Oct. 26, 2021, 9:03 a.m. ET

Daily Business Briefing

Follow our latest coverage of business, markets and economy.

Amazon’s quarterly profit jumps to $7.8 billion.

Amazon on Thursday followed a trend among the country’s biggest tech firms. The company said it made more money in the latest quarter compared with last year — a lot more money.

The company said sales in the three months ending in June hit $113.1 billion, up 27 percent from a year earlier, when lockdowns were at their most extreme. It made $7.8 billion in profit, up 48 percent from $5.2 billion a year ago.

The results were a sign that even as businesses have reopened after the height of the pandemic, many people continue to do their shopping online, and much of that business continues to go Amazon’s way. The other biggest tech companies — Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft — have also reported blockbuster results this week.

But Brian Olsavsky, the company’s finance chief, said in a call with reporters that online sales growth had slowed some because more people were shopping more in person and spending time vacationing or socializing. “That’s all good,” he said, “but that does tend to lead them do other things besides shop.”

Shares of Amazon’s stock were down more than 7 percent in aftermarket trading, as investors had expected sales to be even higher and the outlook for the next quarter to be rosier. Amazon is valued at about $1.8 trillion, more than twice its value before the pandemic.

Amazon’s profit beat investor expectations as its most profitable businesses continued to flourish. Its cloud-computing division is now larger than most companies — Morgan Stanley estimates it is worth $600 billion — and growth continues to be strong. Sales in cloud computing rose 37 percent, to $14.8 billion. Its “other” business segment, which is primarily its advertising business, grew 87 percent to $7.9 billion. And within its consumer business, Amazon’s revenue from fees it charges marketplace sellers totaled $25 billion.

Subscriptions, largely Prime memberships, brought in $7.9 billion. About 200 million people are now Prime members, and a recent analysis from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners found they shop at Amazon 27 times a year on average, almost twice as frequently as customers who are not Prime members.

Amid a building boom to expand its fulfillment and delivery network, the company added another 64,000 workers in the past three months and now employs more than 1.3 million people — 52 percent more than this time last year. In the competitive labor market, Amazon has raised wages, which Mr. Olsavsky called “one of the bigger elements of inflation in our business right now.” He said the company expected to open many new facilities in the coming months as it heads into the holiday shopping season.

Comparing Amazon’s performance with last year’s is somewhat challenging this quarter. Last year, the company had an enormous surge in sales after it adjusted its staffing and other parts of its business to better meet the pandemic-fueled demand. But also this year, Amazon’s Prime Day deals event fell in June instead of October, giving another boost to revenue this quarter. J.P. Morgan estimated this year’s event generated about $8.4 billion in sales.

Uber delays its return to office and will require vaccines for employees.

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Uber will only allow employees to come into its offices if they are vaccinated and wear masks, a spokesman said.Credit...John Muggenborg for The New York Times

Uber told employees on Thursday that it would require them to be vaccinated, and it postponed a mandate to return to the office, joining a group of tech companies that have delayed reopening and stepped up vaccine requirements in response to the spread of the highly contagious Delta variant of the coronavirus.

On Wednesday, Google postponed its return-to-office plans until October and said employees in its U.S. offices would be required to be vaccinated. Lyft, Uber’s largest U.S. competitor, said it would not require employees to return to the office until February. Twitter shut down its San Francisco and New York offices, and put an indefinite halt to its reopening plans. Last week, Apple postponed its reopening until October.

The changes come as coronavirus cases have surged in the United States. Cases in the country increased 146 percent in the past two weeks, according to a New York Times tally.

Uber will also require employees to be vaccinated in order to work from the office. The mandate will begin with employees in the United States, and the company will assess its requirements for employees in other countries based on vaccine availability, Uber’s chief executive, Dara Khosrowshahi, wrote Thursday in an email to staff seen by The New York Times. Unvaccinated employees will be required to work from home.

Uber had already opened some offices for employees who wanted to return voluntarily, and a spokesman said that employees could continue to come into Uber’s offices if they are vaccinated and wear masks. But the company said it would not require employees to return until Oct. 25, a delay from its initial September return date.

