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      G7 Finance Ministers Close Ranks as Tensions with Russia and China Fester

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      Western economic officials projected a united front, and braced for retaliation, as they prepped tougher sanctions and tariffs.Top finance officials from the world’s advanced economies moved toward an agreement on Saturday over how to use Russia’s frozen central bank assets to aid Ukraine and pledged to unite against China’s dumping of cheap exports into their markets, aiming to marshal their economic might to tackle twin crises.The embrace of more ambitious sanctions and protectionism came as finance ministers from the Group of 7 nations gathered for three days of meetings in Stresa, Italy. The proposals under consideration could deepen the divide between the alliance of wealthy Western economies and Russia, China and their allies, worsening a global fragmentation that has worried economists.Efforts by the Group of 7 to influence the two powerful adversaries have had limited success in recent years, but rich countries are making a renewed push to test the limits of their combined economic power.In a joint statement, or communiqué, that was set to be released on Saturday, policymakers said they would stay united on both fronts as geopolitical crises and trade tensions have emerged as the biggest threats to the global economy.“We are making progress in our discussions on potential avenues to bring forward the extraordinary profits stemming from immobilized Russian sovereign assets to the benefit of Ukraine,” the statement, which was reviewed by The New York Times, said.Regarding China, the finance ministers expressed concern about its “comprehensive use of nonmarket policies and practices that undermines our workers, industries, and economic resilience.” They agreed to monitor the negative effects of China’s overcapacity and “consider taking steps to ensure a level playing field.”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 Underestimates How Much Black Americans Care About This Issue

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      Black voters will not only be a driving force in the 2024 elections; they will most likely be the driving force. Recent polls showed that roughly 20 percent of Black voters said they would probably vote for Donald Trump if the election were held today — the highest level of Black support for any Republican presidential candidate since the civil rights era. An additional 8 percent said they wouldn’t vote at all.Democratic campaign officials are rightly worried, but there’s still time for President Biden to make up the ground he has lost. One way he could do it is by talking to Black America, especially young Black voters, about a sleeper issue: the climate crisis.As an environment and climate researcher, I have found that despite the growing threat posed by climate change, politicians often seem to downplay the crisis when courting Black communities. Democratic strategists seem to see climate change as a key political issue only for white liberal elites and assume that other groups, like Black voters, are either unaware of or apathetic about it.In reality, Black Americans are growing increasingly concerned about climate change.An April poll from CBS News showed that 88 percent of Black adults said it was “somewhat” or “very important.” That makes sense: The most severe harms from climate change, from heat waves to extreme flooding, are already falling disproportionately on their communities. And it’s starting to be reflected in their political priorities. A poll conducted by the Brookings Institution last September showed that climate change is now a greater political concern for Black Americans than abortion or the state of democracy.If Democrats are serious about making inroads with some of the people they have lost in these communities, they should begin by talking to voters about what the climate crisis looks like for them. In major Democratic strongholds such as Cleveland, Milwaukee and Philadelphia, heat waves and flooding are driving up electricity bills and destroying homes. If Mr. Biden were to routinely speak about these challenges and commit to creating forums for Black Americans to discuss climate concerns with government officials, his administration could earn back some of the faith it has squandered.As a start, Mr. Biden could focus more intently on young Black people, a group passionate about climate change. Until May 19, when he gave the commencement address at Morehouse College, the president had largely refrained from direct engagement with young Black audiences on the campaign trail. When he speaks to Black voters, climate often is a footnote, or it’s mentioned in a policy buffet along with the economy, abortion and voting rights. During his speech at Morehouse, he mentioned the climate crisis explicitly only in a stray line about “heeding your generation’s call to a community free of gun violence and a planet free of climate crisis and showing your power to change the world.”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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      What the Dow Jones Hitting 40,000 Points Tells Us

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      Last week, for the first time in history, the Dow Jones industrial average closed above 40,000.Unlike many right-wing commentators, I don’t consider the stock market the best indicator of the economy’s health, or even a good indicator. But it is an indicator. And given the state of American politics, with hyperpartisanship and conspiracy theorizing running rampant, I’d argue that this market milestone deserves more attention than it has been getting.Not to put too fine a point on it, but do you have any doubt that Republicans, across the board, would be trumpeting the Dow’s record high from every rooftop if Donald Trump were still in the White House?The background here is the gap between what we know about the actual state of our economy and the way Trump and his allies describe it.By the numbers, the economy looks very good. Unemployment has now been below 4 percent for 27 months, a record last achieved in the late 1960s, ending in February 1970. Inflation is way down from its peak in 2022, although by most measures it’s still somewhat above the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent. U.S. economic growth over the past four years has been much faster than in comparable major wealthy nations.Yet Trump says that the economy is “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin.” How can such claims be reconciled with the good economic data?Well, the numbers I just cited come from official agencies — the Bureau of Labor Statistics (which produces labor market data) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (which estimates gross domestic product). And if you were a hard-core MAGA partisan inclined to conspiracy theories — but I repeat myself — you might tell yourself that the good economic numbers are fake, concocted by a corrupt deep state to help President Biden win the election.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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      The One Thing Voters Remember About Trump

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      What one thing do you remember most about Donald Trump’s presidency? In April as part of the New York Times/Siena College survey, we called about 1,000 voters across the country and asked for their most prominent memory of the Trump years. Here’s what they said, in their own words. “His honesty” Trump supporter in 2024 […] More

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      Biden Looks to Raise Taxes on Wealthy and Corporations to Shave Deficit

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      Lael Brainard, the director of the National Economic Council, said lawmakers should raise taxes on companies and the wealthiest while extending the 2017 cuts for those making less than $400,000.President Biden’s top economic adviser said on Friday that lawmakers should take advantage of a looming tax debate next year to try to reduce budget deficits by sharply raising taxes on corporations and the rich.Under that plan, Mr. Biden would more than offset the cost of maintaining tax cuts for people earning $400,000 a year or less.In a speech to the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Lael Brainard, who directs the White House National Economic Council, gave the most detailed explanation yet of how Mr. Biden would seek to shape what promises to be a multitrillion-dollar tax debate.A batch of tax cuts signed into law in 2017 by former President Donald J. Trump, who is facing Mr. Biden in a rematch this fall, is set to expire at the end of next year. It includes cuts for individuals at all income levels. Republicans built that expiration into the tax bill to reduce its projected cost to deficits and comply with congressional rules.Ms. Brainard’s speech renewed Mr. Biden’s commitment to reducing taxes for middle-class Americans and for raising them on high earners. But her remarks expressed more concern about growing debt and deficits than the president and his aides had previously demonstrated when discussing the looming tax debate.“At minimum, we should avoid making the fiscal hole created by Republican tax cuts deeper, by fully paying for any tax cuts that are extended,” Ms. Brainard said, in remarks released by the White House. “And we should use the 2025 tax debate as an opportunity to meet our national needs by raising revenue overall by asking the wealthy and large corporations to pay their fair share.”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