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      Russia’s War Machine Revs Up as the West’s Plan to Cap Oil Revenues Sputters

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      Russia has largely evaded attempts by the U.S. and Europe to keep it from profiting from its energy exports.The United States and its allies in the Group of 7 nations set two goals in 2022 when they enacted a novel plan to cap the price of Russian oil: restrict Moscow’s ability to profit from its energy exports while allowing its oil to continue flowing on international markets to prevent a global price shock.A year and a half later, only the latter goal appears to have worked. Energy prices have been relatively stable across the world, including in the United States, which helped devise the plan. But Russia’s war effort in Ukraine is intensifying, making it increasingly clear that efforts by Western allies to squeeze Moscow’s oil revenues are faltering.A variety of factors have allowed Russia to continue profiting from strong oil revenue, including lenient enforcement of the price cap. Russia’s development of an extensive “shadow” fleet of tankers has allowed it to largely circumvent that policy. That has allowed the Russian economy to be more resilient than expected, raising questions about the effectiveness of the coordinated sanctions campaign employed by the G7.The Biden administration maintains that the strategy has been effective and that the price cap has imposed costs on Russia and forced it to redirect money that it would have used in Ukraine to finance an alternative oil ecosystem.Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said in an interview on Sunday that the price of Russian oil was not the only measure of their profits, noting that Russia has had to invest significant resources in response to the cap.“We’ve made it very expensive for Russia to ship this oil to China and India in terms of acquiring a shadow fleet and providing insurance,” Ms. Yellen said on her flight to Europe, where she is holding meetings in Germany and attending a gathering of finance ministers in Italy. “We still think it’s working.”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 Companies Dodge Tariffs

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      Protectionist trade policies are popular on both the left and right. But some economists say they’re likely to backfire.No matter who wins the White House and control of Congress this autumn, one aspect of trade policy is likely to endure: Washington’s tough-on-China protectionist stance. But several trade experts predict that the America-first model of slapping tariffs on adversaries — as President Biden did this week — will backfire.Critics of tariffs and export restrictions say they not only will potentially exacerbate inflation and drag down economic growth, but are also likely to fail for a simpler reason: Chinese companies may see their businesses slowed down by the restrictions, but have found ways to beat them.As Alex Durante, an economist at the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank that works with policymakers in the United States and Europe, bluntly put it: “They don’t work.”Huawei has shown that companies can find workarounds. Last year, the Chinese telecom giant unveiled the Mate 60, a smartphone powered by a high-end semiconductor. The new product raised eyebrows in Washington because the advanced chip was precisely the kind of technology that the Biden administration was trying to keep out of China’s hands through the passage of the CHIPS Act a year earlier.Huawei’s breakthrough was less a breach of international trade rules than a result of a company’s using a web of gray channels to get the banned materials it needed to make the chips, concluded Douglas Fuller, an associate professor at Copenhagen Business School. “America’s flimsy controls” of those suppliers helped Huawei, he wrote in a recent research report.A similar approach could work for electric vehicles. Among the $18 billion worth of increased tariffs on Chinese-made goods that Biden announced this week, E.V.s were a major focus. The levies jumped to 100 percent from 25 percent.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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      Podesta Meets With China’s Climate Envoy Amid Deep Economic Tensions

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      Beijing’s dominance raises economic and security concerns, and tensions will be on full display as top climate diplomats meet this week.The world’s two most powerful countries, the United States and China, are meeting this week in Washington to talk about climate change. And also their relationship issues.In an ideal world, where the clean energy transition was the top priority, they would be on friendlier terms. Maybe affordable Chinese-made electric vehicles would be widely sold in America, instead of being viewed as an economic threat. Or there would be less need to dig a lithium mine at an environmentally sensitive site in Nevada, because lithium, which is essential for batteries, could be bought worry-free from China, which controls the world’s supply.Instead, in the not-ideal real world, the United States is balancing two competing goals. The Biden administration wants to cut planet-warming emissions by encouraging people to buy things like EVs and solar panels, but it also wants people to buy American, not Chinese. Its concern is that Chinese dominance of the global market for these essential technologies would harm the U.S. economy and national security.Those competing goals will be on vivid display this week, as the Biden Administration’s top climate envoy, John Podesta, meets for the first time with his counterpart from Beijing, Liu Zhenmin, in Washington.Trade tensions are likely to loom over their talks.The flood of Chinese exports, particularly in solar panels and other green-energy technology, has become a real sore spot for the Biden administration as it tries to spur the same industries on American soil. Mr. Podesta has sharply criticized China for having “distorted the global market for clean energy products like solar, batteries and critical minerals.”Not only that, he has set up a task force to explore how to limit exports from countries that have high carbon footprints, a practice that he called “carbon dumping.” That was considered a veiled reference to China.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 Looks to Thwart Surge of Chinese Imports

