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Chinese Exports Are Threatening Biden’s Industrial Agenda

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The president is increasingly hitting back with tariffs and other measures meant to restrict imports, raising tensions with Beijing.President Biden’s trillion-dollar effort to invigorate American manufacturing and speed a transition to cleaner energy sources is colliding with a surge of cheap exports from China, threatening to wipe out the investment and jobs that are central to Mr. Biden’s economic agenda.Mr. Biden is weighing new measures to protect nascent industries like electric-vehicle production and solar-panel manufacturing from Chinese competition. On Wednesday in Pittsburgh, the president called for higher tariffs on Chinese steel and aluminum products and announced a new trade investigation into China’s heavily subsidized shipbuilding industry.“I’m not looking for a fight with China,” Mr. Biden said. “I’m looking for competition — and fair competition.”Unions, manufacturing groups and some economists say the administration may need to do much more to restrict Chinese imports if it hopes to ensure that Mr. Biden’s vast industrial initiatives are not swamped by lower-cost Chinese versions of the same emerging technologies.“It is a very clear and present danger, because the industrial policy of the Biden administration is largely focused on not the traditional low-skill, low-wage manufacturing, but new, high-tech manufacturing,” said Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University economist who specializes in trade policies.“Those are precisely the areas where China has upped its own investments,” he said.Both America and China are using large government subsidies to stoke economic growth and try to dominate what they believe will be the most important global markets of this century: the technologies meant to speed a global transition away from fossil fuels in order to avert catastrophic climate change.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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    TSMC Will Receive $6.6 Billion to Bolster U.S. Chip Manufacturing

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    Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company plans to build an additional factory and upgrade another planned facility in Phoenix with the federal grants.The Biden administration will award up to $6.6 billion in grants to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the leading maker of the most advanced microchips, in a bid to bring some of the most cutting-edge semiconductor technology to the United States.The funds, which come from the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, will help support the construction of TSMC’s first major U.S. hub, in Phoenix. The company has already committed to building two plants at the site and will use some of the grant money to build a third factory in Phoenix, U.S. officials said on Sunday. TSMC will also increase its total investments in the United States to more than $65 billion, up from $40 billion.Federal officials view the investment as vital for building up a reliable domestic supply of semiconductors, the small chips that power everything from phones and supercomputers to cars and fighter jets. Although semiconductors were invented in the United States, production has largely shifted overseas in recent decades. Only about 10 percent of the world’s chips are made in the United States.The award is the second largest by the federal government under a program intended to re-establish the United States as a leader in semiconductor manufacturing. Its unveiling comes a few weeks after President Biden announced that Intel, another major chipmaker, would receive $8.5 billion in grants and up to $11 billion in loans during a tour of battleground states meant to sell his economic agenda.The CHIPS Act, which lawmakers passed in 2022, gave the Commerce Department $39 billion to distribute as subsidies to incentivize companies to build and expand chip plants across the United States. The program is a major pillar of President Biden’s economic policy agenda, which is centered around strengthening American manufacturing.TSMC’s award will bring the total announced grants to more than $16 billion. Three other smaller companies, including GlobalFoundries, Microchip Technology and BAE Systems, received the first awards.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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    Why a Second Trump Term Could Be Bad for Corporate America

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    There was anxiety in the thin mountain air when the planet’s economic leaders gathered in January at Davos for the 54th meeting of the World Economic Forum. Donald Trump had just trounced Nikki Haley in the Iowa caucuses, all but securing the Republican nomination for president. Haley was reliable, a known quantity. A resurgent Trump, on the other hand, was more worrying.Listen to this article, read by Edoardo BalleriniOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.The Davos attendees needed reassurance, and Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, had some to offer. In an interview with CNBC that made headlines around the world, Dimon praised Trump’s economic policies as president. “Be honest,” Dimon said, sitting against a backdrop of snow-dusted evergreens, dressed casually in a dark blazer and polo shirt. “He was kind of right about NATO, kind of right on immigration. He grew the economy quite well. Trade. Tax reform worked. He was right about some of China.” Asked which of the likely presidential candidates would be better for business, he opted not to pick a side.“I will be prepared for both,” he said. “We will deal with both.”Dimon presides over the largest and most profitable bank in the United States and has done so for nearly 20 years. Maybe more than any single individual, he stands in for the Wall Street establishment and, by extension, corporate America. With his comments at Davos, he seemed to be sending a message of good will to Trump on their behalf. But he also appeared to be trying to put his fellow globalists at ease, reassuring them that America, long a haven for investors fleeing risk in less-stable democracies, would remain a safe destination for their money in a second Trump administration.Jamie Dimon, the chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, here testifying before Congress in 2023, has attempted to reassure global business leaders the economy would remain stable during a second Trump administration.Evelyn Hockstein/ReutersBut would it? As Dimon noted, for all Trump’s extreme rhetoric in the 2016 campaign — his threats to rip up America’s international trade agreements and his attacks on “globalization” and the “financial elite” — his presidency, like most presidencies, proved to be business-friendly. Corporate America wound up with plenty of allies in the administration, from Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs executive; to Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross, a Harvard Business School-educated bankruptcy guru; to Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, an aspiring Wall Street player. And the Trump administration’s economic agenda of reduced taxes and deregulation largely suited corporate America’s interests; JPMorgan saved billions of dollars a year thanks to Trump’s corporate tax cuts.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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    Fed Chair Says Central Bank Need Not ‘Hurry’ to Cut Rates

