Evelyn Reynolds

Americans are becoming more pessimistic about the economy, more worried about inflation — and now, more anxious about the job market, as well.Fifty-two percent of American adults say they are worse off financially than they were a year ago, according to a survey conducted for The New York Times this month by the online research platform Momentive. That was up from 41 percent in April, and was by far the highest share in the survey’s five years. Only 14 percent of Americans said they were better off than a year ago, the worst in the survey’s history.The dour mood is also reflected in other surveys. The University of Michigan’s index of consumer sentiment this month hit its lowest level in its 70-year history. Another measure of consumer confidence, from the Conference Board, has also fallen, though less drastically.There is no mystery as to what is causing consumers’ bleak outlook: prices that are rising at the fastest rate in a generation. More than nine in 10 Americans say they are concerned about inflation, according to the Momentive poll, including 70 percent who say they are “very concerned,” up from 63 percent in April.Inflation has emerged as a major political challenge for President Biden and congressional Democrats. Only 31 percent of Americans said they approved of Mr. Biden’s approach to inflation; support was muted even among Democrats, only 58 percent of whom said they approved of Mr. Biden’s approach, and only 15 percent of them “strongly.”Survey respondents were equally critical of the approach taken by the Federal Reserve, which has begun aggressively raising interest rates in an effort to bring down inflation. Only 30 percent of Americans said they approved of the Fed’s handling of the issue.Until recently, worries about inflation have been offset, at least to some degree, by the strong job market, which has enabled workers to push for higher pay and better benefits. But there are hints that could be changing. Forty-seven percent of adults in June said they thought it was a good time to look for a job, down from 60 percent in April. And nearly half of respondents said they thought the U.S. economy had entered a recession.About the Survey: The data in this article came from an online survey of 5,342 adults conducted by the polling firm Momentive from June 13 to June 19. The company selected respondents at random from the more than two million people who take surveys on its platform each day. Responses were weighted to match the demographic profile of the population of the United States. The survey has a modeled error estimate (similar to a margin of error in a standard telephone poll) of plus or minus 2 percentage points, so differences of less than that amount are statistically insignificant. More

LOS ANGELES — David Alvarado barreled south along the highway, staring through the windshield of his semi truck toward the towering cranes along the coastline.He had made the same 30-minute trek to the Port of Los Angeles twice that day; if things went well, he would make it twice more. Averaging four pickups and deliveries a day, Mr. Alvarado has learned, is what it takes to give his wife and three children a comfortable life.“This has been my life — it’s helped me support a family,” said Mr. Alvarado, who for 17 years has hauled cargo between warehouses across Southern California and the twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, a global hub that handles 40 percent of the nation’s seaborne imports.He weathered the blow to his paycheck early in the pandemic when he was idling for six hours a day, waiting for cargo to be loaded off ships and onto his truck. Now the ports are bustling again, but there is a new source of anxiety: the imminent expiration of the union contract for dockworkers along the West Coast.If negotiations fail to head off a slowdown, a strike or a lockout, he said, “it will crush me financially.”The outcome will be crucial not only for the union dockworkers and port operators, but also for the ecosystem of workers surrounding the ports like Mr. Alvarado, and for a global supply chain reeling from coronavirus lockdowns and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Inflation’s surge to the highest rate in more than four decades is due, in part, to supply chain complications.The contract between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, which represents 22,000 workers at 29 ports from San Diego to Seattle, and the Pacific Maritime Association, representing the shipping terminals, is set to expire on Friday. The union members primarily operate machinery like cranes and forklifts that move cargo containers on and off ships.In a statement this month, representatives of the two sides said that they didn’t expect a deal by the deadline but that they were dedicated to working toward an agreement.The negotiations have centered largely on whether to increase wages for the unionized workers, whose average salaries are in the low six figures, and expanding automation, such as using robots to move cargo containers, to speed up production, a priority for shipping companies.