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      The president has proposed new barriers to Chinese electric vehicles, steel and other goods that could undermine his manufacturing agenda.President Biden is warning that a new surge of cheap Chinese products poses a threat to American factories. There is little sign of one in official trade data, which show that Chinese steel imports are down sharply from last year and that the gap between what the United States sells to China and what it buys is at a post-pandemic low.But the president’s aides are looking past those numbers and fixating on what they call troubling signs from China and Europe. That includes data showing China’s growing appetite to churn out big-ticket goods like cars and heavy metals at a rate that far exceeds the demand of domestic consumers.China’s lavish subsidies, including loans from state-run banks, have helped sustain companies that might otherwise have folded in a struggling domestic economy. The result is, in many cases, a significant cost advantage for Chinese manufactured goods like steel and electric cars.The U.S. solar industry is already struggling to compete with those Chinese exports. In Europe, the problem is much broader. Chinese exports are washing over the continent, to the chagrin of political leaders and business executives. They could soon pose a threat to some of the American companies that Mr. Biden has tried to bolster with federal grants and tax incentives, much of which comes from his 2022 climate law, U.S. officials warn.In an effort to avoid a similar fate, Mr. Biden has promised new measures to shield steel mills, automakers and other American companies against what he calls trade “cheating” by Beijing.European officials are struggling to counter the import surge, an issue they focused on this week when President Xi Jinping of China visited the continent for the first time in five years. In a meeting on Monday with Mr. Xi and President Emmanuel Macron of France, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, urged Mr. Xi to address the wave of subsidized exports flowing from his nation’s factories into Western countries.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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      In Meeting With Xi, E.U. Leader Takes Tough Line on Ukraine War

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      Ursula Von der Leyen, the European Commission president, pushed Beijing to help rein in Russia’s war in Ukraine after meeting with the Chinese and French leaders in Paris.Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president, put pressure Monday on China to help resolve the war in Ukraine, saying Beijing should “use all its influence on Russia to end its war of aggression against Ukraine.”She spoke after accompanying President Emmanuel Macron of France in a meeting with Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, who began his first visit to Europe in five years on Sunday. Ms. von der Leyen has persistently taken a stronger line toward China than has Mr. Macron.With President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia again suggesting he might be prepared to use nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine, she said Mr. Xi had played “an important role in de-escalating Russia’s irresponsible nuclear threats.” She was confident, Ms. von der Leyen said, that Mr. Xi would “continue to do so against the backdrop of ongoing nuclear threats by Russia.”Whether her appeal would have any impact on Mr. Xi was unclear, and describing the conflict as Russia’s “war of aggression” in Ukraine seemed likely to irk the Chinese leader. Beijing has forged a “no limits” friendship with Russia and provided Moscow with critical support for its military effort, including jet fighter parts, microchips and other dual-use equipment.“More effort is needed to curtail delivery of dual-use goods to Russia that find their way to the battlefield,” Ms. von der Leyen said of China. “And given the existential nature of the threats stemming from this war for both Ukraine and Europe, this does affect E.U.-China relations.”It is relatively unusual for a top European official to describe the war in Ukraine as an “existential threat” to the European continent. Doing so may reflect Mr. Putin’s renewed talk of the use of nuclear weapons.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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      Key Solar Panel Ingredient Is Made in the U.S.A. Again

