile companies mostly in the tech sector, such as Google’s parent Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft, layoffs in the economy as a whole remain remarkably, even historically, rare.There were fewer layoffs in December than in any month during the two decades before the pandemic, government data show. Filings for unemployment insurance have barely increased. And the unemployment rate, at 3.4 percent, is the lowest since 1969.Layoffs Are Uncommonly Low More

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    War in Ukraine Deepens Divide Among Major Economies at G20 Gathering

    Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen urged her counterparts at a summit in India to condemn Russia’s actions, and she defended the cost of supplying aid to Kyiv.A year after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the war is deepening the division among the world’s major economies, threatening fragile recoveries by disrupting food and energy supply chains and distracting from plans to combat poverty and restructure debt in poor countries.Those fissures were evident this past week as top economic policymakers from the Group of 20 nations gathered for two days at a resort in Bengaluru, a city in southern India, where efforts to demonstrate unity were overshadowed by flaring tensions over Russia. During the summit, Western nations imposed a barrage of new sanctions on Moscow and unveiled more economic support for Ukraine, while developing countries like India, which have been reaping the benefits of cheap Russian oil, resisted expressing criticism.The differing views left officials struggling to cobble together the traditional joint statement, or communiqué, on Saturday, forcing senior representatives from the Group of 7 nations, the world’s most advanced economies, to try to convince reluctant counterparts that defending Ukraine was worth the cost.“Ukraine is fighting not only for their country, but for the preservation of democracy and peaceful conditions in Europe,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on Saturday in an interview, explaining the case that she had made to the more reluctant countries. “It’s an assault on democracy and on territorial integrity that should concern all of us,” she added.The summit took place at a pivotal moment for the global economy. The International Monetary Fund last month upgraded its global output projections but warned that Russia’s war in Ukraine continued to cast a cloud of uncertainty. The fund also noted that increasing “fragmentation” in the world could be a drag on growth in the future.Ms. Yellen was among the most forceful critics of Russia during the two-day meeting. At one point, she directly confronted senior Russian officials in a private session and called them “complicit” in the Kremlin’s atrocities.The grappling over how to characterize Russia’s actions led Bruno Le Maire, the French finance minister, to publicly vent his frustration with some countries that would not assail Russia in writing. He noted that when the leaders of the Group of 20 nations met in November, in Bali, Indonesia, their statement had asserted that most members strongly condemned the war, and he said on Friday that he was opposed to watering down that sentiment.“I want to make it very clear that we will oppose any step back from the statement of the leaders in Bali on this question of the war in Ukraine,” Mr. Le Maire, who declined to name the holdouts, said at a news conference. “We strongly condemn this illegal and brutal attack against Ukraine.”India’s close economic ties with Russia have made its role as the host of the Group of 20 this year especially challenging. Moscow is a major supplier of energy and military equipment to India, while the United States is India’s largest trading partner.To remain neutral, India has tried to avoid describing the conflict as a “war” and instead focused on other issues. In an opening address to the summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid out the threats facing the global economy, but he made no mention of Russia, pointing instead to “rising geopolitical tensions in many parts of the world.”Some of the resistance to condemning Russia is because of concern about the United States’ use of its economic might to isolate a member of the Group of 20.“The fact that the U.S. clearly has so much power to take action against a geopolitical rival is a significant concern,” said Eswar Prasad, a trade policy professor at Cornell University who speaks to both American and Indian officials. “There’s clearly been a splintering of the G20.”Mr. Prasad added that the aggressive use of sanctions by the United States had raised anxiety among other nations — even if they disagreed with Russia’s actions — that they could someday be exposed to Washington’s wrath.That use of economic warfare was on display on Friday, when the United States imposed sanctions on more than 200 individuals and entities in Russia and other countries that are helping to financially support Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions were also placed on Russia’s metals and mining sector and on energy companies.The war in Ukraine was not the only matter this past week that consumed finance ministers in India.The United States and Europe continued to hash out differences over American subsidies for electric vehicles that European countries believe will harm their economies. A global tax agreement that was struck in 2021 continues to flounder, raising the prospect that it could unravel. And talks over restructuring debt burdens facing poor countries to avoid a cascade of defaults failed to bear fruit, largely because of resistance from China.“There hasn’t been a significant change that I see,” said Ms. Yellen, who expressed frustration at China’s role as a roadblock this past week.But it is the war in Ukraine that has left the world’s economic leaders most divided. In many cases, resistance to supporting Ukraine and confronting Russia is the result of complicated domestic politics in many countries, and the United States is no exception.A growing number of Republicans, including former President Donald J. Trump, have been arguing in recent weeks that the United States cannot afford to endlessly support Kyiv. They contend that at a time when the United States is burdened by record levels of debt and a weakening economy, that money would be better spent on domestic problems.In the past year, the United States has directed more than $100 billion dollars of humanitarian, financial and military aid to Ukraine. The Congressional Budget Office projected last week that the United States was on track to add nearly $19 trillion to its national debt over the next decade, $3 trillion more than previously forecast.For the Biden administration, scaling back aid to Ukraine does not appear to be an option.In the interview, Ms. Yellen argued that the United States can afford to bear the costs and that supporting Ukraine was a priority for national security and economic reasons.“The war is having an adverse effect on the entire global economy,” Ms. Yellen said, “and providing the support that’s necessary for Ukraine to win this and bring it to an end is certainly something that we really can’t afford not to do.” More