“It’s important to say that this date is a global target, and local circumstances will continue to dictate when it makes sense to bring employees back in a given city,” Mr. Khosrowshahi said. “Rising Covid cases in our communities are a real reminder that we still need to be cautious, look at the data, and listen to experts as we return to offices. Every day, teams across the company are closely monitoring the rapidly changing global situation.”

Uber’s return date could be pushed back further if cases continue to surge, Mr. Khosrowshahi wrote.

Uber has not said whether it will require its drivers or riders to be vaccinated. It does require them to wear masks.

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The Olympics has helped to boost the Peacock streaming platform.

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USA’S Simone Biles does her one and only event of the night on the Vault during the Finals of the Team Competition at the Ariake Gymnastics Center in Tokyo, Japan on July 27.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The Tokyo Games may have been marred by a yearlong delay, a recent surge in coronavirus cases and the exit of marquee athletes, but the flurry of events and the rise in the medal count for the United States have helped Peacock, Comcast’s fledgling streaming service.

As of this week, the service had 54 million accounts and about 20 million active users, the company said on Thursday. That’s an increase from the end of March, when the company said it had 42 million sign-ups and 14 million active accounts. Comcast also said it will make Peacock available for free to its 20 million customers at Sky, the company’s satellite TV service in Britain and Europe.

Comcast, which owns the rights to the Olympics through its media unit NBCUniversal, debuted Peacock last year to coincide with the event. With the event pushed off a year, the cable giant relied on a smattering of original programming and older shows from the NBC library to attract customers.

It had a weak start, seeing slow growth in subscribers over its first year. In the second quarter of 2021, the service saw a jump in viewership as it took a page from other streaming platforms and released one of Universal Pictures’s big films, “Boss Baby 2,” on Peacock the same day as it was available in theaters.

NBCUniversal plans to show 7,000 hours of Olympics coverage across all its broadcast and cable networks as well as Peacock, which offers a free tier, making it an outlet for cord cutters.

On a conference call on Thursday following Comcast’s second-quarter financial report, Jeff Shell, the chief executive of NBCUniversal, said Peacock had changed how the Olympics has been watched and will be a key part of the company’s coverage in future games, including the Winter Olympics in Beijing next year.

“What we will learn in this Olympics we will take to Beijing,” he said.

The company expects the Tokyo Games to be profitable, in part because of the rise in viewership on its streaming platform.

Comcast, largest cable provider in the U.S., now considers itself an internet business as pay television continues to erode. Peacock is an extension of that plan, but it is also a way to recapture the ad revenue lost from the drop in traditional viewers at NBC and its cable networks. Unlike Netflix, Peacock relies on a combination of subscription revenue and advertising. It also sells a higher-cost tier that doesn’t include ads.

For the second quarter, Comcast lost 364,000 cable TV customers, bringing its total to 18 million, and gained 334,000 internet subscribers for a total of 29 million. Its internet business is now its largest, growing 14.3 percent to $5.7 billion in revenue.

Peacock, on the other hand, is the fastest-growing unit, but it loses the most money. For the three months ending in June, Peacock took a pretax loss of $363 million on $122 million in revenue, compared with a $117 million in pretax loss on $6 million in revenue in the same period last year.

For 2021, Comcast expects Peacock to lose $1.3 billion as it spends big on original shows and sports programming.

There was a concern that the Olympics could also be a money loser given the weak ratings of the opening ceremony. About 17 million people tuned in to that broadcast, about a 36 percent drop from the Rio Games. NBCUniversal paid about $12 billion for the rights to televise 10 Olympic Games through 2032.

“We had a little bit of bad luck — there was a drumbeat of negativity,” Mr. Shell said on the earnings call. “But the flip side of that is the digital trends kind of offset that.”

A poultry producer and four executives are charged in a chicken price-fixing case.

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Koch Foods was indicted on federal charges for its role in a conspiracy to fix prices of chicken products.Credit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

Koch Foods, one of the nation’s largest poultry processors, was indicted on Thursday on federal charges of engaging in a nationwide conspiracy to fix prices of chicken products. Also accused of taking part in the same conspiracy were four executives who worked for Pilgrim’s Pride, another poultry producer.

The indictments are part of a long-running investigation into claims that some of the biggest American poultry companies, including Tyson Foods and Pilgrim’s Pride, conspired to manipulate chicken prices, raising costs for American consumers.

