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    Living on the Margins, ‘Surfing’ on the Buses

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    “Hold on! Hold on tight!”It was a hot afternoon in Olinda, a coastal city in northeast Brazil, and Marlon da Silva Santos, the leader of a group called Loucos do Surf, or the Crazy Surfers, was shouting from the rooftop of a speeding bus.I grasped at an edge of the roof with one hand, for balance, and tried to shoot with the other — but the bus passed over a bump in the road, jerking abruptly, and I momentarily lost my balance. I managed to stay on, though my camera nearly flew off from my neck.Marlon dos Santos, at right, spreads his arms as he surfs atop a bus in Olinda.I felt a rush of adrenaline. Traveling at 30 miles per hour along President Kennedy Avenue, I was trying my best to document a group of young Brazilians who were illegally “surfing” on moving city buses.Among the group, maneuvers are classified by their degree of difficulty.We saw flashing police lights ahead and retreated into the bus. It was tense inside; the hot sea air swirled around our bodies. Once we passed the sirens, a cheerful celebration erupted as we winded our way to the beach.Émerson plays in the sea with a group of fellow surfers. Olinda is a popular tourist destination in northeastern Brazil.The surfers were young, mostly between the ages of 12 to 16, and a majority of them were Black. They wore Cyclone shorts, flip-flops, caps and golden chains — a style that’s common among many young people from the peripheries of large Brazilian cities.Their presence on the buses made many passengers uncomfortable.A bus driver threatens Loucos do Surf members after they surfed on the roof. Few drivers interrupt their trips for fear of the group’s response.“Some drivers stop the bus, tell us to get off, pick a fight,” Marlon said. “But most follow their normal route while we’re up there.”“We just want to have fun,” he added as we exited the bus.A bus surfer hangs onto a rear window frame.I first learned of the Loucos do Surf via a video posted to Facebook. In it, Marlon, then 16, was surfing on a high-speed bus, oozing confidence and taking selfies. Within an hour, I was exchanging messages with the surfers and planning my trip to Olinda.A week later, I met them at the Xambá bus terminal. They were skeptical at first: “You aren’t a policeman?” they asked.I showed them my website and my Instagram account and, in just a few hours, joined them on a bus ride.During my weeklong visit with the bus surfers in 2017, I felt happy and free. In a way, they allowed me to revisit my own roots: During my teenage years, growing up in São Paulo, I, too, engaged in certain risky and transgressive behavior — including pixação, a derivation of graffiti popular in parts of BrazilPassersby were often amazed to see the surfers on top of the moving buses.When I met the group, they were skeptical of my motives. “You aren’t a policeman?” they asked.But they soon welcomed my presence.The Loucos do Surf are part of a long tradition of performing death-defying stunts involving public transportation in Brazil.In the 1980s and ’90s, thrill-seeking young Brazilians risked their lives by traveling from downtown Rio de Janeiro to the suburbs on the rooftops of crowded trains. The train surfers, hundreds of whom were seriously injured or killed, became popular in the Brazilian press.After an intense