Economy

Inflation jumped to 73.5% in May – fuelled by a tumbling lira, rising energy costs and the war in Ukraine – though the figure was slightly lower than economists had feared.Speaking to members of his ruling AK Party, Erdogan said his government was working on ways to alleviate Turks’ economic woes and combat soaring prices. More

The World Bank Group leadership is under fresh fire from the US administration to step up its climate change efforts, after a blunt complaint from the US Treasury about its failure to take the level of action required.A letter to the international financial institution headed by Trump appointee David Malpass, seen by the Financial Times, says progress had been made to meet Treasury secretary Janet Yellen’s requests but there remained “specific gaps and room for increased climate ambition”.It also urges more “forceful and constructive leadership”. A US Treasury official said that while it “appreciated” the steps taken by the World Bank to advance climate ambitions over 2021, it had “continued to make clear” its position about the the bank falling short on its climate ambition.The US is the largest World Bank Group shareholder, and the only member nation that has a veto power over certain changes in the bank’s structure.The bank provides loans and grants to poorer countries and is seen as critical in distributing money to the developing world to help limit global warming as those economies grow. It has been increasingly criticised by the UN as well as climate experts for failing to align its funding activities with the ideal Paris agreement goal of keeping global warming to 1.5C since the 1800s. The US Treasury letter to World Bank senior management includes a series of requests about avoiding the financing of fossil fuel projects, in particular to help developing countries shift away from coal. The World Bank chose not to join the numerous countries and development banks that pledged at COP26 to end public financing for coal, oil and gas internationally this year, and the group’s climate plan does not include a deadline for phasing out direct and indirect fossil fuel financing.The letter also asks that the institution “only support gas investments in limited circumstances” and where there are “no other credible options”. Treasury officials have also made clear in meetings with civil society organisations that they are dissatisfied with the climate policies of multilateral development banks, and the World Bank in particular, according to a person familiar with the meetings. In an email to several non-profit organisations, a Treasury official said the department had been “pressing [World Bank] management to be more ambitious and proactive in a number of areas” such as “exercising greater [climate] leadership” and on the transition to clean energy.Under Malpass, the bank’s commitment to tackling climate change was criticised by UN special adviser Selwin Hart, who lambasted it at COP26 for being “an ongoing underperformer”. Former US president and climate expert Al Gore has described the bank as “missing in action”.The financial institution pushed for the joint statement by development banks at last year’s UN COP26 climate summit to be shortened and weakened, according to people with knowledge of the talks.The bank’s red tape has also made it difficult for developing countries to access financing related to climate change, say its critics. The letter from the US Treasury asks the bank to “significantly increase” funds available for climate adaptation and resilience. It also requests that the bank set “clear, specific and ambitious” targets for mobilising climate sector finance. Egypt’s finance minister recently told the FT that he believed multilateral development banks, such as the World Bank, were “not providing enough support on climate change, on financing”.“I would like to see better terms and better conditions and lower costs,” Mohamed Maait said. Conditions, such as the obligation on recipients to extensively monitor and report on the use of the money, created a substantial burden on countries with limited resources, he added. In response to the US Treasury letter, the World Bank Group said it was “committed to helping countries meet the goals of the Paris Agreement” and had “stepped up our [climate] financing”.“We will continue to work with client countries and international partners to support the transition to low-carbon, resilient growth, particularly for the poorest and most vulnerable countries,” the group said. More

Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, famously thought that fair markets required a shared moral framework between buyer and seller. That’s no surprise, considering that his ideas came out of the 18th-century marketplace, in which producers and consumers were likely to be neighbours. Advances in technology, transport and communications have taken us a long way since then, creating complex global supply chains. These have reduced consumer prices but introduced risks of their own, from market-distorting monopoly power to labour exploitation and environmental degradation.One of the costs of these supply chains — which exist in both physical products and also global capital — has been the rise of powerful corporate middlemen. These include companies like, for example, Cargill, which transports more than 200mn tonnes of food and other cargo a year, and any number of large financial institutions that package complex securities, Big Tech platforms like Amazon, giant retailers like Walmart or even the real estate brokers that intermediate between home buyers and sellers.These middlemen grease the wheels of capitalism, but also distort it in ways that are undermining our economy and society, argues Columbia University’s Kathryn Judge in her new book Direct: The Rise of the Middleman Economy and the Power of Going to the Source. Middlemen make it possible for us to “buy goods made on