Evelyn Reynolds

Retail sales for the month increased by 0.7%, against the Dow Jones estimate for a decline of 0.2%.
Excluding auto-related sales, the number rose 0.8%, better than the 0.5% forecast.
Compared with a year ago, sales were up 13.9% on the headline number and 15.6% excluding autos.

Consumers spent at a much faster pace than expected in September, defying expectations for a pullback amid pervasive supply chain problems, the Census Bureau reported Friday.
Retail sales for the month increased by 0.7%, against the Dow Jones estimate for a decline of 0.2%. Excluding auto-related sales, the number rose 0.8%, better than the 0.5% forecast.

Compared with a year ago, sales were up 13.9% on the headline number and 15.6% excluding autos.
The increase came during a month when the government ended the enhanced benefits it had been providing during the Covid-19 pandemic and against forecasts that growth would slow in the third quarter due to the delta variant spread and a perceived pullback in consumer activity.
But spending accelerated as coronavirus cases continued to drop.
“Students heading back to school and workers returning to the office are likely the catalysts for the increased retail sales,” said Natalie Kotlyar, national leader of BDO’s retail and consumer products practice. “People who are back to working in a downtown office may be taking more shopping trips on their lunch break or after work. With school back in session and many teens vaccinated, parents may also be more comfortable allowing their teens to take shopping trips to the mall.”
Sporting goods, music and book stores led the way with a 3.7% increase. General merchandise increased 2% while miscellaneous retailers rose 1.8%. As gas prices pushed higher, spending at fuel stations jumped 1.8%, for a 38.2% surge over the past year.

Food and beverage spending increased 0.7%, though restaurants and bars saw a gain of just 0.3%, a sign that fears over the virus may have kept some people at home. Food and drinking establishment spending is up 29.5% over the past year.
Online sales rose 0.6% for the month, while auto sales increased 0.5% despite inventory problems brought on by a shortage in semiconductors.
However, doubts remained about whether the sales strength can continue.
“Services spending may see some renewed strength over the next couple of months, as virus cases continue to drop back,” Capital Economics senior U.S. economist Andrew Hunter wrote. “But with goods shortages likely to persist, and the resulting surge in prices eating into real incomes, we expect consumption growth to remain subdued.”
The spending increases persisted against a backdrop of unexpectedly resilient inflation, which is running around 30-year highs. The consumer price index, which measures the cost of a variety of goods and services, rose another 0.4% in September and is up 5.4% from a year ago, though the gain was smaller when stripping out food and energy.
Inflation is being pushed higher by supply chain problems that have seen massive backups at ships along the California coast and prompted President Joe Biden to order the ports to stay open 24 hours.
Still, there are concerns that the supply problem will hamper the upcoming holiday shopping season, and consumers are being encouraged to shop now to avoid problems later.

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Correction: Natalie Kotlyar is the national leader of BDO’s retail and consumer products practice. A previous version misspelled her last name.

