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    Auto Insurance Spike Hampers the Inflation Fight

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    Costlier vehicles and repairs are pushing premiums higher even as the increase in U.S. consumer prices is tapering overall.Job growth, wage growth and business growth are all lively, and inflation has steeply fallen from its 2022 highs. But consumer sentiment, while improving, is still sour.One reason may be sticker shock from some highly visible prices — even as overall inflation has calmed. The cost of car insurance is a key example.Motor vehicle insurance rose 1.4 percent on a monthly basis in January alone and has risen 20.6 percent over the past year, the largest jump since 1976. It has been a huge hit for those driving the roughly 272 million private and commercial vehicles registered in the country. And it has played a part in dampening the “mission accomplished” mood on inflation that was bubbling up in markets at the beginning of the year.According to a recent private-sector estimate, the average annual premium for full-coverage car insurance in 2024 is $2,543, compared with $2,014 in 2023 and $1,771 in 2022.That spike has a variety of causes, but the central one is straightforward: Cars and trucks are pricier now, so insurance for them is, too.The annual change in the cost of car insurance

    Note: Data is the year-over-year percentage change in motor vehicle insurance per the U.S. city average, not seasonally adjusted.Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    An Emboldened F.T.C. Bolsters Biden’s Efforts to Address Inflation

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    With few unilateral options and little hope of legislation from Congress, the president’s early investment in competition policy could pay a political dividend.An independent federal agency has become one of the most reliable executors of President Biden’s attempts to fight inflation, at a time when the White House has few weapons of its own to quickly bring down stubbornly high prices of consumer staples like groceries.The Federal Trade Commission filed a lawsuit on Monday, joined by several state attorneys general, to challenge a merger between the supermarket giants Kroger and Albertsons. The agency’s rationale in many ways echoed Mr. Biden’s renewed attempts to blame corporate greed for rising prices and shrinking portions in grocery aisles.“If allowed, this merger would substantially lessen competition, likely resulting in Americans paying millions of dollars more for food and other essential household goods,” agency officials wrote in a legal complaint. Because grocery prices have risen significantly in recent years, they added, “the stakes for Americans are exceptionally high.”That is true for consumers, and it is true for the president. More Americans disapprove of his handling of the economy than approve of it. Consumer confidence, while improved in recent months, remains relatively weak for an economy with low unemployment and solid growth like the one Mr. Biden is presiding over.An internal analysis by White House economists suggests that no single factor is weighing more on consumer sentiment than grocery prices. Those costs soared in 2022 and have not fallen, though their rate of increase has slowed.White House officials concede that there is little more Mr. Biden can do unilaterally to reduce grocery prices and even less chance of legislative help from Congress. That is why Mr. Biden has resorted to the bully pulpit, calling on stores to reduce prices and chastising snack makers for engaging in “shrinkflation” — reducing portions while raising or maintaining prices.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Housing Costs Are Running Hot, but Is the Data Missing a Cooling Trend?

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    Pandemic disruptions may have muddled the measurement of home prices in inflation data. That could complicate the Fed’s course on interest rates.The Federal Reserve may have a housing problem. At the very least, it has a housing riddle.Overall inflation has eased substantially over the past year. But housing has proved a tenacious — and surprising — exception. The cost of shelter was up 6 percent in January from a year earlier, and rose faster on a monthly basis than in December, according to the Labor Department. That acceleration was a big reason for the pickup in overall consumer prices last month.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.The persistence of housing inflation poses a problem for Fed officials as they consider when to roll back interest rates. Housing is by far the biggest monthly expense for most families, which means it weighs heavily on inflation calculations. Unless housing costs cool, it will be hard for inflation as a whole to return sustainably to the central bank’s target of 2 percent.“If you want to know where inflation is going, you need to know where housing inflation is going,” said Mark Franceski, managing director at Zelman & Associates, a housing research firm. Housing inflation, he added, “is not slowing at the rate that we expected or anyone expected.”Those expectations were based on private-sector data from real estate websites like Zillow and Apartment List and other private companies showing that rents have barely been rising recently and have been falling outright in some markets.For home buyers, the combination of rising prices and high interest rates has made housing increasingly unaffordable. Many existing homeowners, on the other hand, have been partly insulated from rising prices because they have fixed-rate mortgages with payments that don’t change from month to month.The Housing ConundrumHousing costs, as measured in the Consumer Price Index, are still rising faster than before the pandemic, even as overall inflation has eased.

