Evelyn Reynolds

More stories

  • 75 Shares189 Views

    in Economy

    Consumer Spending Fell Again in December

    Fresh data offered more detail on how shoppers retrenched at the end of 2022.For more than a year now, the U.S. economy has faced two fundamental, interwoven challenges: Consumers wouldn’t stop spending, and prices wouldn’t stop rising.Both trends are now showing early signs of reversing.Consumer spending fell in both November and December, the Commerce Department said on Friday, as shoppers pulled back amid rising prices, dwindling savings and warnings of a looming recession.Inflation is also easing: Consumer prices rose 5 percent in the year through December, according to the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure. While still much more rapid than normal, that was the slowest pace in more than a year.Taken together, the figures paint a picture of an economy that is, at long last, coming off the boil. From the Fed’s perspective, that is good news: The central bank has spent the past year aggressively raising interest rates in an effort to force consumers and businesses alike to pull back their spending, which should result in slower price increases. Now there is mounting evidence those efforts are bearing fruit.“The medicine is taking,” said Sarah Watt House, senior economist at Wells Fargo. “The economy is on the right path.”That path is an uncertain and narrow one, however. So far, the Fed has managed to cool down the economy without short-circuiting the recovery and causing a big increase in unemployment. But the full effects of its actions have yet to be felt.Policymakers are expected to raise rates by another quarter point at their meeting next week, a move that would put rates in a range of 4.5 to 4.75 percent. Even once they stop raising rates, the central bank has indicated it expects to keep borrowing costs high for a significant period.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

  • 150 Shares129 Views

    in Economy

    Key Fed inflation measure eased in December while consumer spending also declined

    Core PCE inflation, the Fed’s preferred measure, rose 4.4% from a year ago, its smallest annual increase since October 2021.
    Consumer spending, however, dropped 0.2%, pointing to an economy that was grinding to a halt as 2022 closed.
    Personal income increased 0.2% for the month, as expected.

    Consumers spent less in December even as an inflation measure considered key by the Federal Reserve showed the pace of price increases easing, the Commerce Department reported Friday.
    Personal consumption expenditures excluding food and energy increased 4.4% from a year ago, down from the 4.7% reading in November and in line with the Dow Jones estimate. That was the slowest annual rate of increase since October 2021.

    On a monthly basis, so-called core PCE increased 0.3%, also meeting estimates.
    At the same time, consumer spending was even less than already modest estimates, indicating that the economy slowed at the end of 2022 and contributing to expectations for a 2023 recession.
    Spending adjusted for inflation declined 0.2% on the month, worse than the 0.1% drop that Wall Street had been anticipating.
    Personal income increased 0.2% for the month, as expected.
    The numbers come with Fed officials closely watching to measure the impact their rate increases have had on the economy. In line with other recent economic data, they show inflation persisting but at a slower pace than the level that had driven price increases in mid-2022 to their fastest pace in more than 40 years.

    However, the data also shows that consumer spending, which drives more than two-thirds of all U.S. economic activity, is waning. Adjusted for inflation, real consumer spending declined 0.3%.
    “Even if real consumption returns to growth over the first few months of this year, the disastrous end to the previous quarter means that first-quarter real consumption growth will be close to zero,” said Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist for Capital Economics. Ashworth now expects first-quarter GDP growth to decline at a 1.5% annualized pace.
    Consumers could get some help from the slowing pace of price increases.
    Headline inflation rose 0.1% on a monthly basis and 5% from a year ago. That number, which includes the volatile food and energy components, was the lowest annual rate since September 2021.
    “The overall decrease in consumer spending wasn’t dramatic, and at the same time incomes rose and inflation fell,” said Robert Frick, corporate economist with Navy Federal Credit Union. “Especially if inflation continues to fall at a steady rate, Americans should start feeling some financial relief this year.”
    The Fed watches core PCE closely as the measure takes into accounts changing consumer behavior, such as substituting lower price goods for higher-priced items, and strips out volatile food and energy prices. Officially, the Fed says that it watches the headline number. But officials have said repeatedly that core PCE usually provides a better long-term indicator on where inflation is headed because it strips out prices that can be volatile over shorter time periods.
    Friday’s report shows the continued shifting of inflation pressures from goods, which were in high demand in the earlier days of the pandemic, to services, where U.S. economic activity is traditionally focused.
    On an annual basis, goods inflation rose 4.6%, down sharply from 6.1% in November, while services inflation held steady at 5.2%. Goods inflation peaked in June 2022 at 10.6%, while services inflation bottomed at 4.7% in July.
    In an effort to bring down runaway inflation, the central bank in 2022 raised its benchmark borrowing rate from near-zero in March to a target range that’s now 4.25%-4.5%.
    Markets are nearly certain of another quarter percentage point increase at next week’s Federal Open Market Committee policy meeting, followed by the likelihood of a similar-sized hike in March.
    The Fed is then expected to pause while it surveys the impact that the series of aggressive hikes has had on the economy. Officials hope to cool a red-hot labor market and reduce supply-demand imbalances that have led to the inflation surge.

