Trump, Donald J

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    Trump Is Expected to Upend Biden Labor Policies Favoring Unions

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    After gains by organized labor under President Biden, a second Trump administration is likely to change course on regulation and enforcement.Joseph R. Biden Jr. promised to be the most pro-labor president in history. He embraced unions more overtly than his predecessors in either party, and filled his administration with union supporters.Labor seemed to respond accordingly. Filings for unionization elections spiked to their highest level in a decade, as did union victories. There were breakthroughs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon, and unions prevailed in organizing a major foreign auto plant in the South. A United Automobile Workers walkout yielded substantial contract gains — and images of Mr. Biden joining a picket line.As Donald J. Trump prepares to retake the White House, labor experts expect the legal landscape for labor to turn sharply in another direction.Based on Mr. Trump’s first term and his comments during the campaign — including his praise for Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, for what he said was Mr. Musk’s willingness to fire striking workers — these experts say the new administration is likely to bring fewer challenges to employers who fight unions. “There will be a concerted effort to repeal pro-worker N.L.R.B. precedents,” said Heidi Shierholz, a senior Labor Department official during the Obama administration, referring to the National Labor Relations Board.Experts like Ms. Shierholz, who is now president of the liberal Economic Policy Institute, said they also expected the Trump administration to ease up on enforcing safety rules, to narrow eligibility for overtime pay and to make it harder for gig workers to gain status as employees.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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    Trump’s Win Shows Limits of Biden’s Industrial Policy

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    When President Biden addressed the nation this week after a gutting election, his reflections on his economic legacy offered a glimpse into why Democrats were resoundingly defeated.The efforts by the Biden-Harris administration to reshape American manufacturing were the most ambitious economic plans in a generation, but most voters had yet to see the fruits of those policies.“We have legislation we passed that’s only now just really kicking in,” Mr. Biden said, explaining that a “vast majority” of the benefits from federal investments that his administration made would be felt over the next decade.Legislation enacted by the Biden-Harris administration was designed to pump hundreds of billions of dollars into the United States economy to develop domestic clean energy and semiconductor sectors. The investments were likened to a modern-day New Deal that would make American supply chains less reliant on foreign adversaries while creating thousands of jobs, including for workers without a college degree.But anger over more immediate and tangible economic issues — including rapid inflation and high mortgage rates — dwarfed optimism about factories that had yet to be built. That reality helped topple Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign and showed the limits of industrial policy as a winning political strategy.In the days since Mr. Trump’s victory, current and former Biden administration officials have been grappling both privately and publicly with why their economic strategy did not prove to be more popular. They have comforted themselves with the fact that inflation has led to the defeat of incumbent leaders around the world, although most of those governments were also struggling with weak economies, whereas growth in the United States remains robust.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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    With Trump Tariffs Looming, Businesses Try to ‘Run From a Moving Target’

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    Rick Muskat woke up the morning after the election with an urgent task. He got his agent in China on the phone at 4:30 a.m. Beijing time and pressed him to ask their factory how many more pairs of men’s dress shoes they could make before Chinese New Year, at the end of January.“I told them if they could make an additional 30,000 pairs, we would take that,” Mr. Muskat, the co-owner of a shoe company called Deer Stags, said on Thursday.The impetus was not a sudden jump in demand for shoes but the looming threat of steep tariffs on Chinese products. By stockpiling now, Mr. Muskat reckoned, his company could avoid at least some of the levies that President-elect Donald J. Trump has promised to impose when he takes office in January.“We’re going to take whatever they can make,” Mr. Muskat said.The election of Mr. Trump is already cascading through global supply chains, where companies are grappling with his promises to remake international trade by raising the tariffs the United States puts on foreign products. Mr. Trump has floated a variety of plans — including a 10 to 20 percent tax on most foreign products, and a 60 percent tariff on goods from China — that would raise the surcharge American importers pay to a level not seen in generations.Much remains unclear about his proposals, including which countries other than China would face tariffs, what products might be excluded and when they would take effect. But given Mr. Trump’s history of imposing taxes and the challenges those pose to global businesses that depend on moving products across borders, many executives are not waiting to see what he does.Some, like Mr. Muskat, are preparing to stock up their U.S. warehouses before tariffs might go into effect. Others have been accelerating plans to move out of China, reaching out to lobbyists and lawyers in Washington and calling board meetings to discuss what the tariff threats could mean for their businesses.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

  • 138 Shares125 Views

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    What Trump’s Win Means for the Federal Reserve and Jerome Powell

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    Donald J. Trump spent his first presidency on a collision course with America’s central bank. Will it intensify?Donald J. Trump spent his first presidency attacking the Federal Reserve, pushing policymakers to cut interest rates and calling Fed officials names that ranged from “boneheads” to “enemy.”That rhetoric is likely to make a return to the White House with Mr. Trump. The Republican has been promising that interest rates will come down on his watch — even though rates are set by the politically independent Fed and the president has no direct control over them.The question looming over markets and the Fed itself is whether Mr. Trump will do more than just talk this time as he tries to get his way. The Fed is in the process of cutting rates, but it is unclear whether it will do so fast enough to please Mr. Trump.Congress granted the Fed independence from the White House so that central bankers would have the freedom to make policy decisions that brought near-term pain but long-term benefits. Higher rates are unpopular with consumers and with incumbent politicians, for instance, though they can leave the economy on a more sustainable path over time.But some in Wall Street and in political circles worry that the Fed’s insulation from politics could come under pressure in the years ahead. Here’s what that might look like.Trump Could Shake Up Fed PersonnelMr. Trump first elevated Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, to his current role in early 2018. He then quickly soured on Mr. Powell, who resisted his calls to sharply lower interest rates.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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    Here’s What to Watch as the Fed Meets Thursday