    Source: Labor DepartmentBy The New York TimesA Wider GapAfter surging in 2021 and 2022, rent growth has moderated. But the slowdown has been more gradual for single-family homes than for apartments.

    Notes: Data is shown as a 12-month change in a three-month moving average. “Houses” include both attached and detached single-family homes.Source: ZillowBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Biden Targets a New Economic Villain: Shrinkflation

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    Liberals prodded the president for years to blame big corporations for price increases. He is finally doing so, in the grocery aisle.On Super Bowl Sunday, the White House released a short video in which a smiling President Biden, sitting next to a table stocked with chips, cookies and sports drinks, slammed companies for reducing the package size and portions of popular foods without an accompanying reduction in price.“I’ve had enough of what they call shrinkflation,” Mr. Biden declared.The video lit up social media and delighted a consumer advocate named Edgar Dworsky, who has studied “shrinkflation” trends for more than a decade. He has twice briefed Mr. Biden’s economic aides, first in early 2023 and again a few days before the video aired. The first briefing seemed to lead nowhere. The second clearly informed Mr. Biden’s new favorite economic argument — that companies have used a rapid run-up in prices to pad their pockets by keeping those prices high while giving consumers less.The products arrayed in the president’s video, like Oreos and Wheat Thins, were all examples of the shrinkflation that Mr. Dworsky had documented on his Consumer World website.While inflation is moderating, shoppers remain furious over the high price of groceries. Mr. Biden, who has seen his approval ratings suffer amid rising prices, has found a blame-shifting message he loves in the midst of his re-election campaign: skewering companies for shrinking the size of candy bars, ice cream cartons and other food items, while raising prices or holding them steady, even as the companies’ profit margins remain high.The president has begun accusing companies of “ripping off” Americans with those tactics and is considering new executive actions to crack down on the practice, administration officials and other allies say, though they will not specify the steps he might take. He is also likely to criticize shrinkflation during his State of the Union address next week.Mr. Biden could also embrace new legislation seeking to empower the Federal Trade Commission to more aggressively investigate and punish corporate price gouging, including in grocery stories.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    New Freighters Could Ease Red Sea Cargo Disruptions

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    Analysts and shipping executives say they expect costs to fall later this year as companies receive vessels they ordered two to three years ago.After the Houthi militia started attacking container ships in the Red Sea last year, the cost of shipping goods from Asia soared by over 300 percent, prompting fears that supply chain disruptions might once again roil the global economy.The Houthis, who are backed by Iran and control northern Yemen, continue to threaten ships, forcing many to take a much longer route around Africa’s southern tip. But there are signs that the world will probably avoid a drawn-out shipping crisis.One reason for the optimism is that a huge number of container ships, ordered two to three years ago, are entering service. Those extra vessels are expected to help shipping companies maintain regular service as their ships travel longer distances. The companies ordered the ships when the extraordinary surge in world trade that occurred during the pandemic created enormous demand for their services.“There’s a lot of available capacity out there, in ports and ships and containers,” said Brian Whitlock, a senior director and analyst at Gartner, a research firm that specializes in logistics.Shipping costs remain elevated, but some analysts expect the robust supply of new ships to push down rates later this year.Before the attacks, ships from Asia would traverse the Red Sea and the Suez Canal, which typically handles an estimated 30 percent of global container traffic, to reach European ports. Now, most go around the Cape of Good Hope, making those trips 20 to 30 percent longer, increasing fuel use and crew costs.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Will Food Prices Stop Rising Quickly? Many Companies Say Yes.