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    The Furniture Hustlers of Silicon Valley

    As tech companies cut costs and move to remote work, their left-behind office furniture has become part of a booming trade.Brandi Susewitz touched the curved stitching on a pair of bright red Arne Jacobsen Egg Chairs and announced they were worth around $5,000 each. The chairs were in pristine condition, perched in the reception area of the software company Sitecore’s office in downtown San Francisco.Trisha Murcia, Sitecore’s workplace manager, said she was likely the only person who ever sat on them. “It’s really sad,” she said. “They opened this office in 2018 and then Covid happened.”Ms. Murcia led Ms. Susewitz around Sitecore’s office, pointing out bar stools that had never been used, 90-inch flat screens, shiny conference room tables and accent chairs from the retailer Blu Dot. The whiteboard walls, outfitted with markers and erasers, were spotless. And rows upon rows of 30-by-60 inch, height-adjustable Knoll desks with Herman Miller Aeron chairs sat collecting dust.Ms. Susewitz measured and snapped photos, identifying designer brands and models. Her office furniture resale business, Reseat, would take all of it, she declared. “We can find a home for this,” she said. “We have time.”Brandi Susewitz looked at two red Arne Jacobsen Egg Chairs during a visit to the Sitecore office in San Francisco last month.Jason Henry for The New York TimesSitecore was reducing its office space because the pandemic meant more employees worked remotely.Jason Henry for The New York TimesMs. Susewitz, who started Reseat in 2020, is one of an increasing number of behind-the-scenes specialists in the Bay Area who are carving out a piece of the great office furniture reshuffling. There are professional liquidators, Craigslist flippers and start-ups spouting buzzwords like “circular economy.” And a few guys with warehouses full of really nice chairs.All of them are capitalizing on a wave of tech companies that are drastically shrinking their physical footprints in the wake of the pandemic-induced shift to remote work and the recent economic slowdown.Nowhere is the furniture glut stronger than in San Francisco. Tech workers have been slowest to return to the office in the city, where commercial vacancy rates jumped to 28 percent last year, up from 4 percent in 2019, according to the real estate firm CBRE. Occupancy in San Francisco in late January was 4 percent below the average of the top 10 U.S. cities, according to the building security firm Kastle. And companies of all sizes, including PayPal, Block and Yelp, are giving up their expensive downtown headquarters or downsizing their office space.Add to that the tech industry’s recent U-turn from optimistic hypergrowth to fear and penny pinching. That has led tech giants such as Google and Salesforce, along with smaller companies like DoorDash and Wish, to carry out widespread layoffs, cutting more than 88,000 workers in the Bay Area over the last year, according to Layoffs.fyi.Some start-ups have abruptly gone under, including the flying car company Kittyhawk, the autonomous vehicle start-up Argo AI and the interior design start-up Modsy. Others have slashed spending, starting with their dusty, rarely-used offices full of designer furniture.Ms. Susewitz checked out an Aeron chair during her visit to Sitecore. She toured the office with Trisha Murcia, Sitecore’s workplace managerJason Henry for The New York TimesMs. Susewitz measured office furniture at Sitecore’s office in downtown San Francisco.Jason Henry for The New York TimesLast month, Twitter held a public auction for some of its furniture, hawking dry erase boards, conference tables and a three-foot blue statue of its bird logo. The social media company, which is owned by Elon Musk, at one point stopped paying the rent on some of its office leases.Layoffs in Big TechAfter a pandemic hiring spree, several tech companies are now pulling back.A Growing List: Alphabet, Microsoft and Zoom are among the latest tech giants to cut jobs amid concerns about an economic slowdown.Salesforce: The company said it would lay off 10 percent of its staff, a decision that seemed to go against the professed commitment of its co-founder and chief executive, Marc Benioff, to its workers.New Parents Hit Hard: At tech companies that spent recent years expanding paid parental leave, parents have felt the whiplash of mass layoffs in an especially visceral way.Tech’s Generational Divide: The recent cuts have been eye-opening to young workers. But to older employees who experienced the dot-com bust, it has hardly been a shock.Martin Pichinson, a founder of Sherwood Partners, an advisory firm that helps restructure failing start-ups, said he was staffing up to handle increased demand. Today’s reckoning was not as severe as that of the dot-com bust in the early 2000s when dozens of tech companies collapsed, he said, but “everyone is acting as if businesses are falling apart.”That’s led to a lot of expendable furniture, much of it hewing to a specific youthful aesthetic of Instagrammable bright colors and midcentury modern shapes. That look, complemented by plant walls of succulents and kombucha on tap, was a hallmark of the tech talent wars over the past two decades, telegraphing a company’s success and sophistication.Then there’s the Aeron chairs. The $1,805 black roller-wheel desk chairs are a closely-watched barometer of tech excesses. Their