A11
B USINESS
THE BULLETIN • THURSDAY, JULY 21, 2022
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BRIEFING
Home sales fall
as prices reach
new heights
Sales of previously
occupied U.S. homes
slowed for the fifth con-
secutive month in June
as higher mortgage rates
and rising prices kept
many home hunters on
the sidelines.
Existing home sales
fell 5.4% last month from
May to a seasonally ad-
justed annual rate of 5.12
million, the National As-
sociation of Realtors said
Wednesday.
That’s lower than the
5.37 million home sales
pace economists were
expecting, according to
FactSet. Sales fell 14.2%
from June last year.
After climbing to a
6.49 million annual rate in
January, sales have fallen
to the slowest pace since
June 2020, near the start
of the pandemic, when
they were running at an
annualized rate of 4.77
million homes. Excluding
the pandemic-related
slowdown, sales in June
were running at the slow-
est pace since January
2019.
Even as home sales
slowed, home prices kept
climbing in June. The
national median home
price jumped 13.4% in
June from a year earlier
to $416,000. That’s an all-
time high according to
data going back to 1999,
NAR said. Despite the in-
crease, home prices are
not climbing as much as
they were earlier this year.
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OREGON
Hiring remains robust, defying recession fears
tinues apace, and job postings
remain far higher than before
the pandemic, suggesting that
employers are still scrambling
to fill openings.
Some businesses have be-
gun signaling a more cau-
tious approach, though. Intel,
Oregon’s largest corporate
employer, announced a hiring
freeze in its software group
last month and said it would
add fewer jobs across the
company in anticipation of
broader economic weakness.
On Wednesday, online tech
publication The Information
reported that Google plans to
pause all hiring for two weeks
and slow the rate of hiring for
the rest of 2022.
“We’ll use this time to re-
view our headcount needs
and align on a new set of pri-
oritized staffing requests for
the next three months,” Goo-
gle Vice President Prabhakar
Raghavan wrote in a note to
employees, according to The
Information. Google has an
outpost in downtown Port-
land.
ELECTRIC SHOCK
How to keep
a cellphone
cool and
working in a
heat wave
BY MIKE ROGOWAY
The Oregonian
Oregon hiring picked up in
June, defying fears of a reces-
sion in the offing amid higher
interest rates and soaring in-
flation.
The state added 8,700
jobs last month, according
to state data out Wednesday,
well above the average rate
of about 6,200 new jobs over
the preceding 12 months. The
jobless rate was essentially flat
at 3.6%, near the lowest level
on record.
“Oregon is continuing to
experience a strong labor mar-
ket with ongoing hiring and
low unemployment,” said Gail
Krumenauer, an economist
with the Oregon Employment
Department.
She said the state has re-
gained 94% of the jobs lost in
the early days of the pandemic
recession.
Oregon’s average pri-
vate-sector wage was $32.05
an hour last month, accord-
ing to a separate report issued
Wednesday. That’s up 7.9%
from June 2021 — a big jump,
but not as fast as the 9.1% an-
nual rate of inflation nation-
wide.
With prices rising at their
fastest clip in decades, the
Federal Reserve is raising in-
terest rates in hopes of cooling
off the economy and slow-
ing inflation. Economists are
watching to see if the tough
medicine will cool off the la-
bor market and push up un-
employment.
There’s no evidence of that
so far in Oregon. Hiring con-
General Motors CEO Mary Barra says company will be global leader in electric cars
BY CHRIS VELAZCO
The Washington Post
Our smartphones are
perhaps as prone to over-
heating as we are in re-
cord-breaking heat waves
marching across the coun-
try.
When hot summer days
arrive, your phone may
start to have trouble shed-
ding the extra heat inside.
Once that happens, you
may eventually find your-
self unable to use your
phone until it cools down,
and that’s not good for any-
one. To help, here are a few
things you can do to keep
your phone functional and
cool when it’s too hot out-
side.
Postal Service ups
EV numbers of
delivery trucks
The United States
Postal Service plans to
make at least 40% of all
new delivery vehicles bat-
tery electric, including at
least 50% of the trucks
purchased from Oshkosh
Corp.
