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    Yellen Says Aim Is ‘Maximum Pain’ for Russia Without Hurting U.S.

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    WASHINGTON — Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on Wednesday that the United States would continue taking steps to cut Russia off from the global financial system in response to its invasion of Ukraine and argued that the sanctions already imposed had taken a severe toll on the Russian economy.She addressed the House Financial Services Committee as the United States rolled out a new array of sanctions on Russian banks and state-owned enterprises and on the adult children of President Vladimir V. Putin. The White House also announced a ban on Americans making new investments in Russia no matter where those investors are based.“Our goal from the outset has been to impose maximum pain on Russia, while to the best of our ability shielding the United States and our partners from undue economic harm,” Ms. Yellen told lawmakers.The measures introduced on Wednesday included “full blocking” sanctions against Sberbank, the largest financial institution in Russia, and Alfa Bank, one of the country’s largest privately owned banks.Sberbank is the main artery in the Russian financial system and holds over a third of the country’s financial assets. In February, the Treasury announced limited sanctions against Sberbank, but Wednesday’s sanctions, a senior Biden administration official said, will effectively freeze relations between the bank and the U.S. financial system.The administration also announced sanctions against two adult daughters of Mr. Putin: Katerina Tikhonova and Maria Putina, who has been living under an assumed name, Maria Vorontsova. Others connected to Russian officials with close ties to Mr. Putin will also face sanctions, including the wife and daughter of Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, and members of Russia’s security council, including former Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev. The official said those people would be effectively cut off from the U.S. banking system and any assets held in the United States.President Biden said on Wednesday that the new sanctions would deal another blow to the Russian economy.“The sense of brutality and inhumanity, left for all the world to see unapologetically,” Mr. Biden said, describing Russia’s actions as war crimes. “Responsible nations have to come together to hold these perpetrators accountable, and together with our allies and our partners we’re going to keep raising the economic costs and ratchet up the pain for Putin and further increase Russia’s economic isolation.”Experts suggested that the latest round of sanctions were unlikely to compel Mr. Putin to change course. Hundreds of American businesses have pulled out of Russia in recent weeks, making new investments unlikely.“The asset freezes on the additional banks aren’t nothing, but this isn’t the most significant tranche we’ve seen to date,” said Daniel Tannebaum, a partner at Oliver Wyman who advises banks on sanctions.Other American agencies are joining the effort to exert pressure on Russia.In a news conference on Wednesday, officials from the Justice Department and the F.B.I. also announced a series of actions and criminal charges against Russians, including the takedown of a Russian marketplace on the dark web and a botnet, or a network of hijacked devices infected with malware, that is controlled by the country’s military intelligence agency.Justice Department officials also celebrated the seizing of the Tango, a superyacht owned by the Russian oligarch Viktor F. Vekselberg, and charged a Russian banker, Konstantin Malofeev, with conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions. Mr. Malofeev is one of Russia’s most influential magnates and among the most prominent conservatives in the country’s Kremlin-allied elite. (The indictment renders his surname as Malofeyev.)At the hearing, Ms. Yellen told lawmakers that she believed Russia should be further isolated from the geopolitical system, including being shut out of international gatherings such as the Group of 20 meetings this year, and should be denounced at this month’s meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. She added that the United States might not participate in some G20 meetings that are being held in Indonesia this year if Russians attended.Ms. Yellen, whose department has been developing many of the punitive economic measures, rebutted criticism that the penalties leveled so far had not been effective, in part because there are some exceptions to allow Russia to sell energy.The Russia-Ukraine War and the Global EconomyCard 1 of 6Rising concerns. More

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    U.S. Levels New Sanctions on Russian Tech Companies

