Investments and Business

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…

Updated March 8, 2024, 8:45 a.m. ETMarch 8, 2024, 8:45 a.m. ETIf the economy is slowing down, nobody told the labor market.Employers added 275,000 jobs in February, the Labor Department reported Friday, in another month to exceed expectations after January’s surprising surge. The unemployment rate increased to 3.9 percent.The repeat performance is additional evidence that four years after the start of the pandemic, America’s jobs engine is nowhere near running out of steam.“We’ve been expecting a slowdown in the labor market, a more material loosening in conditions, but we’re just not seeing that,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief economist at High Frequency…

Economic vibes don’t necessarily predict electoral outcomes, though, and this campaign is different in many ways from those in the past. “We’re kind of in an unprecedented situation where we’re weighing two incumbents,” said Joanne Hsu, who runs the Michigan survey.Anthony Rice, a 54-year-old Democrat in eastern Indiana, and pretty much everyone he knows, he said, are doing well right now. Gas prices are down, jobs are plentiful, and Mr. Rice, a unionized dump-truck driver, is benefiting directly from the infrastructure law that Mr. Biden signed in 2021. Yet few people in the deep-red part of the country where he…

China top leaders set an ambitious goal for economic growth in 2024 as they tried to bolster conviction in an economy facing its biggest challenges in decades.But they announced only modest measures to stimulate growth, refraining from the kind of bold moves the business community has been looking for to address a property crisis, a loss of confidence among Chinese households and wariness by investors.Premier Li Qiang, the country’s No. 2 official after Xi Jinping, said in his report on Tuesday to the annual session of the legislature that the government would seek economic growth of “around 5 percent.” That…

I have covered economics for 11 years now, and in that time, I have come to the realization that I am a statistic. Every time I make a major life choice, I promptly watch it become the thing that everyone is doing that year.I started college in 2009, in the era of all-time-high matriculation rates. When I moved to a big coastal city after graduation, so did a huge crowd of people: It was the age of millennial urbanization. When I lived in a walk-in closet so that I could pay off my student loans (“The yellow paint makes it…

Shares of New York Community Bank slid more than 25 percent on Friday, a day after the lender said its loss in the fourth quarter was $2.4 billion more than it had previously reported, and also announced the departure of its chief executive and a board member.Shares of other regional banks were also lower: Valley National Bank and Columbia Banking System both fell more than 2 percent. The KBW Regional Bank Index, which tracks performance of U.S. regional banks, fell more than 1 percent.The drop in shares of other banks is a sign investors are still nervous about the potential…

Starbucks and the union that represents employees in roughly 400 of its U.S. stores announced Tuesday that they were beginning discussions on a “foundational framework” that would help the company reach labor agreements with unionized workers and resolve litigation between the two sides.The union greeted the development as a major shift in strategy for Starbucks, which has taken steps to resist union organizing at the company since the campaign began in 2021, moves that federal labor regulators have said violated labor law hundreds of times.Starbucks, which has denied the accusations, said in a statement that it hoped to have contracts…