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      REC Silicon says it will soon start shipping polysilicon, which has come mostly from China, reviving a Washington State factory that shut down in 2019.A factory in Moses Lake, Wash., that shut down in 2019 will soon resume shipping a critical ingredient used in most solar panels that for years has been made almost exclusively in China.The revival of the factory, which is owned by REC Silicon, could help achieve a longstanding goal of many American lawmakers and energy executives to re-establish a complete domestic supply chain for solar panels and reduce the world’s reliance on plants in China and Southeast Asia.REC Silicon reopened the factory, which makes polysilicon, the building block for the large majority of solar panels, in November in partnership with Hanwha Qcells, a South Korean company that is investing billions of dollars in U.S. solar panel production. As part of the deal, Hanwha this month said it has become the largest shareholder in REC Silicon, which is based in Norway.Executives at the companies say they reopened the factory in part because of incentives for domestic manufacturing in the Inflation Reduction Act, President Biden’s signature climate law. They expressed hope that their decision would also encourage other companies to revive production of a technology that was created in the United States about 70 years ago.“As a whole, the United States was No. 1,” said Kurt Levens, chief executive of REC Silicon. “People forget that. You need more cell manufacturing that is outside China.”Factories in China and Southeast Asia produce more than 95 percent of the solar panels that use polysilicon and most of the components that go into those devices. Chinese manufacturers are so dominant that most manufacturers in the United States had stopped producing polysilicon, including REC Silicon.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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      I.M.F. Sees Steady Growth but Warns of Rising Protectionism

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      The International Monetary Fund offered an upbeat economic outlook but said that new trade barriers and escalating wars could worsen inflation.The global economy is approaching a soft landing after several years of geopolitical and economic turmoil, the International Monetary Fund said on Tuesday. But it warned that risks remain, including stubborn inflation, the threat of escalating global conflicts and rising protectionism.In its latest World Economic Outlook report, the I.M.F. projected global output to hold steady at 3.2 percent in 2024, unchanged from 2023. Although the pace of the expansion is tepid by historical standards, the I.M.F. said that global economic activity has been surprisingly resilient given that central banks aggressively raised interest rates to tame inflation and wars in Ukraine and the Middle East further disrupt supply chains.The forecasts came as policymakers from around the world began arriving in Washington for the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The outlook is brighter from just a year ago, when the I.M.F. was warning of underlying “turbulence” and a multitude of risks.Although the world economy has proved to be durable over the last year, defying predictions of a recession, there are lingering concerns that price pressures have not been sufficiently contained and that new trade barriers will be erected amid anxiety over a recent surge of cheap Chinese exports.“Somewhat worryingly, progress toward inflation targets has somewhat stalled since the beginning of the year,” Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, the I.M.F.’s chief economist, wrote in an essay that accompanied the report. “Oil prices have been rising recently in part due to geopolitical tensions and services inflation remains stubbornly high.”He added: “Further trade restrictions on Chinese exports could also push up goods inflation.”The gathering is taking place at a time of growing tension between the United States and China over a surge of Chinese green energy products, such as electric vehicles, lithium batteries and solar panels, that are flooding global markets. Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen returned last week from a trip to China, where she told her counterparts that Beijing’s industrial policy was harming American workers. She warned that the United States could pursue trade restrictions to protect investments in America’s solar and electric vehicle industries.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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      China’s First Quarter Results Show Growth Propelled by Its Factories

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      China’s big bet on manufacturing helped to counteract its housing slowdown in the first three months of the year, but other countries are worried about a flood of Chinese goods.The Chinese economy grew more than expected in the first three months of the year, new data shows, as China built more factories and exported huge amounts of goods to counter a severe real estate crisis and sluggish spending at home.To stimulate growth, China, the world’s second-largest economy, turned to a familiar tactic: investing heavily in its manufacturing sector, including a binge of new factories that have helped to propel sales around the world of solar panels, electric cars and other products. But China’s bet on exports has worried many foreign countries and companies. They fear that a flood of Chinese shipments to distant markets may undermine their manufacturing industries and lead to layoffs.On Tuesday, China’s National Bureau of Statistics said the economy grew 1.6 percent in the first quarter over the previous three months. When projected out for the entire year, the first-quarter data indicates that China’s economy was growing at an annual rate of about 6.6 percent.“The national economy made a good start,” said Sheng Laiyun, deputy director of the statistics bureau, while cautioning that “the foundation for stable and sound economic growth is not solid yet.”Retail sales increased at a modest pace of 4.7 percent compared with the first three months of last year, and were particularly weak in March. 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