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    In Canada, Americans Are Missed, With Limits

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesSee Your Local RiskNew Variants TrackerVaccine RolloutAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyIn Canada, Americans Are Missed, With LimitsU.S. visitors usually mean big business for Canada’s tourism industry. But the pandemic has blunted lonesomeness for the country’s best friend.Before the pandemic, American visitors were frequent guests at the Fairmont le Château Frontenac, a castlelike hotel in Quebec City.Credit…GettyFeb. 10, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETDavid McMillan, the co-owner of Montreal’s famed temple of gluttony, Joe Beef, used to spend his days obsessing over his signature dishes like rabbit with mustard sauce, and lobster spaghetti. These days, however, he has another preoccupation: Studying American vaccination rates.Before the pandemic, so many American gastronomy pilgrims from New York, Boston and Los Angeles came each week to Joe Beef that many local residents, facing a 10-week waiting list, all but gave up trying. The Americans, Mr. McMillan recalled wistfully, thought nothing of buying expensive bottles of Champagne and sucking down oysters until midnight, before purchasing his prophetic-sounding cookbook “Surviving the Apocalypse.”“Ah, how I miss the Americans,” said Mr. McMillan, who presides over a mini-empire of four restaurants in the city, including Liverpool House, where Justin Trudeau once bromanced President Obama. American tourists, he added, accounted for half of Joe Beef’s pre-pandemic weekly revenue of about $118,000, or about 150,000 Canadian dollars. “When the Americans were here every night it felt like we were putting on a Broadway show.”David McMillan is the co-owner of Montreal’s Joe Beef, a restaurant which attracted American gastronomy pilgrims before the pandemic.Credit…David Giral for The New York Times“Now, I look every day at how the U.S. vaccination is going,” he added. “And I get messages every day from American clients asking when they can get back in.”It’s a question many in the Canadian tourism industry have also been asking, ever since the Canada-U. S. border was closed to nonessential travelers in March. The loss of American visitors, armed with their strong dollars and consuming zeal, has buffeted popular destinations like Montreal, Quebec City and Vancouver, already reeling from a debilitating pandemic. Canadian airlines have been forced to make thousands of layoffs.More than two thirds of the 21 million international tourists who came to Canada in 2019 were from the United States, according to government data, with Americans pumping about $8.7 billion into the economy. That’s compared to the nearly $1.3 billion spent by Chinese visitors, about $1 billion by Britons and about $735 million by the French.The absence of American tourists feels acute in many quarters of Canada. Above, a deserted stretch of Rue Notre Dame West in Montreal.Credit…David Giral for The New York TimesAbsence makes the heart grow fonder — but not enough to open borders.Canadians have long had a love-hate relationship with their larger, showier neighbor south of the border. That ambivalence was magnified during the Trump administration, when the mercurial American president slapped punishing tariffs on the country, suggested Canada had burned down the White House during the War of 1812 (the country didn’t then exist) and called its prime minister, Justin Trudeau, “very dishonest” and “weak.”But it has always been more love than hate when it comes to travel between the two countries, with Americans drawn by Canada’s proximity, its common language in most regions and its mix of cosmopolitan cities and natural landscapes.The inauguration of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who spent her disco-dancing teenage years in Montreal, has renewed the ardor between the two allies, while vaccination has created cautious optimism about taming the pandemic. Still, while the tourism industry is experiencing one of its worst crises since World War II, recent polls show that the vast majority of Canadians want the borders to remain closed. Canadians, a typically rule-abiding people with a deference to scientific authority, have looked with some horror at the spiraling infection rates in the United States, and the handling of the coronavirus during the Trump administration.Mélanie Joly, Canada’s minister of economic development, who is responsible for tourism, said keeping the borders closed was a matter of pragmatism. “We can’t talk about reopening the economy until we stop the spread of the virus,” she said in an interview. Lamenting the absent Americans, she added: “It’s a bit like losing your best friend but you are sick and your best friend is sick and everyone is better off staying at home.”She said she hoped the travel industry would be “back on its feet” by September, as vaccination in Canada and the United States accelerated. The border, she stressed, would remain closed until the pandemic is contained.The Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal is popular with American visitors. Credit…David Giral for The New York TimesAt the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montreal, American museum-goers from New York, Massachusetts and Vermont helped turn a pre-pandemic exhibition on Leonard Cohen, the gravelly-voiced Montreal-born balladeer, into a blockbuster. But the museum’s director, John Zeppetelli, said knowing friends and colleagues in the art world who had contracted the virus while attending art fairs last year in the United States and elsewhere had underscored the need for caution. “Public health has to supersede economic concerns,” Mr. Zeppetelli said.Covid-19 tests, quarantines and a cruise ship ban create obstacles to travel.As it is, Canada itself is experiencing a lethal second wave, with a curfew in effect in Quebec, a lockdown in most parts of Ontario, the country’s most populous province, and border restrictions in each of the country’s Atlantic coast provinces that have required even Canadians from other provinces to quarantine.