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    Jerome Powell said that strong economic growth gives Federal Reserve officials room to be patient, and he emphasized the institution’s political independence.Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, said on Friday that resilient economic growth is giving the central bank the flexibility to be patient before cutting interest rates.Fed officials raised interest rates sharply from early 2022 to mid-2023, and they have left them at about 5.3 percent since last July. That relatively high level essentially taps the brakes on the economy, in part by making it expensive to borrow to buy a house or start a business. The goal is to keep rates high enough, for long enough, to wrestle inflation back under control.But price increases have cooled notably in recent months — inflation ran at 2.5 percent in February, a report on Friday showed, far below its 7.1 percent peak in 2022 for that gauge and just slightly above the Fed’s 2 percent goal. Given that slowdown, officials have been considering when and how much they can cut interest rates this year.While investors were initially hopeful that rate cuts would come early in the year and be substantial, Fed officials have recently struck a cautious tone, maintaining that they want greater confidence that inflation was under control. Mr. Powell reiterated that message on Friday.“We can, and we will be, careful about this decision — because we can be,” Mr. Powell said, speaking in a question-and-answer session with the “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal in San Francisco. “The economy is strong: We see very strong growth.”Friday’s Personal Consumption Expenditures report showed that consumers are still spending at a rapid clip. Recent hiring data has also remained solid. In all, the economy seems to be holding up even with the Fed’s high 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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    The Trustbuster Who Has Apple and Google in His Sights

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    Shortly after Jonathan Kanter took over the Justice Department’s antitrust division in November 2021, the agency secured an additional $50 million to investigate monopolies, bust criminal cartels and block mergers.To celebrate, Mr. Kanter bought a prop of a giant check, placed it outside his office and wrote on the check’s memo line: “Break ’Em Up.”Mr. Kanter, 50, has pushed that philosophy ever since, becoming a lead architect of the most significant effort in decades to fight the concentration of power in corporate America. On Thursday, he took his biggest swing when the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple. In the 88-page lawsuit, the government argued that Apple had violated antitrust laws with practices intended to keep customers reliant on its iPhones and less likely to switch to competing devices.That lawsuit joins two Justice Department antitrust cases against Google that argue the company illegally shored up monopolies. Mr. Kanter’s staff has also challenged numerous corporate mergers, including suing to stop JetBlue Airways from buying Spirit Airlines.“We want to help real people by making sure that our antitrust laws work for workers, work for consumers, work for entrepreneurs and work to protect our democratic values,” Mr. Kanter said in a January interview. He declined to comment on the Google cases and other active litigation.At a news conference about the Apple lawsuit on Thursday, Mr. Kanter compared the action to past Justice Department challenges to Standard Oil, AT&T and Microsoft. The suit is aimed at protecting “the market for the innovations that we can’t yet perceive,” he said.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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    Biden Budget Lays Out Battle Lines Against Trump

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    President Biden and former President Donald J. Trump offer vastly different policy paths on almost every aspect of the economy.President Biden in his budget this week staked out major economic battle lines with former President Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The proposal offers the nation a glimpse of the diverging directions that retirement programs, taxes, trade and energy policy could take depending on the outcome of the November election.During the past three years, Mr. Biden has enacted key pieces of legislation aimed at bolstering the green energy economy, making infrastructure investments and reinforcing America’s domestic supply chain with subsidies for microchips, solar technology and electric vehicles. Few of those priorities are shared by Mr. Trump, who has pledged to cut more taxes and erect new trade barriers if re-elected.The inflection point will be arriving as the economy enters the final stretch of what economists are now expecting to be a “soft landing” after two years of high inflation. However, the prospect of a second Trump administration has injected increased uncertainty into the economic outlook, as companies and policymakers around the world brace for what could be a dramatic shift in the economic stewardship of the United States.Here are some of the most striking differences in the economic policies of the two presidential candidates.Sparring over the social safety netAt first glance, Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump might appear to have similar positions on the nation’s social safety net programs. In 2016, Mr. Trump broke with his fellow Republicans and refused to support cuts to Social Security or Medicare. Mr. Biden has long insisted that the programs should be protected and has hammered Republicans who have suggested cutting or scaling back the programs.In his budget proposal on Monday, Mr. Biden reiterated his commitment to preserving the nation’s entitlement system. He called for new efforts to improve the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, including making wealthy Americans pay more into the health program. However, his plans were light on details regarding how to ensure both programs’ long-term sustainability.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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    Biden’s $7.3 Trillion Budget Proposal Highlights Divide With Trump and GOP