“It will crush me financially,” David Alvarado said of any work stoppage.Stella Kalinina for The New York TimesTrucks lined up to enter the Port of Los Angeles. Any slowdown, strike or lockout could further snarl the global supply chain.Stella Kalinina for The New York Times“Automation allows greater densification at existing port terminals, enabling greater cargo throughput and continued cargo growth over time,” Jim McKenna, the chief executive of the Pacific Maritime Association, said in a recent video statement on the negotiations.In an open letter posted on Facebook last month, the union president, Willie Adams, attacked moving toward automation, saying it would translate to lost jobs and prioritizes foreign profits over “what’s best for America.”The State of Jobs in the United StatesJob gains continue to maintain their impressive run, even as government policymakers took steps to cool the economy and ease inflation.May Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 390,000 jobs and the unemployment rate remained steady at 3.6 percent ​​in the fifth month of 2022.Downsides of a Hot Market: Students are forgoing degrees in favor of the attractive positions offered by employers desperate to hire. That could come back to haunt them.Slowing Down: Economists and policymakers are beginning to argue that what the economy needs right now is less hiring and less wage growth. Here’s why.Opportunities for Teenagers: Jobs for high school and college students are expected to be plentiful this summer, and a large market means better pay.“Automation,” Mr. Adams wrote, “poses a great national security risk as it places our ports at risk of being hacked as other automated ports have experienced.”As the negotiations, which began in early May, continue, record levels of cargo have arrived here.In May, the Port of Los Angeles had its third-busiest month ever, handling nearly one million shipping container units, largely stocked with imports from Asia. Twenty-one ships were waiting to dock outside the local ports this week, down from 109 in January, according to the Marine Exchange of Southern California.On a recent trip here, President Biden — who authorized a plan last year to keep the Port of Los Angeles open 24 hours a day — met with negotiators to urge a swift agreement. Leaders on both sides say Mr. Biden has worked behind the scenes on the matter, hoping to avoid delays.When a breakdown in talks resulted in an 11-day lockout in 2002, the U.S. economy lost an estimated $11 billion. President George W. Bush eventually intervened, and the lockout was lifted. In 2015, when negotiations went on for nine months, the Obama administration intervened after the standoff led to a work slowdown and congestion at West Coast ports.Mr. Biden’s early intervention could help stave off severe backlogs, said Geraldine Knatz, a professor of the practice of policy and engineering at the University of Southern California.“In the past, the federal government would swoop in at the end when negotiations were at a stalemate,” said Ms. Knatz, who was executive director of the Port of Los Angeles from 2006 to 2014. “The relationship that developed between the ports and the Biden administration as a result of the supply chain crisis is something that did not exist before.”The contract between the International Longshore and Warehouse Union and the Pacific Maritime Association is set to expire this week. Stella Kalinina for The New York TimesEven so, contingency plans are in place, said Jonathan Gold, vice president of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation. Some retailers began pushing up their timetables months ago, ordering supplies long before they needed them, he said, and using ports along the East and Gulf Coasts when feasible.In an interview, Gene Seroka, executive director of the Port of Los Angeles, said he didn’t believe the looming contract deadline would lead to any delays: All the parties involved, he said, know that it’s already an exceptionally busy time for the region.Retail imports account for 75 percent of all cargo coming into the ports, and with back-to-school and holiday shopping seasons nearing, Mr. Seroka said he did not expect cargo volumes to shrink to more typical levels until next year.“Everyone is working as hard as they can,” Mr. Seroka said.But for some retailers, the current limbo brings back painful memories.In early 2015, as delays arose during contract talks, Charlie Woo laid off more than 600 seasonal workers from his company, Megatoys.“It was rough back then,” Mr. Woo said on a recent morning from his 330,000-square-foot warehouse in Commerce, Calif., an industrial city in Los Angeles County not far from the ports.Mr. Woo started Megatoys in 1989 and now imports around 1,000 cargo containers from China every year. The 40-foot containers come filled with small toys like plastic Easter eggs and miniature rubber soccer balls and basketballs, which his employees package into baskets sold at grocery stores and bigger outlets like Walmart and Target.During the pandemic disruptions last fall, some of his shipments were stalled by nearly three months — delays that ultimately translated into a 5 percent drop in sales for his company, which Mr. Woo said brings in tens of millions of dollars annually.He’s bracing for another hard year.“I expect problems; I just don’t know how big the problem will be,” said Mr. Woo, who also owns a manufacturing plant near Shenzhen, China, and said he hoped more U.S. terminals moved toward more automation.