    WATCH LIVEWATCH IN THE APP More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Economy

    A Closely Watched Measure of Inflation Slowed in December

    The Personal Consumption Expenditures price index climbed 5 percent from a year earlier, slower than the reading last month.The Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation index climbed 5 percent in the year through December, a notable slowdown from November and a continuation of a six-month downward trend.After stripping out food and fuel, the price index climbed 4.4 percent compared with a year earlier, in line with what economists in a Bloomberg survey had expected and a slowdown from 4.7 percent in November.The overall picture is one of moderating inflation — providing some long-awaited relief for consumers — but which remains unusually rapid at more than twice the 2 percent rate the Fed aims for on average over time.Central bankers are raising interest rates to make it more expensive to borrow money to make a major investment or finance a business expansion, hoping to cool demand enough that it drives price increases lower. Policymakers lifted their main policy rate from near-zero to more than 4.25 percent last year, and they are widely expected to raise it another quarter point in their decision on Feb. 1.The Fed is deciding when to stop its rate increases and how long to leave them high — decisions that it has said will be influenced by incoming data on inflation and the broader economy. That focuses attention on figures like the one released on Friday.“It will take time for supply and demand to come back into proper alignment and balance, so we must keep moving,” John C. Williams, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said last week.The Fed is also keeping an eye on measures of economic activity, including consumer spending and the labor market. While layoffs at big technology companies have been grabbing headlines in recent weeks, jobless claims remain very low and the unemployment rate is at the lowest level in half a century.That is expected to change this year. As the Fed’s interest rate increases kick in fully, economists at the central bank and on Wall Street expect the U.S. economy to slow and for unemployment to tick higher. Officials are hoping that they can pull off the slowdown without tipping the economy into an outright recession, but there is no guarantee. More

