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      Fed Chair Powell Says Officials Need More ‘Good’ Data Before Cutting Rates

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      Federal Reserve officials are debating when to lower rates. An interview with Jerome H. Powell confirms a move is coming, but not immediately.Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, made clear during a “60 Minutes” interview aired on Sunday night that the central bank is moving toward cutting interest rates as inflation recedes, but that policymakers need to see continued progress toward cooler price increases to make the first move.Mr. Powell was interviewed on Thursday, after the Fed’s meeting last week but before Friday’s blockbuster jobs report. He reiterated his message that lower borrowing costs are coming. But he also said that the Fed’s next meeting in March is probably too early for policymakers to feel sure enough that inflation is coming under control to reduce rates.“We think we can be careful in approaching this decision just because of the strength that we’re seeing in the economy,” Mr. Powell said during the interview, based on a transcript released ahead of its airing. He added that officials would want to see a continued moderation in price increases, even after several months of milder readings.The progress on inflation “doesn’t need to be better than what we’ve seen, or even as good. It just needs to be good,” Mr. Powell said.His remarks reaffirm that lower borrowing costs are likely coming this year — a change that could make mortgages, car loans and credit card debt cheaper for Americans. They also underscore how much better today’s economic situation is proving to be than what economists and Fed officials expected just a year ago.Many forecasters had predicted that the Fed’s rapid campaign of interest rate increases, which pushed borrowing costs from near zero to a range of 5.25 to 5.5 percent from March 2022 to July 2023, would slow the economy so much that it might even spur a recession. Central bankers themselves — including Mr. Powell — believed that some economic pain would probably be needed to cool consumer and business demand enough to prod businesses to stop raising prices so quickly.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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      6 Reasons That It’s Hard to Get Your Wegovy and Other Weight-Loss Prescriptions

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      An array of obstacles make it difficult for patients to obtain Wegovy or Zepbound. Finding Wegovy is “like winning the lottery,” one nurse practitioner said.Talk to people who have tried to get one of the wildly popular weight-loss drugs, like Wegovy, and they’ll probably have a story about the hoops they had to jump through to get their medication — if they could get it at all.Emily Weaver, a nurse practitioner in Cary, N.C., said she told her patients that finding Wegovy was “like winning the lottery.”Here are six reasons why.1. Demand is very high.Fueled in part by TikTok videos and celebrity testimonials, people are increasingly seeking prescriptions for appetite-suppressing medications. The drugs in this class have long been used to treat diabetes but more recently have been recognized for their extraordinary ability to help patients lose weight. The medications are injected weekly and have sticker prices as high as $16,000 a year.About 3.8 million people in the United States — four times the number two years ago — are now taking the most popular weight-loss drugs, according to the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, an industry data provider. Some of these prescriptions are for diabetes. The medicines are Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic and Wegovy (the same drug sold under different brand names), and Eli Lilly’s Mounjaro and Zepbound (also the same drug).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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      Economists Expected a Hiring Slowdown. So Much for That.

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      Job gains remain rapid, unemployment is near a historic low and wage gains are robust nearly two years into the Federal Reserve’s campaign to cool the economy with higher interest rates — an outcome that has surprised policymakers and economic forecasters alike.At this time last year, Fed officials were predicting that unemployment would have spiked to 4.6 percent by now. Instead, it stands at 3.7 percent.Central bankers have for months said that they were hearing anecdotal evidence that the job market had begun to slow down: The Fed’s recent Beige Book summaries of anecdotal reports from around the country have suggested that hiring was slight or even flat in parts of the country. But while hiring cooled somewhat last year, no big fissures have shown through to the actual data.In fact, there are signs that the labor market is still very solid — something Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, acknowledged this week.“We’ve had a very strong labor market, and we’ve had inflation coming down,” Mr. Powell said. “So I think whereas a year ago, we were thinking that we needed to see some softening in the economy, that hasn’t been the case. We look at stronger growth — we don’t look at it as a problem.”Mr. Powell and his colleagues have suggested that the labor market has come back into balance as the supply of workers has recovered, something that has been helped along by a rebound in immigration and a recent jump in labor force participation. The number of job openings in the economy has slowly nudged down.But few if any economists expected job gains to remain this robust at a time when higher interest rates were expected to meaningfully weigh down the economy. In fact, many forecasters were predicting an outright recession early last year.The question for the Fed is what it means if the job market not only fails to slow down as anticipated, but actually accelerates again. While one month of data does not make a trend, officials are likely to keep an eye on strong hiring and wage growth.Mr. Powell said this week that robust growth in and of itself would not worry the Fed — or necessarily prevent them from lowering interest rates this year — so long as inflation continued to come down. But central bankers could become more wary if solid wage gains and a booming economy help to keep consumers spending so much that it gives companies the wherewithal to keep raising prices.“If there was a real concern that we were getting a re-acceleration, it might get them to pause a little bit,” said Kathy Bostjancic, the chief economist at Nationwide. But for now, “they’re more apt now to respond to a weakening in the labor market than to continued strength.” More

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      F.T.C. Warns Dozens of Funeral Homes to Provide Accurate Costs to Callers