the other side of the world, build a diversified investment portfolio, order groceries from the comfort of our couch”, she writes. But this connective power is “undermining accountability” by creating so much separation between buyers and sellers that it’s impossible to tally the real cost of convenience and low prices.There are plenty of examples to support the case, from textiles made with child labour, to E. coli outbreaks in complex food supply chains, to the disproportionate rents taken by middlemen in financial services or platform technology. In the latter, information asymmetries make it difficult for market participants to have a shared understanding of what’s being bought and sold (another thing that Smith believed was a pre-requisite for well-functioning markets).Hyper-globalisation and extreme concentrations of corporate power are certainly factors behind market failures from the subprime crisis of 2008 to the supply-chain shortages of recent years. But Judge believes “the growth of the middleman economy” itself is the problem because it disintermediates responsibility, and even morality, within our market system.Consider, for example, how the landscape of public company stock ownership has changed in recent decades. In the US in 1950, only 6.1 per cent of such stock was held by institutions — the rest was owned outright by individuals who voted on matters such as who should sit on a board. Today, institutional middlemen like pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds and so on, own 70 per cent of those shares. Most use two other large middlemen, the proxy advisers ISS and Glass Lewis, to tick the boxes on corporate voting matters despite efforts by the Securities and Exchange Commission to crack down on such “robovoting”. All this makes real corporate social accountability difficult.There are many other such examples. Is it any wonder that after decades of a market system controlled by middlemen focused on lower costs, higher risk adjusted returns and “efficiency”, we have more financial volatility, a growing number of supply-chain disruptions and a warming planet?The two big questions are how to create system change and who will bear the cost of it. There are no silver-bullet answers for either, though technology offers new possibilities to connect buyers and sellers. The rise of peer-to-peer lending, direct-to-consumer retailers and 3D printing which allow for shorter supply chains are all examples of this, though none currently provides anywhere near the scale to replace current systems of finance or manufacturing.A better and clearer tallying of the input costs of our current market system might help. Just as the now infamous 18th-century block print of a slaveholding ship showing humans packed foot to head in horrible conditions shifted how average individuals saw their sugar bowl, so the increasing amount of research revealing the correlations between things like cheap food and obesity, or fast fashion and landfill dumping, or complex securitisation and predatory lending, could help create demand for a fairer and more sustainable market system today.The challenges of inflation (which will push some consumers and policymakers back towards low prices as the sole metric of wellbeing) and inertia will be powerful headwinds against system change. Yet it’s important to remember that it is already happening in some areas, albeit slowly. As Judge, an expert in financial regulation, points out, we are only just beginning to process, some 15 years on from the 2008 crises, how cutting layers of complexity out of lending systems has led to more stable banks and less indebted consumers.Just as the subprime crisis led us to examine the costs of middlemen in finance, so today’s supply chain disruptions may force us to calculate the true cost of low prices in other goods and [email protected] More

Airports across Europe have struggled to cope with a post-pandemic rebound in demand, but British airports have been particularly hit by major disruption over the past week. Schools were on a half-term break and the country also had a long public holiday weekend to mark Queen Elizabeth’s 70 years on the throne.Shapps, who said earlier this week airlines should stop selling tickets for flights they could not staff, said the industry had to sort out the problem.”The industry itself needs to solve it,” he told BBC TV. “The government doesn’t run airports, it doesn’t run the airlines. The industry needs to do that.”Airlines had hoped for a bumper summer for passengers after two years of COVID-19 travel restrictions.But they have struggled to recruit staff after the turmoil of the pandemic, and complain it is taking longer to recruit new employees and vet them for security clearance. Shapps said staff cuts during the pandemic had gone too deep. “We’ll work with the industry very hard … to make sure we don’t see a repeat of those scenes,” he said.A change in the law was making it easier to deal with the administration needed for security clearance, he said, adding he did not envisage a need for the army to be called in to help speed up the security checks. More