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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    The Clash of Liberal Wonks That Could Shape the Economy, Explained

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyUpshotSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Clash of Liberal Wonks That Could Shape the Economy, ExplainedThey all agree pandemic aid is warranted, but the question is how big and how quickly.Feb. 8, 2021Updated 5:43 p.m. ETJoe Biden in an October 2009 meeting with economic advisers, including Larry Summers, second from right. Mr. Summers, then the director of the National Economic Council, is one of the economists now questioning the scale of the Biden administration’s pandemic stimulus plan.Credit…Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA fierce debate is underway among centrist and left-leaning economists, taking place in newspaper op-eds, heated exchanges on Twitter, and even at the White House lectern. Unlike most internecine battles within a narrow intellectual tribe, this one will shape the future of the American economy and the political fortunes of the Biden administration.The core question is whether the administration’s $1.9 trillion pandemic rescue plan is too big. Is action on that scale needed to contain the economic damage from the coronavirus and get the economy quickly on track to full health? Or is it far too big relative to the hole the economy’s in, thus setting the stage for a burst of inflation followed by a potential recession, as leading center-left economists including Larry Summers (the former Treasury secretary) and Olivier Blanchard (a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund) have argued in recent days?This clash of ideas is taking place at a crucial moment. With the Senate at a 50-50 partisan divide, a single Democratic senator who finds the arguments of Mr. Summers and Mr. Blanchard persuasive could require President Biden to trim his ambitions, with far-reaching consequences for his presidency and the economy.The substance of the debate touches on important macroeconomic concepts like economic speed limits, the risks of deficits and the origins of inflation. But it is impossible to separate the substance from the personal history of those involved.It has created stark divides among economic policy thinkers who for the most part know one another, have worked together in government, have spoken at the same think tank events, and share mostly similar political views.Hanging over it all is the legacy of the Clinton-era Democratic policy establishment, and a continuing debate about past policy decisions.What is in dispute?President Biden’s pandemic aid plan includes direct spending for Covid testing and vaccine rollout, expanded unemployment insurance, money for schools and child care, and $1,400 payments to most Americans. It comes on the heels of a $900 billion bipartisan pandemic aid act enacted in December.For weeks, policy veterans have been fretting among themselves over the scale of Mr. Biden’s proposal, in private emails and text chains. Mr. Summers made those concerns public with an op-ed in The Washington Post last week. Mr. Blanchard has backed him on Twitter, as has Jason Furman to some degree, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama.What is their argument?As Mr. Summers wrote, it is a good idea to spend whatever it takes to contain the virus and enable the economy to recover quickly from its pandemic-induced downturn. Provisions that strengthen the safety net for those who are suffering are worthwhile.The problem, he says, is that the plan’s total size reaches a scale that risks major future problems. In particular, the total money being proposed far exceeds most estimates of the “output gap.” (More on that below.) That implies that much of that spending will just slosh around the economy, causing prices to rise, potentially hindering the rest of Mr. Biden’s agenda and risking a new recession.This isn’t a conventional argument between doctrinaire deficit hawks and doves, but something more subtle. In the past, Mr. Summers in particular has repeatedly called for larger budget deficits to help combat “secular stagnation,” in which major world economies are mired in slow growth, and he has supported large pandemic aid packages.But Mr. Summers says any new spending package should pay out gradually over time and be devoted more substantially to long-term investments.