US Business

With inflation rising sharply, and the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, the United States is facing an increased risk of a downturn, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said Friday.

But any temporary pain caused by a recession would be “a necessary price to pay” to defeat damaging inflation, she said.

The Washington-based crisis lender again slashed its US growth forecast to 2.9 percent, from the 3.7 percent forecast in April, which was cut from the rate predicted at the start of the year.

The world’s largest economy rebounded strongly from the pandemic downturn, but that has come with “unwelcome side effects” of rising prices, Georgieva said.

While the IMF is confident the Fed’s rate hikes will bring down inflation, “We are conscious that there is a narrowing path to avoiding a recession,” she said in a statement.

The Fed last week implemented the biggest increase in its benchmark lending rate in nearly 30 years, as part of its aggressive effort to quell inflation that is at a four-decade high and squeezing American families struggling with rising prices for gasoline, food and housing.

The US economy already was seeing strong demand clashing with supply snarls due to pandemic lockdowns in China and elsewhere, when Russia invaded Ukraine, which has intensified the inflationary pressures.

For 2023, growth is expected to slow to 1.7 percent, but “narrowly avoid” a recession, according to the annual review of the US economy, known as the Article IV consultation.

The IMF chief said the battle against inflation must be the “top priority” despite the impact a US slowdown might have on the global economy.

“Success over time will be beneficial for global growth, but some pain to get to that success can be a necessary price to pay,” she said in response to a question from AFP.

Georgieva met with US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome Powell and the officials “left no doubt as to their commitment to bring inflation back down.”

Nigel Chalk, deputy chief of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere division, said any US recession is likely to be short-lived, given the stockpile of savings and strong business and household balance sheets, and the strong labor market.

“All of those things would help support the economy,” he said. “So if it was hit by negative shock, it should pass relatively quickly and have a relatively quick recovery afterwards.”

– Roll back tariffs –

The IMF also urged Washington to remove punitive trade duties imposed under former president Donald Trump — something President Joe Biden said he is considering and Yellen appears to favor.

“Especially at a time when inflation is high and supply chains are strained… we can see clear benefits in rolling back the tariffs that were introduced over the last 5 years,” Georgieva said in a statement.

However, US Trade Representative Katherine Tai has said the steep tariffs on China offer negotiating “leverage” with Beijing which she is reluctant to give up.

The IMF report said removing tariffs on steel, aluminum, and a range of products from China “would support growth and help reduce inflation.”

The rapid US recovery, helped by low interest rates and hefty government aid, had domestic benefits, reducing poverty and creating more than 8.5 million jobs since the end of 2020, according to the IMF analysis. 

It also offered a boost to the pandemic-ravaged global economy, but fund economists cautioned that it will be “tricky” to avoid recession.

“The stakes are clearly high. Misjudging the policy mix — in either direction — will result in sizable economic costs at home and negative outward spillovers to the global economy.”

However, the report pushed back against comparisons to the inflationary era of the 1980s, noting the economy and the central bank actions are “markedly different.”

The Florida town of Surfside held a memorial ceremony Friday for 98 people who died exactly a year ago when a seaside condominium collapsed, with relatives of the deceased, rescue workers and politicians on hand.

The tribute was held at the spot where part of the 12-story Champlain Towers South building once stood in this town north of Miami Beach.

People taking part in the ceremony cried, hugged and clapped as relatives of victims took turns giving speeches.

“I know what it means to feel profound loss. And one year later, time has not healed my broken heart. Like all of you, I carry this extreme void with me,” said Kevin Spiegel, whose 65-year-old wife Judy died that day.

Raquel Oliveira remembered her husband Alfredo Leone, 48, and their five-year-old son Lorenzo, both of whom died in the accident.

“Exactly 365 days ago, my house imploded, collapsed with everything and everyone inside but me. It took my family two weeks to be found,” said Oliveira.

“We need answers. We need justice. We need something that I hate: the word patience,” she added.

First Lady Jill Biden and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis attended the ceremony.

Except for a teenager rescued hours after the tower collapsed, search crews found no survivors in the rubble.

On Thursday, a judge approved a more than $1 billion settlement, most of which will go to survivors of people who died in the accident. 

A furious Joe Biden denounced a “tragic error” fueled by “extreme ideology,” urging Americans to set things right at the polls. But words aside — the US president is all-but-powerless to defend the right to abortion.