  • 125 Shares189 Views

    in Economy

    Biden Hammers Republicans on the Economy, With Eye on 2024

    The president has found a welcome foil in a new conservative House majority and its tax and spending plans, sharpening a potential re-election message.WASHINGTON — President Biden on Thursday assailed House Republicans over their tax and spending plans, including potential changes to popular retirement programs, ahead of what is likely to be a run for re-election.In a speech in Springfield, Va., Mr. Biden sought to reframe the economic narrative away from the rapid price increases that have dogged much of his first two years in office and toward his stewardship of an economy that has churned out steady growth and strong job gains.Mr. Biden, speaking to members of a steamfitters union, sought to take credit for the strength of the labor market, moderating inflation and news from the Commerce Department on Thursday morning that the economy had grown at an annualized pace of 2.9 percent at the end of last year. In contrast, he cast House Republicans and their economic policy proposals as roadblocks to continued improvement.“At the time I was sworn in, the pandemic was raging and the economy was reeling,” Mr. Biden said before ticking through the actions he had taken to aid the recovery. Those included $1.9 trillion in pandemic and economic aid; a bipartisan bill to repair and upgrade roads, bridges, water pipes and other infrastructure; and a sweeping industrial policy bill to spur domestic investment in advanced manufacturing sectors like semiconductors and speed research and development to seed new industries.Republicans have accused the Biden administration of fanning inflation by funneling too much federal money into the economy, and have called for deep spending cuts and other fiscal changes.Mr. Biden denounced those proposals, including a plan to replace federal income taxes with a national sales tax, curb safety net spending and risk a government default by refusing to raise the federal borrowing limit without deep spending cuts. Why, he asked, “would the Americans give up the progress we’ve made for the chaos they’re suggesting?”Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans have not yet released a detailed or unified economic agenda.Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times“I will not let anyone use the full faith and credit of the United States as a bargaining chip,” Mr. Biden said, reiterating his refusal to negotiate over raising the debt limit. “The United States of America — we pay our debts.”But the president also sought to reach out to working-class voters — in places like his native Scranton, Pa. — who have increasingly voted for Republicans in recent elections. Mr. Biden said those voters had been left behind by American economic policy in recent years, and he tried to woo them back by promising that his policies would continue to bring high-paying manufacturing jobs that do not require a college degree to people who feel “invisible” in the economy.“They remember, in my old neighborhoods, why the jobs went away,” Mr. Biden said, vowing that under his policies “nobody’s left behind.”The Biden PresidencyHere’s where the president stands as the third year of his term begins.State of the Union: President Biden will deliver his second State of the Union speech on Feb. 7, at a time when he faces an aggressive House controlled by Republicans and a special counsel investigation into the possible mishandling of classified information.Chief of Staff: Mr. Biden plans to name Jeffrey D. Zients, his former coronavirus response coordinator, as his next chief of staff. Mr. Zients will replace Ron Klain, who has run the White House since the president took office two years ago.Voting Rights: A year after promising a voting rights overhaul in a fiery speech, Mr. Biden delivered a more muted message at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.The speech built on a pattern for Mr. Biden, who has found the new and narrow Republican majority to be both a political threat and an opportunity.Republicans in the chamber have begun a series of investigations into Mr. Biden, his family and his administration. They have also demanded deep cuts in federal spending in exchange for raising the borrowing limit, a position that risks an economic catastrophe given the huge sums of money that the United States borrows to pay for its financial obligations.The president has refused to tie any spending cuts to raising the debt limit and has called on Congress to increase the $31.4 trillion cap so the nation can continue paying its bills and avoid a federal default..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.But Mr. Biden, who is facing a divided Congress for the first time in his presidency, is increasingly acting as if the newly empowered conservatives have given him a political opening on economic policy. As he prepares for a likely re-election bid in 2024, he is seizing on the least popular proposals floated by House members to cast himself as a champion of the working class, retirees and economic progress.Mr. Biden’s speech on Thursday waded deep into policy details, including the acreage of western timber burned in fires linked to climate change, the global breakdown of advanced chip production and the average salary of new manufacturing jobs, as he recounted his legislative accomplishments.House Republicans have not yet released a detailed or unified economic agenda, and they have not made a clear set of demands for raising the debt limit, though they largely agree that Mr. Biden must accept significant spending curbs.But members and factions of the Republican conference have pushed for votes on a variety of proposals that have little support among voters, including raising the retirement age for Social Security and Medicare and replacing the federal income tax with a national sales tax.Mr. Biden has sought to brand the entire Republican Party with those proposals, even though it is not clear if the measures have majority support in the conference or will ever come to a vote. Former President Donald J. Trump, who has already announced his 2024 bid for the White House, has urged Republicans not to touch the safety-net programs. Other party leaders have urged Republicans not to rule out those cuts. “We should not draw lines in the sand or dismiss any option out of hand, but instead seriously discuss the trade-offs of proposals,” Senator Michael D. Crapo of Idaho, the top Republican on the Finance Committee, wrote in an opinion piece for Fox News, in which he called for Mr. Biden to negotiate over raising the debt limit.Representative Kevin Hern, Republican of Oklahoma, who sits on the House Ways and Means Committee, told a tax conference in Washington this week that there are “lots of problems” with the plan to replace the income tax with a so-called fair tax on consumption. Those include incentives for policymakers to allow prices to rise rapidly in the economy in order to generate more revenue from the sales tax, he noted.“Let’s just say it’s going to be very interesting,” Mr. Hern said at the D.C. Bar Taxation Community’s annual tax conference. “I haven’t found a Ways and Means member that’s for it.”Despite those internal disagreements, Mr. Biden has been happy to pick and choose unpopular Republican ideas and frame them as the true contrast to his economic agenda. He has pointedly refused to cut safety-net programs and threatened to veto such efforts.“The president is building an economy from the bottom up and the middle out, and protecting Social Security and Medicare,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, told reporters this week. “Republicans want to cut Social Security, want to cut Medicare — programs Americans have earned, have paid in — and impose a 30 percent national sales tax that will increase taxes on working families. That is what they have said they want to do, and that is clearly their plan.”The focus on Republicans has allowed Mr. Biden to divert the economic conversation from inflation, which hit 40-year highs last year but receded in the past several months, though it remains above historical norms. On Thursday, he chided Republicans for a vote to reduce funding for I.R.S. enforcement against wealthy tax cheats — a move the Congressional Budget Office says would add to the budget deficit, and which Mr. Biden cast as inflationary.“They campaigned on inflation,” Mr. Biden said. “They didn’t say if elected, they planned to make it worse.”Progressive groups see an opportunity for Mr. Biden to score political points and define the economic issue before the 2024 campaign begins in earnest. That is in part because polls suggest Americans have little appetite for Social Security or Medicare cuts, and have far less focus on the national debt than House Republicans do.“It is a political gift,” said Lindsay Owens, the executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal nonprofit in Washington. More

