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As rising inflation threatens his presidency, President Biden is turning to the federal government’s antitrust authorities to try to tame red-hot price increases that his administration believes are partly driven by a lack of corporate competition, the New York Times reported. Biden has prodded the Agriculture Department to investigate large meatpackers that control a significant share of poultry and pork markets, accusing them of raising prices, underpaying farmers — and tripling their profit margins during the pandemic. As gas prices surged, he publicly encouraged the Federal Trade Commission to investigate accusations that large oil companies had artificially inflated prices, behavior that the administration says continued even after global oil prices began to fall in recent weeks. The push has extended to little-known agencies, like the Federal Maritime Commission, which the president has urged to search for price gouging by large shipping companies at the heart of the supply chain. The turn to antitrust levers stems from Mr. Biden’s belief that rising levels of corporate concentration in the U.S. economy have empowered a few large players in each industry to raise prices higher than a more competitive market would allow. Corporate culpability for rising prices remains unclear. Inflation is at a 40-year high because of pandemic-related factors such as broken supply chains and high demand for goods from consumers still flush with government-provided cash. But as the price increases have spread across sectors, including food and gasoline, the administration has come under increasing pressure to find ways to respond.

President Joe Biden extended the pause on federal student-loan repayments by another three months as the U.S. faces a fresh wave of COVID-19 cases from the omicron variant, removing a near-term threat to millions of Americans’ finances, Bloomberg News reported. The move on Wednesday takes the moratorium on payments, interest and collections through May 1. Biden had initially extended the pause through September after he took office and then stretched the end to Jan. 31. The president had faced pressure from Democratic lawmakers to provide an extension. “We know that millions of student-loan borrowers are still coping with the impacts of the pandemic and need some more time before resuming payments,” Biden said in a statement. He urged students to take steps to “prepare for payments to resume,” including looking at lower payments, exploring loan forgiveness and getting vaccinated and boosted. The latest extension will help 41 million people save $5 billion per month and it provides additional time for borrowers to plan for the resumption of payments and reduce the risk of delinquency and defaults, the U.S. Education Department said in a statement Wednesday.

The U.S. Secret Service said that nearly $100 billion has potentially been stolen from COVID-19 relief programs designed to help individuals and businesses harmed by the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported. The funds have “attracted the attention of individuals and organized criminal networks” world-wide, the agency said in a news release, though its estimate of stolen benefits represents just a fraction of the trillions of dollars in government relief provided since last year. The Secret Service said that it would work closely with a variety of federal agencies — including the Labor Department and Small Business Administration, which have key roles tracking and administering relief funds — to investigate and recover fraudulently disbursed funds. The Secret Service said that its estimate is based on public reports issued by internal government watchdogs, with the bulk of the potentially misused funds stemming from fraud tied to unemployment insurance. Those analyses are based on 2020 activity and could overstate the amount of actual fraud or stolen money, in part because they also include mistaken payments to ineligible recipients and not necessarily bad actors. The Secret Service issued a revised statement on Wednesday afternoon warning of “potential fraudulent activity nearing $100 billion,” amending an earlier release that said “stolen benefits” and pointed to estimates totaling more than $100 billion. In a separate estimate released last week, the Labor Department said about $87 billion in unemployment benefits might have been paid improperly, “with a significant portion attributable to fraud.” The department administers federal components of aid programs in addition to compiling data on state-run benefits.

The Supreme Court last night announced it will hold a special hearing next month to consider challenges to the Biden administration’s pandemic efforts affecting millions of workers, a nationwide vaccine-or-testing requirement for large employers and a separate coronavirus vaccine mandate for health-care workers, the Washington Post reported. Both policies have been at least partially blocked from going into effect by lower courts after challenges from Republican-led states, and from business and religious coalitions. It is highly unusual for the justices to schedule such hearings on emergency requests. Both will be considered Jan. 7, the Friday before the court was to resume its normal schedule of oral arguments. One of the cases involves a rule from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that requires employers with 100 or more workers to have staff vaccinated or tested on a regular basis. The other is from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and it requires vaccination for workers at facilities that receive federal funds tied to those programs.

The Biden administration is considering extending the moratorium on federal student loan payments just weeks before it is set to expire as the highly transmissible omicron variant of the coronavirus poses a new threat to the economy, NBCNews.com reported. A spokesperson for the Education Department said yesterday that the administration will announce "whether to extend the pause further" this week. Administration officials said in September that they did not intend to extend the pause beyond the Jan. 31 deadline, warning borrowers that they should be prepared to resume payments in February. For weeks the White House has maintained that President Joe Biden would stick to the timeline, even as Covid case numbers began to increase and as inflation concerns began to grip the country. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said earlier in the day that "the president has not made a decision yet." Debt relief advocates and some Democratic lawmakers have pressured Biden to extend the moratorium, especially because his Build Back Better plan — which the White House has argued would lower costs for Americans — has failed to pass the Senate.