The 79-year-old Democrat, a staunch Catholic turned abortion rights advocate, kept his remarks brief in addressing the thunderbolt ruling handed down Friday by the Supreme Court.

But in the televised address from the White House, he pulled no punches.

The conservative-dominated court, by overturning “Roe v. Wade,” is “literally taking America back 150 years,” Biden charged. 

“The court has done what it has never done before — expressly take away a constitutional right that is so fundamental to so many Americans,” said Biden — warning that other rights could now be at risk, from contraception to same-sex marriage.

That is the “extreme and dangerous path the court has now taken us on,” he said.

Biden vowed to do everything he could to shield abortion access.

But with the Supreme Court stripping away a half-century-old federal right, handing power to often anti-abortion state legislatures, he acknowledged that his hands are largely tied.

The only way to ensure the right now “is for Congress to restore the protections of ‘Roe v. Wade’ as federal law,” he said. “No executive action from the president can do that.”

“Voters need to make their voices heard,” he said.

Struggling in the polls as inflation surges — and fears mount of a recession — Biden signaled the intention to make abortion a key part of the Democratic campaign to retain control of Congress in November midterm elections.

“This Fall, ‘Roe’ is on the ballot. Personal freedoms are on the ballot — the right to privacy, liberty, equality, are all on the ballot.”

Biden vowed to do “all in my power” to curb the impact of the court’s ruling — citing for instance women’s right to travel out of state to receive reproductive care, and access to abortion pills.

But he did not touch on calls from part of the left for abortion clinics to be built on federal land in conservative states — or for reform of the Supreme Court.

– No questions –

About half of the US states are moving immediately to either ban or severely restrict abortion, responding to decades of activism by the so-called “pro-life” movement, which finally got its chance when Republican president Donald Trump named three more conservative justices to the top court, tilting the balance firmly right.

Biden did not hide his anger as he described some of the laws emerging from states as “jeopardizing the health of millions of women.” 

In some cases, legislators are allowing women to be “punished for protecting their health” and forcing women to “bear their rapist’s child,” he said.

After concluding, Biden turned and left without taking questions from reporters, while the White House daily briefing was canceled — to protests from the press corps.

The next time Biden faces the media will be Saturday morning when he leaves on a days-long trip to Europe.

During back-to-back G7 and NATO summits, the “leader of the free world” will rub shoulders with Western leaders, several of whom have openly denounced the US Supreme Court ruling.

As it happens, his first stop will be Germany, which has just consigned to history a Nazi-era law that limits the information doctors and clinics can provide about abortion.

And by Biden’s own admission, the Supreme Court’s ruling has made the United States an “outlier” among developed nations.

It’s often said that people who click right away share “chemistry.” 

This expression could be true in the literal sense, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, which finds people with similar body odors are more likely to hit it off as friends.

“Nonhuman terrestrial mammals constantly sniff themselves and each other and, based on this, decide who is friend or foe,” wrote a group of researchers led by Inbal Ravreby at Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel.

Since people seek friends who are similar to themselves, the team hypothesized that humans may smell themselves and others to subconsciously estimate body odor similarity and judge their compatibility.

To find out, they set about collecting samples from pairs of same-sex, non-romantic friends who described themselves as having clicked at first sight, that is to say “where a sense of friendship was formed before extensive biographical information was exchanged,” according to the paper.

After an extensive recruitment effort, they found 20 pairs, half of whom were male, and the other half female, all aged between 22 and 39 years old.

In order to prevent contamination or outside factors influencing their samples, all participants had to follow a strict protocol that included avoiding pungent foods and sleeping away from their partner and pets in a clean cotton T-shirt that was provided to them.

The T-shirts were collected in ziplock bags and tested with an electronic nose — a device equipped with sensors to analyze chemical composition. The researchers found that the odor signatures of “click friends” were statistically more closely matched than odors between non-friends.

To assess whether the eNose results accurately mirrored human perception, the team recruited human smellers and devised a set of tests to check the validity of their result. 

In one of these tests, for example, the human smellers were presented with three odors: two from a pair of click friends, and one outlier. They successfully identified the pairs and rejected the outlier.