The conspiracy began as early as 2012 and lasted until at least 2019, the Justice Department said in a statement on Thursday.

On Thursday, a federal jury in Denver indicted Koch Foods, based in Park Ridge, Ill., alleging that it “conspired to suppress and eliminate competition for sales of broiler chicken products,” the statement said.

The four Pilgrim’s Pride executives charged are Jason McGuire, a former executive vice president; Timothy Stiller, a former general manager; Wesley Tucker, a sales executive; and Justin Gay, a sales director.

“Price fixing is not a victimless crime, and the illegal actions taken by these companies and individuals in the broiler chicken industry have had a direct and negative impact on the American consumer,” said Steven M. D’Antuono of the F.B.I.’s Washington field office, which is conducting the investigation with the Justice Department’s antitrust division, the Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture.

The first charges in the investigation came last year, when Jayson Penn, then the chief executive of Pilgrim’s Pride, was indicted in June, along with three other current and former executives at companies that supply chicken to grocery stores and restaurants across the United States. Mr. Penn later left the company.

In October, Pilgrim’s Pride, which is based in Greeley, Colo., paid $110.5 million to settle federal price-fixing charges. “Pilgrim’s is committed to fair and honest competition in compliance with U.S. antitrust laws,” Fabio Sandri, the company’s new chief executive, said in a statement at the time.

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Consumers were a big factor in the second-quarter G.D.P. expansion.

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Shoppers in Miami Beach, Fla., in April. Factors like stimulus checks and rising coronavirus vaccination rates lifted the economy in the spring, but the Delta variant is clouding the outlook for the rest of the year.Credit...Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

Consumers are fueling the economic recovery.

Consumer spending rose 2.8 percent in the second quarter, helping to offset declines in other parts of the economy. Spending on services was particularly robust as widespread vaccinations and falling coronavirus cases led Americans to return to restaurants, nail salons and other in-person activities.

“We finally saw the full pivot to services driving consumer spending instead of goods,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist for the accounting firm Grant Thornton.

Spending on goods remained strong, too, partly reflecting the continuing impact of the third round of stimulus checks, which arrived in Americans’ bank accounts in the spring.

Business investment was also relatively strong, rising 1.9 percent, as companies stepped up spending on technology and equipment.

The housing sector, however, was a drag on growth, shrinking 2.5 percent after three straight quarters of strong gains. That might seem surprising given stories of frenetic bidding wars in red-hot housing markets. But what matters to G.D.P. is construction, and new home building has been hampered by shortages of labor and supplies, and in particular the high price of lumber.

Overall growth in the second quarter fell significantly short of economists’ expectations. But that was largely because of weaker-than-expected government spending, particularly at the state and local level, as well as an unexpectedly sharp drop in inventories. Both of those factors are likely to reverse later this year.

Robinhood’s stock falls after its debut on the public stock market.

Robinhood’s Share Price
$34.82
Change from I.P.O. price
-8%
Major Shareholders Share Value
Index Ventures
Venture capital firm
$2.96 billion
Baiju Bhatt
Co-founder and chief creative officer
$2.75 billion
New Enterprise Associates
Venture capital firm
$2.60 billion
Ribbit Capital
Venture capital firm
$2.20 billion
DST Global
Venture capital firm
$2.02 billion
Vladimir Tenev
Co-founder and chief executive
$1.85 billion
As of 4 p.m. Eastern time. Assumes shares held by Mr. Tenev and Mr. Bhatt have the same price as the publicly traded stock. Source: FactSet and securities filings • By The New York Times

Shares of Robinhood opened trading at $38, valuing the company at $31.7 billion, but then fell as much as 11 percent before ending the day down 8.4 percent. In this market, a first-day slump is rare, showing that investors may be hesitant to buy into the company’s grand mission of upending Wall Street. Read more →

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Stocks rise as G.D.P. data shows consumer spending continued.

Data delayed at least 15 minutes

Source: FactSet

By: Ella Koeze

Stocks rose on Thursday after the latest reading on gross domestic product showed that strong consumer spending and robust business investment brought the economy back to its prepandemic size.

The economy grew 1.6 percent in the second quarter, a 6.5 percent annualized rate, the Commerce Department said on Thursday. That was slower than economists had expected, but the shortcoming may also help ease a concern among stock investors about the economy running too hot.