crackdown, the practice’s popularity waned.Some surfers said they were simply chasing thrills. Others said it was a form of protest.A young surfer named Luciano Schmitt told me that the art of bus surfing was partly a response to a lack of cultural and leisure outlets. “The only soccer field we had was demolished.” Instead, he said, he and his friends prefer “bigu” — the local term for bus surfing — and the beach.Some bus surfers said the activity was also a form of protest against the price of public transportation — and, more broadly, against the hardships and financial restrictions imposed on millions of young people struggling on the peripheries of society.At the time, in 2017, Brazil was still recovering from the worst recession ever to hit the country. Youth unemployment rates spiked to nearly 29 percent in 2017, up from around 16 percent in 2014, according to data from the World Bank.In addition to accessing the roof via windows, surfers also use roof hatches.A dominant element of that hardship is the violence that permeates daily life in Black communities on the outskirts of large Brazilian cities — including the neighborhoods of Sol Nascente, part of the city of Recipe, and Alto da Bondade, in Olinda, where the Loucos do Surf group was established.According to Brazil’s Atlas of Violence, a study released in 2020 by the country’s Institute for Applied Economic Research and the Forum of Public Safety, homicides among Black residents increased by 11.5 percent between 2008 and 2018, whereas homicides among non-Black residents fell by 12.9 percent over the same period. Such data points help expose the racial inequalities that have dominated Brazilian society for centuries — and underscore how desensitized many in the country have become to violence within marginalized Black communities.Electrical wires pose serious dangers.Loucos do Surf hasn’t been spared. Marlon — who was known by his fellow surfers as Black Diamond, and who had earned the status of King of Surf for being the group’s most skilled and courageous surfer — was shot at point-blank range and killed near his home in 2018, a year after my visit.After his funeral, members of the group held a memorial. More than 20 young people balanced atop a bus, singing in his honor.Gabriela Batista, a bus surfer and a close friend of Marlon’s, told me via text that the group was once like a family. But their enthusiasm for the pastime, she said, largely ended with his death.Members of the group lie flat to hide from police officers.When I remember Marlon, my thoughts swirl with the circumstances of his life: the violence he endured, the choices he made, the economic disadvantages he faced, the precariousness of his support networks — including Brazil’s underfunded public education system.“School doesn’t attract me,” he once told me. “What the teachers say doesn’t stay with me.” Instead, he said, whenever he was sitting with a book, he felt like he was wasting time that could be spent surfing.And that’s mostly how I remember him now: poised — proudly, deftly, defiantly — atop a hurtling bus.“Is anything better than this?” he once shouted at me while surfing, the salty air slapping against his face, his eyes bright and alive, his voice carried aloft by the wind.Victor Moriyama, a regular contributor to The Times, is a Brazilian photographer based in São Paulo. You can follow his work on Instagram.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. More