“We must find innovative solutions to catch up with the ports in Asia,” Mr. Woo said.Charlie Woo started Megatoys in 1989 and now imports around 1,000 cargo containers from China every year. Stella Kalinina for The New York TimesShipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles. The current limbo brings back painful memories for some retailers.Stella Kalinina for The New York TimesOn a recent afternoon, Mr. Alvarado, the truck driver, reminisced about the early days of the career he’d been born into.During summer vacations as a little boy, he’d ride shotgun with his father, who has driven a semi truck for nearly four decades at the ports, and they’d listen to Dodger baseball games together.“This is all I ever wanted to be,” Mr. Alvarado, 38, said. Over the years, he has seen many childhood friends move away because they could not afford to live here.It hasn’t always been easy for him, either. Last fall, with more than 80 cargo carriers anchored off the coast here, in part because of the lingering pandemic and a surge of imports ahead of the holiday season, he sometimes waited for hours before he finally got a load, said Mr. Alvarado, who is among the roughly 21,000 truck drivers authorized to pick up cargo at the ports.For an independent contractor, time is money: Mr. Alvarado works 16 hours some weekdays and aims to pick up and drop off four loads each day. When he does that consistently, he said, he can make up to $4,000 a week, before expenses.During the worst of the pandemic delays, he was lucky to get two loads a day, and although things have improved in recent months, he now frets about fuel prices.“Inflation has been intense,” he said.Filling up with 220 gallons for the week now typically costs $1,200, double that of several months ago, Mr. Alvarado said.“It all starts to add up,” he said. “You wonder if you should think about doing something else.”As for the prospects in the labor talks, Mr. Alvarado said he was trying to remain optimistic. The union workers, he said, remind him of his own family: men and women from blue-collar upbringings, many of them Latino with deep family ties to the ports. A work stoppage would be painful for many of them, too.“It will hurt all Americans,” he said.As he drove past the ports, Mr. Alvarado turned his truck into a warehouse parking lot, where the multicolored containers lined the asphalt like a row of neatly arranged Lego blocks.It was his third load of the day, and for this round, he didn’t have to wait on the longshoremen to load the carrier onto his truck. Instead, he backed his semi up to a chassis, and the blue container snapped into place.He pulled up Google Maps on his iPhone and looked at the distance to the drop-off in Fontana, Calif.: 67 miles, an hour and half.It might, Mr. Alvarado said, end up being a four-load day after all. More

Consumer spending was weaker in early 2022 than previously believed, a sign that cracks may be forming in a crucial pillar of the U.S. economy.Spending, adjusted for inflation, increased 0.5 percent in the first three months of the year, the Commerce Department said Wednesday. That was a sharp downward revision from the government’s earlier estimate of 0.8 percent growth, and a slowdown from the 0.6 percent growth in the final quarter of 2021. Spending on services rose significantly more slowly than initially reported, while spending on goods actually fell.Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of economic output, shrank 0.4 percent in the first quarter, adjusted for inflation, the equivalent of a 1.6 percent annual rate of contraction. That was only slightly weaker than previously reported, because the government raised its estimate of how much companies added to their inventories, partly offsetting the weaker consumer spending.Even after the revision, consumer spending remained solid in the first quarter. But any deceleration is significant because consumers have been the engine of the economic recovery. Spending had appeared resilient in the face of the fastest inflation in a generation — a picture that looks at least somewhat different in light of the latest revisions.“That prior estimate of first-quarter G.D.P. was much more comfortable than today’s look,” said Michelle Meyer, chief U.S. economist for the Mastercard Economics Institute. “There is reason for more concern after looking at today’s report.”Economists in recent weeks have steadily lowered their forecasts of economic growth for the rest of the year. IHS Markit estimated on Thursday that G.D.P. would grow at a 0.1 percent annual rate in the second quarter; earlier this month, it expected the economy to grow at a 2.4 percent rate this quarter. Some forecasters now say it is possible that economic output will shrink for the second consecutive quarter — a common, though unofficial, definition of a recession.The National Bureau of Economic Research, the nation’s semiofficial arbiter of when business cycles begin and end, defines recessions differently, as “a significant decline in economic activity that is spread across the economy and lasts more than a few months.”Most economists agree that, by that definition, the United States is not yet in a recession. But a growing number of economists believe that a recession is likely in the next year, as the Federal Reserve raises interest rates in a bid to tame inflation. More

Fed ChairJerome Powell vowed Wednesday at an ECB forum that U.S. policymakers would not allow inflation to take hold of the economy over the longer term.
