Many farmers are. In North Carolina, Ms. Overman, 57, said she could not handle another bad year. Last season, she lost $450,000 when most of her wheat and soybeans were wiped out by a hurricane, the second in three years. Her son and son-in-law have both come home to farm. “But neither of them wants to plant one grain because they see no future in it,” she said. “They would be seventh generation, but they’re tired of going to the bank and getting a loan and not being able to…

OAKHURST, Calif. — Pacific Gas & Electric has a big problem. Its equipment keeps coming into contact with dry trees and shrubs and starting devastating wildfires. So the company is scrambling to trim or cut down hundreds of thousands of trees across its vast Northern California territory. But it has another problem: finding people to do that work. Beyond the tight labor market, there is the challenge of enlisting a certain kind of worker for the difficult and dangerous job. To trim trees well, especially the 200-footers in the Sierra…

On Monday, Canada and Mexico officially lifted the tariffs they had imposed on American pork, milk, cheese, wine and other products, a major relief to American farmers who count the countries as two of their top three export markets, in addition to China. The collateral damage to farmers from the trade clash with China now looms as a potential obstacle to the president’s re-election. China’s tariffs against products like soybeans and beef and a recent move to cancel a major pork order have hit swing states, including Iowa, Ohio and…

Four in 10 American adults wouldn’t be able to cover an unexpected $400 expense with cash, savings or a credit-card charge that could be quickly paid off, a new Federal Reserve survey finds. About 27 percent of people surveyed would need to borrow or sell something to pay for such a bill, and 12 percent would not be able to cover it at all, according to the Fed’s 2018 report on the economic well-being of households. The share that could cover such an expense more easily has been climbing steadily…

He reached out to Canadian and Mexican officials, offering a deal in which the United States would lift its tariffs if the countries would agree to prevent future surges of metal into the United States market, these people said. If those surges happened, the United States could reimpose tariffs of 10 percent on aluminum and 25 percent on steel on the specific products affected. And Canada and Mexico would agree that, if they retaliated, it would only be on American metal, and not on American farmers. On Monday, Canada and…

To get a sense of the scale, consider that the United States budget this year is $4.7 trillion. Of course, varying any critical assumption can add or subtract billions or trillions of dollars. Thomas Craemer, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut, used the same starting point — 40 acres and a mule — but a different method in a study published last year. He used the current average price of agricultural land and figured that 40 acres of farmland and buildings would amount to roughly…

It has all the elements of a classic Trump tale: intervention with an otherwise heartless company, a saved factory in the heartland, and assurances that old-school manufacturing jobs would be preserved. On Wednesday, the factory in question was the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Mr. Trump announced that it was being sold to a little-known maker of electric vehicles, Workhorse Group, and that G.M. was making a new investment in the state. “I have been working nicely with GM to get this done,” he wrote on Twitter. “With all…

Stock markets fell Thursday in the United States, but pared some of those losses after Mr. Trump’s comments in the afternoon. The S&P 500 index ended the day down less than 0.5 percent. Talks resumed at 5 p.m. on Thursday at the offices of the United States trade representative, and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and Robert Lighthizer, Mr. Trump’s top trade negotiator, continued them over a dinner with Mr. Liu and some members of the Chinese delegation. The new 25 percent rate went into effect at 12:01 a.m. Friday….

GREGORIO DE LAFERRERE, Argentina — The turquoise paint is peeling from the walls of Claudia Veronica Genovesi’s modest home. Her roof leaks, but she and her husband — both office cleaners — cannot afford to patch it. On the ragged streets of the shantytown across the road, where stinking outhouses sit alongside shacks fashioned from rusted sheets of tin, families have surrendered hopes that sewage lines will ever reach them. They do not struggle to fashion an explanation for their declining fortunes: Since taking office more than three years ago,…

That is a significant shift from the prevailing view in the United States since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 that close economic engagement with China would produce an increasingly democratic country that would be closely tied to an international economic order founded mainly on Western liberal ideals. That has not happened. China has indeed grown in prosperity, leaping into the ranks of what the World Bank defines as upper-middle income countries. Its economy is now bigger than any other country except the United States. Its manufacturing sector is…