Wall Street has been contending with the risk that high inflation will prompt the Federal Reserve to pull back on its emergency support for the economy. At the same time, the rise of the Delta variant and the end of many pandemic-related support programs could weigh on growth in the future.

On Wednesday, the Federal Reserve left its policy rates unchanged and said it would give plenty of warning before beginning to dial back support for the economy. But Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, made it clear that the central bank isn’t ready to withdraw support just yet. Speaking on Wednesday, he said that while the economy was making “substantial” progress, “we have some ground to cover on the labor market side.”

  • The S&P 500 rose 0.4 percent while the Nasdaq composite rose 0.1 percent.

  • Markets in Europe were also slightly higher, with the Stoxx Europe 600 closing with a gain of 0.5 percent.

  • Shares for Robinhood fell during its public trading debut. The stock trading start-up opened for trading at $38, the same price as its offering, but closed 8.4 percent lower.

  • Facebook fell 4 percent after the company noted that its rapid growth — profits doubled in the last quarter — may not last, especially as more people are vaccinated and begin to venture out of their homes and away from their computers.

New state unemployment claims dipped last week.

  • Initial claims for state jobless benefits declined slightly last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

  • The weekly figure, seasonally adjusted, was about 400,000, a decrease of 24,000 from the previous week. New claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federally funded program for jobless freelancers, gig workers and others who do not ordinarily qualify for state benefits, totaled 95,166, down about 14,700 from the week before.

  • New state claims remain high by historical standards but are one-third the level recorded in early January. The benefit filings, something of a proxy for layoffs, have receded as businesses return to fuller operations, particularly in hard-hit industries like leisure and hospitality. (With the latest report, The New York Times is returning to an emphasis on seasonally adjusted figures for state claims. A change in methodology for seasonal adjustments last year, several months after the pandemic’s onset, made comparisons with earlier data more difficult.)

  • More than 20 states have recently moved to discontinue some or all federal pandemic unemployment benefits — including a $300 weekly supplement to other benefits — even though they are funded through September. Officials in those states said the payments were keeping people from seeking work.

  • A survey of 5,000 adults conducted June 22-25 by Morning Consult found that those whose unemployment benefits were about to expire felt more pressure to find work. But of all those on unemployment insurance, relatively few — 20 percent of those who had worked full time, and 28 percent of those who had worked part time — said the benefits were better than their previous work income in meeting basic expenses.

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Shell and TotalEnergies report higher earnings as gas and oil prices rise.

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Filling up at at Shell station in Denver. Royal Dutch Shell said Thursday it would increase its dividend and buy back shares.Credit...David Zalubowski/Associated Press

Two of Europe’s largest oil companies, Royal Dutch Shell and TotalEnergies, the new name for Total, reported sharply higher earnings for the second quarter on Thursday as higher energy prices and reviving demand for oil and natural gas bolstered results.

Shell’s adjusted earnings were $5.5 billion, compared with just $638 million in the period a year earlier, when much of the global economy gripped by lockdowns to curb the spread of the coronavirus. TotalEnergies — the new name is meant to reflect the Paris-based company’s growing emphasis on renewables and electricity — also reported a big jump in adjusted net income for the quarter: $3.5 billion versus $126 million a year ago.

Shell, which disappointed investors last year when it sharply cut its dividend for the first time since World War II, said that it would increase its dividend for the second quarter by 38 percent, to 24 cents a share. Shell also said it aimed to buy back $2 billion worth of shares in the second half of this year.

Shell’s share price gained more than 3 percent Thursday. TotalEnergies, which also announced plans to buy back shares, gained 2.2 percent.

Ben van Beurden, Shell’s chief executive, said that the company’s decision to sweeten the rewards for shareholders reflected confidence in the future after last year’s brutal downturn set off by the pandemic.

He also said that he thought oil prices, which averaged $69 a barrel in the quarter compared with $30 a barrel a year earlier, were supported by market fundamentals.

“Supply is going to be restrained and demand quite strong,” he said during a news conference Thursday.

Credit Suisse finds incompetence but no criminal conduct in Archegos debacle.