  • 125 Shares109 Views

    in Economy

    U.S. Economy Grew at 2.9% Annual Rate in Fourth Quarter

    The continued growth in the fourth quarter showed the resilience of consumers and businesses in the face of rising inflation and interest rates.The economy remained resilient last year in the face of inflation, war and a Federal Reserve intent on curbing the pace of growth.A repeat performance in 2023 is far from guaranteed.U.S. gross domestic product, when adjusted for inflation, increased at an annual rate of 2.9 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. That was down from 3.2 percent in the third quarter, but nonetheless a solid end to a topsy-turvy year in which the economy contracted in the first six months, prompting talk of a recession, only to rebound in the second half.Beneath the quarterly ups and downs is a simpler story, economists said: The recovery from the pandemic recession has slowed from the frenetic pace of 2021, but it has retained momentum thanks to a red-hot job market and trillions of dollars in pent-up savings that allowed Americans to weather rapidly rising prices. Over the year as a whole, as measured from the fourth quarter a year earlier, G.D.P. grew 1 percent, down sharply from 5.7 percent growth in 2021.“2020 was the pandemic; 2021 was the bounce-back from the pandemic; 2022 was a transition year,” said Jay Bryson, chief economist for Wells Fargo.The question is, a transition to what? Mr. Bryson, like many economists, expects a recession to begin sometime this year, as the effects of higher interest rates ripple through the economy.The initial rebound from the pandemic recession was much stronger in the United States than it was in much of the rest of the world. The gap widened last year as the war in Ukraine threatened to push Europe into a recession and the strict Covid suppression policies in China constrained growth there.But the U.S. economy faces fresh challenges in 2023. Inflation remains too high by many measures, and the Fed is expected to continue increasing rates in an effort to bring prices under control. A congressional showdown over raising the debt ceiling could cause further turmoil in financial markets — or a crisis if lawmakers fail to reach a deal.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

  • 200 Shares179 Views

    in Economy

    U.S. GDP rose 2.9% in the fourth quarter, more than expected even as recession fears loom

    Gross domestic product rose at a 2.9% annualized pace in the fourth quarter, slightly better than expected.
    Consumer spending weakened from the previous period but remained positive.
    A sharp slide in housing helped pull down GDP, while boosts in government spending and private investment aided growth.
    Jobless claims fell last week while durable goods orders increased sharply in December, but mainly due to demand for aircraft.

    The U.S. economy finished 2022 in solid shape even as questions persist over whether growth will turn negative in the year ahead.
    Fourth-quarter gross domestic product, the sum of all goods and services produced for the October-to-December period, rose at a 2.9% annualized pace, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected a reading of 2.8%.

    The growth rate was slightly slower than the 3.2% pace in the third quarter.

