Today’s Stock Market and Economy News: Live Updates – The New York Times

The S&P 500 is on the edge of a correction, a drop of 10 percent from its January high that signifies the markets swiftly changing attitude about the prospects for stocks in the immediate future.

Investors are focused on the Fed’s next move, as the central bank rushes to pull back its support for the economy, instead shifting its focus to tacking inflation.

The worry, which several analysts say is overblown, is that the Fed will decide it is starting its inflation fight too late and move more aggressively than investors anticipate.

There’s no question, though, that investors have become unsettled by the idea that interest rates are going to rise this year, no matter how quickly.

That makes the shift in sentiment this week notable: On Monday, stocks plunged as much as 4 percent as a wave of panic hit Wall Street, heading for what would have been one of the worst daily declines in more than a year.

Now, in the case of the United States, this reflects lower prospects of legislating the Build Back Better fiscal package and earlier withdrawal of extraordinary monetary accommodation, and continued supply disruptions.

pointed to the collapse of the real estate sector and the zero-Covid policy that has restricted travel, shut businesses and reduced consumption.

The fund emphasized that the forecast was subject to a high level of uncertainty — about the course of Covid, the prospects of climate-related natural disasters, supply chain disruptions and rising political tensions, particularly around Ukraine.

The pandemic has changed the way people in many parts of the world spend their money, shifting funds that might have been used for dining, travel and entertainment to goods they can play with, sit on or consume at home.

The exit of so many people from their jobs has created more persistent labor shortages and driven up wages much more than in other countries.

The bank, which is set to release its next policy statement on Wednesday, is raising interest rates and reeling in its purchases of bonds that ensured money would continue to flow through the economy.

The strategy is to discourage people from borrowing money to buy a car or invest in a business and ratchet back demand for products that are in short supply.

“If interest rates rise more sharply, that then puts extra strain on vulnerable developing countries which have most of their debt in dollars,” said Creon Butler, research director at Chatham House, a London research organization.

The slowdown in China, which is both a major supplier and buyer of goods traded with other countries, is also setting off reverberations around the world.

to estimate that growth in Germany — the largest economy in Europe — would decline by 0.8 percentage points, twice as much as the average of all countries that use the euro.

“We want to have a good manufacturing base in the Midwest,” G.M.’s president, Mark Reuss, said in a conference call with reporters.

The investment plan is the latest by the auto industry to ramp up production of electric vehicles.

Ford Motor has already overhauled a plant in Dearborn, Mich., and is set to begin making an electric version of its F-150 pickup this spring.

has battery plants under construction in Ohio and Tennessee, and has retooled a plant in Detroit, where it recently started making an electric Hummer truck.

Ford has been selling an electric S.U.V., the Mustang Mach E, for more than a year, and has taken in more than 200,000 reservations for the electric F-150 Lightning.

It will be built on the site of an existing plant in Lansing, at a cost of $2.6 billion to be shared between G.M.

will also invest $4 billion to enable a plant in Orion Township, Mich., to make electric versions of its Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups.

The plant has been making the Chevrolet Bolt, an electric compact car, although production has been halted for several months because of a recall that requires G.M.

Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate that Mr. Buffett runs, said on Tuesday that it was planning to hold its annual shareholder meeting in person this year.

The decision reflects evolving, and sometimes diverging, approaches to live events at this point in the pandemic.

Berkshire has held its previous two annual meetings virtually, citing the pandemic.

The biggest draw is the hourslong interview session in which Berkshire shareholders ask questions of Mr. Buffett and his longtime lieutenant, Charles T.

Details of how this year’s meeting will proceed, including any coronavirus testing or vaccination requirements for attendees, were not disclosed.

The new system would still eliminate cookies, but it would inform advertisers of a user’s areas of interest — such as “fitness” or “autos and vehicles” — based on the last three weeks of the user’s web browsing history.

Google’s plan to eliminate cookies by the end of next year is a potentially huge shift for the digital advertising industry, though it is not clear if the new method, which the company will start testing in the first quarter this year, will be any less alarming to advertisers and regulators.

Google said in 2019 that it would do away with third-party trackers in Chrome through an initiative called the Privacy Sandbox.

Apple has also cracked down on advertisers, limiting their ability to track users as they browse the web.

Since marketers rely heavily on cookies to target ads and measure their efficacy, Google’s privacy proposal led to worries that it would strengthen the company’s hold on the industry because Google already knows so much about the interests and habits of its users.