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Economic policymakers have said inflation will prove temporary, but rising rents may challenge that view and pressure Washington to react.Terrell McCallum, a private wealth adviser in Dallas, spends a lot of time thinking about markets and interest rates. He knows that the Federal Reserve targets 2 percent annual price increases on average, so it was a shock when he learned that his rent would increase a whopping 10 percent this year.“I can afford it, but it gets to the brink of financial burden,” said Mr. McCallum, 33. He and his wife have been saving up for their first home, but now that they are paying $1,830 for their apartment and fees, that will become more difficult. He tried to push back on the increase, but the company he rents from wouldn’t budge.“They said: ‘This is what the market is doing.’”Mr. McCallum’s experience is echoing across America, as rents shoot higher after a brief pandemic slump, burdening households and fueling overall inflation. That is bad news for the Federal Reserve, because it could make today’s uncomfortably rapid price gains last longer. It’s also problematic for the White House because it hits households right in their pocketbooks, diminishing well-being and fueling unhappiness among voters.The jump in rents stemmed from a frenzy in the market for owned homes. People tried to buy as the pandemic took hold in the United States, often searching for extra space, but found that houses were in short supply after years of under-building following the housing crisis. That dearth of properties has been exacerbated by work stoppages, supply shortages and labor constraints during the coronavirus era, all of which have kept developers from ramping up production to meet demand.As buyers bid up prices on single-family homes and condominiums, many people who would have otherwise moved toward homeownership found themselves unable to afford it, increasing demand for apartments and home leases. Rents have been further boosted by the large number of people searching for places with more space and home offices during the pandemic, and as millennials in their late 20s and early to mid-30s look for more autonomy.“People might be looking to move out and on their own after being stuck with roommates during the pandemic,” said Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at Upwork, an online freelancing marketplace. “There’s also a possibility that remote work is playing a role here.”Government stimulus checks and expanded unemployment benefits also helped people amass savings over the course of the pandemic, so they can afford to move. Personal savings as a share of disposable income popped during the crisis, and while the share has come down toward normal levels, it remains slightly elevated at 9.4 percent, compared with about 8 percent just before the pandemic.The combination of factors seems to have created a perfect storm that pushed the Consumer Price Index measure of rent up 0.5 percent just between August and September, the fastest pace in about 20 years.That’s a concern for the Fed, because housing prices tend to move slowly and once they go up, they tend to stay up for a while. Rent data also feed into what is called “owners’ equivalent rent” — which tries to put a price on how much owners would pay for housing if they hadn’t bought a home. Together, housing measures make up about a third of the overall Consumer Price Index.Overall consumer prices have jumped sharply in 2021, climbing 5.4 percent in September from the prior year. Fed officials have been hoping and betting that the move is temporary, but they are watching housing measures carefully as a risk to that outlook.“Many participants pointed out that the owners’ equivalent rent component of price indexes should be monitored carefully, as rising home prices could lead to upward pressure on rents,” minutes from the Fed’s September meeting, released Wednesday, said.Rent is less critical to the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, the one it officially targets when it shoots for 2 percent annual inflation on average, than it is to the C.P.I. But it is a big part of people’s experience with prices, so it could help shape their expectations about future cost increases.Those expectations matter a lot to the Fed. If consumers come to anticipate faster inflation, they may begin to demand higher wages to cover their rising expenses. As businesses lift prices to cover rising costs, they could set off an upward spiral. Already, some key measures of inflation outlooks — notably the New York Fed’s Survey of Consumer Expectations — have jumped higher.The Fed is already preparing to start slowing the large bond purchases it has been making during the pandemic to keep longer-term interest rates low and money flowing around the economy. If inflation stays high, the Fed may also come under pressure to raise its policy interest rate, its more traditional and more powerful tool. That might slow mortgage lending, cool the housing market and weigh down inflation.An apartment building in New York. The national median rent increased by 16.4 percent since January.Karsten Moran for The New York TimesBut doing that would come at a big cost, slowing the labor market when there are 5 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic. So for now, Fed officials are getting themselves into a position where they can be nimble without signaling that they’re poised to raised rates.White House officials are also wrestling with their options for easing housing price pressures. President Biden’s economic agenda includes measures that would build more houses and discourage zoning rules that keep new construction at bay.Such an intervention would take time — homes are not built overnight. And in the meantime, rents will almost certainly continue moving in the inflation data, which reflect rising housing costs at a long delay. More up-to-date measures of rental pricing pressure produced by Apartment List and Zillow have shown costs climbing in recent months, though many measures of rent and new leases have calmed down somewhat after a red-hot summer.The national median rent has increased 16.4 percent since January, Apartment List said in its September rental report, with monthly growth slowing slightly from its July peak.“This is still very strong by historical standards — we’re in off season,” said Igor Popov, chief economist at Apartment List. “It’s a racecar slowing down ahead of a turn, but it’s still going faster than we ever have in our lives.”Whether rent growth speeds up or slows next year may hinge on whether the government support that has given households the financial ability to afford housing gives way to a strong job market.“There’s room to run, for sure,” based on demographics alone, Mr. Ozimek said. “The question is whether the economy is going to go into full employment, or whether there’s a slowdown.”Rents could heat up as big cities including New York and Los Angeles rebound from the pandemic, said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist of Redfin. While smaller cities’ rental markets have been hot for months, the median rent in Manhattan climbed for the first time since the start of the pandemic in September, data from Miller Samuel and Douglas Elliman showed.The recovery in the New York area as a whole has been uneven as some families have moved to the city, bidding up prices, while others are struggling to pay, said Jay Martin, executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, which represents landlords of mostly rent-stabilized housing.“You have bidding wars for one unit, and then a renter who can’t pay,” he said. “A tale of two cities is happening within the same building.”Drew Hamrick, the senior vice president of the Colorado Apartment Association, a landlord group, said the rise in rents is not driven by landlords but by market factors.“Landlords don’t really set the price, consumers set the price,” he said. “It’s musical chairs.”Even if there is a pullback in rents next year, today’s suddenly higher housing costs could make for a painful adjustment period. Higher rent costs can reverberate through people’s lives and force tough decisions.Luke Martinez, a 27-year-old in Greenville, a town in East Texas, is contemplating buying a trailer and setting his family up on an R.V. lot after learning that he is losing the three-bedroom house he has been renting for about $1,000 per month since 2016.“It’s insane the amount of rent, even in this little Podunk town,” Mr. Martinez said.He’s looking at paying up to $1,500 per month for a new place, which will be tough. After getting laid off at the start of the pandemic, he had been living partly on savings — padded by an insurance payout after his car was stolen and totaled. He returned to working in automotive repair only this week. His wife had been working the front desk at a hotel until two months ago, but she is now home-schooling their 8-year-old.If they end up renting at the higher price, they will most likely afford it by forgoing a new car.“It’s pretty much just scraping by,” he said of his lifestyle. More