sleek design makes them a work of art, according to the Museum of Modern Art. And in the tech industry, where workers are used to being pampered while chained to their desks, they are ubiquitous.When internet companies imploded in 2000, liquidators filled their warehouses with the “dot-com thrones.” Now any whiff of empty Aerons piling up conjures memories of that slump and sets off fears that another is imminent.The Bay Area’s Craigslist currently has gobs of the chairs for sale, photographed in warehouses, lined up in corners of conference rooms and wrapped in plastic outside a storage unit. Some are selling for as cheap as a few hundred bucks.The listings are a reminder: Silicon Valley is a place of booms and busts, with enterprising hustlers who see nothing but opportunity, even in the rubble.Mr. Norbu’s furniture reselling business, called Enliven, has expanded to include a van, three employees and a warehouse.Jason Henry for The New York TimesA trail of Dropbox furnitureFor furniture specialists, it all starts with supplies from tech companies like Dropbox.In 2019, the file storage company moved into its 735,000-square-foot headquarters in San Francisco. Its 15-year lease was the largest in the city’s history at the time. Dropbox’s old office was rented to other companies, and last year, a cache of furniture — futuristic-chic chairs, couches and tables — from that office made its way to a liquidator.The inventory included several emerald green velvet Jean Royère-style Polar Bear chairs that cost roughly $10,000 to custom make in 2016, according to their maker, Classic Design LA.Three of those chairs sold to Tenzin Norbu, a furniture reseller in Richmond, Calif., who paid around $1,000 for each. Mr. Norbu, 25, started buying and selling high-end furniture on online marketplaces early in the pandemic, when people were eager to redecorate the homes they were stuck inside and stymied by supply chain delays on furniture.Since then, his business, called Enliven, has expanded to include a van, three employees, a 4,000-square-foot warehouse and annual revenue in the mid-six figures.The tech talent wars, with companies competing to out-perk one another with the fanciest offices, were good for designer furniture. The retreat from that battle has been just as good for resellers.Last year, Mr. Norbu scored some lounge chairs and couches from Fast, a payments start-up that collapsed in the spring. He also paid “tens of thousands” of dollars, he said, to fill a 20-foot truck of still-in-the-box furniture that WeWork, whose valuation had plummeted, had kept in storage since 2019. The trove included dining chairs, lamps, couches and a chunky red Bollo armchair by the Swedish designer Fogia.Mr. Norbu’s inventory included three green Polar Bear chairs that were custom made for Dropbox.Jason Henry for The New York TimesMr. Norbu said he planned to buy furniture from more tech start-ups as his business grows.Jason Henry for The New York TimesOn a recent tour of his warehouse, Mr. Norbu pointed out a pair of never-used felt poufs from a start-up, two glass coffee tables from Delta Air Lines, some gray lounge chairs that were “probably from Google” and plants from a venture capital firm.Mr. Norbu aims to target more tech start-ups as his business expands. The companies are always acquiring or shedding furniture, since they tend to grow quickly and shut down abruptly. Many of his buyers also work in tech, he said, which means they could find themselves eating dinner at the very conference table they once gathered around for meetings.Last year, Mr. Norbu sold one of the Polar Bear chairs that had been owned by Dropbox to a fellow furniture flipper, Nate Morgan, for $1,400. Mr. Morgan started trading furniture in the fall after he was laid off from a business development job at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram. He said he quickly discovered the Bay Area contains “crazy pockets of massive amounts of furniture.”Mr. Morgan’s business, Reclamation, recently worked with a wealthy tech entrepreneur who had bought a second San Francisco home to live in while his main home was being renovated. The entrepreneur furnished the 4,000-square-foot second home with new goods from Restoration Hardware. Nine months later, when the entrepreneur moved into his main home, Mr. Morgan bought all of the second home’s furniture for 10 percent of its retail price.Mr. Morgan, 44, said the furniture business was a welcome shift from the 15 years he spent working in tech. “It feels really good to be building a local community business that’s tied to this geographic area,” he said.Outside Mr. Norbu’s 4,000-square-foot furniture warehouse.Jason Henry for The New York TimesMr. Morgan later sold the Polar Bear chair that had been at Dropbox for a profit to an interior designer in Los Angeles, who then sold it to a client in the Hollywood Hills. From the liquidator, to Mr. Norbu, to Mr. Morgan, to the interior designer, each person in the chain made a little money.Dropbox declined to comment. During the pandemic, the company shifted to remote work and made plans to sublet 80 percent of its headquarters. Takers have been slow; the company recently lowered its expected rate, pushed out its target for finding tenants by two years and recorded a $175 million charge on its real estate holdings in 2022.Dropbox’s remaining space has been converted into what the company calls a “studio” instead of an “office,” designed for meetings and “touchdown spots,” or cafes and libraries for people to sit, chat and work briefly. There are no more desks.