    Stocks turned mixed following the report while Treasury yields were mostly higher.
    Consumer spending, which accounts for about 68% of GDP, increased 2.1% for the period, down slightly from 2.3% in the previous period but still positive.
    Inflation readings moved considerably lower to end the year after hitting 41-year highs in the summer. The personal consumption expenditures price index increased 3.2%, in line with expectations but down sharply from 4.8% in the third quarter. Excluding food and energy, the chain-weighted index rose 3.9%, down from 4.7%.
    While the inflation numbers indicated price increases are receding, they remain well above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

    Along with the boost from consumers, increases in private inventory investment, government spending and nonresidential fixed investment helped lift the GDP number.
    A 26.7% plunge in residential fixed investment, reflecting a sharp slide in housing, served as a drag on the growth number, as did a 1.3% decline in exports. The housing drop subtracted about 1.3 percentage points from the headline GDP number.
    Federal government spending rose 6.2%, due largely to an 11.2% surge on nondefense outlays, while state and local expenditures were up 2.3%. Government spending in total added 0.64 percentage points to GDP.
    Inventory increases also played a significant role, adding nearly 1.5 percentage points.
    “The mix of growth was discouraging, and the monthly data suggest the economy lost momentum as the fourth quarter went on,” wrote Andrew Hunter, senior U.S. economist for Capital Economics. “We still expect the lagged impact of the surge in interest rates to push the economy into a mild recession in the first half of this year.”

    The report caps off a volatile year for the economy.
    Following a 2021 that saw GDP rise at its strongest pace since 1984, the first two quarters of 2022 started off with negative growth, matching a commonly held definition of a recession. However, a resilient consumer and strong labor market helped growth turn positive in the final two quarters and gave hope for 2023.
    “Just as the economy wasn’t as weak in the first half of 2022 as GDP reports suggested, it’s also not as strong as the Q4 GDP release would indicate,” said Jim Baird, chief investment officer at Plante Moran Financial Advisors. “Held aloft by resilient consumer spending, the economy expanded at a solid pace late last year, but remains vulnerable to a more pronounced slowdown in the coming quarters.”
    A separate economic report Thursday highlighted a strong, tight labor market. Weekly jobless claims fell by 6,000, down to 186,000 for the lowest reading since April 2022 and well below the 205,000 Dow Jones estimate.
    Orders for long-lasting goods also were much better than expected, rising 5.6% for December, compared with the 2.4% estimate. However, orders fell 0.1% when excluding transportation as demand for Boeing passenger planes helped drive the headline number.
    Despite the fairly strong economic data, most economists think a recession is a strong possibility this year.
    A series of aggressive Fed interest rate increases aimed at taming runaway inflation are expected to come to roost this year. The Fed raised its benchmark borrowing rate by 4.25 percentage points since March 2022 to its highest rate since late 2007. Rate hikes generally operate on lags, meaning their real effect may not be felt until the time ahead.
    Markets see a near certainty that the Fed is going enact another quarter percentage point increase at its meeting next week and likely follow that up with one more similar-sized hike in March.
    Some sectors of the economy have shown signs of recession even though overall growth has been positive. Housing in particular has been a laggard, with building permits down 30% in December from a year ago and starts down 22%.
    Corporate profit reports from the fourth quarter also are signaling a potential earnings recession. With nearly 20% of the S&P 500 companies reporting, earnings are tracking at a loss of 3%, even with revenue growing 4.1%, according to Refinitiv.
    Consumer spending also is showing signs of weakening, with retail sales down 1.1% in December.

    WATCH LIVEWATCH IN THE APP More

  • 138 Shares149 Views

    in Economy

    With Layoffs, Retailers Aim to Be Safe Rather Than Sorry (Again)