The move marks an
increase from its previous
plan to make only 20% of
its new vehicles electric as
part of a $2.98 billion ef-
fort to begin replacing its
30-year-old fleet.
In addition to the
50,000 new vehicles pur-
chased from Oshkosh, the
Postal Service plans to
buy 34,500 off-the-shelf
vehicles during the next
two years “because of the
critical and immediate
need to accelerate the
replacement of our ag-
ing fleet,” according to an
agency press release.
Combined, at least
40% of new vehicles from
the two sources will be
electric, USPS said. The
agency plans to buy up
to 165,000 vehicles worth
$6 billion total in the next
decade.
q
David Zalubowski/AP
General Motors CEO Mary Barra isn’t backing off of an audacious prediction: She pledges that by the middle of this decade, her company will
sell more electric vehicles in the U.S. than Tesla, the global sales leader.
BY TOM KRISHER • Associated Press
NEW YORK — The economy is a bit wobbly, but General Motors CEO Mary Barra isn’t backing off of an
audacious prediction: By the middle of this decade, her company will sell more electric vehicles in the U.S. than
Keep phones out of direct
sunlight
Using your phone out
under the sun, snapping
some photos, means it can
quickly absorb heat. And
if it’s especially sunny, your
phone might try to crank
up the brightness of its
screen to make it easier to
read. That can be helpful,
sure, but that also means
your phone is expending
more power, which in-
creases the odds that the
phone will shut down to
protect itself.
Limit your usage
If you can’t quite tear
yourself away — or if you
have a good reason you
need to be on your phone
— the next best thing is to
limit what you do with it.
Tesla, the global sales leader.
To fulfill that pledge in as little as 2½ years, she faces some long odds against immense economic forces that are
working against auto sales. Inflation has spiked, interest rates are rising, material costs have soared and a global
shortage of computer chips is still braking assembly lines at GM and other companies.
See General Motors / A12
See Phone / A12
— Bulletin wire reports
Getting a new farm off the
ground is tougher than ever
One-third of all of America’s 3.4 million farmers are over the age of 65
BY ALLISON WINTER
Idaho Capital Sun
WASHINGTON — More than
half of American farmers will reach
retirement age in the next 10 years,
but the steep price of entry to start
a farm, along with rising input costs
and volatile markets, make it tough
for young and beginning farmers to
take their place.
“Farming is inherently a risky busi-
ness, but in the environment we are
in right now, that risk is elevated,”
Nathan Kauffman, vice president
and economist at the Federal Reserve
Bank of Kansas City in Omaha, Ne-
braska, testified at a U.S. House Agri-
culture Committee hearing July 14.
The current financial outlook for
farmers is particularly challenging.
Farmers face rising costs for not only
farmland, but also for fertilizer, fuel,
seeds and chemicals.
These rising costs are due in part
to the war in Ukraine, strains on the
global supply system, inflation and
severe weather.
Meanwhile, high crop prices that
have buoyed farmers during the past
year are expected to go down.
“Uncertainty about the outlook
for the U.S. agriculture economy is
high and will depend significantly on
global factors, particularly the war in
Ukraine and the strength of global
economic activity,” said Kauffman.
Demand for farm loans is expected
to rise notably, and capital expen-
diture is expected to decline in the
coming months for the first time
since 2020, according to Kauffman.
House lawmakers are looking for
ways to mitigate some of these risks
and support young and beginning
farmers in the next farm bill, the
sweeping legislation that will set pro-
grams and funding levels for farm
and food support for the next five
years.
“It is a national and very critical
issue. And we must ensure that the
next generation of men and women
can take the place of those who are
retiring from this grand occupation
Sean Ellis/Idaho Farm Bureau Federation
Dry beans are planted in a field near Parma, Idaho, in spring . More than half of
American farmers will reach retirement age in the next 10 years, but the steep price
of entry to start a farm, along with rising input costs and volatile markets, make it
tough for young and beginning farmers to take their place.
called farming,” House Agriculture
Committee Chairman David Scott,
a Georgia Democrat, told his col-
leagues at the hearing. “This is very
critical to me. And credit is one of
those tools that we must make read-
ily available.”
See Farm / A12