‘It was a ghost town’Ms. Susewitz, 49, has worked in office furniture since 1997, when she became a customer service representative at Lindsay-Ferrari, a Bay Area furniture dealer now known as One Workplace.The furniture industry’s wastefulness always bugged her, she said, with companies discarding durable, commercial-grade items that were built to last decades every time they moved. Companies waited until the last minute to deal with the furniture, she said, increasing the odds it wound up in the trash.In the late 1990s dot-com boom, Ms. Susewitz created a business plan to build an online marketplace for used office furniture. She abandoned it when eBay took off, thinking the company would eventually solve the problem. “But that never happened,” she said.Over the next two decades, she worked in sales and business development, outfitting Bay Area businesses with goods from “the big five” of workplace furniture — Steelcase, MillerKnoll, Haworth, Allsteel and Teknion.Before the pandemic, Sitecore was expanding its space so rapidly that it had leased another half of a floor in its office tower.Jason Henry for The New York TimesWhen the pandemic hit, Ms. Susewitz’s livelihood of new office furniture screeched to a halt. She watched with disgust as companies tossed out barely-used desks and chairs.“Perfectly good, brand-new furniture is just being carted off to landfills,” she said. So she created Reseat to help businesses liquidate furniture. The company uses an inventory management system that tracks the items’ “life cycles” so it can quickly share the specifications for the furniture, making the goods easier to sell. Given enough time, sellers can expect 20 cents on the dollar for their furniture, she said. Reseat, which has 14 employees, has worked with more than 100 companies and sold more than eight million pounds of furniture.“Our goal is to sell it standing,” Ms. Susewitz said. “Once it ends up in a warehouse, it loses value and ends up collecting dust.”In December, Reseat was hired to liquidate more than 900 work stations, 96 office chairs, 40 work benches, 24 sofas and 84 file cabinets at an office in Santa Clara, Calif. Analog Devices, the semiconductor company that had moved out, hardly used the space during the pandemic. But Pure Storage, the data storage company moving in, didn’t want those pieces. Reseat had just four weeks to sell the items.“It just ate me up inside,” Ms. Susewitz said. That she found buyers in time was “a miracle,” she added.Pure Storage said it was reusing a “substantial” amount of Analog Devices’s furniture, including desk chairs and conference room items, but it planned to install its existing desks “to better suit how Pure employees work in a more open office environment.” An Analog Devices representative declined to comment.Ms. Susewitz was excited about the furniture at Sitecore because the company had contacted Reseat months ahead of its move, setting it up to easily find a home for its goods. At Sitecore’s office, she showed off how to identify the size of an Aeron chair. Each one has a set of plastic bumps hidden on its back. Two bumps indicate the most common size, a “B.”There were 16 size Bs around a wooden conference table that Sitecore had built using wood from a houseboat that was in Sausalito, Calif. In the center, a basin filled with Legos was flanked by the universal emblems of the pandemic: a bottle of Purell and a package of Clorox wipes.Ms. Susewitz said she would take everything from Sitecore’s kitchen area, except for the plates and silverware.Jason Henry for The New York TimesBefore the pandemic, Sitecore was expanding its space so rapidly that it had leased another half of a floor in its office tower. But “once the pandemic hit, it was a ghost town,” said Brad Hamilton, the company’s head of real estate and facilities.Sitecore plans to downgrade to 30 desks from 170. “We’re paying an outrageous amount of money for a floor that nobody uses,” he said.Toward the end of the office tour, Ms. Susewitz surveyed Sitecore’s empty kitchen area, outfitted with a Ping-Pong table, a Ms. Pac-Man machine and two curved, six-foot privacy coves. Ms. Susewitz said she would take everything, except for the plates and silverware.Chair influencersOne result of the furniture trading is a lot more people logging into Zoom meetings from very nice chairs — and not only in the Bay Area.In January, Gilad Rom, a software engineer in Los Angeles, decided to upgrade his work station at home. He searched Craigslist and found a seller with 500 Aeron chairs — apparently acquired from a SiriusXM office that had shifted to remote work — in Culver City, Calif.When he posted a picture of the chairs gathered in a room, their black foam arms intertwined, the reaction was explosive. Some people wanted to score their own cheap Aeron. Many more wanted to reminisce about what the empty chairs represented — corporate excess gone awry.“I think it brought back a lot of memories,” Mr. Rom, 43, said. “Flashbacks from 2008 and 2000.”The seller, a secondhand furniture shop called Wannasofa, was so overwhelmed with calls after Mr. Rom’s tweet that the store gave him a 25 percent discount. “Apparently I’m a chair influencer now,” he said.The reaction also gave him an idea.“Maybe I should build an app that helps people find cheap luxury furniture,” he said. “Maybe there’s something there.” More