About 10,000 unionized employees walked out, as worker activism rises during nationwide labor shortages.Employees of Deere & Company formed picket lines after some 10,000 unionized workers went on strike to demand better pay and benefits at a time when the agriculture equipment maker was on track for a year of record profits.Meg Mclaughlin/Quad City Times, via Associated PressSome 10,000 unionized workers at the agriculture equipment maker Deere & Company went on strike early Thursday after overwhelmingly rejecting a contract proposal worked out with the company by negotiators for the United Automobile Workers union.“Our members at John Deere strike for the ability to earn a decent living, retire with dignity and establish fair work rules,” Chuck Browning, the director of the union’s agricultural department, said in a statement. “We stay committed to bargaining until our members’ goals are achieved.”Deere said it was “determined to reach an agreement” that would benefit workers. “We will keep working day and night to understand our employees’ priorities and resolve this strike, while also keeping our operations running for the benefit of all those we serve,” Brad Morris, the company’s vice president for labor relations, said in a statement.The strike deadline was announced on Sunday after the union said its members had voted down the tentative agreement reached on Oct. 1 with the company, which makes the John Deere brand of tractors. Union negotiators had said the proposal would provide “significant economic gains” and “the highest-quality health care benefits in the industry.”But workers, who are spread out across 14 facilities, primarily in Iowa and Illinois, criticized the deal for insufficiently increasing wages, for denying a traditional pension to new employees and for failing to substantially improve an incentive program that they consider stingy.“We’ve never had the deck stacked in our advantage the way it is now,” said Chris Laursen, a worker at a John Deere plant in Ottumwa, Iowa, who was president of his local there until recently.Mr. Laursen cited several sources of leverage for workers: the profitability of Deere & Company — which is on a pace to set a record of nearly $6 billion this fiscal year — as well as relatively high agricultural commodity prices and supply-chain bottlenecks resulting from the pandemic.“The company is reaping such rewards, but we’re fighting over crumbs here,” he said.Deere, long known to farmers for its green-and-yellow product line, is a publicly traded company valued at more than $100 billion. After a brief plunge early in the pandemic, its shares have tripled, far outpacing the overall market. They rose slightly on Thursday.Steve Volkmann, an analyst with the investment bank Jefferies, acknowledged that Deere was doing well. “Crop prices have increased with every other commodity,” he said, “and when farmers make money, they tend to buy equipment.” And he said Deere’s leadership in agricultural technology had helped make it more profitable.Mr. Volkmann said the financial damage from the labor dispute, if it was settled quickly, would be limited. The company’s bigger challenge, he said, comes from the pandemic’s disruption to the worldwide supply chain, which has caused shortages and raised prices for some components.“Deere is already under some stress,” he said. “They’re not producing at full capacity anyway — they just don’t have the parts.”As many employers grapple with worker shortages, workers across the country appear more willing to undertake strikes and other labor actions.Last week, more than 1,000 workers at Kellogg, the cereal maker, went on strike, and Mondelez International, which makes Oreos and other Nabisco snacks, experienced a work stoppage this summer. Coal miners in Alabama have been on strike for months. Workers have also waged prominent union campaigns at Amazon and Starbucks.Those on strike elsewhere in the country have raised similar complaints as the Deere employees, pointing out that they put in long hours as essential workers during the pandemic but are not sharing much of the profits that their companies reaped during that time.“There was no reprieve — everyone was working seven days a week,” said Dan Osborn, the president of a Kellogg workers local in Omaha.Mr. Osborn said his members were upset over a two-tier compensation system that they worry puts downward pressure on the wages and benefits of veteran workers. “Divide and conquer, it’s an age-old adage,” he said.The Facebook pages of some U.A.W. locals on Thursday encouraged workers to turn out for picketing, which one said would qualify them for strike pay and health insurance.Union members at General Motors walked off the job for almost six weeks in 2019 before agreeing to a four-year contract that included substantial wage increases and closed disparities in a two-tier wage structure.Under the tentative deal at Deere, wages would have increased 5 or 6 percent this year, depending on a worker’s pay grade, and then an additional 3 percent each in 2023 and 2025.Pension benefits would have increased but would have remained substantially lower for workers hired after 1997, and many workers were disappointed to see benefits eliminated for new hires, Mr. Laursen said.Other workers are perturbed about the lack of health care benefits for retirees, which also ceased for workers hired after 1997.Analysts suggested that Deere might be wary of taking on additional long-term obligations because its current level of profitability is unlikely to last.“It’s a very cyclical business,” said Ann Duignan, an analyst with J.P. Morgan. “They may be having record profits this year, but we believe we are close to a peak.”Many workers were frustrated with similar elements of the last contract that the union negotiated with Deere, in 2015, and had been anticipating a showdown ever since.“I’ve been saving since the last contract,” said Toby Munley, a Deere electrician in Ottumwa, where U.A.W. members voted to reject the previous contract, as did another local in Iowa. “People were feeling it then.” That contract was narrowly approved overall.Looming over the negotiation is suspicion among rank-and-file workers toward the international union after a series of scandals in recent years involving corruption in the union and illegal payoffs to union officials from executives at the company then known as Fiat Chrysler.The scandals led to more than 15 convictions, including those of two recent U.A.W. presidents.Mr. Munley said he had worried that the U.A.W. would try to negotiate a marginally better deal and sell the membership on it before the strike deadline Wednesday night, but said he was encouraged that the union had held firm.“I was happy to see we didn’t come back with a tentative agreement,” he said. “It restored some of my faith in my international.”Nelson D. Schwartz More