Last year, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority reached an agreement with Google to allow the regulator to review changes to trackers in Chrome as part of a settlement of another investigation.

Topics will address some of the concerns raised by privacy advocates about FLoC, preventing more covert tracking techniques, Google said.

Google said there had been tens of thousands of potential cohorts under the previous plan, but that it would reduce the number of Topics to fewer than a few thousand.

Google said Topics would use human curators rather than allow machine learning technology to generate user groups, as the FLoC plan did.

In 2019, the company gave users the ability to set up their search history to automatically purge every three or 18 months.

“He said, ‘It’s nothing personal, pal,’” Mr. Doocy told the host Sean Hannity.

When Mr. Hannity pressed on whether Mr. Biden had apologized, Mr. Doocy laughed and demurred.

Mr. Trump deemed Jim Acosta of CNN “a rude, terrible person,” called Jonathan Karl of ABC “a disgrace,” and said April Ryan, now of TheGrio, was a “loser,” to name but three examples.

On Monday, Mr. Doocy shouted his question after Mr. Biden finished brief remarks at the start of a cabinet meeting focused on increasing the country’s economic competitiveness.

Mr. Doocy, who along with the rest of the press corps was being led out of the room by White House staff members, pivoted to an economic query.

“The first policy mistake was completely misunderstanding inflation,” said Mohamed El-Erian, the chief economic adviser at the financial services company Allianz.

Plenty of economists disagree with Mr. El-Erian, pointing out that the Fed reacted swiftly as it realized that conditions did not match its expectations, Jeanna Smialek reports for The New York Times.

“The downturn was faster, the upturn was faster: It was an unprecedented event, so not forecasting it properly was not the end of the world,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, a senior U.S.

Unilever plans to cut 1,500 management jobs, the consumer products giant announced on Tuesday, as part of a broad reorganization of its business amid pressure from investors to improve its performance.

According to a calculation by Billboard, the music trade publication, the rights to Dylan’s recordings may be worth about $200 million, based on an estimate of $16 million in annual revenue around the world.

The “Mean Girls” tour made it to Oklahoma before it was knocked out by the coronavirus.

When the show hit the pause button, Jonalyn Saxer, the actress playing Karen Smith, found herself with two weeks off and no home of her own — like many actors, she gave up her New York apartment and put her stuff in storage when she signed on to tour.

The phenomenon is in some ways similar to what happened on Broadway, where so many theater workers tested positive in December that half of all shows canceled performances on some nights.

“In some cities, we’re in hotels and we’re the only people wearing masks,” she said.

There are currently about three dozen shows moving from venue to venue, stopping at a mix of nonprofit performing arts centers and for-profit theaters in nearly 300 North American cities, according to Meredith Blair, the president and chief executive of the Booking Group, an agency that arranges touring shows.

Most of the venues that present touring productions depend on locals, rather than visitors, so they are less vulnerable to the drop in tourism that has walloped Broadway.

“There’s a huge difference between New York and the audience on the road,” said Rich Jaffe, a co-chief executive of Broadway Across America, which presents Broadway tours in 48 North American markets.

Many North American tours are bypassing Canada because of government-mandated capacity restrictions there.

Squires, the president of Omaha Performing Arts, which hosted touring productions of “Cats” and “Hamilton” in the fall and then “Dear Evan Hansen” in the days before and after the New Year’s holiday.

“‘Hadestown’ arrived just as we were starting to see Omicron spike, and it far exceeded our targets for attendance and sales,” said Maria Van Laanen, the president and chief executive of Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in Appleton.

“We certainly noticed a slower pattern of buying over the holidays — in any other year, we would have been completely sold out, but that obviously wasn’t the case because there was some hesitancy,” said Jeffrey Finn, the vice president of theater producing and programming at the John F.

Keeping tours going has required shows to add staff members.

We had a couple of bad weeks where the numbers were not in our favor, and one of the people from the tour came in and saved us.

“Hamilton” shut down for a month in Los Angeles, and upon its reopening next month, it is now scheduled to stay just six more weeks, rather than running into the spring as initially anticipated.

“It’s very eye-opening, and very humbling, and makes me appreciate what we do even more, because it’s been taken away so many times,” he said.

Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati for further consideration, though that court most likely would have followed the Supreme Court’s lead and struck it down.

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