“There’s a clock running here, where we have inflation running now for more than a year,” the central bank leader noted.
Powell reiterated his tough talk on inflation in the U.S. that is currently running at its highest level in more than 40 years.

The U.S. Federal Reserve increased its benchmark interest rate by 75 basis points to a range of 1.5%-1.75% in June — the biggest increase since 1994. Fed Chair Jerome Powell (above) flagged there could be another rate hike in July.
Mary F. Calvert | Reuters

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell vowed Wednesday that policymakers would not allow inflation to take hold of the U.S. economy over the longer term.
“The risk is that because of the multiplicity of shocks you start to transition to a higher inflation regime. Our job is literally to prevent that from happening, and we will prevent that from happening,” the central bank leader said. “We will not allow a transition from a low-inflation environment into a high-inflation environment.”

Speaking to a European Central Bank forum along with three of his global counterparts, Powell continued his tough talk on inflation in the U.S. that is currently running at its highest level in more than 40 years.
In the near term, the Fed has instituted multiple rate hikes to try to subdue the rapid price increases. But Powell said that it’s also important to arrest inflation expectations over the longer term, so they don’t become entrenched and create a self-fulfilling cycle.
“There’s a clock running here, where we have inflation running now for more than a year,” he said. “It would be bad risk management to just assume those longer-term inflation expectations would remain anchored indefinitely in the face of persistent high inflation. So we’re not doing that.”
Since the Fed started raising rates in March, market indicators of inflation expectations have fallen considerably. A measure of the outlook over the next five years that compares inflation-indexed government bonds to standard Treasurys fell from nearly 3.6% in late March to 2.73% this week.
However, other surveys show that consumers expect prices to continue to climb. One such measure, from the University of Michigan, helped pressure the Fed into raising its benchmark interest rate 0.75 percentage point at its meeting earlier this month.

The Fed now is charged with bringing down those expectations while not crashing the economy. Powell said he’s confident that will happen, though he acknowledged the risks ahead.
“We’re strongly committed to using our tools to get inflation to come down. The way to do that is to slow down growth, ideally keeping it positive,” he said. “Is there a risk that would go too far? Certainly, there’s a risk. I wouldn’t agree that it’s the biggest risk to the economy. The bigger mistake to make … would be to fail to restore price stability.”