Trade Representative Katherine Tai outlined her vision for the battered World Trade Organization, saying the U.S. wanted to re-engage and address working people’s concerns.Katherine Tai, the United States trade representative, affirmed the Biden administration’s commitment to supporting the World Trade Organization in a speech in Geneva on Thursday but said further reforms were needed to restore the global trade body’s relevance to working people.Ms. Tai addressed the organization’s shortcomings, criticizing some of its processes as “unwieldy and bureaucratic” and saying the international group had “rightfully been accused of existing in a ‘bubble,’ insulated from reality and slow to recognize global developments.”But she said the United States was committed to strengthening the organization, which critics say the Trump administration had actively worked to undermine. And she argued that the W.T.O. had a crucial role to play in steering countries through the pandemic and confronting challenges like rising inequality and climate change.“The reality of the institution today does not match the ambition of its goals,” said Ms. Tai, who spoke from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. However, she added, “We all recognize the importance of the W.T.O., and we all want it to succeed.”The speech marked a putative return of the United States to its traditional leadership role at the beleaguered trade body, which functions based on consensus from its 164 member countries. It was the first time a United States trade representative had visited the W.T.O.’s offices in Geneva in half a decade.It was also a personal return to Geneva for Ms. Tai, who litigated trade cases on behalf of the United States at the World Trade Organization earlier in her career.Ms. Tai’s visit comes at a crucial moment for the global trade body, which is struggling to make headway on issues ranging from global vaccine distribution to rules for the fishing industry as it prepares for a major ministerial conference beginning Nov. 30.The 25-year-old World Trade Organization was designed as a forum for trade negotiations as well as for settling trade disputes between its members. It also plays an important role in monitoring and publishing data about global trade. But under pressure from an expanding membership of countries, including nonmarket economies like China, it has struggled to produce new trade agreements and resolve disputes in a timely manner.The Trump administration criticized the W.T.O. for its failure to police Chinese trade practices and its limits on how the United States protects its workers, among other issues. Many other member countries had accused the United States in recent years of abandoning its traditional role as one of the organization’s greatest supporters.Jake Colvin, the president of the National Foreign Trade Council, which represents major multinational companies, said it was “fundamentally encouraging to hear Ambassador Tai reaffirm the continued commitment of the administration to the W.T.O.”“That’s important and can’t be taken for granted,” he said. “I would agree with her, and the administration would agree with her, that the organization needs to show that it’s capable of addressing challenges and it’s not just trade for trade’s sake.”Richard E. Baldwin, a professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, posed questions to Ms. Tai after her speech. He was enthusiastic about the departure from the Trump administration’s harsh critiques. “I haven’t heard optimism and W.T.O. said in the same sentence in a long time,” he said.In remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington on Thursday, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the director general of the W.T.O., said that despite a bruising trade war, discussion of decoupling the United States and China, and pandemic-related shortages, global trade was actually at historic highs and the multilateral trading system continued to strongly benefit the global economy.“To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the death of multilateral trade are greatly exaggerated,” she said. “Warnings of deglobalization are not matched by the evidence, not yet, at least.”As the organization prepares for its meeting next month, W.T.O. members are divided over whether to grant a waiver that allows countries to bypass the intellectual property protections pharmaceutical companies have on their products to more quickly produce and distribute coronavirus vaccines to lower-income nations.Backed by the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, the Biden administration has stated its support for the waiver. But it continues to face criticism, both from supporters who say the administration isn’t doing enough to provide vaccine access to poorer countries, and from the business community, which worries about the long-run effects of the erosion of intellectual property rights.On Thursday, Ms. Tai countered accusations of the administration’s “silence” on the issue by saying the United States was working actively behind the scenes. She compared the administration’s efforts to a duck sailing on a pond where “underneath the surface the duck’s legs are going very, very fast.”Ms. Okonjo-Iweala said “there seems to be a will to find a compromise” that would allow developing countries to have access to vaccines without discouraging research and development. “That solution is within reach,” she said, adding that more than 100 developing countries were proponents of the waiver.The World Trade Organization is also under pressure in the coming weeks to conclude a two-decades-long negotiation over curtailing harmful subsidies that countries give to their fishing industries.The Biden administration has made a last-minute proposal to add provisions combating the use of forced labor on fishing boats, provisions that many countries say they support in principle but view as complicating the negotiations in the final hour.Ms. Tai said the United States had made the forced labor proposal a way of bringing “trade policy back to thinking through the impacts on working people” as well as sustainability, and that the United States was hopeful to reach consensus on the issue.Trade can be “a force for good that encourages a race to the top,” she said.Ms. Tai also suggested that the United States was ready to engage on an intense disagreement over the organization’s system for settling disputes, but that further negotiations would be needed.The W.T.O. appellate body, the final stop in the organization’s system for settling trade disputes, has been defunct since 2019, when the Trump administration refused to appoint new officials. That refusal protested a system that the White House once said had long ceased to function as its designers intended.Ms. Tai offered similar criticisms of the dispute settlement system, saying that the W.T.O. had become a forum for “prolonged, expensive and contentious” litigation, and that it was also having a chilling effect on finalizing new negotiations.She cited as an example a standoff between the United States and Europe on subsidies given to aircraft makers Boeing and Airbus. It resulted in 16 years of litigation at the W.T.O. and was only resolved through outside talks in June.But she distanced herself from the Trump administration’s more combative approach at the W.T.O., emphasizing that the United States was eager to engage and work toward solutions.“If you will listen to us, we will listen to you, and let’s start the reform process from there,” she said. More