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      The agency said an “undercover phone sweep” of more than 250 homes found that 38 failed to provide prices or supplied inconsistent prices in separate calls.The Federal Trade Commission said its first “undercover phone sweep” of funeral homes across the country had found that dozens didn’t accurately disclose costs for services to callers.Of the more than 250 funeral businesses F.T.C. employees called, 38 either didn’t answer questions about prices or supplied inconsistent prices for identical services, the commission said. Many homes, it said, provided “materially different” prices for the same services during two separate phone calls.Another home promised to send an itemized price list, the agency said, but instead sent a list of package prices, which don’t meet disclosure requirements.The 39 funeral homes received warning letters in January that they had failed to comply with a law known as the Funeral Rule. The F.T.C. enforces the rule, which outlines protections for consumers shopping for funeral services.“It’s very important that consumers are able to comparison shop,” said Melissa Dickey, an F.T.C. lawyer and a co-coordinator of the Funeral Rule. “Not everyone can go in person to pick up a price list.”Of the funeral home that sent a list of package options, Ms. Dickey said: “You don’t have to buy a package.” The funeral home must let you buy only the services you want.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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      Economists Predicted a Recession. So Far They’ve Been Wrong.

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      A widely predicted recession never showed up. Now, economists are assessing what the unexpected resilience tells us about the future.The recession America was expecting never showed up.Many economists spent early 2023 predicting a painful downturn, a view so widely held that some commentators started to treat it as a given. Inflation had spiked to the highest level in decades, and a range of forecasters thought that it would take a drop in demand and a prolonged jump in unemployment to wrestle it down.Instead, the economy grew 3.1 percent last year, up from less than 1 percent in 2022 and faster than the average for the five years leading up to the pandemic. Inflation has retreated substantially. Unemployment remains at historic lows and consumers continue to spend even with Federal Reserve interest rates at a 22-year high.The divide between doomsday predictions and the heyday reality is forcing a reckoning on Wall Street and in academia. Why did economists get so much wrong, and what can policymakers learn from those mistakes as they try to anticipate what might come next?It’s early days to draw firm conclusions. The economy could still slow down as two years of Fed rate increases start to add up. But what is clear is that old models of how growth and inflation relate did not serve as accurate guides. Bad luck drove more of the initial burst of inflation than some economists appreciated. Good luck helped to lower it again, and other surprises have hit along the way.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?  More

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      Airlines Hoping for More Boeing Jets Could Be Waiting Awhile

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      The Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to limit Boeing’s production of 737 Max planes could hurt airlines that are struggling to buy enough new aircraft.Boeing hoped 2024 would be the year it would significantly increase production of its popular Max jets. But less than a month into the year, the company is struggling to reassure airline customers that it will still be able to deliver on its promises.That’s because the Federal Aviation Administration said on Wednesday that it would limit the plane maker’s output until it was confident in Boeing’s quality control practices. On Jan. 5, a panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 body shortly after takeoff, terrifying passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight and forcing the pilots to make an emergency landing at Portland International Airport in Oregon. Almost immediately, the F.A.A. grounded some Max 9s.Since then, details have emerged about the jet’s production at Boeing’s facility in Renton, Wash., that have intensified scrutiny of the company’s quality control. Boeing workers opened and then reinstalled the panel about a month before the plane was delivered to Alaska Airlines.The directive is another setback for Boeing, which had been planning to increase production of its Max plane series to more than 500 this year, from about 400 last year. It also planned to add another assembly line at a factory in Everett, Wash., a major Boeing production hub north of Seattle.As part of the F.A.A.’s announcement on Wednesday, it also approved inspection and maintenance procedures for the Max 9. Airlines can return the jets to service once they have followed those instructions. United Airlines said on Thursday that it could resume flying some of those planes as soon as Friday.The move is another potential blow to airlines. Even though demand for flights came roaring back after pandemic lockdowns and travel restrictions eased, the airlines have not been able to take full advantage of that demand. The companies have not been able to buy enough planes or hire enough pilots, flight attendants and other workers they need to operate flights. A surge in the cost of jet fuel after Russia invaded Ukraine also hurt profits.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?  More

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      U.S. Economy Grew at 3.3% Rate in Latest Quarter

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      The increase in gross domestic product, while slower than in the previous period, showed the resilience of the recovery from the pandemic’s upheaval.The U.S. economy continued to grow at a healthy pace at the end of 2023, capping a year in which unemployment remained low, inflation cooled and a widely predicted recession never materialized.Gross domestic product, adjusted for inflation, grew at a 3.3 percent annual rate in the fourth quarter, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. That was down from the 4.9 percent rate in the third quarter but easily topped forecasters’ expectations and showed the resilience of the recovery from the pandemic’s economic upheaval.The latest reading is preliminary and may be revised in the months ahead.Forecasters entered 2023 expecting the Federal Reserve’s aggressive campaign of interest-rate increases to push the economy into reverse. Instead, growth accelerated: For the full year, measured from the end of 2022 to the end of 2023, G.D.P. grew 3.1 percent, up from less than 1 percent the year before and faster than in any of the five years preceding the pandemic. (A different measure, based on average output over the full year, showed annual growth of 2.5 percent in 2023.)There is little sign that a recession is imminent this year, either. Early forecasts point to continued — albeit slower — growth in the first three months of 2024. Layoffs remain low, and job growth has held steady. Cooling inflation has meant that wages are again rising faster than prices. And consumer sentiment is at last showing signs of rebounding after years in the doldrums.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?  More