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    The Race to Lead Trump’s Treasury Dept. Is Becoming a Cliffhanger

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    Howard Lutnick? Scott Bessent? Marc Rowan? Kevin Warsh? The president-elect’s list of candidates has grown longer, clouding the future of the department.Who will get the key to head up the Treasury Department?Kevin Lamarque/ReutersRowan and Warsh shake up Treasury raceFew of the unfilled positions in Donald Trump’s cabinet are as important as Treasury secretary. But the question of who will fill the role is only getting cloudier.Allies of two candidates, Howard Lutnick, the transition co-chair, and Scott Bessent, a top economic adviser, publicly stumped for them this weekend. But The Times reports that the president-elect himself wants somebody “big” for the role and is now considering Marc Rowan, the C.E.O. of Apollo Global Management, and Kevin Warsh, a former Fed governor.Elon Musk, Dan Loeb and others are weighing in. Musk threw his support behind Lutnick over the weekend, calling Bessent “business as usual,” an especially cutting criticism in the Trump camp. That said, The Times reports that Trump has privately griped about Lutnick hanging around too much and potentially manipulating the transition process for his own benefit.Loeb backed Bessent, arguing that choosing Lutnick might rattle investors, including in the $28 trillion market for Treasury bonds and notes. That said, Bessent is also being floated for positions such as chair of the White House’s National Economic Council.Trump has told associates that he is impressed by Rowan, The Times reports. The president-elect tends to value wealth and status on Wall Street, and Rowan, a co-founder of Apollo who helped turn the firm into a $733 billion investment giant, has plenty of both.Rowan would be likely to reassure many on Wall Street, particularly given how unorthodox some of the other cabinet choices have been. But it’s unclear whether he would want to take such a public role, especially given his current work at Apollo. (How hard it would be to extricate Rowan from any “key man” provisions in the firm’s funds is another question.)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, Jay Powell and a Potential Fight over the Fed’s Future

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      As Trump allies including Elon Musk endorse ending the Federal Reserve’s independence, the central bank’s chair is reportedly ready to go to court to fight back.Jay Powell appears ready to defend Fed independence, and his job.Kent Nishimura/Getty ImagesA battle over the Fed’s future Donald Trump’s threat to exert more say over the Fed or even fire Jay Powell, the chair of the central bank, has alarmed some on Wall Street. But the president-elect’s effort took on added weight in recent days, after Elon Musk endorsed a push to erode the Fed’s independence.The fight shows how the future of the Fed could remain high on the agenda, and how far Musk’s influence — and the role of X as place for announcing policy positions — could extend across government.The Fed has its foes. Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, introduced a bill in June to abolish the central bank, accusing it of being an “economic manipulator that has directly contributed to the financial instability many Americans face today.”Lee said on X that he wants to see the Fed under the president’s control — a view that Musk backed.Powell could turn to the courts to challenge any White House attempt to exert more control, according to The Wall Street Journal’s Nick Timiraos. Trump appointed Powell in 2017 but flirted with removing him shortly afterward. Powell held onto his job, but was ready for a fight if Trump made a move, Timiraos writes:Powell told then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that he would fight his removal if sought by the president, according to people familiar with the matter. Trump was upset the Fed was raising interest rates against his wishes.For Powell, the unsavory prospect of a legal showdown — one he might have to pay for out of his own pocket — was imperative to preserve the ability of future Fed chairs to serve without the threat of being removed over a policy dispute.Powell has made it clear that the president doesn’t have the authority to remove a Fed chair. Last week, he said he wouldn’t step down if Trump asked him to do so after the central bank lowered borrowing costs by a quarter point. Removing him, he added, was “not permitted under the law.”A 1977 law gave Congress more oversight of the Fed, but enshrined the institution’s independence on policy.The central bank’s ability to set monetary policy without political influence is a core tenet for markets and the economy. The Fed also has an outsized influence through its freedom to buy and sell securities, like Treasury notes and bonds, as it looks to bring more liquidity to trading.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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      Powell, Fed Chair, Will Likely Face Heavy Pressure From Trump