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    Hot Vax Summer Is Looking Lukewarm

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    The latest jobs report suggests that getting the economy back up to speed is not going to be effortless.Scene from a diner in New York City last fall. Finding people to fill jobs, particularly those like restaurant work, is proving hard for employers.Laylah Amatullah Barrayn for The New York TimesNow that’s more like it.Employers added 559,000 jobs in May, and created more jobs in March and April than earlier estimates suggested. The shockingly weak April number that confounded economists four weeks ago (originally reported as a gain of 266,000 jobs, now revised up to 278,000) looks like an aberration, not a major downshift in the pace of recovery.But that doesn’t mean all is well. Just a few weeks ago, it seemed more likely than not that the United States was on the verge of a boom summer, a time of explosive growth that would bring the economy back to full health faster than in any recovery in memory.It has become increasingly clear, however — both from anecdotal reports and in data — that a reopening spurred on by vaccination is harder than it once seemed. The possibility of adding a million jobs a month seemed within grasp not long ago, but now looks more like wishful thinking.It’s not so much a hot vax summer as a warm vax summer.If you average the last three months of job creation, employers are adding 541,000 positions a month. In a normal expansion, that would be great; it’s a higher number than was attained for even a single month in the recovery that began in 2009. But it does not imply a return to full health in the immediate future.At the job creation rate of the last three months, it would take 14 months to return to February 2020 employment levels — longer if the goal is to return to the prepandemic employment trend.Unlike in a typical recovery, the problem appears to be the supply of labor, not the demand for it. Job openings are at record highs and employers are eager to hire, but they can’t find workers, at least not at the wages they are used to paying.The details of the May numbers support this idea. Wages are soaring — average hourly earning were up 0.5 percent, yet the share of adults in the labor force actually ticked down. The number of people not in the labor force rose by 160,000, implying more people just said, “Forget it, I’m not even looking for a job.”There have been heated debates over whether this is a result of expanded unemployment insurance benefits, which may give people less incentive to work; concerns related to child care and Covid-related health risks; or perhaps a broader psychological reset for many would-be workers.These are not mutually exclusive; all are likely to be contributors to this unusual moment in which demand for goods and services is soaring and supply of them is constrained.An open question is how much labor supply might increase in some states that end expanded jobless benefits earlier than the September expiration date contained in federal law.The details of the industries that are adding jobs similarly point to reopening struggles. The leisure and hospitality sector, which suffered the worst damage from the pandemic, added 292,000 jobs in May. That sounds great, but is actually slower than the 328,000 jobs it added in April.In other words, even as the nation was four weeks further along in achieving widespread vaccination, and seemingly every restaurant in the country was complaining it couldn’t hire enough waiters, cooks and dishwashers, the pace of recovery in that sector slowed rather than accelerated.To the degree that the labor supply shortage is about people re-evaluating their priorities, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. It could lead to a more lasting reset of compensation and work standards across the economy.But it does have implications for politics and the economy as a whole. For instance, Democrats want to run on a boom-time economy in the 2022 midterms. That will be hard to do if the supply of labor turns out to have shifted lower in the long term.In this strange reopening summer, there have been supply constraints on many things, including lumber, computer chips and used cars. But there is a big difference between those supply problems and the labor supply problem: Humans, unlike lumber and semiconductors, can make choices.To the degree that the labor shortage is caused by expanded jobless benefits or schools that are closed, it should go away in time. To the degree there is a broader rethinking of the role of work in people’s lives, this phenomenon will outlast this post-pandemic summer, whatever its temperature ultimately turns out to be. More