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Jill Cataldo is a master of coupons.She began cutting them out to save a dollar here and 50 cents there in the Great Recession, when she had two children in diapers and money was tight. Starting with a training session at the library in her Chicago suburb, she shared what she learned with others, and now has a syndicated column and a website where she writes about coupon deals and other ways to spend less.The pandemic, however, upended Ms. Cataldo’s world. Paper coupon inserts in the Sunday newspaper seemed flimsier. Even increasingly popular digital coupons were hard to come by.“There are brands that I’ve followed for over a decade that are just not issuing a lot of coupons right now,” Ms. Cataldo said. “It’s kind of frustrating, because it’s something we came to count on for a long time.”Now the steepest rise in the cost of living in four decades is making bargains even more coveted. “With inflation, this is what should go up tremendously as a tool to help customers,” said Sanjay Dhar, a marketing professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.But that tool is getting ever harder to come by. In 2021, Kantar Media estimates, 168 billion circulated, across both print and digital formats. That was down from about 294 billion in 2015.The shrinking coupon market includes not just the number of coupons distributed but also the share turned in at checkout. Redemption rates declined to 0.5 percent of all print and digital coupons in 2020 from about 3.5 percent in the early 1980s, according to a paper by economists at Harvard University, Georgetown University and Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.The economists see a larger phenomenon: Increasingly time-strapped consumers don’t want to deal with even small hassles to save a few dollars on toothpaste.“The declining use of coupons and the declining redemption rates indicate a fundamental shift in consumer shopping behavior,” the authors wrote. They added, “We view this as additional evidence that declining price sensitivity reflects a longer-run secular trend.”At the same time, mobile phones have made all kinds of other incentives possible, including cash-back rewards, points that can be redeemed for store credit and contest prizes.“Practitioners often want to get discounts to consumers in a seamless manner,” said Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “It’s not clear that traditional coupons do this.”That explanation offers little consolation to people who’ve come to depend on coupons to keep their grocery costs down, like Ms. Cataldo’s readers.“I don’t think from the consumer perspective that they’re like, ‘Oh, we don’t care.’ We do care,” Ms. Cataldo said. “It’s just that we have fewer tools right now to play the game.”A Venerable IncentiveThe couponing industry as we know it started in the early 1970s when a Michigan printing company, Valassis Communications, began distributing booklets of discounts on particular products that could be redeemed at any store.Valassis would total up the slips of paper, and the manufacturer reimbursed the retailer for the discount. Soon, grocers saw the value of coupons in driving traffic to their own stores, and began newspaper inserts of their own. The number of print coupons distributed peaked in 1999 at 340 billion, as newspaper circulation also crested, according to Inmar Intelligence, the other large coupon settlement company, alongside Valassis.But a slide in redemption rates had already begun. It’s difficult to pin down why, but people close to the industry believe it’s related to the rise of the two-income household, as more women entered the work force. Ms. Cataldo remembers growing up in the 1980s, when, she said, her mother used coupons enthusiastically.“Back then it was a little bit of a different culture because we had so many stay-at-home parents who had time to do this,” she said. “It’s time that pays well, but you have to have that time, and if you are working eight hours a day, you probably don’t.”Coupon use enjoyed a resurgence during the recession of 2007-9, which left millions of people out of work much longer and with much less financial assistance than they would receive during the pandemic recession a decade later. “Couponing” became a widely used verb courtesy of the reality show “Extreme Couponing,” which brought people into the practice with promises of stackable discounts that could bring the cost of a shopping cart’s worth of purchases close to zero.But what delighted serious couponers dismayed manufacturers, which are focused on getting people to buy things they wouldn’t otherwise, not giving discounts to people who’d buy the product anyway. That’s why brands started pulling back on promotions and limiting the number of coupons that could be used in a given trip.At the same time, grocers and big-box stores were coming under pressure from e-commerce platforms like Amazon. They responded by beefing up their store brand offerings as well as asking companies like Procter & Gamble to lower prices on name-brand items.