Economy

MADRID (Reuters) – World Bank chief economist Carmen Reinhart said she is skeptical that the U.S. and global economies can dodge a recession, given spiking inflation, sharp hikes in interest rates and slowing growth in China.Reinhart, who returns to Harvard University on July 1 after a two-year public service leave, said it was historically a tall order to reduce inflation and engineer a soft landing at the same time, and recession risks are clearly a “hot topic” at the moment.“What worries everybody is that all the risks are stacked on the downside,” Reinhart told Reuters in a remote interview, citing a series of adverse shocks and moves by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates after a decade and a half of ultra-low and negative rates.The global financial crisis of 2008-2009 affected mostly a dozen advanced economies and China at that time was a big engine of growth, but this crisis is far broader and China’s growth is no longer in the double digits, she said.The World Bank this month slashed its global growth forecast by nearly a third to 2.9% for 2022, warning that Russia’s war in Ukraine had added to damage from the COVID-19 pandemic, and many countries now faced recession.It said global growth could fall to 2.1% in 2022 and 1.5% in 2023, driving per capita growth close to zero, if downside risks materialized.Asked if a recession could be avoided in the United States or globally, Reinhart said, “I’m pretty skeptical. In the mid-1990s, under (Fed) Chairman (Alan) Greenspan, we had a soft landing, but the inflation concern at the time was around 3%, not around 8.5%. It’s not like you can point to a lot of episodes of significant Fed tightening that haven’t taken a toll on the economy.”Reinhart said the Biden administration was not alone in misjudging the extent of the inflation risk, noting that the Fed, International Monetary Fund and others had shared that view, although the World Bank early on called it a “real risk.””The Fed should have acted – and I’ve been saying this for a long time – sooner rather than later and more aggressively,” she said. “The longer you wait, the more draconian the measures you have to take.” More

The UK will extend a package of quotas and tariffs on foreign steel imports by two years in an effort to protect domestic producers, the international trade secretary announced on Wednesday.Anne-Marie Trevelyan admitted that the move would risk a legal challenge at the World Trade Organization, which oversees global trade, but said it was essential to protect Britain’s steel industry.“We have concluded that it is in the economic interest of the UK to maintain the safeguards to reduce the risk of material harm if they were not maintained,” she told the House of Commons.However, some experts believe extending the tariffs would constitute a breach of the UK’s international legal obligations under WTO rules.Lord Christopher Geidt quit this month as ethics adviser to Boris Johnson, the prime minister, citing his disapproval of the plan to breach international law through steel tariffs as part of the reason for his decision.The government will extend existing steel tariffs, largely on developed countries and China, by a further two years. It will also expand import limits to other, mostly developing but as yet unnamed, countries to prevent a flood of steel into the UK after some of them increased their exports to the UK beyond the legal threshold. Trevelyan said Ukraine would not be included, in order to help its steel industry.The move was welcomed by trade unions and UK Steel, the industry trade body, which said it showed that the “government is backing Britain’s steel industry”.“As the UK establishes itself as an independent trading nation, [ministers] have taken their duty seriously to stand up for jobs in British steelmaking and for the future of this strategic industry,” said Gareth Stace, UK Steel’s director-general.The interventions, he added, would “guard against anticipated surges in imports from trade diverted away from the US and EU markets that will remain shielded for years to come” and which would have “risked jobs, investment, and our ability to transition to net zero”. Sir Andrew Cook, chair of family-owned Sheffield steel fabricator William Cook, said unrestricted imports would have “created a great deal of damage, not just to the domestic industry but also on a wider scale”.Most of the “offending steel comes from China . . . which has almost single-handedly created enormous overcapacity”, he added, noting that there were also questions over the reliability of that country’s product quality control.The UK sector employs more than 33,000 people directly and supports a further 42,000 jobs in supply chains.

The two largest producers, Tata Steel and British Steel, are both backed by foreign owners — India’s Tata and China’s Jingye Group, respectively. Liberty Steel, which has manufacturing sites in Yorkshire, is owned by Sanjeev Gupta’s GFG Alliance. GFG’s companies are under investigation by the Serious Fraud Office over suspected fraud and money laundering.The UK adopted “safeguard” measures in 2018 while it was part of the EU and has since rolled over most of them.The limits, which apply to 15 categories of steel, restrict how much a country can export to Britain before being hit with a 25 per cent tariff.Nick Thomas-Symonds, shadow trade secretary, welcomed the decision, saying it would provide “welcome relief” to the steel industry, but criticised the government for not moving faster.The decision, however, has sparked concerns among some UK manufacturers who said they had to rely on overseas steel as domestic suppliers were unable to meet demand. “The cost changes associated with further tariffs will force businesses across the supply chain to scrutinise their contracts,” warned Mark Stefanini, partner at law firm Mayer Brown. “They will be seeking to understand whether and in what circumstances they are required to pay these additional costs and if so whether they can in turn pass them on to their customers.” More