– Smell predicted friendships too –

These results seemed to confirm the hypothesis that similar smells might spur friendship, but an alternative explanation was that people who are friends spend a lot of time together and so have similar body-odor shaping experiences, such as where they live and what they eat.

To disentangle these two possibilities, the team devised another test to see whether smell could be a successful predictor in whether two people who’ve never met go on to click.

They recruited 17 strangers and had them all interact with one another in a test called the “Mirror Game” — standing half a meter apart so they could subconsciously smell each other, they were asked to mimic each other’s hand movements for two minutes, without talking to each other.

Chemical similarity in their odors, as tested by the eNose, successfully predicted mutual clicks in 77 percent of cases, and predicted 68 percent of cases where both sides said they did not click.

What’s more, the closer people’s smell was, the more they reported liking each other, understanding one another, and feeling greater chemistry between themselves.

Together, the study’s results “converged to suggest that human same-sex nonromantic click friends smell more similar to each other than expected by chance,” the team concluded.

Humans, unlike other terrestrial mammals, use complex language to interact, and so it’s possible the effects of smell in lab settings were amplified compared to how important they may have been in real life, the team wrote.

“Nevertheless, we think our results imply that we may also be more like other terrestrial mammals in this respect than we typically appreciate.”

Beaming young women chanted in joy as a machine spat out bubbles and party music blared in front of the US Supreme Court, which had just revoked the federal right to abortion.

Someone shouted “We won” and another cheer rose from the anti-abortion campaigners, one of whom waved a sign bearing a tombstone marked 1973-2022 — the lifespan of that right in America.

“I am so over-the-moon, overjoyed, excited at the overturning of Roe v. Wade. This is a new era of feminism,” Faith Montgomery, an 18-year-old student, shouted over the music.

A parallel demonstration just steps away was filled with rage, disbelief and pledges of resistance against the ruling on one of the most politically incendiary issues in a deeply polarized nation.

“Coat hangers… and whatever crazy things women used to think they could do to get rid of a pregnancy — now we’re going to be back to that again,” said Amy Senkowicz, 63, who was visiting from Florida.

She had a legal abortion when she was 16, just a few years after the 1973 Supreme Court decision that guaranteed women’s right to the procedure, and she was horrified to see that right taken away.

“I think it’s awful,” said the mother of three.

America’s split on the issue was brought into clear relief by the competing demonstrations that at times engaged in shouted debates that did not appear to spill over into violence.

The scene was under heavy police surveillance and riot officers with helmets and shields stood by as some members of Congress spoke outside the fenced and guarded court building.

Congresswoman Sara Jacobs, a Democrat from California, told AFP: “This takes us back to a time when I will have less rights than my mother and grandmother. I’m furious.”

– ‘What’s next?’ –

The decision will likely become a rallying cry for Americans supportive of women’s ability to choose to have an abortion, the way Roe V. Wade was one for decades for conservatives.

Anna Lulis, 24, with an anti-abortion group called Students for Life of America, said activists are already moving on to the next steps in their advocacy.

They will be “informing our community but also going to the states, which are going to now push radical pro-abortion laws, in order to cultivate a culture of life there,” she said.

The decision opens the door for states to restrict or forbid abortion, but does not prevent them from allowing the procedure.

Lulis noted that abortions done with medication will rise after Friday’s ruling, and added her group would be making sure there’s “nothing illegal going on behind the scenes.”

“Our goal is to abolish abortion completely,” she said, arguing there needed to be “common sense medical standards” to protect women’s health in cases where pills are used.

Abortion proponents were also looking at what comes next, especially with key legislative votes coming in November that could sweep away Democrats’ narrow hold on Congress.

“It’s going to be a long, long, long fight to bring things back to the way they were,” said Senkowicz, the mother of three. 

Yet some were left with a feeling that the court has been overrun by the feverish politics of America’s culture wars that have developed around issues like abortion and gun ownership.

“They are beholden and enslaved to the people who nominate them,” said Kim Boberg, 49, referring to the court and its overwhelming conservative majority after three Donald Trump-era appointments.

“It should be above politics but it’s not,” she said, worried about the possibilities the decision could open up.

“So what’s next? Is it the morning after pill? Is it contraception? How many rights have to be taken away before it’s enough?”

Former US president Donald Trump on Friday said “God made the decision” to end the national right to abortion after the Supreme Court overturned nearly five decades of settled law.