Susan Kirsch is a 78-year-old retired teacher who lives in a small cottage home in Mill Valley, Calif., on a quiet suburban street that looks toward a grassy knoll. A Sierra Club member with a pesticide-free garden, she has an Amnesty International sticker on her front window and a photograph on her refrigerator of herself and hundreds of other people spelling “TAX THE 1%” on a beach.The cause that takes up most of her time, however, is fighting new development and campaigning for the right of suburban cities to have near total control over what gets built in them. We met just before the pandemic, after Ms. Kirsch sent an email inviting me to coffee and in the note suggested that my reporting on the nation’s housing problems could benefit from her slow-growth perspective.We’ve become friendly in the two years since, and as I’ve absorbed her cheerful demeanor and come to appreciate her distrust of large institutions, I’ve tried not to reduce her philosophy to a single and oversimplified term. But just so we know what we’re talking about, Susan Kirsch is a NIMBY.NIMBY stands for “Not in my backyard,” an acronym that proliferated in the early 1980s to describe neighbors who fight nearby development, especially anything involving apartments. The word was initially descriptive (the Oxford English Dictionary added “NIMBY” in 1989 and has since tacked on “NIMBYism” and “NIMBYish”) but its connotation has harshened as rent and home prices have exploded. NIMBYs who used to be viewed as, at best, defenders of their community, and at worst just practical, are now painted as housing hoarders whose efforts have increased racial segregation, deepened wealth inequality and are robbing the next generation of the American dream.It seems like a lot to dump on what amount to hyperlocal disputes that largely consist of homeowners trekking down to city hall to complain about a new condominium building or proposed row of townhomes. But take a step back: What’s at stake in these disputes is the structure of American civilization. In a country with little national housing policy, the thicket of zoning, environmental and historic preservation laws that govern local land use are the primary regulators of a multi-trillion-dollar land market that is the source of most households’ wealth and form the map for how the nation’s economy and society are laid out.Around the country, cities and states that have struggled to tame rising housing costs are now trying to wrest control from neighborhood activists like Ms. Kirsch. Their logic is that too much of the power over whether new housing and infrastructure projects get built is left to a relatively small band of activists who pack late-night city meetings to tell their city councils that whatever is being proposed is “out of character” and should be built somewhere else — not in their backyard.To distinguish themselves from NIMBYs, the current generation of housing activists has adopted new “back yard” variants (YIMBY, “Yes in my backyard”; PHIMBY, “Public housing in my backyard”; YIGBY, “Yes in God’s backyard”) to declare how they are for things (everything, subsidized housing, building on church parking lots) that a NIMBY presumably is not. Politicians have piled on: In California, homeowners who are used to being catered to with a host of regulatory and tax policies recently woke up to discover that their governor, Gavin Newsom, told The San Francisco Chronicle, “NIMBYism is destroying the state.”Before we go any further, I am obligated to note that Susan Kirsch does not appreciate the word “NIMBY.” She describes herself as someone who helps communities “feel empowered and self-reliant.” She has, nevertheless, made peace with the term.After all, this is a person who once wrote an op-ed that said the removal of five trees in Mill Valley sent “existential messages to our fellow citizens of the world.” Who has fought for two decades to prevent a developer from putting 20 condominiums on a hill at the end of her street.Ms. Kirsch’s nonprofit, Catalysts for Local Control, opposes just about every law the California legislature puts forward to address the state’s housing and homelessness problem. In Zoom meetings with her members, she describes lawmakers’ intentions in dark terms and drives the message home with graphics that say things like, “Our homes and cities are under attack.”It might seem kitschy if it weren’t so effective. Susan Kirsch was 60 when she began her fight against the condos down the block. Eighteen years later, the hill remains dirt.The potential development site, which lies at the end of the road on which Ms. Kirch lives.Aaron Wojack for The New York TimesStories like that, one project fight after another, form a larger story about how the state and nation dug themselves into a growing housing shortage. The impulse behind NIMBYism is timeless: People who already live somewhere have always raised objections to newcomers. The feeling applies to renters as well as homeowners, crosses boundaries of race, class, and culture, and has been a part of urban life for centuries.But California has gone further than most in empowering it. And until fairly recently, this was seen as something to be proud of.That turnabout is what’s so baffling to activists like Ms. Kirsch. In the late 1970s, when she moved to Marin County, California was in the vanguard of an ideological backlash that created modern environmentalism and rejected the assumption that a growing economy and more people were always good — a cause that was championed by state and national politicians and celebrated everywhere from songs to magazine covers.California is now a different place with a different struggle, and a lack of housing is at its center. It’s not just that the $800,000 median home price is too expensive, or that the 100,000 people who sleep outside are a daily tragedy, or that the outflow of cost-of-living refugees has helped steer it into population decline. It’s that those statistics have raised hard questions about the state’s governance and sense of self.How does a place that prides itself on progressive politics have so many policies that exacerbate inequality? How do homeowners whose window signs say they welcome every oppressed group rationalize a housing system that has caused their own children to flee?Ms. Kirsch does not deny that California has a housing problem but has a different narrative about why. In her telling the state’s problems have little to do with the lack of housing — a diagnosis that unites basically every liberal and conservative economist along with the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations — but instead blames investors who buy single-family houses, big technology companies, and inequality generally.She wraps her opposition to development in a “small c” conservative philosophy that a smaller local government is better and more responsive to its citizens than a bigger one further away. Where many people see gridlock, she sees having her voice heard — and in the midst of a brutal housing crisis, fewer people want to listen.