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European stock markets turned lower on Wednesday and government bond prices rose, as traders weighed up fresh signs of a looming economic slowdown.The regional Stoxx Europe 600 share index fell 0.6 per cent, calling a halt to three days of gains. Germany’s Dax slipped 1.2 per cent and the FTSE 100 was 0.1 per cent higher in London. Those moves followed heavy losses overnight for Wall Street’s main US share indices, after a lacklustre US consumer confidence report fuelled concerns about a downturn. Futures trading implied the S&P 500 share index would edge 0.4 per cent higher in early New York dealings, with contracts on the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 also adding 0.4 per cent. Central banks have moved to tackle persistently high inflation with aggressive interest rate rises, prompting concerns that tighter policy will curb spending by businesses and households.“We’ve already had a lot of weak data from the US housing market, we’ve got weak consumer confidence data from around the world because of rising prices, and business investment tends to react to the consumer,” said Trevor Greetham, head of multi-asset at Royal London Asset Management. In government bond markets, the yield on the 10-year US Treasury note fell 0.06 percentage points to 3.15 per cent as the price of the benchmark debt security rose. Germany’s 10-year Bund yield slid 0.07 percentage points to 1.57 per cent.Bond yields, which move inversely to their prices, tend to rise in tandem with forecasts for interest rates and inflation. But market expectations of a possible recession have prompted a repricing in recent weeks.After the Federal Reserve raised its main funds rate by an extra large 0.75 percentage points this month, several of its policymakers argued for a similar-sized increase in July. The European Central Bank, which has experimented with negative interest rates to boost economic activity since 2014, is widely expected to lift its main deposit rate above zero by September. Futures markets are now tipping the Fed’s benchmark interest rate to climb to 3.5 per cent by early 2023, down from estimates roughly two weeks ago of 3.9 per cent — signalling scaled-back expectations of the extent to which central bankers will lift borrowing costs. The Fed’s current benchmark target range sits at 1.50-1.75 per cent.“People fear how much demand could fall in this period where central banks are raising rates quite aggressively,” said Nitesh Shah, head of commodities and macroeconomic research for Europe at exchange traded fund provider WisdomTree. “With higher recession risk, bonds can help your portfolio because you can price some rate cuts in coming years” added Guilhem Savry, head of macro and dynamic allocation at Unigestion. In a potential signal that surging inflation in some large economies is easing, the annual rate of consumer price inflation in Germany declined to 7.6 per cent this month from 7.9 per cent in May, data on Wednesday showed. Elsewhere in markets, Brent crude oil rose 1.3 per cent to $119.54 a barrel as worries about falling global demand were overshadowed by forecasts of a supply deficit as western nations ratchet up their restrictions on Russian exports. In Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng share index fell 1.9 per cent while its sub-index of technology shares lost 3.3 per cent. More