“There is nothing wrong with targeting $1.9 trillion, and I could support a much larger figure in total stimulus,” he wrote in a follow-up article. “But a substantial part of the program should be directed at promoting sustainable and inclusive economic growth for the remainder of the decade and beyond, not simply supporting incomes this year and next.”What’s the output gap?Imagine a world in which the American economy is cranking at its full potential. Pretty much everyone who wants to work is able to find a job. Every factory is at its complete capacity. The output gap is, simply, how far away the economy is from that ideal state.A traditional approach to fiscal stimulus has been to estimate the size of that gap, apply some adjustments to account for the way federal spending circulates through the economy, and use that arithmetic to decide how big a stimulus action ought to be.In theory, if the government pumps too much money into the economy, it is trying to generate activity over and above potential output, which is impossible to sustain for long. Workers might put in overtime, and a factory might run extra hours for a while, but eventually the workers want a breather, and the machines need to shut down for maintenance. If there is more money floating around in the economy than there is supply of goods and services, the result won’t be increased prosperity, but rather higher prices as people bid up the things they want to buy.By that traditional thinking, Mr. Summers and other skeptics are on solid ground. The Congressional Budget Office is projecting an output gap for 2021 of only $420 billion, implying that $1.9 trillion in additional cash is much more than the economy needs to fill the gap. Even if you believe the C.B.O. is too pessimistic about America’s potential, we’re talking orders of magnitude of difference.There are problems with this argument, though. For one, potential output is a theoretical concept, not something we can ever know with precision. In fact, there is a solid case to be made that technocrats have underestimated the economy’s true potential for years, given the absence of inflation in 2018 and 2019 despite a hot job market.For another, it imagines the economy as a series of hydraulic tubes, in which a skilled engineer can push the right buttons to achieve a predictable outcome. In macroeconomics, especially in the era of a once-a-century pandemic, things might not be so simple.How is the Biden administration responding?Aggressively.Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other top officials have taken to the airwaves in recent days to argue that their proposal is prudent and appropriately scaled.Administration officials have described the plan as “bottom-up,” meaning it was devised by starting with specific problems facing Americans — a lack of income for those out of work, bottlenecks in vaccine delivery, a lack of funds for school reopening — and then ending with forecasts of the sums necessary to solve those problems.Their argument is that the United States is in a do-whatever-it-takes moment, and that the most urgent goal is to try to ensure that the economy can fully reopen as quickly as possible while preventing potential lasting damage to families and businesses.“I think that the idea now is that we have to hit back hard; we have to hit back strong if we’re going to finally put this dual crisis of the pandemic and the economic pain that it has engendered behind us,” Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in a news briefing Friday.They do not dismiss the possibility that there will be higher inflation down the road — but say it is a manageable risk.Inflation is “a risk that we have to consider,” Ms. Yellen said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, but “we have the tools to deal with that risk if it materializes” and “we have a huge economic challenge here and tremendous suffering in the country.”“That’s the biggest risk,” she said.In the logic that has prevailed within the administration and among other former officials who support the approach, it misses the point to theorize about output gaps and inflation risks. They say this relief should be thought of differently than traditional fiscal stimulus.“Relief payments are life support,” wrote Austan Goolsbee, another former Obama adviser. “To avoid permanent damage, they need to last as long as the virus does. Without them, the chance of deterioration and irrevocable harm soars.”So if this passes, is there really going to be a huge burst of inflation?Maybe.The economy is in uncharted territory. With potentially trillions of pandemic aid spending on the way — in addition to vast accumulated savings over the last year because of Americans’ pandemic-constrained spending and stimulus-boosted incomes — there is a lot of money poised to be spent.And some things may reduce the supply of goods and services, like disruptions to global supply chains resulting from the pandemic and business closures.Lots of money chasing finite supply is an Economics 101 recipe for surging prices.But for the medium term, the more important question is whether any inflation surge would be a temporary not-so-harmful phenomenon or the start of something more lasting.Why does that matter?The Federal Reserve will be inclined to mostly ignore a one-time shock of post-pandemic inflation. Chair Jerome Powell said so in a news conference last month.There is a possibility “that as the economy fully reopens, there’ll be a burst of spending because people will be enthusiastic that the pandemic is over,” Mr. Powell said. “We would see that as something likely to be transient and not to be very large.”In that case, he said, “the way we would react is we’re going to be patient.”It might even help rebalance the economy after years in which the United States has depended on low interest-rate policies from the Fed to keep growth afloat. Somewhat higher inflation would mean lower “real,” inflation-adjusted interest rates, and might gain the Fed some credibility that it will not permit inflation to be persistently too low. It could, plausibly, get back to above-zero interest rates sooner than it would otherwise, taking the air out of financial bubbles and giving it more room to combat the next downturn.However, if surging prices were to create a vicious cycle of higher prices and higher wages, the Fed would be inclined to raise interest rates enough to try to break that cycle — potentially driving the economy into another recession in the process. That is the last thing that American workers need, let alone Democrats seeking to hold Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024.So is this part of a wider philosophical divide among Democratic economists?There is no ideological chasm here.But there is a deeper division than just the technical question of the output gap’s size or what the risks are of too much versus too little pandemic aid. Rather, the Biden approach represents a rejection of the technocratic bent within the Democratic Party that many on the left believe has been deeply damaging to the country.President Bill Clinton and President Obama relied for economic advice on what might be called the Bob Rubin coaching tree. Mr. Rubin, who served as Treasury secretary in the 1990s, was a mentor to Mr. Summers, who was a mentor to Timothy Geithner, Mr. Obama’s first Treasury secretary, and so on.The policymakers in this tradition view themselves as rigorous, careful and pragmatic. Many liberals view them as excessively moderate, too deferential to Wall Street and clueless about the political dynamics that could make for durable policies to help the working class.The Biden administration includes many top officials from outside that tree, such as Ms. Yellen. And it is particularly seeking to correct what are seen as the mistakes of the early Obama administration, when Mr. Summers and Mr. Geithner were in top jobs.The new administration sees this as a moment of profound crisis, a time when it must act on a scale commensurate with the problem. It is betting that if it solves the problem, its political fortunes will be better rather than worse, and it can always deal with inflation or other side effects if they come.In a sense then, the debate over pandemic aid isn’t entirely about output gaps or risk trade-offs. It’s about which mode of policymaking ought to prevail in the Democratic Party.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Margaret C. Snyder, the U.N.’s ‘First Feminist,’ Dies at 91

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyMargaret C. Snyder, the U.N.’s ‘First Feminist,’ Dies at 91Inspired by her liberal Roman Catholic upbringing, she refocused the organization’s development efforts to include women’s empowerment.Margaret C. Snyder in 2016 at the exhibition “HERstory: A Celebration of Leading Women in the United Nations” at U.N. headquarters in Manhattan. Dr. Snyder created and ran a series of programs that brought training, loans and equipment to women around the world.Credit…Megan SnyderFeb. 5, 2021, 12:52 p.m. ETMargaret C. Snyder, whose liberal Roman Catholic upbringing inspired a pioneering career at the United Nations, where she refocused the mechanisms of global development aid to include millions of women in Africa, Asia and Latin America, died on Jan. 26 in Syracuse, N.Y. She was 91.The cause was cardiac arrest, her nephew James Snyder said.Dr. Snyder, who went by Peg, had already spent years working on women’s development issues in Tanzania when she joined the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in 1971. At the time, the overwhelming male staff directed most of its resources to helping men become better farmers and entrepreneurs, even while women were doing much of the growing and selling.“There was a failure to realize,” she wrote last year for a U.N. publication, “that the most serious problems of development defy solution without the involvement of women.”During her nearly 20 years at the U.N. and more than 30 years afterward as an informal adviser to the organization, she created and ran a series of programs that brought millions of dollars in training, loans and equipment to women around the world — for instance, supplying mills to women in Burkina Faso to process shea butter and helping Kenyan women counter soil erosion by planting trees.Known widely as the U.N.’s “first feminist,” Dr. Snyder promoted women within the organization as well. When she began working at the U.N., in the early 1970s, most women there did secretarial work. Under her influence, that began to change: She put young women on her staff and later helped them advance, both at the U.N. and in their home countries, through her considerable network of contacts, which eventually included presidents like Joyce Banda of Malawi and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia.“Peg was a trailblazer,” Comfort Lamptey, the U.N. women’s country representative in Nigeria, said in an interview. “She believed that if you put money in the hands of women, they can do magic.”Dr. Snyder in the 1950s, when she was the women’s dean at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y.Credit…via Snyder familyMargaret Cecilia Snyder was born on Jan. 30, 1929, in East Syracuse, N.Y. Her father, Matthias, was a doctor, and her mother, Cecilia (Gorman) Snyder, taught Latin and German in a local high school.She is survived by her brother, Thomas Snyder. Another brother, Robert, died in December.Syracuse in the first half of the 20th century was a hotbed of liberal Catholic thought, producing leading thinkers and activists like Theodore Hesburgh, the longtime president of the University of Notre Dame, and the peace advocates Daniel J. and Philip Berrigan.The Snyders were friendly with both families, though Dr. Snyder said her biggest influence was her parents. During the Great Depression, her father put New Deal posters in the window of their home and took in patients on welfare. Her mother brought in extra money by playing the piano for silent movies — earning 30 percent less than a man who did the same job on other nights, an instance of gender segregation that Dr. Snyder said inspired her interest in women’s rights.In high school, Peg worked summers at a settlement house in Syracuse, helping Black migrants as they arrived from the South. She attended the College of New Rochelle in Westchester County, N.Y., graduating in 1950; two years later she received a master’s degree in sociology from the Catholic University of America in Washington.While working as the women’s dean at Le Moyne College, a liberal Jesuit institution in Syracuse, she became enthralled by John F. Kennedy’s call for young Americans to volunteer overseas. In 1961 she took a yearlong sabbatical to work with volunteer organizations in Tanganyika (which merged with Zanzibar to become Tanzania in 1964) and Uganda. Among other tasks, she arranged for African students to attend college in the United States — part of an effort known as “Kennedy airlifts.”When her year ended, she quit her job at Le Moyne and stayed in Africa, but she moved home in 1965 to help run the East African Studies program at Syracuse University. She advised students from the region on their graduate work, many of whom went on to hold leadership positions in their countries — the first threads of her continentwide network. Five years later she went back to Tanzania, where she completed a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Dar es Salaam in 1971.Dr. Snyder, seen her with an unidentified African woman, began her career helping women in Africa and later built the U.N. Development Fund for Women into a global powerhouse.Credit…via Snyder familyThat same year she joined the U.N. as a co-founder of what would become the African Training and Research Center for Women, the organization’s first major program directed specifically at improving economic opportunities for women. In 1978 she moved to New York City, where she was put in charge of a development fund focused on women that was paid for by voluntary contributions from member states.She built the organization, later renamed the U.N. Development Fund for Women (and even later U.N. Women), from operating on a shoestring budget to a global powerhouse that served women not just in Africa but also across the developing world. By the end of the 1980s, it had created women’s development commissions in 30 countries, through which the U.N. funneled millions of dollars to grass-roots women’s projects.“We were trying to make a paradigm shift from looking at women as mothers to looking at women and their economic activities,” said Thelma Awori, a former assistant secretary general of the United Nations who worked closely with Dr. Snyder. “Peg picked that up and enlarged it.”One of her first grants went to Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, an anti-deforestation initiative led by Wangari Maathai, who went on to win the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize in part for that work. Dr. Snyder and Ms. Maathai remained close friends — whenever Ms. Maathai came to New York she would stay at Dr. Snyder’s spacious, light-filled apartment on Mitchell Place in Manhattan, just north of the U.N., and Dr. Snyder hosted a wedding party for her daughter Wanjira.After she retired from the United Nations in 1989, Dr. Snyder was a Fulbright scholar in Uganda and a visiting fellow at the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. She also wrote or co-wrote three books on women’s economic development in Africa.But perhaps her most important post-retirement work was as an adviser and advocate for a long list of women activists and organizations, many of whom she hosted at her apartment. It was there, in 2006, that she helped organize the Sirleaf Market Women’s Fund, a program to rebuild markets across war-torn Liberia, named for Ms. Sirleaf, the country’s first female president.For all her career success, Dr. Snyder was in constant conflict with entrenched interests within the U.N., both because she was a woman and because her approach to development challenged the ways many of her colleagues were used to doing things. The risk of bureaucratic sabotage was ever-present: Once, Dr. Snyder and her team returned from a trip to find that their office had been moved to a different building, in a room without a single phone line.But she could take some comfort in the long view: By 2021, women would make up a significant portion of the U.N. professional staff, and women’s issues, including development, remain one of the organization’s focal points.“Through all of the administrative issues, we were reminded that working to empower the poorest women was threatening to some high level and powerful people,” she wrote in 2020. “They could move us, but they couldn’t stop us.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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    Europe’s Bankruptcies Are Plummeting. That May Be a Problem.