“They want to get the best deals so they are competitive at the shelf,” said Aimee Englert, who directs client strategy for consumer packaged goods companies at Valassis, now part of a company called Vericast. “What that ends up doing is constricting the budgets that manufacturers have to pull levers, like to provide a coupon.”As their wiggle room on discounts shrank, brands wanted to make sure they were squeezing as many extra purchases as possible out of their promotion dollars. The average value of coupons shrank, as did the time over which they could be used. And the rise of smartphones provided an opportunity that seemed far superior to blanketing neighborhoods with newsprint: Offers could be personalized and aimed at specific demographic profiles. Coupons could be linked to a supermarket loyalty card, which gave retailers data on whether the coupons prompted a shopper to switch brands.Greg Parks is another coupon blogger who got started in the wake of the Great Recession, looking to stretch his income to feed three children. Although he began with newspaper clippings all over his floor, he now does instructional videos exclusively using digital coupons, which can be used nationwide rather than in a single distribution area.Greg Parks is on the high end of coupon user sophistication.Luke Sharrett for The New York TimesMr. Parks at a CVS store where he often films videos on couponing.Luke Sharrett for The New York Times“I like to say that I’m a lazy couponer now,” Mr. Parks said. Plus, he has noticed that digital coupons cut down on dirty looks from cashiers when they have to process a stack of paper.“Some of them act like we’re stealing, or taking something from them,” Mr. Parks said. “They don’t want to deal with all those paper coupons, they’re such a headache. With digital, everything just automatically comes off.” (While only 5 percent of coupons distributed are digital, they represent about a third of all coupons redeemed, according to Inmar.)Mr. Parks, however, is on the high end of coupon user sophistication. Many people who depended most on print coupons — older shoppers on fixed incomes — may not have the computer or smartphone literacy to adopt the digital version. Dr. Dhar, the University of Chicago professor, said the switch to digital hit the wrong demographic.“That’s not the coupon-using population — they don’t use digital media very much,” said Dr. Dhar, who remembers surviving on coupons 30 years ago as a graduate student in Los Angeles. “A lot of this isn’t driven by the response to coupons. It’s driven by coupons not reaching the right people.”To be sure, manufacturers have not abandoned the pure reach of physical coupons. The free-standing insert still works as an advertising vehicle: In fact, the ideal outcome for a manufacturer is that a shopper sees a coupon and then goes to the store to buy the item without redeeming it.A Sudden Shake-UpIf coupons had been slowly dying for years, the pandemic delivered a sharp blow.Seemingly overnight, roiling supply chains and the lurch from office to home left consumers desperate to buy anything they could get their hands on; brand preferences went out the window. When inflation started to spike last year, not only did retailers have trouble keeping shelves stocked, they weren’t even sure they could maintain stable prices until the coupons expired.“The last thing those manufacturers want to do is put more incentives on those because it’s going to spike demand up even more,” said Spencer Baird, Inmar’s interim chief executive. “This is what we very consistently hear: ‘We’ve got a budget, we’re ready to go, but until we get my fill rate where it needs to be, I don’t want to mess up my supply chain.’”Use of even digital coupons sank in 2020, for the first time, before rebounding. While most of those are tethered to a specific retailer, the coupon industry is working on a universal standard that will allow shoppers to redeem digital coupons at any retailer that signs up.But there’s no guarantee that retailers will stick with coupons, when other incentives are gaining in popularity.Lisa Thompson works for Quotient, a company formerly known as Coupons.com, which started in 1998 as a website where you could print coupons rather than clipping them. The company is phasing out printable coupons, and the Coupons.com app already mostly offers cash-back promotions instead.“Honestly, it’s a dying form of savings, and we know that,” Ms. Thompson said. “A lot of my work has been working with the marketing team to make ‘coupon’ sound sexy.”Plenty of dedicated couponers still prefer the old-fashioned way.“I agree, it’s going down, and at some point it will die,” Ms. Cataldo said. “I’m not looking forward to that. But it’s not happening nearly as quickly as they thought it would.” More

As the Federal Reserve tries to fight high inflation, costly mortgage rates have begun to price people out of the housing market.For the past two years, anyone who had a home to sell could get practically any asking price. Good shape or bad, in cities and in exurbs, seemingly everything on the market had a line of eager buyers.Now, in the span of a few weeks, real estate agents have gone from managing bidding wars to watching properties sit without offers, and once-hot markets like Austin, Texas, and Boise, Idaho, are poised for big declines.The culprit is rising mortgage rates, which have spiked to their highest levels since the 2008 housing crisis in response to the Federal Reserve’s recent efforts to tame inflation. The jump in borrowing costs, adding hundreds of dollars a month to the typical mortgage payment and coming on top of two years of home price increases, has pushed wishful home buyers past their financial limits.“We’ve reached the point where people just can’t afford a house,” said Glenn Kelman, chief executive of Redfin, a national real estate brokerage.Weekly average 30-year fixed mortgage rate