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    How the Fed Opened Pandora’s Box

    Jerome H. Powell’s no-holds-barred response to the pandemic was made possible by history. It raises questions about the future.It was July 2019 when Representative Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, asked Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, whether he would use the central bank’s powers to help state and local governments during the next recession.“We don’t have authority, I don’t believe, to lend to state and local governments,” Mr. Powell replied. “I don’t think we want that authority.”Yet nine months later, at the start of April 2020, the central bank announced that it would do effectively what Ms. Tlaib had asked. Fed officials set up a program to make sure that state and local governments could continue to borrow as credit markets dried up.What had changed was the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Roughly 15 of every 100 adults who wanted to work found themselves jobless that month, many of them suddenly. Stocks had plunged in value so precipitously that the nation’s households would lose 5.5 percent of their wealth in just the first three months of the year. Amid government-imposed shutdowns, with millions of people at home, there were real worries that Wall Street and small businesses alike would implode.What hadn’t changed was the Fed’s enormous power. Whether central bankers were ready to embrace it in 2019 or not, the institution has long had sweeping authority to use its ability to create money out of thin air to save the financial system and economy in times of trouble.And it could exercise that power expediently — and with considerable independence from the rest of the government — in no small part because a man named Marriner Eccles reluctantly took on the job of leading America’s central bank in 1934. That history is particularly useful for understanding what happened in 2020 — and what that might set in motion for the future. It is detailed in my new book “Limitless: The Federal Reserve Takes on a New Age of Crisis,” from which this article is adapted.The Fed staged a no-holds-barred intervention during the pandemic to stabilize Wall Street and insulate the economy, slashing interest rates to rock bottom, buying trillions of dollars’ worth of government-backed bonds to keep critical markets functioning and promising trillions more in emergency programs that would keep loans flowing to municipal and corporate borrowers and midsize businesses.It worked. The rescue was so successful that by the end of 2020 the Fed’s response effort was shutting down, rapidly fading from headline-grabbing news to mere historical artifact.But the Fed’s actions quietly opened the monetary and financial policy equivalent of Pandora’s box: They made it clear to Fed officials themselves, to Congress and to financial market players exactly what the central bank is capable of doing and whom it is capable of saving. That makes it much more likely that the central bank will be called on to use its tools expansively again.After seeing what the Fed could do during the 2008 financial meltdown, politicians asked: Why save Wall Street but not Detroit? After 2020, they may wonder: Why react to a pandemic crisis but not a climate crisis, or a military one?Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