The U.S. health-care profession is suffering its own Great Resignation, pushing more hospitals into financial distress just as a winter surge of the coronavirus hits, Bloomberg News reported. Across the country, hospitals are buckling under the strain of nursing shortfalls and the spiraling cost of hiring replacements. For Watsonville Community Hospital on California’s Central Coast, those costs became too much to bear, and contributed to the facility’s bankruptcy this month. The shortages are most acute at hospitals like Watsonville that rely on government funding to treat poorer patients, since they have fewer resources to compete against the rising cost of keeping staff. The situation adds to the stress facilities have already experienced responding to the early onset of the virus, just as the last of federal aid is being doled out. The issue is emerging in the capital markets, too. Aveanna Healthcare Holdings Inc. went public in April in an effort to expand beyond its leading position in pediatric home health services. But a shortage of caregivers has pummeled its stock, while credit raters gave a debt issue to fund acquisitions low-tier junk level assessments. Insurers are trying to move patients out of hospitals more quickly due to the staffing shortages and have offered the home-care company premiums to do so, according to an emailed statement from Executive Chairman Rod Windley. The pain spreads beyond nurses. A report by human-resources firm Mercer this year estimated a shortfall of 3.2 million lower-wage workers, such as nursing assistants and home health aides, by 2026. Employers will also need to hire more than 1.1 million registered nurses in that period, Mercer said. Walsh said his hospital is also struggling to fill lab, respiratory therapist and administrative positions.

President Joe Biden today is convening a meeting of U.S. officials and private sector companies, including FedEx, to talk about ongoing efforts to address supply chain disruptions, Reuters reported. Biden created a task force in June to address the issue, and the White House argues it has made "significant progress to alleviate bottlenecks that are rooted in the global pandemic." Last month, Walmart Inc. Chief Executive Doug McMillon said a decision to extend port hours was having a positive impact on the flow of goods. Still, supply chain issues continue to affect many U.S. industries. Reuters reported this week that candy makers, like retailers and farmers, have been slammed during COVID-19 with high commodity prices, labor shortages, and transportation and supply chain snarls, preventing them from fully cashing in on the holiday season. Much of the shipping crunch resulted from the pandemic. Home-bound Americans with unspent travel and entertainment dollars and government stimulus checks splurged on everything from food and refrigerators to toys and exercise equipment. The demand for imports overwhelmed supply chains. Biden, who is wrestling with U.S. inflation that recently hit a 31-year high, has taken measures to try to break such logjams, including unclogging ports and expanding trucker hours. Today's meeting will include the secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Labor and Transportation as well as National Economic Council Director Brian Deese and Port Envoy John Porcari.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued two joint letters yesterday regarding important legal housing protections for military families, according to a CFPB press release. One letter was sent to landlords and other housing providers regarding protections for military tenants. A second letter was sent to mortgage servicers regarding military borrowers who have already exited or will be exiting COVID-19 mortgage forbearance programs in the coming weeks and months. The letter to landlords and other housing providers reminds property owners of the important housing protections for military tenants, some of whom may have had to relocate or make other changes to their housing arrangements in response to the crisis. While military families enjoy the same legal protections and privileges afforded to all other homeowners and tenants, they also have additional housing protections under the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act (SCRA), which is enforceable by the DOJ and servicemembers themselves. The letter to mortgage servicers comes in response to complaints from military families and veterans on a range of potential mortgage servicing violations, including inaccurate credit reporting, misleading communications to borrowers, and required lump sum payments for reinstating their mortgage loans. These complaints are being reviewed for compliance by the CFPB with the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act and other applicable requirements.

The swift arrival of a new coronavirus variant has rekindled economic anxieties in Washington, D.C., as congressional lawmakers, business leaders and consumer advocates begin to worry whether there is enough federal aid to shield Americans from another round of financial despair, the Washington Post reported. Over the course of the nearly two-year pandemic, Congress has committed nearly $6 trillion toward combating the contagion and bringing a battered economy back from the brink. But some of the most significant programs to keep businesses afloat and help households pay bills have expired or run out of funds, raising new risks for the future of the country’s recovery, particularly as the omicron variant wave begins to take hold. There’s no federal money left to keep restaurants open. The aid for concert halls and other customer-starved performance spaces has nearly gone dry. Federal officials ended their primary effort that pumped money into small businesses with sagging balance sheets, and they stopped paying out extra sums to workers who are out of a job. Federal student loan protections are expiring imminently, meaning students’ bills are set to come due early next year. A stimulus initiative under President Biden that provided monthly payments to more than 35 million families with children may have issued its last round of deposits this past Wednesday. And attempts to extend those tax benefits — or address a wider array of longer-term financial issues facing parents — have stalled again on Capitol Hill. “I’m concerned that you’re going to have many, many vulnerable Americans, Americans with young children for example, falling between the cracks,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), adding: “January looks like a tough month with respect to omicron.”