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    WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department on Thursday leveled new sanctions on Russian technology companies and illicit procurement networks that the country is using to evade existing sanctions, expanding the Biden administration’s effort to punish Russia for its invasion of Ukraine by crippling its economy.The new measures reflect the challenge that the United States and its allies continue to face in enforcing restrictions that have been imposed to cut off Russia’s central bank, financial institutions and oligarchs from the global financial system, and the need to disrupt Russian supply chains and efforts to conceal transactions.“Russia not only continues to violate the sovereignty of Ukraine with its unprovoked aggression, but also has escalated its attacks striking civilians and population centers,” the Treasury secretary, Janet L. Yellen, said in a statement. “We will continue to target Putin’s war machine with sanctions from every angle until this senseless war of choice is over.”Among the 34 organizations and individuals targeted are Serniya and Sertal, Moscow-based companies that illicitly procure dual-use equipment and technology for Russia’s defense sector.The Treasury Department is also imposing sanctions on several technology companies that produce computer hardware, software and microelectronics that are used by Russia’s defense sector. Among them is Joint Stock Company Mikron, Russia’s largest chip-maker.Adewale Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary, foreshadowed the sanctions during a speech on Tuesday, when he said that Russia’s military industrial sector would be the next to face restrictions.“We are planning to target additional sectors that are critical to the Kremlin’s ability to operate its war machine, where a loss of access will ultimately undermine Russia’s ability to build and maintain the tools of war that rely on these inputs,” Mr. Adeyemo said in his speech at Chatham House, an international affairs think tank in London. “In addition to sanctioning companies in sectors that enable the Kremlin’s malign activities, we also plan to take actions to disrupt their critical supply chains.” More

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    Treasury Shifts Cash Among States as Pandemic Housing Aid Dries Up

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    The Biden administration pulled back the aid from states and counties with unspent funds and diverted it to four states pressing for more: California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration has clawed back $377 million in federal emergency housing aid from states and counties, most of them controlled by Republicans, and redirected the cash to states that have been clamoring for more help, including New York, California and New Jersey.The $46 billion Emergency Rental Assistance Program, first enacted by Congress in 2020, succeeded in preventing a wave of evictions stemming from the downturn caused by the pandemic. But Treasury Department officials, increasingly concerned that evictions might rise after the program winds down, have tried to ensure that none of the remaining funding goes unspent while pushing states to find other funding sources to assist poor tenants.In recent months, White House officials have pressured governors in states with unspent funds to turn over the money to local governments within their states. Now they are going one step further, pulling back cash from states with relatively few tenants — like Montana, Nebraska, South Dakota and Wyoming — or localities that failed to efficiently distribute the aid, including Alabama, Arkansas and several counties in Texas.The money, in turn, is being diverted to four states that burned through their allotted amounts — with $136 million in additional aid headed to California, $119 million to New York, $47 million to New Jersey and $15 million to Illinois, according to a spreadsheet provided by a senior administration official. North Carolina, Washington and other localities will be receiving smaller amounts.New York officials were happy with their windfall but said it fell far short of the $1.6 billion in additional aid requested by the state.