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    How It Looks to Live in N.Y.C. During a Pandemic on $100 a Week

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    Ms. Galán’s home is small, but happy. Christopher, 11, Mia, 7, and Ian, 1, get along. The older children help keep the space tidy. The youngest has kept them giggling during the long year they’ve spent together indoors. Before the pandemic, Ms. Galán worked at a dry cleaner in the Bronx, earning about $350 per […] More

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    China’s Biggest ‘Bad Bank’ Tests Beijing’s Resolve on Financial Reform

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    Chinese regulators say they want to clean up the country’s financial system, but a state-owned conglomerate may ultimately get in the way.HONG KONG — BlackRock gave it money. So did Goldman Sachs.Foreign investors had good reason to trust Huarong, the sprawling Chinese financial conglomerate. Even as its executives showed a perilous appetite for risky borrowing and lending, the investors believed they could depend on Beijing to bail out the state-owned company if things ever got too dicey. That’s what China had always done. More

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    Covid-19 Pushes India’s Middle Class Toward Poverty

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    The pandemic sent 32 million people in India from the middle class last year. Now a second wave is threatening the dreams of millions more looking for a better life.NOIDA, India — Ashish Anand had dreams of becoming a fashion designer. A former flight attendant, he borrowed from relatives and poured his $5,000 life savings into opening a clothing shop on the outskirts of Delhi selling custom-designed suits, shirts and pants.The shop, called the Right Fit, opened in February 2020, just weeks before the coronavirus struck India. Prime Minister Narendra Modi abruptly enacted one of the world’s toughest nationwide lockdowns to stop it. Unable to pay the rent, Mr. Anand closed the Right Fit two months later.Now Mr. Anand, his wife and his two children are among millions of people in India in danger of sliding out of the middle class and into poverty. They depend on handouts from his aging in-laws. Khichdi, or watery lentils cooked with rice, has replaced eggs and chicken at the dinner table. Sometimes, he said, the children go to bed hungry.“I have nothing left in my pocket,” said Mr. Anand, 38. “How can I not give food to my children?”Now a second wave of Covid-19 has struck India, and the middle class dreams of tens of millions of people face even greater peril. Already, about 32 million people in India were driven into poverty by the pandemic last year, according to the Pew Research Center, accounting for a majority of the 54 million who slipped out of the middle class worldwide.The pandemic is undoing decades of progress for a country that in fits and starts has brought hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Already, deep structural problems and the sometimes impetuous nature of many of Mr. Modi’s policies had been hindering growth. A shrinking middle class would deal lasting damage.“It’s very bad news in every possible way,” said Jayati Ghosh, a development economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “It has set back our growth trajectory hugely and created much greater inequality.”The second wave presents difficult choices for India and Mr. Modi. India on Friday reported more than 216,000 new infections, another record. Lockdowns are back in some states. With work scarce, migrant workers are packing into trains and buses home as they did last year. The country’s vaccination campaign has been slow, though the government has picked up the pace.Yet Mr. Modi appears unwilling to repeat last year’s draconian lockdown, which left more than 100 million Indians jobless and which many economists blame for worsening the pandemic’s problems. His government has also been reluctant to increase spending substantially like the United States and some other places, instead releasing a budget that would raise spending on infrastructure and in other areas but that also emphasizes cutting debt.Anil G. Kumar lives in Palam, one of the many neighborhoods in Delhi that have been hurt by the pandemic.Smita Sharma for The New York TimesThe Modi government has defended its handling of the pandemic, saying vaccinations are making progress and that signs point to an economic resurgence. Economists are forecasting a rebound in the coming year, though the sudden rise in infections and India’s slow vaccination rate — less than 9 percent of the population has been inoculated — could undermine those predictions.The heady growth forecasts feel far away for Nikita Jagad, who was out of work for over eight months. Ms. Jagad, a 49-year-old resident of Mumbai, stopped going out with her friends, eating at restaurants and even