Economy

A Times housing reporter wants to learn more about the pressures of rising housing costs and how they have affected your community and family.“No society can be fully understood apart from the residences of its members.”I have that quote (from “Crabgrass Frontier,” the seminal history of America’s suburbs) taped to a wall behind my desk. It summarizes why I love covering housing for The New York Times and seem never to run out of things to write about. Housing is everything. It’s where we live and raise our families. It is most people’s largest store of wealth. Whether you own, you rent, or you sleep outside, where you hang your head defines much of your existence.Over the past few decades, and especially since the pandemic, housing has gone from a symbol of American strength to an everyday crisis. Aspiring homeowners are becoming forever renters. People live in increasingly crowded households, the supply of illegal housing has surged and homeless camps have multiplied. People are fleeing expensive states for cheaper ones — which has in turn created housing problems in the cities where they end up.There have also been new opportunities: The rise of at-home offices has allowed many people to relocate to cheaper housing markets and prompted a number of families to quit their 9 to 5s and redevelop property or become landlords. In California and elsewhere, the legalization of backyard homes has inspired a number of homeowners to become developers by creating small rental units on their properties.For the past several years, I have covered virtually every aspect of America’s housing crisis, from the public officials trying to tackle it in statehouses to the people living its consequences. I write about tenants as well as landlords, developers as well as environmentalists, public housing as well as private — even an attempt to build a new city from scratch.My stories range in topic and come from around the country, but the common thread is that they are rooted in the accounts of people and the places that make them. Which is why I want to hear from you. I want to know what kinds of housing pressures you are dealing with and how they have affected your life, family, friendships and community. And I want to know what stories or topics you think need more attention. The articles I write are inspired by the stories people tell me.I read all submissions. I also always reach back out to ask more questions and make sure I’ve got my facts right before I publish anything. I won’t publish anything without your explicit permission, and I won’t use your contact information for any other purpose or share it outside the newsroom. If you would like to submit information anonymously, please visit our tips page. More

Minutes from the Federal Reserve’s Jan. 30-31 meeting showed policymakers thought that risks of an inflation pickup had “diminished.”Federal Reserve officials welcomed a recent inflation slowdown at their last meeting in late January but were intent on proceeding carefully as they tiptoe toward rate cuts, according to minutes from that gathering, which were released on Wednesday.Central bankers raised interest rates sharply from March 2022 to July 2023, pushing them to 5.3 percent from a starting point near zero. Those moves were meant to cool consumer and business demand, which officials hoped would weigh down rapid inflation.Now, inflation is slowing meaningfully. Consumer prices climbed 3.1 percent in the year through January, down sharply from their recent peak of 9.1 percent. But that is still faster than the pace that was normal before the pandemic, and it is above the central bank’s goal: The Fed aims for 2 percent inflation over time using a different but related metric, the Personal Consumption Expenditures index.The economy has continued to grow at a solid clip even as price growth has moderated. Hiring has remained stronger than expected, wage growth is chugging along and retail sales data have suggested that consumers are still willing to spend.That combination leaves Fed officials contemplating when — and how much — to lower interest rates. While central bankers have been clear that they do not think they need to raise borrowing costs further at a time when inflation is moderating, they have also suggested that they are in no hurry to cut rates.“There had been significant progress recently on inflation returning to the committee’s longer-run goal,” Fed officials reiterated in their freshly released minutes. Officials thought that cooler rent prices, improving labor supply and productivity gains could all help inflation to moderate further this year. Policymakers also suggested that “upside risks to inflation” had “diminished” — suggesting that they are becoming more confident that inflation is coming down sustainably.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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Germany on Wednesday said that it was slashing its expectations for gross domestic product growth for 2024 to 0.2%, down from a 1.3% estimate previously.
The country narrowly avoided a recession at the end of 2023 and has faced a series of economic crises.
“The economy is in tricky waters,” Habeck said in a statement released online, according to a CNBC translation. “We are coming out of the crisis more slowly than we had hoped.”

Robert Habeck, German Minister for Economy and Climate Protection and Vice Chancellor, is pictured during the weekly meeting of the cabinet on February 21, 2024 in Berlin, Germany.
Florian Gaertner | Photothek | Getty Images

Germany’s gross domestic product is now expected to grow by just 0.2% this year, as the country wades in “tricky waters,” German Economy Minister Robert Habeck said Wednesday.
The revised GDP growth forecast is down from a previous estimate of 1.3%. Habeck said the government now anticipates German GDP to increase by 1% in 2025.