In the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, government-owned energy companies are increasing oil and natural gas production as U.S. and European companies pare supply because of climate concerns.HOUSTON — After years of pumping more oil and gas, Western energy giants like BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil and Chevron are slowing down production as they switch to renewable energy or cut costs after being bruised by the pandemic.But that doesn’t mean the world will have less oil. That’s because state-owned oil companies in the Middle East, North Africa and Latin America are taking advantage of the cutbacks by investor-owned oil companies by cranking up their production.This massive shift could reverse a decade-long trend of rising domestic oil and gas production that turned the United States into a net exporter of oil, gasoline, natural gas and other petroleum products, and make America more dependent on the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, authoritarian leaders and politically unstable countries.The push by governments to increase oil and gas production means it could take decades for global fossil fuel supplies to decline unless there is a sharp drop in demand for such fuels. President Biden has effectively accepted the idea that the United States will rely more on foreign oil, at least for the next few years. His administration has been calling on OPEC and its allies to boost production to help bring down rising oil and gasoline prices, even as it seeks to limit the growth of oil and gas production on federal lands and waters.The administration’s approach is a function of two conflicting priorities: Mr. Biden wants to get the world to move away from fossil fuels while protecting Americans from a spike in energy prices. In the short run, it is hard to achieve both goals because most people cannot easily replace internal-combustion engine cars, gas furnaces and other fossil fuel-based products with versions that run on electricity generated from wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable sources of energy.Western oil companies are also under pressure from investors and environmental activists who are demanding a rapid transition to clean energy. Some U.S. producers have said they are reluctant to invest more because they fear oil prices will fall again or because banks and investors are less willing to finance their operations. As a result, some are selling off parts of their fossil fuel empires or are simply spending less on new oil and gas fields.That has created a big opportunity for state-owned oil companies that are not under as much pressure to reduce emissions, though some are also investing in renewable energy. In fact, their political masters often want these oil companies to increase production to help pay down debt, finance government programs and create jobs.Saudi Aramco, the world’s leading oil producer, has announced that it plans to increase oil production capacity by at least a million barrels a day, to 13 million, by the 2030s. Aramco increased its exploration and production investments by $8 billion this year, to $35 billion.“We are capitalizing on the opportunity,” Aramco’s chief executive, Amin H. Nasser, recently told financial analysts. “Of course we are trying to benefit from the lack of investments by major players in the market.”Aramco not only has vast reserves but it can also produce oil much more cheaply than Western companies because its crude is relatively easy to pump out of the ground. So even if demand declines because of a rapid shift to electric cars and trucks, Aramco will most likely be able to pump oil for years or decades longer than many Western energy companies.“The state companies are going their own way,” said René Ortiz, a former OPEC secretary general and a former energy minister in Ecuador. “They don’t care about the political pressure worldwide to control emissions.”State-owned oil companies in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Libya, Argentina, Colombia and Brazil are also planning to increase production. Should oil and natural gas prices stay high or rise further, energy experts say, more oil-producing nations will be tempted to crank up supply.The global oil market share of the 23 nations that belong to OPEC Plus, a group dominated by state oil companies in OPEC and allied countries like Russia and Mexico, will grow to 75 percent from 55 percent in 2040, according to Michael C. Lynch, president of Strategic Energy and Economic Research in Amherst, Mass., who is an occasional adviser to OPEC.If that forecast comes to pass, the United States and Europe could become more vulnerable to the political turmoil in those countries and to the whims of their rulers. Some European leaders and analysts have long argued that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia uses his country’s vast natural gas reserves as a cudgel — a complaint that has been voiced again recently as European gas prices have surged to record highs.A pump jack in Stanton, Texas. American companies have been cautiously holding back exploration and production.Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York TimesOther oil and gas producers like Iraq, Libya and Nigeria are unstable, and their production can rise or fall rapidly depending on who is in power and who is trying to seize power.“By adopting a strategy of producing less oil, Western oil companies will be turning control of supply over to national oil companies in countries that could be less reliable trading partners and have weaker environmental regulations,” Mr. Lynch said.An overreliance on foreign oil can be problematic because it can limit the options American policymakers have when energy prices spike, forcing presidents to effectively beg OPEC to produce more oil. And it gives oil-producing countries greater leverage over the United States.“Today when U.S. shale companies are not going to respond to higher prices with investment for financial reasons, we are depending on OPEC, whether it is willing to release spare production or not,” said David Goldwyn, a senior energy official in the State Department in the Obama administration. He compared the current moment to one in 2000 when the energy secretary, Bill Richardson, “went around the world asking OPEC countries to release spare capacity to relieve price pressure.”This time, state-owned energy companies are not merely looking to produce more oil in their home countries. Many are expanding overseas.In recent months, Qatar Energy invested in several African offshore fields while the Romanian national gas company bought an offshore production block from Exxon Mobil. As Western companies divest polluting reserves such as Canadian oil sands, energy experts say state companies can be expected to step in.“There is a lot of low-hanging fruit state companies can pick up,” said Raoul LeBlanc, an oil analyst at IHS Markit, a consulting and research firm. “It is a huge opportunity for them to become international players.”Kuwait announced last month that it planned to invest more than $6 billion in exploration over the next five years to increase production to four million barrels a day, from 2.4 million now.This month, the United Arab Emirates, a major OPEC member that produces four million barrels of oil a day, became the first Persian Gulf state to pledge to a net zero carbon emissions target by 2050. But just last year ADNOC, the U.A.E.’s national oil company, announced it was investing $122 billion in new oil and gas projects.Iraq, OPEC’s second-largest producer after Saudi Arabia, has invested heavily in recent years to boost oil output, aiming to raise production to eight million barrels a day by 2027, from five million now. The country is suffering from political turmoil, power shortages and inadequate ports, but the government has made several major deals with foreign oil companies to help the state-owned energy company develop new fields and improve production from old ones.Even in Libya, where warring factions have hamstrung the oil industry for years, production is rising. In recent months, it has been churning out 1.3 million barrels a day, a nine-year high. The government aims to increase that total to 2.5 million within six years.National oil companies in Brazil, Colombia and Argentina are also working to produce more oil and gas to raise revenue for their governments before demand for oil falls as richer countries cut fossil fuel use.After years of frustrating disappointments, production in the Vaca Muerta, or Dead Cow, oil and gas field in Argentina has jumped this year. The field had never supplied more than 120,000 barrels of oil in a day but is now expected to end the year at 200,000 a day, according to Rystad Energy, a research and consulting firm. The government, which is considered a climate leader in Latin America, has proposed legislation that would encourage even more production.“Argentina is concerned about climate change, but they don’t see it primarily as their responsibility,” said Lisa Viscidi, an energy expert at the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research organization. Describing the Argentine view, she added, “The rest of the world globally needs to reduce oil production, but that doesn’t mean that we in particular need to change our behavior.” More