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    President Biden proposed a $7.3 trillion budget on Monday packed with tax increases on corporations and high earners, new spending on social programs and a wide range of efforts to combat high consumer costs like housing and college tuition.The proposal includes only relatively small changes from the budget plan Mr. Biden submitted last year, which went nowhere in Congress, though it reiterates his call for lawmakers to spend about $100 billion to strengthen border security and deliver aid to Israel and Ukraine.Most of the new spending and tax increases included in the fiscal year 2025 budget again stand almost no chance of becoming law this year, given that Republicans control the House and roundly oppose Mr. Biden’s economic agenda. Last week, House Republicans passed a budget proposal outlining their priorities, which are far afield from what Democrats have called for.Instead, the document will serve as a draft of Mr. Biden’s policy platform as he seeks re-election in November, along with a series of contrasts intended to draw a distinction with his presumptive Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump.Mr. Biden has sought to reclaim strength on economic issues with voters who have given him low marks amid elevated inflation. This budget aims to portray him as a champion of increased government aid for workers, parents, manufacturers, retirees and students, as well as the fight against climate change.Speaking in New Hampshire on Monday, Mr. Biden heralded the budget as a way to raise revenue to pay for his priorities by raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans and big corporations.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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    The Surprising Left-Right Alliance That Wants More Apartments in Suburbs

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    The YIMBY movement isn’t just for liberals any more. Legislators from both sides of the political divide are working to add duplexes and apartments to single-family neighborhoods.For years, the Yimbytown conference was an ideologically safe space where liberal young professionals could talk to other liberal young professionals about the particular problems of cities with a lot of liberal young professionals: not enough bike lanes and transit, too many restrictive zoning laws.The event began in 2016 in Boulder, Colo., and has ever since revolved around a coalition of left and center Democrats who want to make America’s neighborhoods less exclusive and its housing more dense. (YIMBY, a pro-housing movement that is increasingly an identity, stands for “Yes in my backyard.”)But the vibes and crowd were surprisingly different at this year’s meeting, which was held at the University of Texas at Austin in February. In addition to vegan lunches and name tags with preferred pronouns, the conference included — even celebrated — a group that had until recently been unwelcome: red-state Republicans.The first day featured a speech on changing zoning laws by Greg Gianforte, the Republican governor of Montana, who last year signed a housing package that YIMBYs now refer to as “the Montana Miracle.” Day 2 kicked off with a panel on solutions to Texas’s rising housing costs. One of the speakers was a Republican legislator in Texas who, in addition to being an advocate for loosening land-use regulations, has pushed for a near-total ban on abortions.Anyone who missed these discussions might have instead gone to the panel on bipartisanship where Republican housing reformers from Arizona and Montana talked with a Democratic state senator from Vermont. Or noticed the list of sponsors that, in addition to foundations like Open Philanthropy and Arnold Ventures, included conservative and libertarian organizations like the Mercatus Center, the American Enterprise Institute and the Pacific Legal Foundation.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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    How Trump’s Justice Dept. Derailed an Investigation of a Major Company

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    The industrial giant Caterpillar hired William Barr and other lawyers to defuse a federal criminal investigation of alleged tax dodges.In December 2018, a team of federal law enforcement agents flew to Amsterdam to interview a witness in a yearslong criminal investigation into Caterpillar, which had avoided billions of dollars of income taxes by shifting profits to a Swiss subsidiary.A few hours before the interview was set to begin, the agents were startled to hear that the Justice Department was telling them to cancel the long-planned meeting.The interview was never rescheduled, and the investigation would limp along for another few years before culminating, in late 2022, with a victory for Caterpillar. The Internal Revenue Service told the giant industrial company to pay less than a quarter of the back taxes the government once claimed that Caterpillar owed and did not impose any penalties. The criminal investigation was closed without charges being filed — and even without agents having the chance to review records seized from the company.Caterpillar appears to have defused the investigation at least in part by deploying a type of raw legal power that rarely becomes publicly visible. This account is based on interviews with people familiar with the investigation, regulatory filings and internal Justice Department emails provided to Senate investigators and reviewed by The New York Times.In the months leading up to the canceled interview in the Netherlands, Caterpillar had enlisted a small group of well-connected lawyers to plead the company’s case. Chief among those was William P. Barr, who had served as attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration.Richard Zuckerman, the Justice Department’s top tax official, stopped an investigation into Caterpillar after meeting with its lawyers.Jerry ZolynskyWe 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