Speaking during a news briefing, the minister attributed the revised forecast to an unstable global economic environment and to the low growth of world trade, alongside higher interest rates.
Those issues have negatively impacted investments, especially in the construction industry, he said.
German housebuilding is among the sectors that have been most affected by this, with developers canceling projects and order numbers declining, according to recent data. Analysts fear the sector may face further difficulties this year.
“The economy is in tricky waters,” Habeck said in a statement released online, according to a CNBC translation. “We are coming out of the crisis more slowly than we had hoped.”
This is despite energy costs and inflation falling and consumer spending power increasing again, he said. Habeck nevertheless maintained that Germany has proven resilient in the face of losing access to Russian seaborne crude and oil product supplies, as a result of the war in Ukraine.

Budget crisis

The country narrowly avoided a recession in the second half of 2023, despite its GDP declining by 0.3% in the final quarter as well as for the full-year 2023. The third-quarter GDP for 2023 was revised to reflect stagnation, however. It means the country dodged a technical recession, which is characterized by two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
Habeck pointed to Germany’s recent budget crisis which left a 60 billion euro ($65 billion) hole in the government’s financial plans over the coming years as an additional economic challenge.
Last year, the country’s constitutional court ruled that it was unlawful for the government to reallocate emergency debt that was taken on but not used during the Covid-19 pandemic to its current budget plans. This caused significant disruption to financial planning and forced the government to make cuts and savings.
The biggest challenge for Germany is a lack of skilled workers, which will only intensify in the years ahead, Habeck said in remarks published Wednesday. He also said there were various structural issues which need to be addressed to “defend” the competitiveness of Germany as an industrial hub.
Habeck also addressed the outlook for inflation, saying it is expected to fall to 2.8% throughout 2024, before returning to the 2% target range again in 2025. The harmonized consumer price index for January 2024 came in at 3.1% on an annual basis. More

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LONDON (Reuters) – The World Bank warned that high borrowing costs have “changed dramatically” the need for developing nations to boost sluggish economic growth.The multilateral lender’s latest warning comes as international bond sales from emerging market governments hit an all-time record of $47 billion in January, led by less risky emerging economies such as Saudi Arabia, Mexico and Romania. However, some riskier issuers have started to tap markets at higher rates. Kenya recently paid more than 10% on a new international bond – the threshold above which experts often consider borrowing unaffordable.”When it comes to borrowing, the story has changed dramatically. You need to grow much faster,” Ayhan Kose, deputy chief economist of the World Bank, told Reuters in an interview in London on Tuesday, though he declined to comment on individual countries. “If I had a mortgage with a 10% interest rate, I would be worried,” he added. Kose added that faster growth, especially a real growth rate higher than the real cost of borrowing, could prove elusive. The World Bank warned in its Global Economic Prospects report, published in January, that the global economy was set for the weakest half-decade performance in 30 years during 2020-2024, even if recession is avoided. Global growth is expected to slow for a third consecutive year to 2.4%, before ticking up to 2.7% in 2025. Those rates are still well below the 3.1% average of the 2010s, the report showed. The growth slowdown is particularly acute for emerging economies, around a third of which have seen no recovery since the COVID-19 pandemic and have per capita income below their 2019 levels. Kose said this throws many education, health and climate spending goals into question. “I think that it’s going to be difficult to meet those objectives, if not impossible, given the type of growth we have seen,” Kose said. An escalation of the Middle East conflict is a further downside risk, adding to concerns over tight monetary policy and weak global trade. “Trade has been a critical driver of poverty reduction, and obviously for emerging markets economies, a critical source of earnings,” Kose said.DEBT RESTRUCTUREIf growth remained low, some emerging economies might face having to restructure debt, Kose added, by reprofiling maturities or agreeing haircuts with creditors. “Sooner or later you need to restructure the debt and you need to have a framework,” he said. “That has not happened in the way the global community was hoping for.”G20 nations launched the Common Framework in 2020, when the pandemic upended nations’ finances. The programme aimed to speed up and simplify the process of getting overstretched debt-distressed countries back on their feet. But the process has been beset by delays, with Zambia locked in default for more than three years. “If growth remains weak and financing conditions remain tight, you will not see an easy path out of this problem. But if growth magically goes up, it’s like a medicine.” More