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesVaccine InformationTimelineWuhan, One Year LaterRomain Rozier in his empty restaurant in Paris. “We’re at death’s door.” he said.Credit…Sabine Mirlesse for The New York TimesEurope’s Bankruptcies Are Plummeting. That May Be a Problem.Governments have extended national programs to keep troubled businesses afloat, but the aid may only be postponing a painful reckoning.Romain Rozier in his empty restaurant in Paris. “We’re at death’s door.” he said.Credit…Sabine Mirlesse for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyJan. 25, 2021, 12:01 a.m. ETPARIS — Romain Rozier’s cafe should be bankrupt by now.Since the coronavirus hit last spring, sales at the once buzzing lunch spot in northern Paris are down 80 percent. The only customers on a recent day were a couple of UberEats couriers and a handful of people spaced far apart at the counter, ordering takeout.“We’re at death’s door,” Mr. Rozier said, tallying the 300 euros ($365) he had made from the lunch shift, well below the €1,200 he used to pull in. “The only reason we haven’t gone under is because of financial aid.”France and other European countries are spending enormous sums to keep businesses afloat during the worst recession since World War II. But some worry they’ve gone too far; bankruptcies are plunging to levels not seen in decades.While the aid has prevented a surge in unemployment, the largess risks turning swaths of the economy into a kind of twilight zone where firms are swamped with debt they cannot pay off but receiving just enough state aid to stay alive — so-called zombie companies. Unable to invest or innovate, these firms could contribute to what the World Bank recently described as a potential “lost decade” of stagnant economic growth caused by the pandemic.“We need to get off of all of these subsidies at some point — otherwise, we’ll have a zombie economy,” said Carl Bildt, co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations and a former prime minister of Sweden.Bankruptcies fell 40 percent last year in France and Britain, and were down 25 percent on average in the European Union. Without government intervention, including billions in state-backed loans and subsidized payrolls, European business failures would have almost doubled last year, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private American organization.At the Commercial Court of Paris, Judge Patrick Coupeaud, who has handled bankruptcy cases for nearly a decade, sees the difference. “I have about a third fewer people coming to me, because many troubled businesses are being helped by the state,” he said, gesturing to the court’s nearly empty colonnaded marble halls.Judges Dominique-Paul Vallée, left, and Patrick Coupeaud. “Failure is not a word that the French like to use,” Judge Vallée said.Credit…Sabine Mirlesse for The New York TimesBy contrast, Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings in the United States rose in the third quarter to the highest level since the 2010 financial crisis, a trend that is expected to continue in 2021, according to an index compiled by the U.S. law firm Polsinelli.President Biden has proposed a new $1.9 trillion rescue package to combat the economic downturn and the Covid-19 crisis, and last week, the government reported that 900,000 Americans had filed new unemployment claims.Those statistics are shaping a debate over whether Europe’s strategy of protecting businesses and workers “at all costs” will cement a recovery, or leave economies less competitive and more dependent on government aid when the pandemic recedes.“Parts of the misery have only been delayed,” said Bert Colijn, chief eurozone economist at the Dutch bank ING. He added that there would be “a catch-up in bankruptcies” and a spike in unemployment whenever support measures were withdrawn.Analysts say the government programs are already seeding the economy with thousands of inefficient businesses with low productivity, high debt and a high prospect of default once low interest rates normalize.An estimated 10 percent of companies in France were saved from bankruptcy because of government funds, according to Rexecode, a French economic think tank.Letting unviable businesses go under, while painful, will be essential for allowing competitive sectors to thrive, said Jeffrey Franks, the head of the International Monetary Fund’s mission for France.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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    Kentucky Hurting While Awaiting Federal Pandemic Aid