COLOMBO (Reuters) – Doctors and bankers were among the hundreds of Sri Lankans who marched on Wednesday to demand that the government resolve a severe fuel shortage at the heart of the worst economic crisis in decades or step down.Weeks of street demonstrations against cascading woes such as power cuts and shortages of food and medicine brought a change in government last month after nine people were killed and about 300 injured in protests.Left with just enough fuel for about a week, the government restricted supplies on Tuesday to essential services, such as trains, buses and the health sector, for two weeks.Still, doctors, nurses and medical staff say that despite being designated essential workers, they struggle to find enough fuel to get to work on time.”This is an impossible situation, the government has to give us a solution,” H. M. Mediwatta, secretary of one of Sri Lanka’s largest nursing unions, the All Island Nurses Union, told reporters.The South Asian nation’s most serious economic crisis since independence in 1948 comes after COVID-19 battered the tourism-reliant economy and slashed remittances from overseas workers.Rising oil prices, populist tax cuts and a seven-month ban on the import of chemical fertilisers last year that devastated agriculture have compounded the trouble.A march to the president’s house by a trade union grouping of bankers, teachers, and the self-employed was stopped by riot police who had thrown up barricades to guard the area.”Things have become unbearable for the common man,” said Joseph Stalin, an official of a teachers’ union in the grouping. “We want this government to go home.”Vowing to keep up the protests, he added, “Today, schools are closed, state institutions are closed, everything is closed. No fuel, nobody can get fuel. People are facing great difficulties.” More than 100 medical staff of the national hospital in Colombo marched to the prime minister’s office calling for the government to ensure fresh supplies of fuel and medicine, including life-saving drugs, that have run low for months.Public health inspectors and other health service workers are also on strike on Wednesday and Thursday.The island of 22 million has nearly run out of useable foreign exchange reserves to import essentials such as food, medicine, petrol and diesel.As the sense of crisis grows, many people have been detained trying to flee the country by boat.The government is also looking abroad for help, to countries from the Middle East to Russia.On Tuesday, in a bid to secure fuel, Power and Energy Minister Kanchana Wijesekera met Qatar’s minister of state for energy affairs and the chief executive of Qatar Energy. He is also seeking a line of credit from a Qatar development fund.Another Sri Lankan minister will travel to Russia at the weekend, in search of energy deals.U.S. President Joe Biden has pledged $20 million to feed more than 800,000 Sri Lankan children and 27,000 pregnant women and lactating mothers for the next 15 months, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa said on Twitter (NYSE:TWTR).Investment firm Asia Securities said the shortages of fuel and other essentials, dwindling reserves, and low fiscal space would remain key concerns for the rest of the year.The economy could contract by 7.5% to 9.0% on the year, outstripping the firm’s previous forecast of a contraction of about 5.5%, it said. The economy grew by 3.3% last year.”This, combined with low U.S. dollar liquidity and rising rates, looks to dampen economic productivity for the medium term,” it said.An International Monetary Fund (IMF) team is in Colombo for talks on a bailout package of as much as $3 billion. Sri Lanka hopes to reach a staff-level agreement by Thursday, but even so, it would be unlikely to bring immediate funds. More

NEW YORK (Reuters) – If you are having trouble keeping track of all the consumer boycotts swirling around, you are not alone.    A quarter of Americans are boycotting a product or company they had spent money on in the past, according to a recent survey from online loan marketplace LendingTree.    Whether because of political differences, or stances on social issues, or concerns about environmental impact, people are expressing themselves not only with their voices, but with their wallets.    “The numbers are big, because people have become more willing to come out and take a political stance in recent years,” said Matt Schulz, LendingTree’s chief credit analyst. “One of the ways people can have their voice heard in an impactful way is through a boycott.”Boycotts are not new: In fact when LendingTree ran this survey in the summer 2020, with the country roiling from protests following the murder of George Floyd, the percentages were even higher.    In the most recent survey, of over 2,100 consumers in April, the segments of society most likely to be boycotting some product or company were six-figure earners (37% of them do so), Gen Z (32%), Millennials (28%), those whose political affiliation is Democratic (31%) and Republican (24%).     Boycotts can extend to travel as well: 24% of respondents said they have scratched states or countries off their itineraries because of legislative or policy disagreements.    “Those numbers don’t surprise me, because people are becoming more aware of where to spend their money or not spend it,” said Adrianne Wright, founder and chief executive of Rosie, a storytelling agency for nonprofit organizations.”It’s good to rally and march, but just gathering may not get the outcomes you’re looking for. To move the world forward, you have to think about how to make good trouble, and get more creative with your tactics.”    During the administration of President Donald Trump, for instance, the ‘Grab Your Wallet’ movement (grabyourwallet.org) compiled a spreadsheet of Trump-connected businesses to avoid, “to protest the Trump administration’s serial targeting of women, immigrants, and communities of color.”As an example on the other side of the political spectrum, Disney recently faced calls for a consumer boycott, related to its opposition to Florida’s so-called ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill.     And on the hot-button topic of Russia, Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld has been assembling a list of companies (both American and international) that are still operating in Russia, despite widespread anger in the West over its invasion of Ukraine.    The most-cited reason for boycotting? Political donations, mentioned by 39% of respondents in the LendingTree survey. That was followed by treatment of employees (34%), stance on social issues (33%), and policy positions (30%).    WHEN TO TAKE ACTION?    The real challenge for consumers: How much to let political and social issues guide your purchasing decisions. There are so many potential subjects you might disagree on with a company, that it would be very easy to enter any mall or supermarket and be completely paralyzed.    On a practical level, it requires a huge amount of time and effort to stay current on the issues of every company you do business with on a daily basis. It is also challenging to boycott multinationals which may make hundreds of different products.    Companies can feel like they are being put in a box. Taking a political stance may please some consumers but anger others. Not taking a stance can do exactly the same thing.    Even trickier for companies: consumers most likely to boycott are the biggest earners, according to LendingTree. Among those with six-figure incomes, 77% of them are more likely to spend their cash at businesses that share their political or social beliefs. “That’s a big deal, because businesses tend to listen to people who spend the most money with them,” said Schulz.    For consumers, it is a matter of picking your battles. “We are all so exhausted and overwhelmed with all the issues coming up every single day, so I would say choose one or two issues that are near and dear to your heart,” Wright said.”You can’t do everything all at once. So what are the issues that break your heart? Then look at the products and services in your life, the ones you come into contact with on a daily basis, and look at the alignment between those products and those issues.” More