“This is better,” said Representative Ritchie Torres, a Democrat whose district includes the South Bronx, which has some of the highest eviction and poverty rates in the country. “But it’s a pitiful drop in the bucket compared to what we need.”The four states, home to roughly a third of the nation’s low-income renters, have already spent billions in emergency aid paying back rent for tenants at risk of eviction, and they have requested more funding, citing affordable housing shortages and rising rents. In January, their governors — Gavin Newsom of California, Kathy Hochul of New York, Philip D. Murphy of New Jersey and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, all Democrats — called on Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen to shift cash from low-spending states into their accounts, saying that tenants were “facing an immediate need now.”Treasury officials responded with the reallocation — but made it clear the well was running dry, and states would soon have to make hard choices by using their own revenues, or other federal pandemic relief funding, to bankroll anti-eviction initiatives that might have been buoyed by President Biden’s stalled social spending bill.“The emergency rental program has helped keep millions of families in their homes, reducing the economic costs of the pandemic, and built a nationwide system for eviction prevention that didn’t exist before,” the deputy Treasury secretary, Wally Adeyemo, who has overseen the implementation of the program, said in an interview.“As these funds run out, Treasury is encouraging state and local governments to invest in long-term strategies to prevent evictions and build affordable housing, using other resources,” he added.The program, initiated under the Trump administration and ramped up by Mr. Biden’s team, got off to a sluggish start, as state governments struggled to create new systems to process applications, determine eligibility and distribute the cash.But by late 2021, most local systems were up and running, thanks in part to White House guidelines relaxing verification requirements.The enormous infusion of cash, coupled with federal and local eviction bans, helped prevent or delay about 1.35 million evictions in 2021, according to an analysis published last week by Princeton’s Eviction Lab. Evictions have risen in recent months in some cities but remain below the levels predicted when the pandemic first struck.Most of the aid that the Treasury Department is clawing back comes from states in the West, Midwest and New England with relatively high per capita incomes and low percentages of renters per capita. But part of the money is being pulled out of some of the country’s poorest states, where local officials were unable, for various political and logistical reasons, to disburse the funds.Alabama, for instance, is losing $42 million from a total allocation of about $263 million. A spokesman for the state’s housing agency provided a memo from state housing officials claiming that the Treasury Department “did not consider that Alabama has a lower proportion of renters to homeowners” in making its aid decisions, and that an overall lack of need put “downward pressure” on applications.But applicants and housing groups have complained that the state has made accessing the money difficult, and that a company hired to run the program rejected a large percentage of low-income tenants.West Virginia, which has been slow to distribute a range of federal food, housing and anti-poverty aid during the pandemic, was forced to return $39 million despite recent efforts by state officials to encourage more renters to apply. A spokesman for Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia, a Republican, said the state was “simply not a renter state,” adding that the program “was clearly designed with Manhattan in mind — not rural America.”And Arkansas, which took months to organize its effort, is giving back $9 million, according to the tally provided by the senior administration official.The Biden administration had hoped to avoid shifting funding across state lines, opting instead to negotiate with governors to send unspent aid to counties and cities in their own states. Late last year, the White House persuaded Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Wisconsin and other states to voluntarily shift about $875 million to the cities and counties in their states that needed the money most.Yet administration officials are less concerned about offending state officials that have lost funding than tamping down the expectations of Democratic governors who want them to claw back even more.Gene Sperling, who oversees the Biden administration’s pandemic relief programs, said that the program was on track to help around five million renters, and that the largest complaint now was that “the funds are moving out so swiftly that there is very little left to be reallocated.” More