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    The Fed’s Preferred Inflation Gauge Sped Back Up

    Inflation is down from its peak last summer, but recent readings have shown substantial and surprising staying power.There was a moment, late last year, when everything seemed to be going according to the Federal Reserve’s plan: Inflation was slowing, consumers were pulling back and the overheated economy was gently cooling down.But a spate of fresh data, including worrying figures released Friday, make it clear that the road ahead is likely to be bumpier and more treacherous than expected.The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index — the Fed’s preferred measure of inflation — climbed 5.4 percent in January from a year earlier, the Commerce Department said Friday. That was an unexpected re-acceleration from December’s 5.3 percent pace after six months of relatively consistent cooling.Even after stripping out food and fuel prices, both of which jump around a lot, the price index climbed 4.7 percent over the year through last month — also a pickup, and more than expected in a Bloomberg survey of economists.Those readings are well above the Fed’s goal of 2 percent annual inflation. And the report’s details offered other reasons to worry. The previously reported slowdown in December, which had given economists hope, looked less pronounced after revisions. While price increases had also been consistently slowing on a month-to-month basis, they, too, are now showing signs of speeding back up.Stocks slumped to their worst week of the year, with the S&P 500 down by 1.1 percent at the close of trading on Friday as investors digested the report and what it portends for the Fed, which has been raising rates aggressively since last year. Financial markets have come under sustained pressure in recent weeks as investors have recalibrated their expectations for how long inflation could remain high, and how high interest rates could go as a result.The figures released Friday are just the latest evidence that neither price increases nor the broader economy is cooling as much as expected as 2023 begins. Employers added half a million jobs in January, wages continue to rise, and figures released Friday showed that Americans continue to spend freely on goods and, especially, on services like vacation travel and restaurant meals.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

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    Fed can’t tame inflation without ‘significantly’ more hikes that will cause a recession, paper says

    The Federal Reserve building is seen before the Federal Reserve board is expected to signal plans to raise interest rates in March as it focuses on fighting inflation in Washington, January 26, 2022.
    Joshua Roberts | Reuters

    The Federal Reserve is unlikely to be able to bring down inflation without having to raise interest rates considerably higher, causing a recession, according to a research paper released Friday.
    Former Fed Governor Frederic Mishkin is among the authors of the white paper that examines the history of central bank efforts to create disinflation.

    Despite the sentiments of many current Fed officials that they can manage a “soft landing” while tackling high prices, the paper says that is unlikely to be the case.
    “We find no instance in which a central-[bank]induced disinflation occurred without a recession,” said the paper, co-authored by economists Stephen Cecchetti, Michael Feroli, Peter Hooper and Kermit Schoenholtz.

    The paper was presented Friday morning during a monetary policy forum presented by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
    The Fed has implemented a series of interest rate hikes in an effort to tame inflation that had been at its highest level in some 41 years. Markets widely expect a few more hikes before the Fed can pause to assess the impact the tighter policy is having on the economy.
    However, the paper suggests that there’s probably a ways to go.

    “Simulations of our baseline model suggest that the Fed will need to tighten policy significantly further to achieve its inflation objective by the end of 2025,” the researchers said.
    “Even assuming stable inflation expectations, our analysis casts doubt on the ability of the Fed to engineer a soft landing in which inflation returns to the 2 percent target by the end of 2025 without a mild recession,” they added.
    The paper, however, rejects the idea of raising the 2% inflation standard. In addition, the researchers say the central bank should abandon its new policy framework adopted in September 2020. That change implemented “average inflation targeting,” allowing inflation to run hotter than normal in the interest of a more inclusive employment recovery.
    The researchers say the Fed should go back to its preemptive mode where it started raising rates when unemployment fell sharply.
    Fed Governor Philip Jefferson released a reply to the report, saying the current situation differs from previous inflation episodes. He noted that this Fed has more credibility as an inflation-fighter than some of its predecessors.
    “Unlike in the late 1960s and 1970s, the Federal Reserve is addressing the outbreak in inflation promptly and forcefully to maintain that credibility and to preserve the ‘well anchored’ property of long-term inflation expectations,” Jefferson said.

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