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Biden administration is turning up the heat on China’s top sanctioned chipmaker by cutting off its most advanced factory from more American imports after it produced a sophisticated chip for Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro phone, three people familiar with the matter said.Late last year, the Commerce Department sent dozens of letters to U.S. suppliers to Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC), suspending permission to sell to its most advanced plant, said two people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the matter.While many companies had already stopped selling to SMIC South, as the unit is known, the letters halted millions of dollars worth of shipments of chipmaking materials and parts from at least one supplier, Entegris (NASDAQ:ENTG), one of the people said. Reuters found no evidence that Entegris had violated any U.S. laws or regulations.Entegris said it made the shipments in accordance with a valid export license and halted them after receiving letters from the Commerce Department suspending permission to send products to SMIC South. The Massachusetts-based company, which produces filters, gases, chemicals, and products for handling wafers, the building blocks for making chips, said it monitors and complies with the “rapidly evolving regulatory requirements” for international trade affecting the chip industry.SMIC did not respond to a request for comment. Huawei, the White House and the Commerce Department declined to comment.”This is out-and-out economic bullying and will inevitably backfire,” said a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington. “We urge the U.S. side to stop overstretching the concept of national security and abusing the state power to suppress Chinese companies.The license suspensions by the Commerce Department, first reported by Reuters, show the Biden administration has taken action against SMIC amid rising pressure from Republican China hawks to stem the flow of U.S. technology to the company and degrade its ability to make sophisticated chips. That pressure has built since August, when sanctioned Chinese telecoms giant Huawei shocked the world with a new phone powered by a sophisticated chip. The Huawei Mate 60 Pro was seen as a symbol of the China’s technological resurgence despite Washington’s ongoing efforts to cripple its capacity to produce advanced semiconductors. The phone also prompted a review by the Biden administration to learn the details behind the chip that powers it, the most advanced semiconductor China has so far produced. Critics say the round of letters don’t go far enough. Republican Congressman Michael McCaul, who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee, said the Commerce Department should have acted sooner. “This was negligent work by [the agency] and casts further doubt on its ability to fulfill its national security mission,” he added in a statement to Reuters this month. Commerce declined to comment on McCaul’s allegations of negligence. RISING RESTRICTIONSThe United States has charted a slow course towards depriving SMIC and Huawei of access to advanced U.S. technology.Huawei was added to a trade restrictions list in 2019 by the Trump administration over alleged sanctions violations. SMIC was added to the same list in 2020 for alleged ties to the Chinese military industrial complex. Both companies have previously denied wrongdoing. Being added to that list usually bars U.S. companies from selling to the targeted firms, but Trump gave the green light to shipments of certain items to Huawei and SMIC, allowing billions of dollars in U.S. goods to flow to them over the last few years.The Biden administration unveiled new rules in October, 2022, which effectively banned U.S. suppliers from sending semiconductor tools and materials to advanced Chinese-run chipmaking factories in China including SMIC South.    But U.S. rules allowed companies with preexisting licenses — which generally are valid for four years — to keep supplying the facility.Entegris shipped chipmaking parts and materials to SMIC South between October 2022 and the end of last year, a person familiar with the matter said. China accounted for 16% of Entegris’ $180 million in sales last year, the company said in its 2023 annual report, noting that recent U.S. export regulations “have reduced our ability to sell our products in China and it is possible future regulation could further reduce demand for our products.”Lita Shon-Roy, CEO of market research firm Techcet, said SMIC South could likely turn to Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese and Korean sources for most chemicals and parts used in the chipmaking process. However, if SMIC’s top facility “saw its United States supply chain suddenly cut off, that could potentially interrupt their production for 3 to 9 months depending on inventories,” she said. She noted it would take time to find and conduct rigorous testing of new suppliers unless SMIC South had done so in advance. Experts assert that SMIC South is the only SMIC factory with the capability of making the Mate 60’s 7 nanometer chip. Analysis firm Techsights also said in September a teardown of the phone revealed SMIC built the advanced processor to power it.”I don’t think there’s any doubt that it’s that [factory],” said Doug Fuller, a chip industry expert with the Copenhagen Business School. Reuters reported in December how a chip designer part-owned by SMIC still enjoys access to state-of-the art U.S. chip design software. More