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A Credit Suisse branch in Bern, Switzerland.Credit...Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters

Credit Suisse suffered humiliation and shareholder wrath this year when it lost $5.5 billion from the collapse of the Archegos Capital Management investment fund. On Thursday, the bank admitted that its own failings were to blame, releasing a report that chronicled the “fundamental failure of management and controls” behind the debacle.

Perhaps the only bright spot for Credit Suisse in a report full of painful details was that the New York law firm hired by the bank to conduct the autopsy attributed the losses to incompetence and fear of alienating a big client. The investigators concluded that none of the bank employees “engaged in fraudulent or illegal conduct or acted with ill intent.”

The 165-page report, by the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, amounted to a case study in everything that can go awry inside an investment bank and lead to financial disaster. At Credit Suisse, the problems included an overworked and underqualified staff, miscommunication between departments, inattentive senior managers and a system geared to increase sales rather than monitor risk.

Credit Suisse, based in Zurich, was hardly the only bank to do business with Archegos, which managed the wealth of Bill Hwang, a onetime star money manager. But after Archegos collapsed in March, done in by a $20 billion wager on shares of ViacomCBS that went sour, Credit Suisse was slower than Goldman Sachs and other creditors to liquidate the fund’s positions, and it had the biggest losses.

Credit Suisse probably also suffered the biggest hit to its reputation, in part because it was caught up in another disaster at almost the same time. Greensill Capital, which organized funds that Credit Suisse marketed to investors, filed for bankruptcy in London only weeks before Archegos’s meltdown. Credit Suisse said Thursday that it expected to return at least $5.9 billion to investors in the Greensill funds, which had been valued at $10 billion.

Credit Suisse, which also reported a big quarterly drop in profit on Thursday, said it would use the Archegos debacle “as a turning point for its overall approach to risk management.” The bank said that 23 employees would forfeit or be required to pay back $70 million in bonuses, and that nine in the group would be fired.

“We are determined to learn all the right lessons and further enhance our control functions to ensure that we emerge stronger,” António Horta-Osório, who took over as chairman of Credit Suisse in April, said in a statement.

The blame went beyond individual cases of negligence, according to the Paul, Weiss report. The bank’s zeal to cut costs and increase profit was also a factor, the report said.

Starting in 2015, rounds of staff cuts left senior managers at Credit Suisse “wearing so many hats, receiving so many reports and being inundated with so much data that it was difficult for them to digest all of the information and discharge their responsibilities effectively.”

Seasoned managers were replaced by junior employees. The team responsible for overseeing Archegos and other clients “struggled to handle more work with less resources and less experience,” the report said.

Archegos’s collapse came as a shock to outsiders, but the risk of doing business with the fund had been apparent for years, according to the report. In 2012, Mr. Hwang, the founder, pleaded guilty to a U.S. charge of wire fraud while running another fund, and settled insider trading allegations with the Securities and Exchange Commission. He had also been barred in 2014 from trading in Hong Kong.

In 2015, Credit Suisse employees “shrugged off” Mr. Hwang’s history after reviewing the risk of doing business with him, the Paul, Weiss report said. In subsequent years, the bank allowed Archegos to make big bets using mostly borrowed money — moves that generated interest income and fees for Credit Suisse. In 2020, though, Archegos began chronically exceeding limits on the amount of risk it was allowed to assume.

Credit Suisse executives ignored or downplayed the breaches and other red flags because they were aware that Archegos was working with other banks. They were afraid of alienating an important client.

When the bank’s risk managers suggested in February that Archegos be required to post an additional $1 billion in cash to reduce its leverage, people responsible for working with the fund said that would be “pretty much asking them to move their business,” according to the report.

“The Archegos matter directly calls into question the competence of the business and risk personnel who had all the information necessary to appreciate the magnitude and urgency of the Archegos risks, but failed at multiple junctures to take decisive and urgent action to address them,” the report said.

The scale of Archegos’s problems did not become evident to the top echelon of Credit Suisse managers until March 24, a day before the fund collapsed, according to the report. By then, it was too late.

“No one at C.S. — not the traders, not the in-business risk managers, not the senior business executives, not the credit risk analysts and not the senior risk officers — appeared to fully appreciate the serious risks that Archegos’s portfolio posed to C.S.,” the report said. “These risks were not hidden. They were in plain sight.”