“It feels like huge forces conspiring to take away control from people at the lowest level at which they live,” she said.Yimbytown vs. NimbytownAlan Durning, the head of Sightline Institute, a Seattle think tank.Ruth Fremson/The New York Times“We are winning.”Alan Durning, founder of the Sightline Institute, a sustainability think tank that pushes for dense housing, was feeling triumphant. He was on a stage in Portland, Ore., addressing the 2022 Yimbytown conference, which bills itself as a gathering of pro-housing activists and draws heavily from the ranks of embittered millennials who feel locked out of the housing market and under the thumb of rising rents.Mr. Durning had just referenced a host of new state and local development laws — from California to Seattle, Minneapolis, Austin and Connecticut — that in the past two years have shifted the national conversation around housing. New rules that allow homeowners to build second homes in their yards. Sweeping legislation to discard single-family zoning restrictions that ban apartments in suburban neighborhoods. When he mentioned a more obscure set of rules that limit the amount of parking in new developments, someone in the crowd of 300 went “Woo!”A few weeks after the conference, the Biden administration released its own cheer in the form of a “Housing Supply Action Plan.” Among other measures, the plan aims to increase the nation’s supply of housing by using grant money to reward cities that reform land-use regulations in the manner Yimbytown celebrates. The administration pegged the nation’s housing shortage at 1.5 million units (other sources put it as high as 3.8 million).That deficit is the product of two main trends. The most recent one is the Great Recession, which left the home-building industry so hobbled that even now, 17 years after the housing bust began, new home construction has yet to eclipse the mid-2000s peak. The other built gradually over decades as cities installed a cat’s cradle of land use rules that empowered local NIMBYism and made housing scarcer and more expensive.In the hours before the Yimbytown gathering began, an unseasonable April snow fell on Portland’s streets. As attendees walked and Ubered to a Portland State auditorium for the conference, they passed sidewalk tents under a fresh layer of frost.“It puts a knot in our stomachs, a clutching feeling in our chests, we have feelings of fear about being excluded, about being pushed out, about being unwelcome, unable to keep up,” Mr. Durning said in his speech. “That’s what housing feels like in Nimbytown. But here in Yimbytown, we’re about the opposite of all that.”He added: “We want abundance of housing.”The word “abundance” was not incidental. It refers to an emerging framework that says many of America’s deepest problems stem from shortages — too few houses, not enough colleges, a lack of wind and solar projects — and the only way to solve them is to build.Encoded in YIMBY ideology is a belief that the best thing to do with NIMBYs is discard them. But since the successes of one generation become the burdens of another, they should first understand them.Small Is BeautifulAaron Wojack for The New York TimesForty-nine years earlier, Susan Kirsch was also young, idealistic and in Portland. She’d grown up on a farm in Minnesota, in a town with 1,400 people. After a series of urban teaching jobs broken up by trips from the Midwest to Washington, D.C., to protest the war in Vietnam, she took a yearlong road trip with a man she called “the adventure husband.” The final stop was Portland, and they rolled into town in a van.Back then, the idea that the activist circuit might include a stop at Yimbytown would have seemed preposterous. Instead of build baby build, the national feeling had swung from the post-World War II boom to a new posture that said three decades of mass suburbanization and urban redevelopment had created a crisis of too much.The pebbles to this backlash had been sprinkled through songs like the 1962 tract home satire “Little Boxes” (“And they’re all made out of ticky tacky/And they all look just the same”). Or the speech two years later in which President Lyndon Johnson warned of “an ugly America” beset by decaying cities and lifeless sprawl that a raft of social critics said were breaking community spirit and creating an epidemic of loneliness.Susan Kirsch was partial to “Small Is Beautiful,” which was published in 1973 by the economist E.F. Schumacher. The book cast doubt on a growth-at-all costs mentality and was but one entry in what the historian Kevin Starr called “this developing genre of population and land use apocalypse.”“Part of how it influences me is I think greater self-reliance and self-resiliency are qualities that keep a community or culture strong,” Ms. Kirsch said of the book. “And the trends we have now, with being able to have efficacy in your own life, is part of what I think is being diminished.”Instead of celebrating the arrival of new citizens, new power plants, new cloverleaf interchanges, California scholars started semi-seriously lamenting that they couldn’t require visas for people arriving from elsewhere in the United States. Environmental activists came to define themselves by what they could stop.