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    Employer Practices Limit Workers’ Choices and Wages, U.S. Study Argues

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    A Biden administration report says collusion and other constraints on competition hold down pay and prospects in the labor market.The recent narrative is that there is a tight labor market that gives workers leverage. But a new report from the Biden administration argues that the deck is still stacked against workers, reducing their ability to move from one employer to another and hurting their pay.The report, released Monday by the Treasury Department, contends that employers often face little competition for their workers, allowing them to pay substantially less than they would otherwise.“There is a recognition that the idea of a competitive labor market is a fiction,” said Ben Harris, assistant Treasury secretary in the office of economic policy, which prepared the report. “This is a sea change in economics.”The report follows up on a promise made by President Biden last summer when he issued an executive order directing his administration to address excessive concentration in the market for work.Drawing from recent economic research, the report concludes that lack of competition in the job market costs workers, on average, 15 to 25 percent of what they might otherwise make. And it emphasizes that the administration will deploy the tools at its disposal to restore competition in the market for work.“This is the administration declaring where it is on the enforcement of antitrust in labor markets,” Tim Wu, a special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy on the National Economic Council, said in an interview in which he laid out the report’s findings. “It is sending a strong signal about the direction in which antitrust enforcement and policy is going.”Across the economy, wage gains generally come about when a worker changes jobs or has a credible offer from outside that will encourage the current employer to provide an increase, argues Betsey Stevenson, a professor of economics at the University of Michigan who was on President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers.The State of Jobs in the United StatesEmployment growth accelerated in February, as falling coronavirus cases brought customers back to businesses and workers back to the office.February Jobs Report: U.S. employers added 678,000 jobs and the unemployment rate fell to 3.8 percent ​​in the second month of 2022.Wages and Prices: A labor shortage is helping to push up workers’ pay. With inflation running hot, that could be a problem for the Federal Reserve.Service Workers:  Even as employers scramble to fill vacancies, service workers are seeing few gains. Part-time work is partly to blame.Unionization Efforts: The pandemic has fueled enthusiasm for organized labor. But the pushback has been brutal, especially in the private sector.New to the Work Force: Graduating college seniors will start their career without the memory of prepandemic work life. Here is what they expect.“Companies are well aware of this,” she said in an interview, so they rally around a simple solution: “If we just stop competing, it will be better for everybody.”The Treasury report lays out the many ways in which employers do this. There are noncompete agreements that bar workers from moving to a competitor, and nondisclosure agreements that keep them from sharing information about wages and working conditions — critical information for workers to understand their options. Some companies make no-poaching deals.“There is a long list of insidious efforts to take power out of the hands of workers and seize it for employers’ gain,” said Seth Harris, deputy director at the National Economic Council and deputy assistant to the president for labor and the economy.This is happening against a backdrop of broad economic changes that are hemming in the options of many workers, especially at the bottom end of the job market.The outsourcing of work to contractors — think of the janitors, cafeteria workers and security guards employed by enormous specialist companies, not by the companies they clean, feed and protect — reduces the options for low-wage workers, the report argues.The mergers and acquisitions that have consolidated hospitals, nursing homes, food processing companies and other industries have also reduced competition for workers, the study says, curtailing their ability to seek better jobs.The report notes, for instance, that mergers trimmed the number of hospitals in the United States to 6,093 in 2021, from 7,156 in 1975. It cites research into how some of these mergers have depressed the wage growth for nurses, pharmacy employees and other health workers.The Treasury’s document is drawn from a body of research that has been growing since the 1990s, when a seminal paper by David Card and Alan B. Krueger found that raising the minimum wage did not necessarily reduce employment and could even produce more jobs.The conclusion by Mr. Card and Mr. Krueger, which economists would consider impossible in a competitive labor market in which rising labor costs would reduce employer demand, started the discipline down a path to investigate the extent to which employers competed for workers. If a few employers had the power to hold wages below the competitive equilibrium, raising the wage floor might draw more workers in.Lack of competition, the Biden administration argues, goes a long way to explain why pay for a large share of the American work force is barely higher, after accounting for inflation, than it was a half-century ago. “The fact that workers are getting less than they used to is a longstanding problem,” Ms. Stevenson, who was not involved in the Treasury report, noted.Anticompetitive practices thrive when there are fewer competitors. If workers have many potential employers, they might still agree to sign a noncompete clause, but they could demand a pay increase to compensate.Even if there is no conclusive evidence that the labor market is less competitive than it used to be, the report says, researchers have concluded that there is, in fact, very little competition.Suresh Naidu, a professor of economics at Columbia University, argues, moreover, that institutions like the minimum wage and unions, which limited employers from fully exercising their market power, have weakened substantially over time. “The previously existing checks have fallen away,” Mr. Naidu said.Unions are virtually irrelevant across much of the labor market. Only 6 percent of workers in the private sector belong to one. The federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is so low that it matters little even for many low-wage workers. The Treasury report argues that an uncompetitive labor market is reducing the share of the nation’s income that goes to workers while increasing the slice that accrues to the owners of capital. Moreover, employers facing little competition for workers, it argues, are more likely to offer few benefits and impose dismal working conditions: unpredictable just-in-time schedules, intrusive on-the-job monitoring, poor safety, no breaks.The damage runs deeper, the report says, arguing that uncompetitive labor markets reduce overall employment. Productivity also suffers when workers have a hard time moving to new jobs that could offer a better fit for their skills. Noncompete clauses discourage business formation when they limit entrepreneurs’ ability to find workers for their ventures.Addressing the issues that the report singles out is likely to be an uphill task. The administration’s push to increase the federal minimum wage to $15 has been unsuccessful. In Congress, bills that would ease the path for workers to join a union face long odds. Going after noncompete clauses, no-poaching deals and other forms of anticompetitive behavior would be an easier task.Last year, the Justice Department’s antitrust division brought several cases challenging no-poaching and wage-setting agreements. In January, four managers of home health care agencies in Maine were indicted on federal charges of conspiring to suppress the wages and restrict the job mobility of essential workers during the pandemic.Still, deploying antitrust enforcement in the job market is somewhat new. It has been used mostly to ward off anticompetitive behavior that raises prices for consumers in product and service markets. Persuading courts to, say, prevent a merger because of its impact on wages might be tougher.A note by the law firm White & Case, for instance, complained that the move to block Penguin Random House’s attempt to buy Simon & Schuster on the grounds that it would reduce royalties to authors is “emblematic of the Biden administration’s and the new populist antitrust movement’s push to direct the purpose of antitrust away from consumer welfare price effects and towards other social harms.” More