Jobless claims totaled 293,000 for the week ended Oct. 9, below the 318,000 estimate.
That was the first time initial claims dropped below 300,000 since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Continuing claims fell by 134,000 to 2.59 million.
Wholesale producer prices increased 0.5% for September and 8.6% over the past year, the latter being a fresh record and reflective of ongoing inflationary pressures.

Initial jobless claims fell below 300,000 for the first time since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Labor Department said Thursday.
In another sign the jobs market is getting closer to its old self, first-time claims for unemployment insurance totaled 293,000, the best level since March 14, 2020, which saw 256,000 claims just as the Covid-19 spread intensified.

The Dow Jones estimate for claims was 318,000. Last week’s total represented a decline of 36,000 from the previous week.
The four-week moving average, which helps smooth out weekly volatility, dropped to 334,250, a 10,500 decline that also marked the lowest number since March 14, 2020.
Also, continuing claims, which run a week behind the headline number, fell by 134,000 to 2.59 million, another pandemic-era low.

A separate economic release Thursday showed that prices for final-demand wholesale goods increased 0.5% in September, slightly below the 0.6% Dow Jones estimate for the producer price index.
However, on a 12-month basis, the index increased 8.6%, a fresh record for a data series that goes back to November 2010 and reflective of the current inflationary climate, according to the Labor Department.