“It became a politics of quality of life rather than a politics of prosperity,” said Jacob Anbinder, a Ph.D candidate at Harvard whose dissertation is on the emergence of anti-growth politics in the postwar period.Marin County, a woodsy enclave that sits across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, enacted some of the strictest growth control measures in the country — proudly. In the early 1970s, when a group of Marin homeowners mobilized to stop a nearby townhome development, the county commended them for distinguished public service.But housing fights could also be proxies for racial exclusion. Even though discriminatory practices such as redlining — banks refusing to offer mortgages in nonwhite neighborhoods — had been outlawed by federal civil rights legislation, economic segregation persisted. Today Marin County is the most segregated county in the Bay Area.Marin was Susan Kirsch’s next stop after Portland. She arrived in Mill Valley in 1979, where she remarried, had kids and stretched to buy a house for $112,500.Blithedale TerracePhil Richardson at his home, with plans for a housing development in Mill Valley, Calif.Aaron Wojack for The New York TimesPhil Richardson surveyed a tiny home on his dining room table. It was a model of a townhome he wants to build, and it lay atop a bath-towel-sized aerial photograph of Mill Valley.The model and the photo were one small piece of a growing archive of drawings, renderings and environmental reports that document Mr. Richardson’s failure to build two dozen condominiums on Kite Hill, a plot of trees and bushes that sits next to a small office building at the end of Ms. Kirsch’s block. Various proposals and millions of dollars in land, legal and consulting fees later, he has yet to placate neighbors.Mr. Richardson is a small-time developer who works from a home office decorated with models of World War II tanks and battleships. In a recent interview at his home, he recounted the time he met Ms. Kirsch to talk about his townhomes. She told him he should scrap it and build a park bench.He started the project in his late 60s and is now 86. He is determined to see it through. “My wife thinks I’m crazy,” he said. “I think the town could use the housing.”Later, he added: “I’d still like to know her motivation. Forget my project: What drives her bus?”Ms. Kirsch first heard about the proposal in 2004, after she got a public notice in the mail. The plan — then called Blithedale Terrace — was for 20 earth-toned townhomes with pitched roofs and wood shingles. She convened a group of neighbors in her living room to see if they had an opinion about it.“And we did,” she said.There ensued a decade of meetings, lots of legal back and forth, and a sign that said “Save Kite Hill.” The city also got a lot of letters. They said project was an “insane” idea that would create “unimaginable density” and lead Mill Valley toward an “LA like destruction.”Most of the letters raised questions about parking and traffic. Others voiced a more esoteric set of concerns, like “confusion for the post office.” One writer averred that anyone who lived in the new condos would be accepting a higher cancer risk, since their homes would be downwind from the wood-fired oven at a nearby restaurant.Mr. Richardson has been hoping to develop this site for 18 years.Aaron Wojack for The New York Times“From my backyard I see the hillside,” Ms. Kirsch wrote from her Hotmail account. “Explain how my property value is not deflated if open space is replace(d) with view-blocking, dense, unsightly buildings.”Mr. Richardson set Blithedale Terrace aside in 2013, nine years after proposing it, to focus on another development elsewhere. Ms. Kirsch used the dispute to launch a slow-growth platform.She’d fought the developer through a group called the Freeman Park Neighborhood Association. It morphed into a larger organization called Friends of Mill Valley, then a group called Citizen Marin. In 2016, having raised her profile through activism, Ms. Kirsch ran for the Marin County Board of Supervisors. She lost with 42 percent of the vote.“We’re all getting clobbered”In retrospect, 2016 was a turning point of a different sort. It marked the beginning of a blitz of state legislation that would force cities to accept higher density neighborhoods in the form of backyard units and duplexes that could no longer be prohibited by local governments, and even higher density in the future, after the state reformed a longstanding planning process to increase the amount of growth cities have to plan for. To make sure cities actually comply, Governor Gavin Newsom recently created an “accountability and enforcement unit,” a sort of NIMBY patrol that monitors whether or not localities are approving new housing.When you ask a planner or policy wonk how this happened, they point to a series of dull but important bills that were modest in isolation. Stacked together, however, they’ve shifted power over housing away from city councils to state bureaucrats and local planning and building departments — a move intended to prevent activists like Ms. Kirsch from having so much influence over whether new housing gets approved.They also got comparatively little press coverage or debate, because most of the attention was consumed by a more extreme series of bills proposed by Scott Wiener, a state senator from San Francisco, from 2018 to 2020. The bills had various forms — none passed — but would have forced California cities to allow four- to eight-story buildings within a mile of rail stations and bus stops, regardless of local rules.“I’m a former local elected official and former neighborhood association president — I am a huge believer in making decisions at a local level and people passionately tending to their community,” Mr. Wiener said in an interview. “But we’re going over the cliff, and whatever the benefits of local decision making, and there really are benefits, it has failed to produce the housing we need.”One afternoon in 2018, after traveling to San Francisco to hear Mr. Wiener talk about his plans at a police station, Ms. Kirsch and a group of furious attendees left the meeting for a nearby restaurant, where they founded a organization called Livable California. Its aim was to take the fight for local government to the statehouse.