    Companies that ramped up hiring in areas like technology over the past few years are cutting back as customers slow their spending.The retail industry is trying to figure out its correct size.Retailers, faced with sky-high demand from shoppers during the pandemic, spent the past three years ramping up their operations in areas like human resources, finance and technology. Now, times have changed.A public that rushed to buy all sorts of goods in the earlier parts of the pandemic is now spending less on merchandise like furniture and clothing. E-commerce, which boomed during lockdowns, has fallen from those heights. And with consumers worried about inflation in the prices of day-to-day necessities like food, companies are playing defense.Saks Off 5th, the off-price retailer owned by Hudson Bay, laid off an unspecified number of workers on Tuesday. Saks.com is laying off about 100 employees, or 3.5 percent of its workers. Stitch Fix laid off 20 percent of its salaried workers this month and closed a distribution center in Salt Lake City. Last week, Wayfair said it would lay off 1,750 people, or 10 percent of its work force, and Amazon started laying off 18,000 workers, many of them in its retail division. Bed Bath & Beyond cut its work force this month as it tries to shore up its finances and prepares for a possible bankruptcy filing.While it’s not unusual for major retailers to announce store closings and some job cuts after the blitz of the holiday season, the recent spate of layoffs is more about structural changes as the industry recalibrates itself after the rapid growth from pandemic-fueled shopping. And it accompanies broader worries about the state of the U.S. economy and layoffs by prominent tech companies.“Retailers are really being cognizant of capital preservation,” said Catherine Lepard, who leads the global retail market for the executive search firm Heidrick & Struggles. “They don’t know how long this cooler economy is going to last, and they want to make sure they have the right cash to get through that. For retailers that are struggling, it really means tightening the belt with some cost cutting.”Sales during the all-important holiday shopping season were weaker than in years past, when growth hit record levels. December retail sales increased 6 percent from the same period last year, but that number was not adjusted for inflation, which was at 6.5 percent.Department stores posted sizable sales declines. At Nordstrom, sales in the last nine weeks of 2022 decreased 3.5 percent from a year earlier, with the company noting that they “were softer than prepandemic levels.” Macy’s said its holiday sales had been on the lower end of its expectations.Macy’s holiday sales were on the lower end of expectations, the company said. Mathias Wasik for The New York TimesThe layoffs at certain retail companies are a sign that the industry is bracing for a slowdown and another change in how people shop.“To mitigate macroeconomic headwinds and best position our business for success, we have made changes to streamline our organizational structure,” Meghan Biango, a spokesperson for Saks Off 5th, said in a statement. “As part of this, we made the difficult decision to part ways with associates across various areas of the business.” The layoffs affected divisions such as talent acquisition and supply chain.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.Walmart: The retail giant is significantly raising its starting wages for store workers, as it battles to recruit and retain workers in a tight retail labor market.Tech Layoffs: The industry’s recent job cuts have been an awakening for a generation of workers who have never experienced a cyclical crash.Infrastructure Money: Government spending on initiatives intended to combat climate change and rebuild infrastructure are expected to land this year. The effects on the labor market will be deep but hard to measure.Restaurant Workers: Mandatory $15 food-safety classes are turning cooks, waiters and bartenders into unwitting funders of a lobbying campaign against minimum wage increases.Not all retailers are in a defensive crouch. For instance, Walmart announced this week that it was raising the minimum wage for its store employees in a bid to attract and retain workers in a tight labor market.Still, some retailers are becoming focused less on bringing in new customers — an expensive undertaking — and more on retaining those they gained during the pandemic.“There’s a sense of conservatism,” said Brian Walker, chief strategy officer at Bloomreach, which works with retailers on their e-commerce and digital marketing businesses. “They’re still adjusting in many ways to this omnichannel retail environment and are probably seeing this as an important time to calibrate their organizations and make sure they have the right people, and not too many of them to be pragmatic and weather a potential storm.”That means fewer projects that require lots of money and time and more investments where a company can start seeing results quickly, Mr. Walker said.Ms. Lepard agreed. “This isn’t the economy to really get creative and take on high risk,” she said. “There might be a pulling back of some of that innovation in future investment to make sure they’re pacing themselves.”It’s also a moment for retailers to assess what e-commerce abilities they need. In the early months of the pandemic, online sales exploded as many brick-and-mortar stores went dark. That growth has slowed. E-commerce traffic in North America declined 1.6 percent in the third quarter of 2022 compared with a year earlier, according to Bloomreach’s Commerce Pulse data. Conversion rates — the measure of someone’s buying an item after seeing it advertised — dropped 12 percent during the same period.“This is where people overshot the runway,” said Craig Johnson, president of the retail advisory firm Customer Growth Partners, who has tracked the industry for 25 years. “This works like a ratchet. It might go up to 27 percent, but that’s going to normalize,” he added, referring to the share of total e-commerce spending for the first year of the pandemic, when many stores were grappling with Covid restrictions and closures.When online spending was rising, many companies pushed to fill roles that could help them meet the demand. Now they have to adjust to a new reality.“Unfortunately, along the way, we overcomplicated things, lost sight of some of our fundamentals and simply grew too big,” Niraj Shah, Wayfair’s chief executive, said in a note to employees last Friday. His company, which reported in November that its net revenue was down 9 percent from a year earlier, is looking to save $1.4 billion.Demand for luxury goods is still there, but those retailers say they need to restructure to continue to innovate.Mathias Wasik for The New York TimesIn the luxury sector, the shopper demand is still there, but a restructuring is needed to continue to innovate. As part of its layoffs, Saks.com also separated its technology and operations teams.“We are at a point in our trajectory as a digital luxury pure-play where we need to optimize our business to ensure we are best positioned for the future,” Nicole Schoenberg, a Saks spokeswoman, said in a statement. “These changes are never easy, but they are necessary for our go-forward success.”While reducing head count might help save costs in the short term, retailers will have trouble in the future if they do not also address how to improve the customer experience online, said Liza Amlani, founder of Retail Strategy Group, which works with brands on their merchandising and planning strategies.“With Wayfair, and as with many digital players, what we’ve seen in the last three years is that they scaled and grew too quickly,” Ms. Amlani said. “They banked on an influx of spending across digital. They didn’t invest where they needed to invest.”The retail layoffs are an about-face from 2021, when companies couldn’t hire frontline workers fast enough. After the initial jolt of the pandemic, which led many retailers to furlough or outright fire workers, many people received stimulus checks from the government. They wanted to spend that money, and when companies needed to ramp up in-store services again, they often struggled to find enough workers.Recalling that difficulty might give some retailers pause before they lay off workers this time, Mr. Walker said. If a steep downturn never comes, or if there’s a sudden rebound in demand, companies don’t want to be stuck without enough employees.But the next few months could be rough for retailers, as profit margins shrink and revenue growth slows from what it was the past couple of years. In that kind of environment, investors generally like to see large companies take steps to cut costs. And once layoffs begin, a kind of industry groupthink can set in.“Once a couple of companies start to do it,” said Peter Cappelli, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who researches management and human resources, “then it creates some momentum where then you’ve got to explain why you’re not doing what everybody else is doing.” More