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    US Escalates Sanctions With a Freeze on Russian Central Bank Assets

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    WASHINGTON — The Treasury Department on Monday moved to further cut off Russia from the global economy, announcing that it would immobilize Russian central bank assets that are held in the United States and impose sanctions on the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund that is run by a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin.The moves are meant to curb Russia’s ability to use its war chest of international reserves to blunt the impact of sanctions that the United States and European allies have enacted in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.“The unprecedented action we are taking today will significantly limit Russia’s ability to use assets to finance its destabilizing activities, and target the funds Putin and his inner circle depend on to enable his invasion of Ukraine,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said in a statement.Russia has spent the last several years bolstering its defenses against sanctions, amassing $643 billion in foreign currency reserves in part by diverting its oil and gas revenues and reducing its holdings of U.S. dollars. New restrictions by the United States and its allies against selling rubles to Russia aim to undercut the country’s ability to support its currency in the face of new sanctions on its financial sector.As a result of the sanctions, Americans are barred from taking part in any transactions involving the Russian central bank, Russia’s National Wealth Fund or the Russian Ministry of Finance.Any Russian central bank assets that are held in U.S. financial institutions are now stuck, and financial institutions outside the United States that hold dollars for the bank cannot move them. Because the United States has acted in coordination with European allies, Russia’s ability to use its international reserves to support its currency has been curbed. Japan joined with Western allies in imposing the central bank sanctions, freezing Russia’s yen-denominated foreign reserves, the news agency Nikkei reported.“This is simply unprecedented to a scale and scope that we haven’t seen since the Cold War,” said John E. Smith, the former director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. “Sanctions against the Central Bank of Russia and the central bank’s assets held worldwide are simply beyond comparison to previous sanctions regimes, particularly involving a major power like Russia.”It is not clear how much of Russia’s currency reserves are held in U.S. dollars, and Biden administration officials declined to provide an estimate in a briefing with reporters on Monday.The sanctions on the Russian Direct Investment Fund represent an expansion of the effort to sever Russian financial ties from the rest of the world and punish Russian elites. The Treasury Department described the fund, which was created in 2011 and operates in the insurance and financial services industries, as Mr. Putin’s “slush fund” and emblematic of Russia’s kleptocracy. The chief executive of the fund is Kirill Dmitriev, a close ally of Mr. Putin.The fund, according to its website, works with the “world’s foremost investors” to make direct investments in leading and promising Russian companies. It has reserved capital of $10 billion under management and has attracted over $40 billion into the Russian economy. The sanctions ban any Americans from investing in the fund and freeze any assets that it holds in the United States.Senior Biden administration officials said the actions were effective immediately. They noted that the value of Russia’s ruble had already fallen more than 30 percent over the weekend and that Russia’s central bank more than doubled its interest rate to try to mitigate the fallout. They also predicted that inflation would soon spike and economic activity would contract as the country’s currency lost value.Even nations that usually remain neutral in global disputes entered the fray.Switzerland, a favorite destination for Russian oligarchs and their money, announced on Monday that it would freeze Russian financial assets in the country, setting aside its tradition of neutrality to join the European Union and a growing number of nations seeking to penalize Russia for the invasion of Ukraine. The country said it would immediately freeze the assets of Mr. Putin, Prime Minister Mikhail V. Mishustin and Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov, as well as all 367 individuals the European Union imposed sanctions on last week.“These are probably the most serious economic sanctions ever imposed on a country,” said Elina Ribakova, the deputy chief economist of the Institute of International Finance, predicting that Russia’s economy could contract by double digits.The U.S. moves represent a significant escalation of sanctions, although the Treasury Department said it was making an exemption to ensure that transactions related to Russia’s energy exports could continue. It is issuing a “general license” to authorize certain energy-related transactions with the Russian central bank.The carve-out means that energy payments will continue to flow, mitigating risks to global energy markets and Europe, which is heavily reliant on Russian oil and gas exports. U.S. officials said that they wanted energy prices to remain steady and that they did not want a spike in prices to benefit Mr. Putin. However, they noted that they were considering measures that would restrict Russia from acquiring technology it needs to be an energy production leader in the long term.“The U.S. and other Western economies have deployed a set of highly potent financial weapons against Russia with remarkable speed,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economics professor and a former International Monetary Fund official. “Cutting off access to global financial markets and to a country’s war chest of international reserves held in currencies of Western economies amounts to a crippling financial blow, especially to an economy like Russia’s that relies to such a large extent on export revenues.”The measures announced on Monday were born from lessons the United States has learned since imposing sanctions on Russia after its annexation of Crimea in 2014. A senior Biden administration official said that Mr. Putin began amassing international reserves after 2014 to blunt the impact of future sanctions and that the United States, in preparing to exert new pressure on Russia’s economy, determined during months of preparation with European allies that it would need to target Russia’s central bank directly.Understand Russia’s Attack on UkraineCard 1 of 7What is at the root of this invasion? More