“The whole thing was, we’re all getting clobbered, we’ll have greater impact if we unify,” she said.Livable California is now the most recognized brand among a class of new groups protesting the state’s housing moves. The groups do things like organize neighborhood associations and produce research that paints the idea of a shortage as overblown. (This charge is discordant with the volumes of research on the topic, the state’s low per capita building rate, and its surfeit of illegal and overcrowded homes.)Many of the most active members are from wealthy enclaves like Marin, but the fight to maintain local control over housing attracts a more diverse group than the stereotype of a rich, suburban NIMBY would suggest. In California and around the country, activists who fight gentrification in cities frequently team up with suburban homeowners worried about development to oppose broad zoning reforms. Even if these groups don’t agree on housing policy, they often side with having those decisions made at the city or neighborhood level, where the political sphere is small enough that a group of volunteers can still be effective.“Community activists organize in person,” said Isaiah Madison, who is 26 and Black, a resident of Los Angeles’s historically Black Leimert Park neighborhood — and on the board of Livable California. “But when you take it to the state, you’re just a number. There are so many issues, and so much bureaucracy and politics and money, that community gets lost.”Over the course of several interviews, many of the most active homeowners expressed a feeling of upper middle-class regression. It seems unfair to them that people who did exactly what society told them to do — buy a house, get involved in their neighborhood — are now being asked to accept large changes in their surroundings.More than anything, they are furious how an epithet like “NIMBY” can reduce someone who cares about their neighborhood to a cartoon. Yes, they are the people who fight development. These are also the people who make and distribute lawn signs. Who attend late-night city meetings to ask probing questions about bids on the city’s dog-catching contract. Who organize the block party and help start library programs that everyone else takes for granted.“The state is crazy in trying to make all these cities their enemy,” said Maria Pavlou Kalban, who is on the board of directors of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association and recently founded a statewide homeowners’ and neighborhood group called United Neighbors. “These are people that are really seriously trying to answer the problem of ‘Where do our kids live?’”When the conversation shifts to solutions, however, the conundrum of local control resurfaces. In an interview, Ms. Kalban outlined a plan to build higher-density housing on high-traffic corridors, which sounds perfectly reasonable. It also sounds like the townhomes Mr. Richardson has been trying to build since 2004.The Homevoter HypothesisPlans for Mr. Richardson’s development.Aaron Wojack for The New York TimesHousing is a “bundled purchase,” or a big decision governed by a million little variables: The number of bedrooms, the size of the yard, the quality of local schools, proximity to work, family and transit. Hanging over all of this is, of course, the price.Housing politics is driven by emotion, specifically the fear of losing what you have. The economist William Fischel, a professor at Dartmouth, laid out the financial dimensions in a theory — “The Homevoter Hypothesis” — that holds NIMBYism is a form of insurance. Since you can’t buy a policy that will protect you from the neighborhood going to hell, the thinking goes, people compensate by packing planning meetings to fight anything (be it a dump, a freeway or a low-rent apartment complex) they perceive as a threat.People usually get involved in local politics for a distinct reason — they are angry at their school board, for instance, or worried about a condo complex at the end of their street — but they stay involved because they make friends and derive purpose from the work. It becomes something to do.Aaron Wojack for The New York TimesOver the past two decades, Susan Kirsch said she has spent almost as much time on her deck drinking wine and talking housing with fellow activists as she does with longtime friends.In our own conversations she dedicated as much energy to railing about how corporations are too big and billionaires too under-taxed, and inequality so troubling, as she did to the state housing policy. And so I asked the obvious question: With so many things to be angry about, why spend so much time fighting some condos?“I suppose it is just that feeling of home,” she said. “Just that feeling of home and the safety and security and groundedness that goes with having a safe place to go to at the end of the day, where you can believe you can have security, you don’t need to worry about how are you going to have money for both food and insurance and dental care for your kids and all of those things, that metaphor of home as a place of comfort.”The natural follow-up was what about the next generation, who say they are fighting for that too? She defaulted to neighborhood control.“Local communities would do a much better job of solving these problems,” she said. “Using the language of centralized power is what charges me to do this — I think small is beautiful.”Mr. Richardson recently put forth a new proposal for Kite Hill. This time it would consist of 25 condos that range from 800 square feet to 2,100 square feet, including six subsidized units for households making around or below the area median income. He’s feeling better about his chances thanks to changes in state law, but, at 86, is getting short on time.“I’m going to win or I’m going to die,” Mr. Richardson said. “It’s one or the other.”The city has yet to schedule a public hearing on the new proposal, but he is hopeful there will be one later this year. Whatever the date, Susan Kirsch plans on being there. She has some things to say. More