“This is following the Constitution, and giving rights back when they should have been given long ago,” Trump told Fox News after a 6-3 majority said individual states should be allowed to make their own rules on abortion.

Asked if he felt he played a role in this outcome, having appointed three conservative justices to the court while in office, Trump said “God made the decision.”

But a short time later, the 45th president chimed in again to take credit for the ruling.

“Today’s decision, which is the biggest WIN for LIFE in a generation…(was) only made possible because I delivered everything as promised, including nominating and getting three highly respected and strong Constitutionalists confirmed to the United States Supreme Court,” he said in a statement.

“It was my great honor to do so!”

Trump’s four years in office saw the appoinment of three justices that tilted the balance of the Supreme Court to its current conservative majority.

Those appointees were Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, all of whom signed on to Friday’s majority decision.

Trump, whose statement carried the familiar scattering of capital letters, castigated Democrats, the media and “RINOs” — a disparaging term for Republicans deemed not sufficiently right-wing — as the “enemy of the people.”

“Even though the Radical Left is doing everything in their power to destroy our Country, your Rights are being protected, the Country is being defended, and there is still hope and time to Save America! 

“I will never stop fighting for the Great People of our Nation!”

Trump, whose actions and inactions around the January 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol are under the spotlight at Congressional hearings, is publicly mulling another run at the White House.

He was defeated in 2020 in his bid for re-election by President Joe Biden, but has refused to accept the result.

Emboldened by its landmark win at the Supreme Court, the US anti-abortion movement pivoted immediately Friday to its next goal: to have the procedure banned in each of America’s 50 states.

Declaring the end of constitutional abortion rights a “historic” victory, leaders of the largely Christian conservative “pro-life” movement declared a new phase, in which they would focus at the local level to get state legislatures to end the practice.

But some also said their ultimate goal would be to return to the Supreme Court for a ruling that would give fetuses the same rights as a person, which would equate abortion with murder.

“An entirely new pro-life movement begins today,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America campaign — vowing to go on the “offensive for life in every single one of those legislative bodies, in each statehouse and the White House.”

“Over the next few years we will have the opportunity to save hundreds of thousands, even millions of lives by limiting the horror of abortion in many states.”

Other groups echoed that view.

“While it’s a major step in the right direction, overturning Roe does not end abortion,” said the March for Life group in a statement.

– Battle in the states –

Part of their goal has already been achieved, with the conservative-dominated Supreme Court overturning the landmark 1973 “Roe v. Wade” decision enshrining a woman’s right to an abortion.

More than half of all states are now poised to severely restrict or outlaw the practice, 13 of them through so-called “trigger” laws that come into effect almost immediately, based on the high court’s decision.

Within hours of the ruling, Missouri banned abortion — making no exception for rape or incest — and so did South Dakota, except where the life of the mother is at risk.

But a handful of others are moving in the opposite direction, with the most populous state of California pledging jointly with Oregon and Washington to defend abortion access in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling.

And so both anti-abortion and abortion rights groups girded for more localized battles, in legislatures, local courts and local elections.

March for Life immediately sent out a fundraising email to boost its local efforts.

“To say that we are elated would be an understatement, but our work does not stop here,” they said of the Supreme Court decision.

They pointed to work by supporters of abortion rights to press for federal legislation and for White House orders protecting access across the country — to justify continued mobilization by their own camp.

“With your support, we have reached the most monumental moment in pro-life history, and we are more energized than ever to continue the fight for life,” they said.

Dannenfelser said her group’s focus includes the legislative elections coming up in November, when Republicans hope to take control from Democrats of the Senate and House of Representatives.

“Today’s outcome raises the stakes of the midterm elections,” she said.

– ‘Personhood’ –

But the movement has broader horizons, hoping ultimately to persuade Congress or the Supreme Court to fully outlaw abortions on the grounds that a fetus or embryo has the same federally protected rights as a person.

“Throughout human history, countless groups of humans have been unjustly deprived of the status of ‘personhood,’ by both society and the law,” said March for Life. “Abortion is no different.”

“We want abortion abolition,” said Americans United for Life.

“We must clarify, as a constitutional matter as much as a matter of fundamental justice, that abortion shall not exist in the United States of America,” the group’s president, Catherine Glenn Foster, said in a statement.