taking bus rides, unless the trip was for a job interview. Sometimes, she said, she shut herself inside her bathroom so her 71-year-old mother wouldn’t hear her crying.Last week, Ms. Jagad got a new job as a manager at a company that provides housekeeping services for airlines. It pays less than $400 a month, roughly half her previous salary. It could also be short-lived: the state of Maharashtra, home to Mumbai, announced lockdown-like measures this week to stop the spreading second wave.If she loses her new job, Ms. Jagad is still the only support for her mother. “If something happens to her,” she said, “I don’t have the money to even admit her in the hospital.”India’s middle class may not be as wealthy as its peers in the United States and elsewhere, but it makes up an increasingly potent economic force. While definitions vary, Pew Research defines middle-class and upper-middle-class households as living on about $10 to $50 a day. The kind of income could give an Indian family an apartment in a nice neighborhood, a car or a scooter, and the opportunities to send their children to a private school.Roughly 66 million people in India meet that definition, compared with about 99 million just before the pandemic last year, according to Pew research estimates. These increasingly affluent Indian families have drawn foreign companies like Walmart, Amazon, Facebook, Nissan and others to invest heavily in a country of aspirational consumers.A collage of vacation photographs in Ashish Anand’s apartment in Noida, a reminder of the good times the family once had.Smita Sharma for The New York TimesAnil G. Kumar, a civil engineer, was one of them. Around this time last year, he and his family were about to buy a two-bedroom apartment. But when last year’s lockdown hit, Mr. Kumar’s employer, a construction chemicals manufacturer, slashed his salary by half.“Everything turned turtle within a few hours,” he said. Three months later, his job had been eliminated.Now Mr. Kumar spends his days in his home in a working-class neighborhood in the western part of Delhi, searching for jobs on LinkedIn and taking care of his son.The family’s middle-class life is now under threat. They survive on the $470-a-month salary Mr. Kumar’s wife draws from a private university. Instead of holding a big celebration for their son’s 10th birthday at a restaurant, which would have cost nearly $70, they ordered a cake and a new outfit for about one-fifth the cost. Mr. Kumar also canceled his Amazon Prime subscription, which he hadn’t used in a while.“Every day you can’t sit on the laptop,” he said. “At times, you feel depressed.”India’s middle class is central to more than the economy. It fits into India’s broader ambitions to rival China, which has grown faster and more consistently, as a regional superpower.To get there, the Indian government may need to address the people the coronavirus has left behind. Household incomes and overall consumption have weakened, even though the sales of some goods have increased recently because of pent-up demand. Many of the hardest hit come from India’s merchant class, the shopkeepers, stall operators or other small entrepreneurs who often live off the books of a major company.“India is not even discussing poverty or inequality or lack of employment or fall in incomes and consumption,” said Mahesh Vyas, the chief executive of the Center for Monitoring of the Indian Economy. “This needs to change first and foremost,” he said.Mr. Kumar with his 10-year-old son, Akshay, in the Palam neighborhood in Delhi, India. Mr. Kumar lost his job as a civil engineer during last year’s lockdown.Smita Sharma for The New York TimesMost Indians are “tired” and “discouraged” by the lack of jobs, said Mr. Vyas, especially low-skilled workers.“Unless this problem is addressed,” he said, “this will be a millstone that will hold back India’s sustained growth.”Mr. Anand, the prospective fashion designer, who lives in the industrial hub of Noida in the southeastern Delhi area, found himself at wit’s end during last year’s lockdown. The family fell behind on the rent. Two months into the lockdown, he collapsed in what he described as a panic attack.“We did not want to live,” said his wife, Akanksha Chadda, 33, a former operations manager at a luxury retail store who also hasn’t been able to find a job. She sat facing a photograph taken three years ago of her son and daughter sitting on a giant turtle at an amusement park. “I didn’t know if I would wake up the next morning or not.”The days when they could afford muesli for breakfast and pizza for dinner are gone, said Mr. Anand. On good days, they get some vegetables and banana for the kids.In January, Ms. Chadda sold their 8-year-old son’s bicycle to buy milk, lentils and vegetables. He cried for a solid evening. But she felt she had little choice. She had already sold her jewelry the month before.“When you don’t see a ray of hope,” she said, “you lose it.” More