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was expected to hit the budget this year as the Czech Republic took in hundreds of thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting, and also seeks to ease the burden of soaring inflation for households and companies.In addition, the state is spending more on defence and increases to pensions. It has spent billions to add natural gas to state emergency reserves.”When we see the development of tax revenue, I expect the deficit will unfortunately be over 300 billion,” Stanjura told Czech Television on Saturday evening.Stanjura is due to present an updated budget to the government in July. The government has sought to cut the budget deficit from a record 420 billion crowns in 2021.The five-party ruling coalition won a general election last October and pledged to rein in public finances after a jump in debt in recent years due to the coronavirus pandemic and faster pension and wage hikes promised by the previous administration.($1 = 22.9910 Czech crowns) More

Investing.com — Stock markets ended the first week of June on a down note, as a strong U.S. jobs report made clear the Federal Reserve and other central banks can continue their monetary tightening policy, at the expense of risk assets.This week brings CPI reports in the U.S., as inflation remains the biggest concern at the Fed and other central banks. The European Central Bank meets this week amidst expectations of policy normalization. And with oil prices closing higher last week and a bevy of corporate rumblings over storm clouds ahead, reminders abound that a soft economic landing may be difficult to realize, no matter how strong the consumer is.Here’s what to watch in the markets for the week ahead:Friday’s U.S. CPI report for May comes a few days before the next Federal Reserve meeting, and will act as a final input before the Fed decides how much to hike rates. Inflation is expected to come in at 8.3% year over year, while core inflation (ex energy and fuel prices) is expected to come in at 5.9% year over year. The latter number would mark a third month of consecutive declines and make the case that core inflation may have peaked, which would echo the slower wage growth in last week’s jobs report. At the same time, the overall inflation number of 8.3% would be close to peak, and given the pain at gas pumps and grocery stores, consumers may take little solace in knowing the core number is leveling out.While central banks around the world have begun their rate hike cycle, the ECB is seen as a step or two away from it. Eurozone inflation hitting record highs, though, has added more urgency to the discussion, and analysts expect this meeting to make clear that rate hikes will be coming in Q3.ECB president Christine Lagarde said as much in a blog post two weeks ago, so both the ECB statement and the press conference to follow will provide a chance for Lagarde to elucidate the road back to positive interest rates and to re-affirm the bank’s credibility. The EUR/USDrose 1.67% since the end of April and 3.55% from mid-May lows, suggesting the bank has re-won at least a little bit of that credibility with markets.OPEC+’s announced 50% production increase did little to slow the rise of crude, with both WTI Futures and Brent finishing the week just shy of $120/barrel. Despite rumblings of slowdowns, economic expansion (PMIs) and consumer demand suggest that demand for oil will remain high, and there are doubts that OPEC’s production increase will be enough or even be fully realized.For the week ahead, eyes are on whether U.S. President Joe Biden will decide to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman amid human rights concerns. As we enter the summer travel season, weekly crude inventories and gasoline inventories will be of interest, and they will likely correspond with the Michigan consumer sentiment survey, where readings are approaching 2008-09 lows (admittedly, lows also seen in the debt ceiling crisis of 2011, a reminder that the survey can reflect political sentiment as much as anything else).While we are through most of the Q1 earnings season, a few big names report numbers this week that will give read-throughs to various investing themes. DocuSign Inc (NASDAQ:DOCU) is poised to report Thursday after the bell; the software as a service former highflyer was one of the first to start warning of slowing activity, and investors may now hope it will join the recent resurgence seen in names like Zoom Video Communications Inc (NASDAQ:ZM) or Okta (NASDAQ:OKTA). Smartsheet (NYSE:SMAR) (Tuesday) and Coupa Software Inc (NASDAQ:COUP) (Monday) are also among software companies reporting this week.JM Smucker Company (NYSE:SJM) and Campbell Soup (NYSE:CPB) both report this week and may offer some insight into the impact of inflation in consumer staples. Likewise, Caseys General Stores (NASDAQ:CASY), Five Below (NASDAQ:FIVE), and Signet Jewelers Ltd (NYSE:SIG) all report from the retail sector, giving another round of inputs on consumer spending and appetite.Nio (NYSE:NIO) reports earnings on Thursday, with the Chinese electric vehicle automaker near 52-week lows as it has struggled with coronavirus related lockdowns in China.Check out our full earnings calendar here.Last week was marked by a number of comments and corporate announcements from big names, including Jamie Dimon’s economic hurricane forecast, Elon Musk’s email mooting a 10% reduction of Tesla’s workforce, and Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) announcing a hiring freeze and rescindment of some accepted job offers. With several investor conferences this week, there will be plenty of opportunities for executives from across the economy to weigh in on whether the economy is teetering on the brink, as Dimon argued, or whether, as former Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) CEO Lloyd Blankfein argued, “we may yet land softly.”The contrast between any further layoff news on the one hand and merger & acquisitions news, like Friday’s Bristol Myers (NYSE:BMY) Squibb acquisition, on the other hand, will also provide grist for the investor mill.It’s not the easiest market to navigate, but then again, when is it ever? More