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    Food companies are talking about smaller price increases this year, good news for grocery shoppers, restaurant diners and the White House.Few prices are as visible to Americans as the ones they encounter at the grocery store or drive-through window, which is why two years of rapid food inflation have been a major drag for U.S. households and the Biden administration.Shoppers have only slowly regained confidence in the state of the economy as they pay more to fill up their carts, and President Biden has made a habit of shaming food companies — even filming a Super Bowl Sunday video criticizing snack producers for their “rip off” prices.But now, the trend in grocery and restaurant inflation appears to be on the cusp of changing.After months of rapid increase, the cost of food at home climbed at a notably slower clip in January. And from packaged food providers to restaurant chains, companies across the food business are reporting that they are no longer raising prices as steeply. In some cases that’s because consumers are finally pushing back against price increases after years of spending through them. In others, it’s because the prices that companies pay for inputs like packaging and labor are no longer rising as sharply.

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    Year-over-year change in consumer price indexes
    Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesEven if food inflation cools, it does not mean that your grocery bill or restaurant check will get smaller: It just means it will stop climbing so quickly. Most companies are planning smaller price increases rather than outright price cuts. Still, when it comes to the question of whether rapid jumps in grocery and restaurant prices are behind us, what executives are telling investors offer some reason for hope.Some, but not all, consumers are saying no.Executives have found in recent months that they can raise prices only so high before consumers cut back.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Three Lessons From a Surprisingly Resilient Job Market

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    The recovery from the pandemic lockdowns has prompted economists to consider whether their playbook is outdated or just missing a page.The pandemic created an economic crisis unlike any recession on record. So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that the aftermath, too, has played out in a way that almost no economists expected.When unemployment soared in the first weeks of the pandemic, many feared a repeat of the long, slow rebound from the Great Recession: years of joblessness that left many workers permanently scarred. Instead, the recovery in the labor market has been, by many measures, the strongest on record.In early 2021, some economists foresaw a surge in inflation. Others were skeptical: Similar predictions in recent years — in some cases from the same forecasters — had failed to come true. This time, however, they were right.And when the Federal Reserve began trying to tamp down inflation, there were warnings that the job market was sure to buckle, as it had threatened to do every time policymakers began raising interest rates too rapidly in the decade before the pandemic. Instead, the central bank has raised rates to their highest level in decades, and the job market is holding steady, or perhaps even gaining steam.The final chapter on the recovery has not been written. A “soft landing” is not a done deal. But it is clear that the economy, particularly the job market, has proved far more resilient than most people thought probable.Interviews with dozens of economists — some of whom got the recovery partly right, many of whom got it mostly wrong — provided insights into what they have learned from the past two years, and what they make of the job market right now. They didn’t agree on all the details, but three broad themes emerged.

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    Unemployment usually rises when job openings fall. Not this time.
    Notes: Job openings are shown as a share of employment. Unemployment is shown as a share of the labor force. All data is seasonally adjusted.Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York Times

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    The racial unemployment gap is narrowing
    Note: Data is seasonally adjusted.Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York Times

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    Job growth has far surpassed prepandemic expectations
    Notes: Change since fourth quarter 2014. Projection based on 2015 Congressional Budget Office forecast.Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics; Congressional Budget OfficeBy The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Can America Turn a Productivity Boomlet Into a Boom?

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    After drooping in 2022, the output of U.S. businesses per worker has surged. Economists wonder if the trend can continue, and who will benefit most.Kevin Rezvani came of age in kitchens: spending summers at his grandfather’s bakery in Japan, doing work-study in his college cafeteria and working for years as a line cook at mid-tier restaurants, along with some stints in fast food.By his late 20s, the biggest takeaway Mr. Rezvani had from his experience “working in every kind of thing in food” was the industry’s widespread inability to reconcile the art of a kitchen, and the science of a restaurant, with the math of a business.Too many ventures, he says, are not profitable enough to justify all the work hours needed from managers and employees to stay afloat, much less grow. In other words, they fall short on productivity.“There’s a very fine line between doing OK, and doing well in this business,” said Mr. Rezvani, now 36. “And if you’re doing OK, it’s not worth your time.”He and two partners opened a casual sit-down restaurant near Rutgers University a few years after his graduation. But in early 2020, they split from him over personal and business disagreements, and he was on his own.To pay bills, he worked for a moving company and made deliveries for Amazon, which was booming during the lockdowns, as people idled at home spent their disposable income on buying goods.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More