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in Economy

    Why The Times Is Resuming its Emphasis on Annualized Figures for GDP

    When the pandemic first disrupted the U.S. economy — and economic data — in 2020, The New York Times changed the way it reported certain government statistics. Now, with the pandemic shock no longer producing exceptional economic gyrations, it is changing back.On Thursday, with coverage of the Commerce Department’s preliminary estimate of U.S. gross domestic product for the fourth quarter of 2022, The Times is again emphasizing the annualized rate of change from the prior quarter, rather than the simple percentage change from one period to the next.In the United States, G.D.P. figures have traditionally been reported at an annualized rate, meaning the amount the economy would have grown or shrunk if the quarter-to-quarter change had persisted for an entire year. Annual rates make it easier to compare data collected over different periods, allowing analysts to see quickly whether growth in a quarter was faster or slower than in 2010, for example, or in the 1990s as a whole. But annual rates can also be confusing, particularly during periods of rapid change. When shutdowns crippled the economy early in the pandemic, G.D.P. contracted at an annual rate of nearly 30 percent. To nonexperts, that might sound as if economic output had shrunk by nearly a third, when in reality the decline was less than 10 percent. As a result, The Times decided to emphasize the quarterly change in its coverage, a decision explained in detail at the time. (The Times continued to provide the annualized figures as well.) But now — despite ongoing disruptions tied to the pandemic and new challenges, like high inflation — economic data is beginning to look more normal. So The Times is returning to its practice of reporting G.D.P. and related statistics as annualized rates. More