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      The chair of the Federal Reserve made clear he would not resign, even under pressure. But pressure from the White House is likely, market watchers say.Jay Powell, the Fed chair, with President Trump during more tranquil times in 2017.Carlos Barria/ReutersPowell pushes back Jay Powell and the Fed may have pulled off the improbable soft landing in taming inflation while not crashing the economy into recession, proving many a Wall Street naysayer wrong.But an even bigger wildcard looms in another Donald Trump presidency — what Trump 2.0 might mean for interest rates, Fed independence and the Fed chair’s own job.That tension burst into the open at the Fed’s news conference on Thursday. The usually dry event had moments of high drama that nearly overshadowed the decision to cut the benchmark lending rate by a quarter percentage point. Powell delivered a forceful “no” when asked by Victoria Guida of Politico if he would consider resigning if Trump asked.He delivered a more emphatic response when pressed by another reporter on whether the president had the legal authority to fire him. “Not permitted under the law,” Powell said.Trump has made waves by saying that a president should have a say in rates policy. And suggestions have circulated from inside the president-elect’s camp that he would sideline Powell if re-elected — something Trump flirted with during his first term after appointing Powell in 2017.The S&P 500 advanced as the news conference wore on, closing at another record, and Treasury bonds also rallied.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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      Jobs Report Adds to Economic Momentum for Harris

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      Vice President Kamala Harris probably could not have hoped for a better run of pre-election economic data than what the United States has enjoyed over the last month, punctuated by Friday’s surprisingly strong jobs report.In recent weeks, key inflation indicators have fallen close to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target rate, after years of running hot under Ms. Harris and President Biden. Federal Reserve officials cut interest rates by a half-percentage point to stoke economic activity, immediately bringing mortgage rates to their lowest point in two years. The Commerce Department confirmed that the economy has grown at a robust 3 percent clip over the last year, after adjusting for rising prices. The Census Bureau reported that the typical household’s inflation-adjusted income jumped in 2023.Those numbers had encouraged Democrats, including policymakers in the White House and close to Ms. Harris’s campaign team. Recent polls have shown Ms. Harris closing the gap, or pulling even, with former President Donald J. Trump on the question of who can best handle the economy and inflation.But it was Friday’s employment report — 254,000 jobs gained, with wages growing faster than prices — that appeared to give Harris boosters a particularly large dose of confidence. The report came less than a day after striking dockworkers agreed to return to work through the end of the year, avoiding what could have been a major economic disruption with a month to go before the election.“The combination of this great job market and easing inflation is generating solid real wage and income gains,” said Jared Bernstein, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers. “While those continue to power this expansion forward, we’re also seeing record investment in key sectors, an entrepreneurial boom and gains in worker bargaining power to help ensure that workers get their fair share of all this growth.”Even Mr. Biden, who has attempted to strike a balance between cheering the economy’s performance and acknowledging the struggles created by years of fast-rising prices, sounded more upbeat than normal for a post-jobs-report statement.“Today, we received good news for American workers and families with more than 250,000 new jobs in September and unemployment back down at 4.1 percent,” he said.Independent economists were less cheerful. Several of them acknowledged the strong numbers but warned that they could be illusory, and that the Fed may need to continue to cut interest rates in the months to come to keep unemployment from rising.“The September jobs report is unambiguously strong,” James Knightley, the chief international economist at ING, wrote in a research note. But he immediately warned that other indicators, including Americans’ personal assessments that the job market is worsening, cloud the picture. “We feel that the risks remain skewed towards weaker growth.” More

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      After Fierce Lobbying, Regulators Soften Proposed Rules on Banks