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    U.S. escalates sanctions with a freeze on Russian central bank assets.

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    The Treasury Department on Monday moved to further cut off Russia from the global economy, announcing that it would immobilize Russian Central Bank assets that are held in the United States and impose sanctions on the Russian Direct Investment Fund, a sovereign wealth fund that is run by a close ally of President Vladimir V. Putin.The moves are meant to curb Russia’s ability to use its war chest of international reserves to blunt the impact of sanctions that the United States and European allies have enacted in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.“The unprecedented action we are taking today will significantly limit Russia’s ability to use assets to finance its destabilizing activities, and target the funds Putin and his inner circle depend on to enable his invasion of Ukraine,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said in a statement.As a result of the sanctions, Americans are barred from taking part in any transactions involving the Russian Central Bank, Russia’s National Wealth Fund or the Russian Ministry of Finance.The moves represent a significant escalation of U.S. sanctions, although the Treasury Department said it was making an exemption to ensure that transactions related to Russia’s energy exports can continue. It is issuing a “general license” to authorize certain energy-related transactions with the Russian Central Bank.On Saturday, the European Commission, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and the United States said they would remove some Russian banks from the SWIFT financial messaging system, essentially barring them from international transactions, and impose new restrictions on Russia’s Central Bank to prevent it from using its large international reserves to sidestep sanctions.Russia has spent the last several years bolstering its defenses against sanctions, amassing $643 billion in foreign currency reserves in part by diverting its oil and gas revenues. New restrictions by the United States and its allies against selling rubles to Russia aim to undercut the country’s ability to support its currency in the face of new sanctions on its financial sector. More

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    U.S. Eases Sanctions to Allow Routine Transactions With Afghan Government