Excluding food and energy, the core PPI rose just 0.1% versus the 0.5% forecast, putting the 12-month gain at 5.9%, the highest level since March 1982.
Jobless claims fell as enhanced unemployment benefits associated with the pandemic began to fade. The rolls of those getting benefits under all programs declined by more than half a million to 3.65 million, according to data through Sept. 25.
Most of the decline came from those leaving two pandemic-related federal programs as well as other extended benefits. A year ago, the total receiving benefits was close to 25 million.
The drop in claims comes at an important time for the labor market, which has added jobs over the past two months at a decidedly slower-than-expected pace – 366,000 in August and 194,000 in September, leaving the household employment total still more than 5 million shy of where it was pre-pandemic.
Thursday’s jobless claims report covered the period just before the Labor Department’s survey week for the closely watched nonfarm payrolls report.
Federal Reserve officials have been watching the job market’s progress closely as the central bank weighs when to begin pulling back on the extraordinary help it’s been providing. Minutes released Wednesday from the Fed’s September meeting indicated that the first pullback could start as early as mid-November with a reduction in the amount of bonds it buys each month.
One big concern now for the Fed is rising inflation, and Thursday’s data showed continuing but concentrated pressures.
Final demand energy prices advanced 2.8% in September, pushed by a 3.9% surge in gasoline. The bulk of the price increases overall came from final demand goods, which increased 1.3%, compared with just a 0.2% increase in services.
More than two-thirds of the services gain came from an 11.6% burst in margins for fuel and lubricant retailing. By contrast, airline passenger services prices tumbled by 16.9%.
Final demand food prices increased by 2%, which included a 21.2% price increase on eggs for fresh use and a 19.4% jump in fresh and dry vegetables.

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Federal Reserve officials were preparing to begin slowing down monetary policy support as soon as the middle of November, minutes from their September meeting showed, and policymakers debated when they might need to raise rates amid rising inflation risks.The Fed has been buying $120 billion in bonds each month and holding the federal funds rate near zero to make borrowing cheap and keep money flowing through the economy, stoking demand and speeding up the recovery. But the central bank’s officials signaled after their Sept. 21-22 meeting that they might announce a plan to pare back those asset purchases as soon as early November. Minutes from the gathering, released Wednesday, provided additional details on that plan.The minutes suggested that “if a decision to begin tapering purchases occurred at the next meeting, the process of tapering could commence with the monthly purchase calendars beginning in either mid-November or mid-December.”The process could end by the middle of next year, the minutes indicated. That backed up the timeline that Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, laid out during his news conference after the meeting.At the same time, Fed officials have been clear that they will continue to support the economy with low interest rates as the job market continues to heal. Their hopes of moving very gradually when it comes to rate increases could be complicated by rapidly rising prices, though, as supply chain disruptions tied to the pandemic persist and rising rents raise the prospect of sustained increases.The minutes showed that “various” meeting participants thought that rates should stay at or near zero for a couple of years, warning that long-run trends that had dragged inflation down before the pandemic would again come to dominate. But “in contrast, a number” of Fed officials said that rates would need to increase next year, and that “some of these participants saw inflation as likely to remain elevated in 2022 with risks to the upside.”The committee as a whole fretted about supply chain disruptions, which have been pushing inflation higher and curbing growth. They discussed several bottlenecks, including in the housing industry.“Participants noted that residential construction had been restrained by shortages of materials and other inputs and that home sales had been held back by limited supplies of available homes,” the minutes showed. Later, they added that “firms in a number of industries were facing challenges keeping up with strong demand due to widespread supply chain bottlenecks as well as labor shortages.”And officials noted that they might take time to fade.“Most participants saw inflation risks as weighted to the upside because of concerns that supply disruptions and labor shortages might last longer and might have larger or more persistent effects on prices and wages than they currently assumed,” the minutes showed.“Participants noted that their district contacts generally did not expect these bottlenecks to be fully resolved until sometime next year or even later.”Consumer prices jumped more than expected last month, data released on Wednesday showed. The Consumer Price Index climbed 5.4 percent in September from a year earlier, faster than its 5.3 percent increase through August. From August to September, the index rose 0.4 percent, also above expectations.Housing prices rose, and food — especially meat and eggs — cost consumers more. When volatile food and fuel prices are stripped out, inflation is still rapid, at 4 percent in the year through last month.Fed officials have repeatedly said they expect price gains to moderate as the economy gets back to normal, but they have stuck an increasingly wary tone as inflation has been slow to moderate.“I believe, as do most of my colleagues, that the risks to inflation are to the upside, and I continue to be attuned and attentive to underlying inflation trends,” Richard H. Clarida, the Fed’s vice chair, said during a speech Tuesday.Among the causes for concern: Inflation expectations seem to be picking up, at least by some measures.The Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Survey of Consumer Expectations showed this week that medium-term inflation expectations — those for three years ahead — climbed to 4.2 percent in September from 4 percent in August. That is the highest level since the series started in 2013. Short-term expectations jumped to 5.3 percent, also a new high. More