There’s a Race to Power the Future. China Is Pulling Away.

ChinaSolar in Shanxi Province Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times U.S.Oil in California J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times Lithium-ion batteries China$65 bil.United States$3 bil.Asia$21 bil.Europe$26 bil.Africa$2 bil.Americas$17 bil.Oceania$1 bil. Solar panels and modules China$40 bil.United States$69 mil.Asia$11 bil.Europe$20 bil.Africa$2 bil.Americas$6 bil.Oceania$1 bil. Electric cars China$38 bil.United States$12 bil.Africa$281 mil.Oceania$3 bil.Europe$26 bil.Asia$14 bil.Americas$8 bil. Crude oil China$844 mil.United States$117 bil.Asia$50 bil.Americas$16 bil.Oceania$799 mil.Europe$52 bil.Africa$359 mil. Natural gas China$3 bil.United States$42 bil.Asia$13 bil.Europe$22 bil.Africa$3 mil.Americas$11 bil. Coal China$1 bil.United States$15 bil.Africa$718 mil.Americas$3 bil.Asia$8 bil.Europe$5 bil.Oceania$16 thou. ChinaElectric car…

Republican Bill to End E.V. Tax Credit Could Hurt G.M. and Ford

Sales of electric vehicles have been rising in recent years, partly because of a $7,500 tax credit from the federal government that helps lower the cost of buying one. But a budget bill that House Republicans released on Monday would end that tax credit. Their proposal would also put new restrictions on other tax breaks that have encouraged automakers to invest tens of billions of dollars in new battery plants in the United States. By next year, the bill would do away with the $7,500 tax credit for buyers of…

Yellen Sees ‘More Work to Do’ as China Talks End With No Breakthrough

Four days of top-level economic meetings between the United States and China concluded in Beijing on Monday with no major breakthrough, but the world’s two largest economies agreed to hold more discussions to address rising friction over trade, investment and national security. The conversation is poised to become even more difficult, however, as hopes of greater economic cooperation collide with a harsh political reality: It is an election year in the United States, and antipathy toward China is running high. At the same time, Chinese officials appeared unmoved by Treasury…

United States Spurns China for Mexico and Other Allies, Trade Data Shows

In the depths of the pandemic, as global supply chains buckled and the cost of shipping a container to China soared nearly twentyfold, Marco Villarreal spied an opportunity. In 2021, Mr. Villarreal resigned as Caterpillar’s director general in Mexico and began nurturing ties with companies looking to shift manufacturing from China to Mexico. He found a client in Hisun, a Chinese producer of all-terrain vehicles, which hired Mr. Villarreal to establish a $152 million manufacturing site in Saltillo, an industrial hub in northern Mexico. Mr. Villarreal said foreign companies, particularly…

Trump’s Tariffs Hurt U.S. Jobs but Swayed American Voters, Study Says

The sweeping tariffs that former President Donald J. Trump imposed on China and other American trading partners were simultaneously a political success and an economic failure, a new study suggests. That’s because the levies won over voters for the Republican Party even though they did not bring back jobs. The nonpartisan working paper examines monthly data on U.S. employment by industry to find that the tariffs that Mr. Trump placed on foreign metals, washing machines and an array of goods from China starting in 2018 neither raised nor lowered the…

Flush With Investment, New U.S. Factories Face a Familiar Challenge

The Biden administration has begun pumping more than $2 trillion into U.S. factories and infrastructure, investing huge sums to try to strengthen American industry and fight climate change. But the effort is facing a familiar threat: a surge of low-priced products from China. That is drawing the attention of President Biden and his aides, who are considering new protectionist measures to make sure American industry can compete against Beijing. As U.S. factories spin up to produce electric vehicles, semiconductors and solar panels, China is flooding the market with similar goods,…

World Bank Warns of Energy Price Surge if Mideast War Spreads

The global economy is at risk of a “wasted” decade and the weakest stretch of growth in 30 years, the World Bank warned on Tuesday, saying a sluggish recovery from the pandemic and crippling wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are expected to weigh heavily on output. In its semiannual Global Economic Prospects report, the World Bank projected that the growth in world output will slow further in 2024, declining to 2.4 percent from 2.6 percent. Although the global economy has been surprisingly resilient, the report warned that its…

Trump’s 2025 Trade Agenda: A New Tax on Imports and a Split from China

Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an aggressive expansion of his first-term efforts to upend America’s trade policies if he returns to power in 2025 — including imposing a new tax on “most imported goods” that would risk alienating allies and igniting a global trade war. While the Biden administration has kept tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed on China, Mr. Trump would go far beyond that and try to wrench apart the world’s two largest economies, which exchanged some $758 billion in goods and services last year. Mr. Trump…

Income Inequality Has Been Transformed Globally

Culturally, the age of inequality is still churning: Over just the last six months, we’ve had the song “Rich Men North of Richmond” and Shawn Fain’s leading the United Auto Workers into a triumphant labor war with Detroit’s Big Three while wearing an “Eat the Rich” T-shirt. But at the structural level, our picture of American inequality also seems to be changing. According to some measures, U.S. income inequality hasn’t meaningfully grown over the last decade, the very period in which it has become such a potent cultural and political…

Lawmakers Call for Raising Tariffs and Severing Economic Ties With China

Bipartisan lawmakers on Tuesday called for severing more of America’s economic and financial ties with China, including revoking the low tariff rates that the United States granted Beijing after it joined the World Trade Organization more than two decades ago. The House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party released a wide-ranging set of recommendations for resetting America’s economic relationship with China. The report, which was signed by both House Democrats and Republicans, argued that China had carried out a “multidecade campaign of economic aggression” that had undercut American firms,…