This week, Credit Suisse appointed David Wildermuth, a veteran Goldman Sachs executive, as its chief risk officer, the latest in a series of high-level management changes. Lara Warner, who served as the bank’s chief risk officer and chief compliance officer, stepped down in April.

Archegos remains a burden on Credit Suisse earnings. The bank said Thursday that net profit in the second quarter fell nearly 80 percent, to 253 million Swiss francs, or $278 million. It booked an additional loss from Archegos of $653 million in the quarter, and also absorbed an 18 percent decline in sales, to 5.1 billion francs.

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The latest: ArcelorMittal reports a strong quarter as demand for steel rebounds.

  • ArcelorMittal, Europe’s largest steel company, reported net income of $4 billion for the second quarter on Thursday, the highest in more than a decade, as economies rebounded from the severe downturn of the pandemic. Aditya Mittal, the chief executive, said that the steel maker expected to spend $10 billion over the next decade reducing carbon emissions, and that he expected governments to foot half that bill.

  • Facebook said on Wednesday that revenue rose 56 percent to $29 billion in the three months ending in June compared with the same period last year, while profits rose 101 percent to to $10.4 billion, as the social network continues to benefit from a surge of users spending more time online during the pandemic. Advertising revenue, which continues to be the bulk of Facebook’s income, rose 56 percent to $28.6 billion, easily surpassing Wall Street expectations. Roughly 3.51 billion people now use one of Facebook’s apps every month, up 12 percent from a year earlier.

  • Ford Motor said on Wednesday that its profit for the three months that ended in June fell by about 50 percent, to $561 million, in large part because a global shortage of computer chips kept the company from selling more cars and trucks. The result, however, was not as bad as the automaker had feared. Ford also gave a more upbeat outlook for the full year, saying it now expected an adjusted operating profit in the range of $9 billion to $10 billion, some $3.5 billion more than it had previously forecast.

  • Boeing on Wednesday said that it made a $587 million quarterly profit, a result that surprised Wall Street, which had been expecting a loss, and a strong sign that the aerospace giant is overcoming the 737 Max crisis, problems with its 787 Dreamliner jet and the economic shock caused by the pandemic. The profit for the second quarter, which ended in June, is a big turnaround from the $2.4 billion loss Boeing reported in the same period last year. Wall Street analysts had expected Boeing to lose more than $100 million in the quarter this year, according to S&P CapitalIQ.

Biden calls on Congress to extend the federal eviction freeze for one month.

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The Maricopa County constable inspected an apartment while serving an eviction order in Phoenix in September.Credit...John Moore/Getty Images

WASHINGTON — President Biden asked Congress on Thursday to approve a one-month extension of a federal moratorium on residential evictions, a long-shot request made just two days before the current freeze expires.

The decision to ask Congress for help comes as the White House continues to struggle with a $47 billion rental relief program that has been plagued by delays, confusion and red tape. Just 600,000 tenants have been helped by the program, passed as part of two coronavirus relief packages in 2020 and 2021.

The request caught Democratic leadership by surprise. An attempt to pass an extension by a voice vote this week is expected to fail in the Senate, according to several people close to the situation.

The expiration of the moratorium will almost certainly lead to an increase in evictions across the country, with estimates ranging from 300,000 to more than a million families in the first month after the freeze ends.

About 6.5 million tenants have fallen behind in rent payments since the start of the pandemic, according the Census Bureau. The White House had hoped the infusion of cash for rental assistance included in the two relief packages would prevent nearly any eviction stemming from unpaid rent accrued during the pandemic.

But the Treasury Department had spent only about $3 billion as of July 1, as states and cities have struggled to create systems to allocate the assistance on the fly.

“We are missing an enormous opportunity,” said Mary K. Cunningham, who studies housing policy for the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan Washington-based policy group. “We have $47 billion — $47 billion — in housing assistance. It is stunning to me that with these unprecedented resources we are going to have even one added eviction for the poor.”

White House officials, under pressure from tenants’ rights groups, agreed to a one-month extension of the ban, which was issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just before its previous expiration date of June 30.

Last month, the Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the freeze by landlords, saying it would allow the moratorium to continue until July 31, as planned, to give the Treasury Department and the states time to disburse cash to renters and their landlords.