If you think the Asia-Pacific is the crucible in which the future of integrated world trade is being concocted, you’re well behind the times. Everyone is into the Indo-Pacific these days. This sounds like a tiresomely pedantic distinction, perhaps a needless change that the manufacturers of Risk would make to the gameboard to justify putting out a new edition. In fact it’s a pretty big deal, and underlines why the US and increasingly its allies are sublimating trade liberalisation to security in the region.The (imperfectly defined) areas may be fairly similar, though Indo-Pacific generally covers more of the globe to the west, taking in the whole Indian Ocean. The real distinction is that Indo-Pacific is an international relations term, not an economics one. The zero-sum mercantilist Donald Trump started using the term a lot during his presidency as part of his confrontation with China. It continues to fit a world where, particularly given Russia’s assault on Ukraine, the US and frequently its allies — the EU, UK, Australia, Japan — prioritise constructing counterweight alliances to Beijing and Moscow above liberalising trade.Once, the US constructed a Trans-Pacific Partnership, including relatively liberal free-trading nations of the eastern Pacific such as Chile, Mexico and Canada. Now the prized members of its new Indo-Pacific Economic Framework are India and Indonesia, both of which were invited to this week’s G7 leaders’ meeting in Germany. The EU last year launched its own Indo-Pacific strategy, and has picked up trade talks with India after a hiatus of almost a decade. India’s military might and increasing estrangement from China make the US keen to work with New Delhi on every possible front. The strategic Quad partnership of (more or less) democracies in the region — the US, Australia, India and Japan — has expanded its role to include Covid vaccines, climate change and critical technologies. Unfortunately, the phobia about trade deals that has gripped Washington means it cannot offer market access as an incentive for economic integration. The TPP was designed to mould a trading area in the US’s image. The Biden administration’s IPEF has correctly been widely dismissed for containing few binding measures at all.The EU has the opposite problem: it can sign trade deals but it doesn’t have a navy. Even in trade, Brussels’s modus operandi in Asia has generally involved picking off countries one by one with a standard bilateral model agreement rather than attempting to weld them into a bloc. There wasn’t a lot more respect among trade folk for the EU’s Indo-Pacific strategy, which involved a lot of hand-waving about digital partnerships, than for the US version.The desire to keep India onside has caused US allies to shy away from aggressive liberalisation and forthright trade diplomacy. India under Narendra Modi may declare itself a mercantile nation, and is back in the preferential trade agreement game, but it’s still leery of competition from other Asian economies, notably China. Modi abandoned plans to join the Asia-Pacific’s Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, let alone the updated TPP. New Delhi is also as obstreperous as ever on the multilateral circuit, dominating a recent World Trade Organization ministerial meeting by threatening to tear up a moratorium of 24 years’ standing on taxing digital trade, insisting on watering down a deal on fishing subsidies and blocking a deal on agriculture.Yet although the advanced economies were intensely frustrated, much of their public criticism of India was muted. Don Farrell, the Australian trade minister, told the FT in an interview during the WTO ministerial meeting: “We don’t want to make things more difficult for India. We want to have a good relationship with them. We share democratic values. We have a very important strategic partnership.” Australia and the UK are signing weak PTAs with India, full of loopholes and exceptions, because of the political imperative.Now, it might be (it probably is, in my view) that meaningful trade deals are neither necessary nor sufficient to cement strategic alliances. India wants, and is getting, military co-operation from Washington much more than it cares about access to the US market. But to the extent that trade does have a geopolitical impact, the US’s aversion to any substantive agreement has allowed China to expand its influence in the region, joining RCEP and trying to accede to TPP.None of the advanced economies really has a coherent policy combining trade with geopolitics in the Indo-Pacific. If their rivalry with China continues to intensify, it’s an omission that may come to weigh increasingly heavily on the minds of the governments [email protected] More

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