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      A top Federal Reserve official said that blowback to proposed rules on capital requirements led him to “relearn the lesson of humility.”Regulators on Tuesday watered down an effort to layer new oversight on banks to protect against losses, which led to a fierce outcry from big banks and their lobbyists.The new standards, known as “Basel III endgame,” had been debated for years. They would have raised the amount of capital banks were required to maintain, funds intended to ensure stability and provide a financial cushion. Banks argued that the stricter rules would force them to crimp lending.The newly proposed rules will largely erase extra requirements on banks with between $100 billion and $250 billion in assets. It also slashes in half the capital reserve requirements on the largest, so-called systematically important lenders.Michael S. Barr, the Federal Reserve vice chair who is no favorite of the bank lobby, acknowledged the blowback in a speech laying out the changes: “Capital has costs, too,” he said in a speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington. In its statements pushing against the rules over the years, the banks’ main lobbying organization has said that “capital isn’t free.”“Life gives you ample opportunity to learn and relearn the lesson of humility,” Mr. Barr said.This is a developing story. Check back for updates. More

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      Inflation Is Fading, Statistically and Politically

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      Last week was full of speeches. Most of those that attracted national attention were at the Democratic National Convention, culminating in Vice President Kamala Harris’s big moment on Thursday. But there was another important speech on Friday: Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’s talk at the Fed’s annual shindig in Jackson Hole, Wyo.Yes, Powell’s remarks were of particular interest to investors looking for clues about future monetary policy. But even though his speech was rigorously apolitical, it had important political implications. For what we’re seeing, I’d argue, is inflation fading away — not just in the data, but also as a political issue. And that, of course, is very good news for Democrats.About Powell’s speech: He noted that the inflation rate has declined a lot since it peaked in 2022 and expressed confidence that it’s on track to reach the Fed’s target of 2 percent — and why it’s getting there without the mass unemployment some economists had claimed would be necessary. Falling inflation all but guarantees that the Fed will cut interest rates at its Open Market committee meeting next month, although the size of the anticipated cut is uncertain.What has brought inflation down? Like many economists, myself included, Powell believes that inflation was largely caused by “pandemic-related distortions” and that “the unwinding of these factors took much longer than expected but ultimately played a large role in the subsequent disinflation.”Although Powell didn’t and couldn’t say so explicitly, this analysis implicitly exonerates the Biden administration. Many people, like Elon Musk — who, after demonstrating his political acumen last year by boosting Robert Kennedy Jr., has lately decided that he’s an expert on macroeconomics — attribute inflation to Biden-era government spending. Powell’s discussion suggests, however, that fiscal policy played at most a distinctly secondary role.But few voters follow Fed speeches; won’t they continue to blame Democrats for inflation?Not necessarily. Surveys suggest that the political salience of inflation and the economy in general have been fading. It’s probably too late to convince voters that Democrats have done a good job managing the economy, even though that’s objectively the case — overall, America has outperformed other wealthy nations, achieving exceptionally high growth without exceptionally high inflation. But the economy is looking less and less like the, um, trump card Republicans were counting on.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. Added 818,000 Fewer Jobs Than Reported Earlier

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      The Labor Department issued revised figures for the 12 months through March that point to greater economic fragility.The U.S. economy added far fewer jobs in 2023 and early 2024 than previously reported, a sign that cracks in the labor market are more severe — and began forming earlier — than initially believed.On Wednesday, the Labor Department said that monthly payroll figures overstated job growth by roughly 818,000 in the 12 months that ended in March. That suggests employers added about 174,000 jobs per month during that period, down from the previously reported pace of about 242,000 jobs — a downward revision of about 28 percent.The revisions, which are preliminary, are part of an annual process in which monthly estimates, based on surveys, are reconciled with more accurate but less timely records from state unemployment offices. The new figures, once finalized, will be incorporated into official government employment statistics early next year.The updated numbers are the latest sign of vulnerability in the job market, which until recently had appeared rock solid despite months of high interest rates and economists’ warnings of an impending recession. More recent data, which wasn’t affected by the revisions, suggest job growth slowed further in the spring and summer, and the unemployment rate, though still relatively low at 4.3 percent, has been gradually rising.Federal Reserve officials are paying close attention to the signs of erosion as they weigh when and how much to begin lowering interest rates. In a speech in Alaska on Tuesday, Michelle W. Bowman, a Fed governor, highlighted “risks that the labor market has not been as strong as the payroll data have been indicating,” although she also said that the increase in the unemployment rate could be overstating the extent of the slowdown.Investors, too, had been watching the revisions closely because of their implications for Fed policy. They were forced to wait longer than expected, however: The data, originally scheduled for a 10 a.m. release, was not published until after 10:30 a.m.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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      Americans Growing Worried About Losing Their Jobs, Labor Survey Shows