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    The move allows financial dealings with civil servants at government institutions, even if those ministries are now overseen by Taliban members.WASHINGTON — The Biden administration moved on Friday to relax sanctions that have contributed to the collapse of Afghanistan’s economy since the Taliban takeover in August, issuing a measure that makes clear that people can lawfully engage in transactions with the Afghan government in most circumstances.The measure, known as a general license and announced by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, says that people can lawfully transfer money to civil servants in government agencies — including ministries now led by Taliban officials. The move covers transactions like taxes, fees, import duties and the purchase or receipt of permits, licenses or public utility services.In a statement, Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary, portrayed the move as part of a larger effort by the United States to not just support the flow of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan, but also to facilitate commercial and financial activity there that could allow the economy to function — without directly benefiting Islamist extremists.“In light of this dire crisis, it is essential that we address concerns that sanctions inhibit commercial and financial activity while we continue to deny financial resources to the Taliban, the Haqqani network and other malign actors,” he said.The measure appeared aimed at making it harder to blame the United States government’s sanctions for the unfolding economic disaster in Afghanistan. The economic situation is creating a humanitarian crisis, including widespread starvation, that is spurring a huge wave of migrants to leave the country.The malnutrition ward of the Indira Gandhi Children’s Hospital in Kabul last month.Jim Huylebroek for The New York TimesA senior Biden administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity in a background briefing for reporters, cautioned that many other factors were contributing to the economic collapse in Afghanistan. Those include the abrupt cutoff of huge amounts of Western foreign aid that had paid for government salaries and infrastructure projects, as well as the exodus of technocrats and others with special expertise after the Taliban swept into control.In a statement describing the move, the Treasury Department also emphasized that theme.“While sanctions relief alone cannot reverse longstanding structural challenges and the flight of technocratic and government experts due to the Taliban’s mismanagement, it can ensure that sanctions do not prevent economic activity that the people of Afghanistan rely on to meet their most fundamental needs,” it said.The general license excludes doing business with any entity in which the Taliban or the Haqqani network owns a majority interest. It also does not permit payments related to luxury items or services.The Afghan central bank, known as Da Afghanistan Bank or D.A.B., is among the governing institutions that will face fewer obstacles under the measure. The central bank had formerly propped up the value of the Afghan currency by regularly auctioning United States dollars.That activity has ceased, and the value of the Afghan currency has plunged — making food too expensive for many poor Afghans to buy. At the same time, a currency shortage has led to limits on how much those Afghans who have bank accounts may withdraw from them.Many officials from the bank fled in August, and the Taliban has installed its own leaders to oversee it. But in the briefing, a senior administration official said the U.S. government had been exploring ideas for restarting some normal central bank activities if it can be made truly independent, with controls to prevent money laundering and third-party monitoring. The official said much of whether that could be done was in the hands of the Taliban.The notion of potentially trying to resuscitate Afghanistan’s central bank is in some tension with a move this month by the Biden administration regarding about $7 billion the central bank has deposited at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, money whose fate has been a major focus since the Taliban takeover.When the government of Afghanistan dissolved, the bank made those funds unavailable for withdrawal. The Taliban have since claimed a right to them, while relatives of people killed in the Sept. 11 attacks are trying to seize the funds to pay off the Taliban’s default judgment debts to them from lawsuits they had brought against the Taliban, Al Qaeda and others.On Feb. 11, the Biden administration moved to split those funds in half — in a way that would potentially leave the bank decapitalized. Mr. Biden invoked emergency powers to try to move $3.5 billion into a fund that will be used for the benefit of the Afghan people. The administration left the remaining money for the Sept. 11 plaintiffs to continue pursuing in court.It will be up to a judge to decide whether those funds can be lawfully used to pay off the Taliban’s judgment debts, a question that raises several thorny and unresolved legal issues.The Treasury Department noted that nothing in the new general license “affects the property or interests in property of Da Afghanistan Bank that are protectively blocked” pursuant to Mr. Biden’s recent action. More