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    China's First Quarter Growth is Expected to Boom on Paper

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    The world’s traditional growth engine is expected to report a double-digit first-quarter jump. But consumers and small business aren’t fully sharing in the spoils.Factories are whirring, new apartments are being snapped up, and more jobs are up for grabs. When China releases its new economic figures on Friday, they are expected to show a remarkable postpandemic surge.The question is whether small businesses and Chinese consumers can fully share in the good times.China is expected to report that its economy grew by a jaw-dropping double-digit figure in the first three months of the year compared with the same period last year. Economists widely estimate the number to be 18 percent to 19 percent. But the growth is as much a reflection of the past — the country’s output shrank 6.8 percent in the first quarter of 2020 from a year earlier — as it is an indication of how China is doing now.A year ago, entire cities were shut down, planes were grounded and highways were blocked to control the spread of a relentless virus. Today, global demand for computer screens and video consoles that China makes is soaring as people work from home and as a pandemic recovery beckons. That demand has continued as Americans with stimulus checks look to spend money on patio furniture, electronics and other goods made in Chinese factories.China’s recovery has also been powered by big infrastructure. Cranes dot city skylines. Construction projects for highways and railroads have provided short-term jobs. Property sales have also helped strengthen economic activity.The port container terminal in Lianyungang, a city in China’s Jiangsu Province. Global demand for Chinese goods is soaring.Hector Retamal/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut exports and property investment can carry China’s growth only so far. Now China is trying to get its consumers to return to their prepandemic ways, something that other countries will soon have to grapple with as more vaccines become available.Demand for Chinese exports is expected to weaken later in the year. Policymakers have moved to tamp down overheating in the property market and in the corporate sector, where many firms have borrowed beyond their means. Many economists are looking for signs of a broader recovery that relies less on exports and the government and more on Chinese consumers to juice growth.A slow vaccination rollout and fresh memories of lockdowns have left many consumers in the country skittish. Restaurants are still struggling to bounce back. Waiters, shopkeepers and students are not ready yet for the “revenge spending” that economists hope will power growth. When virus outbreaks occur, the Chinese authorities are quick to put new lockdowns in place, hurting small businesses and their customers.To avoid a wave of outbreaks in February, the authorities canceled the travel plans of millions of migrant workers for the Lunar New Year holiday, the biggest holiday in China.“China’s Covid strategy has been to crush it when it reappears, but there seems to be a lot of voluntary social distancing, and that’s affecting services,” said Shaun Roache, chief economist for Asia Pacific at S&P Global. “It’s holding back normalization.”A worker producing engineering equipment for export at a factory in Nantong in Jiangsu Province. Demand for Chinese exports is expected to weaken later in the year. Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWu Zhen runs a family business of 13 restaurants and dozens of banquet halls in Yingtan, a city in China’s southeastern Jiangxi Province. When China began to bounce back last year, more people started going to her restaurants for their favorite dishes, like braised pork. But just as she and her employees began preparing for the Lunar New Year, a new Covid-19 outbreak prompted the authorities to limit the number of people allowed to gather in one place to 50.“It should have been the best time of the year for our business,” said Ms. Wu, 33.This year, Ms. Wu decided that closing the entire business over the holiday would be cheaper. “If we want to serve Lunar New Year’s Eve dinner, the labor wage for one day is three times higher than the usual time. We save more money by just closing the doors and the business,” she said. It will be the second year in a row that the restaurants shut their doors over the holiday.Ms. Wu inherited the business from her father two years ago and employs more than 800 people. Before the pandemic, three-quarters of the business revenue came from big banquets for weddings and family reunions. She said business had yet to return to normal after months of crushing virus restrictions.The setbacks facing small-business owners like Ms. Wu are also affecting regular consumers who are jittery about opening their wallets. According to Zhaopin, China’s biggest job recruitment platform, more jobs in hotels and restaurants, entertainment services and real estate are available than a year ago. But households are still being cautious about spending.Families continue to save at a higher rate than they did before the pandemic, something that worries economists like Louis Kuijs, who is head of Asian economics at Oxford Economics. Mr. Kuijs is looking at household savings as an indication of whether Chinese consumers are ready to start splurging after months of being stuck at home.“More people still seem to not go all the way in terms of carefree spending,” he said. “At times there are still some lingering Covid concerns, but there is perhaps also a concern about the general economic situation.”Many families took on more debt last year to buy property and cover expenses during the pandemic. China still largely lacks the kind of social safety net that many wealthy countries provide, and some families have to dip into savings for health care and other big costs.Unlike much of the developed world, China doesn’t subsidize its consumers. Instead of handing out checks to jump-start the economy last year, China ordered state-owned banks to lend to businesses and offered tax rebates.Retail figures on Friday will give a better sense of where consumers are picking up their old spending habits. But data from the first two months of the year already show that consumers like Li Jinqiu are spending less and saving more.Mr. Li, 25, who recently got married, has a 1-month-old baby at home. He had planned to work for the family business, but it has been hit by the pandemic and he doesn’t think there is much opportunity for him if he stays.“The whole family has some sense of crisis,” Mr. Li said. “Because of the pandemic and because of family business, I have a sense of crisis.”Mr. Li said he had received a job offer in sales at a financial firm in Beijing but had delayed the start date to help take care of his newborn. He said he had once borrowed to spend on items like his $150,000 Mercedes. Now he drives a $46,000 electric car and has put off buying new clothes.“When I spend,” he said, “I am more cautious.” More

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    As U.S. Prospects Brighten, Fed’s Powell Sees Risk in Global Vaccination Pace