Source: Freddie MacBy The New York TimesMore than any other part of the economy, housing — a purchase that for most buyers requires taking on huge amounts of debt — is especially sensitive to interest rates. That sensitivity becomes even more pronounced when homes are unaffordable, as they are now. As a result, home prices and new construction are a central component of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to slow rapid inflation by raising interest rates, which the central bank has done several times this year. But the Fed’s moves come with an inherent risk that the economy will spiral into a recession if they stifle home purchases and development activity too much.While housing does not account for a huge amount of economic output, it is a boom-bust industry that has historically played an outsize role in downturns. The sector runs on credit, and new home purchases are often followed by new furniture, new appliances and new electronics that are important pieces of consumer spending.“We need the housing market to bend to rein in inflation, but we don’t want it to break, because that would mean a recession,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics.Home prices are still at record levels, and they are likely to take months or longer to fall — if they ever do. But that caveat, which real estate agents often hold up as a shield, cannot paper over the fact that demand has waned considerably and that the market direction has changed.Sales of existing homes fell 3.4 percent in May from April, according to the National Association of Realtors, and construction is also down. Homebuilders that had been parsing out their inventory with elaborate lotteries now say their pandemic lists have shriveled to the point that they are lowering prices and sweetening incentives — like cheaper counter and bathroom upgrades — to get buyers over the line.Understand Inflation and How It Impacts YouInflation 101: What’s driving inflation in the United States? What can slow the rapid price gains? Here’s what to know.Inflation Calculator: How you experience inflation can vary greatly depending on your spending habits. Answer these seven questions to estimate your personal inflation rate.An Economic Cliff: Inflation is expected to remain high later this year even as the economy slows and layoffs rise. For many Americans, it’s going to hurt.Greedflation: Some experts say that big corporations are supercharging inflation by jacking up prices. We take a closer look at the issue. “There was this collective belief that housing was invincible — that it was so undersupplied and demand so high that nothing could stop price growth,” said Ali Wolf, chief economist with Zonda, a housing data and consulting firm. “A very rapid increase in interest rates and home prices has proven that theory to be false.”It is a stark change for a market that blossomed soon after the initial shock of the pandemic, which for many people turned out to be a perfect time to buy a home. Rock-bottom mortgage rates lowered borrowing costs, while the shift to home offices and Zoom meetings opened up new swaths of the country to buyers who had been struggling to penetrate the market near the jobs they once commuted to.That caused prices to explode in far-flung exurbs and once-affordable places like Spokane, Wash., where a crush of new home buyers decamped from pricey West Coast cities. People became so willing to move long distances to buy a home that “the normal laws of supply and demand didn’t apply,” Mr. Kelman said.After two years of swift price increases, however, places that once seemed cheap no longer are. Home values have risen about 40 percent over the past two years, according to Zillow, forcing buyers to stretch ever further in price even as they run out of geography.Now add in mortgage rates, which have nearly doubled this year. And inflation, which is eating into savings for some families as it increases household expenses. And a wobbly stock market, which has reduced the value of portfolios that many buyers intended to tap for a down payment.Larisa Kiryukhin and her husband are renting a home in Sarasota, Fla., after higher interest rates thwarted their purchase of a house.Todd Anderson for The New York TimesLarisa Kiryukhin and her family were long ago priced out of the San Francisco Bay Area, where they had lived for decades. Ms. Kiryukhin, 44, is a medical assistant who was tied to her hospital, but the pandemic gave her husband, who works in information technology, the flexibility to move to a more affordable city. So Ms. Kiryukhin switched jobs, and this year the couple and their two children moved to Tampa, Fla., in hopes of buying a home.Inflation F.A.Q.Card 1 of 5What is inflation? More

Georgia actually has a long history with vineyards. About 90 miles from Atlanta, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains, there are more than 40 wineries and tasting rooms.La Tanya Eiland is from Compton, Calif. and has a passion for wine. So when she moved to Atlanta in 2013, she asked locals the question she always asks when she travels anywhere new: “Where is wine country?”In Atlanta, the most common answer was “north.”About 90 miles north of Atlanta, nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the city of Dahlonega has a dozen wine tasting rooms and eight wineries. Nearby communities, including Helen, Cleveland and Sautee Nacoochee, are also home to several establishments that offer local, regional and international wines. In total, North Georgia has more than 40 wineries and tasting rooms in a region that is becoming an increasingly popular destination for day trips and weekends away. More