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    Federal Reserve officials are widely expected to cut rates by a quarter point, as uncertainty about a second Trump presidency looms large.Federal Reserve officials are widely expected to cut interest rates on Thursday. The bigger focus will center on what comes next for America’s central bank.Fed officials are cutting interest rates in response to months of slowing inflation. Policymakers lowered borrowing costs for the first time in four years in September, reducing them by half a percentage point. Officials projected two more smaller rate cuts in 2024 and a string of further reductions in 2025.But a combination of stronger recent economic data and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House could muddle that outlook.The job market, which seemed wobbly when the Fed last met in September, has since stabilized. Consumer spending has remained strong, and overall growth looks solid. Those developments suggest that rates might not need to come down as much or as quickly in order to keep the economy steady.And if Mr. Trump follows through on his campaign promises, they could make it more difficult for the Fed to continue lowering interest rates as quickly. He has pledged a combination of tax cuts, tariffs and deportations that economists and Wall Street investors think could fuel inflation.“The main takeaway is that his election injects a higher degree of uncertainty into the outlook both for growth and for inflation,” said Blerina Uruci, chief U.S. economist at T. Rowe Price.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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    Democrats Got the Recovery They Wanted. It Wasn’t Enough.

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    America’s economic growth is the envy of its global counterparts. But voters wanted more from the Biden administration — specifically, lower prices.Donald Trump has won the 2024 presidential election. Follow live updates and results.Every major U.S. ally is uncomfortably familiar with one of President Biden’s favorite charts. It is a graph of economic recoveries in the wealthy world since the end of the pandemic recession. It shows growth flatlining for the United Kingdom, Germany and Japan over the past two years — while in the United States, growth keeps rocketing up.That chart helps explain why voters have punished ruling parties in election after post-Covid election around the world. Sluggish growth, coupled with a surge in consumer prices, proved toxic for the Conservative Party in Britain. It helped hobble President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition in France and contributed to Japan’s longtime leaders, the Liberal Democrats, losing their majority this fall.Germany’s governing coalition has been so weakened by recession and so flustered by disagreements over how to revive growth that it teetered this week on the brink of collapse.Advisers to Mr. Biden and to Vice President Kamala Harris, his successor candidate in the presidential election, had hoped that America’s outlier economy would rescue them from a similar fate.It did not.Ms. Harris lost to former President Donald J. Trump. Democrats will spend at least months parsing data for conclusions on what drove the defeat. Certainly, economic factors were only one contributor.But as Europe’s stumbling economies woke on Wednesday to the news of Ms. Harris’s defeat, one thing was immediately clear: America’s growth engine may be the envy of the world, but it is not the envy of the American public.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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    Trump’s Economic Plans Could Worsen Inflation, Economists Say

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    Many Americans fretted about inflation as they headed out to vote. But Donald J. Trump’s approach comes with risks of a renewed boost.Americans have been chafing against higher prices for years now, propelling unhappy voters to the polls and helping to deliver the White House to the Republican candidate, Donald J. Trump.But how Mr. Trump’s policies would help on costs is unclear. And in fact, many economists have warned that his proposals could instead make inflation worse.Inflation measures how much prices are rising over a given period, usually a year. It picked up sharply starting in 2022 and remained rapid in 2023. While prices are no longer climbing as quickly, those two years of rapid increase have left costs for many common purchases — from eggs to apartments and restaurant meals — notably more expensive than consumers remember them being as recently as 2019 or 2020.For months, that has weighed on consumer confidence and caused many voters to give the nation’s economic performance poor marks, even though the unemployment rate is very low and companies have been hiring.Voters regularly cited the economy as a top concern in polls headed into the election, and they often suggested that they thought Mr. Trump would do a better job in managing it. While the economic perception gap between Mr. Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris, the democratic candidate, closed somewhat over time, it never fully faded.While rapid inflation had been a global trend, Mr. Trump regularly pinned the blame for it on the Biden administration. And exit polls suggested that voters were indeed worried about the economy as they headed out to vote. Roughly three in four voters said that inflation had caused their families hardship over the past year.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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    U.S. Farmers Brace for New Trump Trade Wars Amid Tariff Threats

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    Despite their concerns, some farm operators still support the former president and prefer his overall economic plan.To former President Donald J. Trump, “tariff” is the most beautiful word in the dictionary.But to farmers in rural America, the blanket import duties that Mr. Trump wants to enact if elected are a nightmare that they would rather not live through again.As president, Mr. Trump imposed tariffs in 2018 and 2019 on $300 billion of Chinese imports, a punishment he wielded in order to get China to negotiate a trade deal with the United States. His action triggered a trade war between Washington and Beijing, with China slapping retaliatory tariffs on American products. It also shifted more of its soybean purchases to Brazil and Argentina, hurting U.S. soybean farmers who had long relied on the Chinese market.When Mr. Trump finally announced a limited trade deal in 2019, American farmers were frazzled and subsisting on subsidies that the Trump administration had handed out to keep them afloat.Now it could happen all over again.“The prospect of additional tariffs doesn’t sound good,” said Leslie Bowman, a corn and soybean farmer from Chambersburg, Pa. “The idea of tariffs is to protect U.S. industries, but for the agricultural industry, it’s going to hurt.”The support of farmers in swing states such as Pennsylvania could be pivotal in determining the outcome of Tuesday’s election. Mr. Trump remains popular in rural America, and voters such as Mr. Bowman say they are weighing a variety of factors as they consider whom to vote for.Mr. Trump has said that if he wins the election he will put tariffs as high as 50 percent on imports from around the world. Tariffs on Chinese imports could be even higher, and some foreign products would face levies upward of 200 percent. Economists have warned that such tariffs could reignite inflation, slow economic growth and harm the industries that Mr. Trump says he wants to help.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