Has US inflation already peaked?US inflation is expected to have moderated in May, in a sign that inflation may have peaked, as weakening consumer demand and loosening supply chains mitigate price growth.In April, the US consumer price index moderated for the first time in eight months to an annual pace of 8.3 per cent, 0.2 percentage points lower than the previous month. Despite the modest decline, inflation came in above economists’ expectations and remained at a 40-year high.Still, a second consecutive moderation in the annual rate should offer “hope that we have indeed passed the peak in inflation”, said James Knightley, chief international economist at ING.May’s consumer price index data, due to be published on Friday, may, in turn, give further clues as to how aggressively the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates in June and thereafter.Economists polled by Reuters expect monthly consumer prices to have risen 0.7 per cent in May. Consumer price growth slowed to 0.3 per cent month on month in April, as surging energy and food costs fuelled by the war in Ukraine abated. Housing, food and energy are likely to continue to contribute to inflation, as petrol prices rose in May, but that could be partially offset by auto prices and a loosening supply chain.“Auto prices could be one of the softer CPI components because consumers are unwilling to pay current prices, so demand destruction is bringing supply and demand into balance,” said Steven Englander, a strategist at Standard Chartered.There have been reports of increases in inventories and imports and recent rises in auto production, which could be evidence of some improvement in supply chains, Knightley said. “But order backlogs remain long and supply chains remain vulnerable to Covid containment measures elsewhere in the world.” Alexandra WhiteWill the ECB stick to plans to raise rates in July?With inflation setting new eurozone records every month so far this year, it will be hard for the European Central Bank to explain why it is not immediately raising interest rates when its policymakers meet in Amsterdam next week.Yet this is exactly what ECB president Christine Lagarde is likely to do on Thursday when she is expected to say that the central bank is sticking to its pre-announced plan to first stop buying more bonds before starting to raise its deposit rate from minus 0.5 per cent.That means the earliest the ECB could raise rates for the first time since 2011 is at its subsequent meeting on July 21, after it stops adding to its €4.9tn bond portfolio.The main question left to be resolved is how big the July rate rise will be. The ECB’s chief economist, Philip Lane, said this week that quarter percentage point rises were its “benchmark pace”. But he left the door open for others to “make the case for moving more strongly”.Klaas Knot, president of the Dutch central bank, and Robert Holzmann, Austria’s central bank chief, have both discussed the potential for the ECB to follow in the footsteps of the US Federal Reserve with a half percentage point rate rise. A majority of investors polled by Deutsche Bank in May thought this would happen.Andrew Kenningham, an economist at Capital Economics, predicted that “core inflation will continue to surprise on the upside and this will ultimately prompt the ECB to move more rapidly than many now anticipate” by ending its eight-year experiment with negative rates with one bumper rise in July. Martin ArnoldDid China’s economy stabilise in May?China’s economy was buffeted by strict and widespread coronavirus lockdowns in April, with several indicators plummeting to two-year lows. While the severity of restrictions largely stabilised in May — and even showed signs of tentative easing towards the end of the month — the limited respite was likely not enough to avert a further slew of weak data.Both manufacturing and services purchasing managers’ indices came in several points higher in May but remained in contraction territory, meaning that while the rate of decline in activity slowed, most companies still engaged in less activity than they did the month before. Caixin’s China manufacturing PMI also noted that the time taken for orders to reach manufacturers had increased “markedly” in May, suggesting that the country’s logistical problems were far from over.Other indicators will probably show similarly muted improvements: analysts at Citi predict that retail sales, which declined by 11.1 per cent year on year in April, will contract by a lesser 6.8 per cent in May. Likewise, while the analysts predict trade will recover slightly, April’s data suggest the days of booming Covid-era exports are well over.While Beijing on Wednesday instructed policy banks to extend an Rmb800bn ($120bn) credit line to fund infrastructure spending, overall stimulus is much weaker than in 2020.A question remains over whether the slight easing in restrictions that helped cushion China’s economy last month will be sustained as the country vows to stick to its zero-Covid approach, with economists worried about the possible damage from another round of widespread lockdowns.“Shanghai’s phased-in reopening may only represent a respite rather than a turning point,” Ting Lu, analyst at Nomura, wrote in a note. “The real turning point will be marked by a shift in China’s stance on its ZCS [zero-Covid stance] rather than headline Covid caseloads, the easing of some lockdowns or monthly activity data.” William Langley More