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      The New York Fed’s labor market survey showed cracks just as Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, prepares for a closely watched Friday speech.Americans are increasingly worried about losing their jobs, a new survey from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York released on Monday showed, a worrying sign at a moment when economists and central bankers are warily monitoring for cracks in the job market.The New York Fed’s July survey of labor market expectations showed that the expected likelihood of becoming unemployed rose to 4.4 percent on average, up from 3.9 percent a year earlier and the highest in data going back to 2014.In fact, the new data showed signs of the labor market cracking across a range of metrics. People reported leaving or losing jobs, marked down their salary expectations and increasingly thought that they would need to work past traditional retirement ages. The share of workers who reported searching for a job in the past four weeks jumped to 28.4 percent — the highest level since the data started — up from 19.4 percent in July 2023.The survey, which quizzes a nationally representative sample of people on their recent economic experience, suggested that meaningful fissures may be forming in the labor market. While it is just one report, it comes at a tense moment, as economists and central bankers watch nervously for signs that the job market is taking a turn for the worse.The unemployment rate has moved up notably over the past year, climbing to 4.3 percent in July. That has put many economy watchers on edge. The jobless rate rarely moves up as sharply as is has recently outside of an economic recession.But the slowdown in the labor market has not been widely backed up by other data. Jobless claims have moved up but remain relatively low. Consumer spending remains robust, with both overall retail sales data and company earnings reports suggesting that shoppers continue to open their wallets.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 Big Number: 2.9%

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      The rate of inflation in July on a yearly basis.Inflation slowed in July, the Consumer Price Index showed, increasing 2.9 percent from a year earlier. That was a drop from 3 percent in June, and it marked the first time that inflation had fallen below 3 percent since 2021.Inflation is still higher than the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent, but it has fallen well below the high of 9.1 percent reached in June 2022. The report on Wednesday was another data point to suggest that the Fed will cut interest rates when it meets next month.“It doesn’t mean our work is done, but it does mean we’re moving in the right direction, and with a bit of momentum,” Jared Bernstein, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an email after the release of the report.The Fed started raising interest rates in March 2022 to slow demand and bring price pressures under control after a run-up during the Covid-19 pandemic. Since July 2023, the Fed has held rates steady at about 5.3 percent, the highest level in more than two decades.But evidence like Wednesday’s report makes it all the more likely that the central bank will begin cutting rates, especially after the unemployment rate last month ticked up to 4.3 percent. Historically, increases in joblessness like the one in July have been an indicator of a recession.Still, consumer spending has remained robust while the economy has continued to grow.Can the growth continue? That is the unanswered question at the moment.“The government is taking action to ensure that these products do not turn the dream of homeownership into a nightmare.”Rohit Chopra, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, on the agency’s intention to crack down on seller-financed home sales, a predatory practice.“You can’t compare a machine-made cookie with a handmade cookie. It’s like comparing a Rolls-Royce with a Volkswagen.”Wally Amos, the creator of the cookie brand Famous Amos, said in an interview with MSNBC in 2007. He died Tuesday.“We took what people thought were Tubi’s perceived weaknesses — older content, no stars, lower-budget movies — and we made it our strength.”Nicole Parlapiano, Tubi’s marketing chief, on how Tubi has become one of the most popular streaming services.

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