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    Some countries are lagging behind in vaccinations, and policymakers warned that no economy is secure until the world is safe from coronavirus variants.Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, and the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Kristalina Georgieva, emphasized the economic need for worldwide vaccinations on Thursday.Pool photo by Stefani ReynoldsJerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, stressed on Thursday that even as economic prospects look brighter in the United States, getting the world vaccinated and controlling the coronavirus pandemic remain critical to the global outlook.“Viruses are no respecters of borders,” Mr. Powell said while speaking on an International Monetary Fund panel. “Until the world, really, is vaccinated, we’re all going to be at risk of new mutations and we won’t be able to really resume activity with confidence all around the world.”While some advanced economies, including the United States, are moving quickly toward widespread vaccination, many emerging market countries lag far behind: Some have administered as little as one dose per 1,000 residents.Mr. Powell joined a chorus of global policy officials in emphasizing how important it is that all nations — not just the richest ones — are able to widely protect against the coronavirus. Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, said policymakers needed to remain focused on public health as the key policy priority.“This year, next year, vaccine policy is economic policy,” Ms. Georgieva said, speaking on the same panel as Mr. Powell. “It is even higher priority than the traditional tools of fiscal and monetary policy. Why? Without it we cannot turn the fate of the world economy around.”Still, she also warned against pulling back on monetary policy support prematurely, saying that clear communication from the United States is helpful and important. The Fed is arguably the world’s most critical central bank thanks to the widely used dollar, and unexpected policy changes in the United States can roil global markets and make it harder for less developed economies to recover.“Premature withdrawal of support can cut the recovery short,” she cautioned.The Fed has held interest rates near zero since March 2020 and has been buying about $120 billion in government-backed bonds per month, policies meant to stoke spending by keeping borrowing cheap. Officials have been clear that they will continue to support the economy until it is closer to their goals of maximum employment and stable inflation — and that while the situation is improving, it is not there yet.“There are a number of factors that are coming together to support a brighter outlook for the U.S. economy,” Mr. Powell said, noting that tens of millions of Americans are now fully vaccinated, so the economy should be able to fully reopen fairly soon. “The recovery though, here, remains uneven and incomplete.”Employers added more than 900,000 workers to payrolls last month, but the country is still missing millions of jobs compared with February 2020 and fresh data showed that state jobless claims climbed last week. Mr. Powell pointed out that the burden is falling heavily on those least able to bear it: Lower-income service workers, who are heavily minorities and women, have been hit hard by the job losses.When asked what keeps him awake at night, Mr. Powell said that “there’s a pretty substantial tent city” he drives past on his way home from work in Washington. “We just need to keep reminding ourselves that even though some parts of the economy are just doing great, there’s a very large group of people who are not.”Given the pandemic’s role in exacerbating inequality, both Mr. Powell and Ms. Georgieva said it was critical to support workers and make sure they can find their way into new and fitting jobs.The Fed chair said policy tended to focus too much on short-term, palliative measures and not enough on longer-term solutions that help to expand economic possibility.“I think we need to, really as a country — and I’m not talking about any particular bill — invest in things that will increase the inclusiveness of the economy and the longer-term potential of it,” Mr. Powell said. “Particularly invest in people, so that they can take part in, contribute to and benefit from the prosperity of our economy.”Those comments come as the Biden administration is pushing for an ambitious $2 trillion infrastructure package that would include provisions for labor market training, technological research and widespread broadband. The administration has proposed paying for the package by raising corporate taxes.“For quite some time, we have been in favor of more investment in infrastructure. It helps to boost productivity here in the United States,” Ms. Georgieva said, calling climate-focused and “social infrastructure” provisions positive. She said they had not had a chance to fully assess the plan, but “broadly speaking, yes, we do support it.”But the White House’s plan has already run into resistance from Republicans and some moderate Democrats, who are wary of raising taxes or engaging in another big spending package after several large stimulus bills.Some commentators have warned that besides expanding the nation’s debt load, the government’s virus spending — particularly the recent $1.9 trillion stimulus package — could cause the economy to overheat. Fed officials have been less worried. “There’s a difference between essentially a one-time increase in prices and persistent inflation,” Mr. Powell said on Thursday. “The nature of a bottleneck is that it will be resolved.”If price gains and inflation expectations moved up “materially,” he said, the Fed would react.“We don’t think that’s the most likely outcome,” he said. More