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    #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Coronavirus OutbreakliveLatest UpdatesMaps and CasesThe Stimulus PlanVaccine InformationF.A.Q.TimelineAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyKentucky Is Hurting as Its Senators Limit or Oppose Federal AidUrban and rural fortunes diverge in the state, with the pandemic compounding troubles that predated it.A line for food being given out in Owensboro, Ky., this fall. As hunger and poverty have spread in the state, Senator Mitch McConnell has opposed broad-based aid to state and local governments.Credit…Alan Warren/The Messenger-Inquirer, via Associated PressBen Casselman and Dec. 28, 2020Updated 7:17 p.m. ETIn Perry County, Ky., the local government is cutting back on garbage pickup. Magoffin County is laying off public safety workers. And in Floyd County, where food pantries are reporting that demand has tripled over the past month, officials are trying to figure out how to avoid cuts to a program distributing food to families.“A lot of these kids, this is the only meal they get in a day,” said Robert Williams, Floyd County’s judge-executive, the chief elected official. “I can’t ask a kid to sit on a computer all day with nothing to eat.”In cases and deaths, Kentucky hasn’t been hit as hard by the coronavirus as some other states. Like most of the country, it has experienced a surge this fall, but one less severe than in neighboring Tennessee. Kentucky’s economy is reeling all the same, particularly in rural areas already struggling.“We were in dire need of help economically to start with, before Covid,” said Matthew C. Wireman, the judge-executive of Magoffin County, an Appalachian county where the unemployment rate was 16.7 percent in October, one of the highest in the country.The relief package passed by Congress this month and signed by President Trump on Sunday should provide help. The $600 payments to individuals, criticized by the president and many progressives as too small, would go a long way where the typical household earns less than $40,000 a year. So would the $300 weekly supplement to unemployment benefits. And the bill includes provisions meant to help rural areas, including subsidies for broadband infrastructure and help for small farmers.But the aid would come over the objection of one of Kentucky’s Republican senators, Rand Paul, who was one of just six to vote against the package in the Senate, on the grounds that it amounted to handing out “free money.” And it would be smaller and later than it might otherwise have been because of the work of the state’s other senator, Mitch McConnell, who as majority leader fought to limit the package.Mr. McConnell in particular worked to exclude broad-based aid to state and local governments — help that many local officials in his state say they desperately need.A spokesman for Mr. McConnell, however, said the lawmaker had not been a hindrance and had helped lead the multitrillion-dollar federal response to the pandemic.“The compromise bill is not perfect, but it will do an enormous amount of good for struggling Kentuckians and Americans across the country who need help now,” Mr. McConnell said in a statement Sunday evening.In an email, Mr. Paul blamed Kentucky’s economic problems on orders issued by the state’s governor, Andy Beshear, a Democrat.“The best way for Kentucky to recover is to repeal Governor Beshear’s lockdown edicts that have caused massive unemployment,” the senator said. “I support extending unemployment and paying for it by reducing foreign aid and nation-building expenditures in Afghanistan.”Unemployment rates in some rural counties are in the double digits. Rates of hunger and poverty, high before the crisis, have soared. Kentucky has lost more than 20,000 state and local government jobs since February, and with budgets crippled by falling tax receipts, officials must choose between raising taxes and cutting services.“It’s frustrating that our own senator won’t support local governments,” Mr. Wireman, a Democrat, said. “These are extraordinary times, and we need to be taking extraordinary measures on the national level from our federal government to help folks out.”Like many rural areas across the country, Magoffin County depends heavily on the public sector. State and local government jobs account for nearly a third of all employment in the county, versus an eighth of all jobs nationally. Elliott County, two counties to the north, is even more reliant: Nearly two-thirds of all jobs are government jobs, including more than 200 at a state prison.“In many rural communities, state and local government is the major employer,” said Janet Harrah, executive director of outreach at Northern Kentucky University’s business school.The Coronavirus Outbreak More

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    Ezra F. Vogel, Eminent Scholar of China and Japan, Dies at 90

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    AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyEzra F. Vogel, Eminent Scholar of China and Japan, Dies at 90A longtime scholar at Harvard, Professor Vogel wrote books that helped shape how the world viewed the two ascendant economic powers.Ezra Vogel’s writings over six decades established him as a giant in the study of China and Japan and earned him wide-ranging influence.Credit…Ben RosserPublished More

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    2020: The Year in Sports When Everybody Lost

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    They don’t do that this year, not in the age of the coronavirus. Lambeau is absent of fans, and the bars and party houses are mostly empty. So are the restaurants and sausage stands at Miller Park in Milwaukee, home to the Brewers, and the seats at Fiserv Forum, where the Bucks play.

    The sports economy has been ravaged by the pandemic. The absence of live fans alone has forced the thousands of people who once put on games at these venues out of work.

    In Wisconsin, ticket agents and hot dog vendors and bartenders and janitors lost their livelihoods this year. More