But there was a big catch: Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh wrote in a concurring opinion that any future extension of the moratorium would require congressional action.

On Thursday, Mr. Biden’s press secretary, Jen Psaki, citing the steep rise in coronavirus infections across the country, pressed Congress to extend the freeze for another month to avoid a health and eviction crisis.

“Given the recent spread of the Delta variant, including among those Americans both most likely to face evictions and lacking vaccinations, President Biden would have strongly supported a decision by the C.D.C. to further extend this eviction moratorium,” she said in a statement. “Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has made clear that this option is no longer available.”

Mr. Biden “calls on Congress to extend the eviction moratorium to protect such vulnerable renters and their families without delay,” she added.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday night also urged her colleagues to act, calling the extension “a moral imperative” and saying that “families must not pay the price” for the slow distribution of aid.

Still, the last-minute timing of the request virtually ensures such an effort will not succeed, Democratic congressional aides said. And some Democrats, including Representative Maxine Waters of California, had pushed the White House to extend the moratorium without Congress.

Late Thursday, the House Rules Committee took up a measure to extend the moratorium until the end of the year, but the only way to ram it through the Senate is to use a procedure known as unanimous consent, which can be blocked by a single dissenting vote.

“There’s no way I’m going to support this. It was a bad idea in the first place,” said Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania. “Owners have the right to action. They need to have recourse for the nonpayment of rent.”

Asked if an extension could pass, Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who supports a long-term freeze, threw up his arms in frustration as he headed to a vote at the Capitol on Thursday and said, “Who knows!”

The federal moratorium was imposed last fall by the Trump administration, citing the danger posed to public health by evicted tenants spreading the virus as they sought shelter. Many states, including California and New York, have extended their own freezes through the fall, which could blunt the impact when the federal moratorium lapses.

Diane Yentel, the president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a nonpartisan tenants’ rights group, is pressing the White House to consider new steps, including imposing a freeze on evictions of tenants from federally backed apartments.

“We need more time to get the money out the door,” she said. “And the Delta variant has changed everything. The health crisis is not over.”

The Biden administration’s effort to head off a crisis gained modest momentum in June, with 290,000 tenants receiving $1.5 billion in pandemic relief, according to Treasury Department statistics released last week. To date, about 600,000 tenants have been helped under the program.

But the flow of cash provided under the pandemic relief packages remains sluggish and hampered by confusion at the state level. The biggest problem, officials involved in the program said, is that some states had no infrastructure to distribute the money, and have been slow to develop collaborations with legal aid groups, housing court administrators and landlord associations who have more expertise.

Some states, especially Illinois and Texas, have picked up the pace, but many states and cities have still failed to allocate any funding.

In recent days, White House officials have been working the phones to pressure officials in New York, and other states, to move faster. In the past week, Wally Adeyemo, the deputy Treasury secretary overseeing the program, sent letters to officials in several localities, including New York, warning that their share of the cash could be taken back if it was not spent by mid-September, according to two senior administration officials.

“There can be no excuse for any state or locality not to promptly deploy the resources that Congress appropriated to meet this critical need of so many Americans,” Ms. Psaki said.

This week, the country’s biggest trade group for residential landlords sued the federal government over the national moratorium, claiming that it had cost owners around $27 billion that was not covered by existing aid programs.

The suit by the group, the National Apartment Association, cited industry estimates showing that 10 million delinquent tenants owed $57 billion in back rent by the end of 2020, and that $17 billion more had gone unpaid since then.

“Any extension of the eviction moratorium equates to an unfunded government mandate that forces housing providers to deliver a costly service without compensation and saddles renters with insurmountable debt,” said Bob Pinnegar, the association’s president, who downplayed fears that the expiration of the moratorium would prompt an eviction crisis.

“Housing providers do not want people to lose their homes,” he added. “Such notions are contrary to the industry’s survival and simply untrue.”

Emily Cochrane contributed reporting.

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Today in On Tech: Big Tech has outgrown this planet.

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CreditCredit...Nicole Ginelli

Today in the On Tech newsletter, Shira Ovide writes, “The already bonkers dollars of Big Tech have become even bonkers-er,” and offers an explanation for what it all could mean.

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