More than seven months after it was launched, the biggest rental assistance program in U.S. history has delivered just a fraction of the promised aid to tenants and landlords struggling with the impact of the Covid-19 crisis.

Since last December, Congress has appropriated a total of $46.6 billion to help tenants who were behind on their rent. As of June 30, just $3 billion had been distributed, though a senior official said the Biden administration hoped at least another $2 billion had been distributed in July.

While the program is overseen by the Treasury, it relies on a patchwork of more than 450 state, county and municipal governments and charitable organizations to distribute aid. The result: months of delays as local governments built new programs from scratch, hired staff and crafted rules for how the money should be distributed, then struggled to process a deluge of applications.

Often, tenants and landlords didn’t know money was available, and...

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The metropolitan area competing for the tightest labor market in the nation isn’t a tech hub on the West Coast, or a boomtown in Texas. It is Birmingham, Ala., a southern city with an unemployment rate that is nearly half the national level and similar to Salt Lake City’s.

Birmingham, the most populous metro area in Alabama, had the second-lowest unemployment rate of metropolitan areas with more than one million people in June, according to the Labor Department’s latest rankings. Its seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for that month was 3.1%, near its pre-pandemic level of 2.4% in February 2020, and slightly above Salt Lake City’s 2.8% rate for June. Birmingham’s June unemployment rate was lower than other southern cities such as Atlanta, Charlotte and Houston—and compares with July’s national rate of 5.4%.

Economists say the city’s diversified economy, Alabama’s relatively relaxed Covid-19 restrictions and resilient consumer behavior have helped the...

Inflation stayed high in July, with U.S. consumer prices rising 5.4% from a year ago as the economic recovery gained steam.

The consumer price index measures what consumers pay for goods and services, including groceries, clothes, restaurant meals, recreation and vehicles.

Inflation has heated up this year for several reasons. U.S. gross domestic product rose at a rapid 6.5% seasonally adjusted annual rate in the second quarter, powered by consumer spending that climbed at an 11.8% pace as more people received vaccinations, businesses reopened and trillions of dollars in federal aid flowed through the economy.

Prices in categories hit hardest by the Covid-19 pandemic are still recovering to pre-pandemic levels, including for air travel, apparel, entertainment and recreation. Those price increases should slow once prices return to more normal levels, though the outbreak of the Delta variant of the Covid-19 virus could delay that process, many economists...

WASHINGTON—The Senate passed a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint early Wednesday, the first step in an arduous process designed to allow Democrats to push through a sweeping package of education, healthcare, climate and other provisions without GOP support.

The party line vote, 50-49, came just before 4 a.m., one day after the Senate passed a roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package. It is an initial victory for President Biden and congressional Democrats who are seeking to pass as much of their legislative agenda as possible this year, before next year’s midterm elections overtake Capitol Hill.

“Senate Democrats have just took a massive step towards restoring the middle class of the 21st century,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) said just after the vote. “What we’re doing here is not easy. Democrats have labored for months to reach this point. And there are many labors to come. But I can say with absolute certainty that it will be...

More than seven months after it was launched, the biggest rental assistance program in U.S. history has delivered just a fraction of the promised aid to tenants and landlords struggling with the impact of the Covid-19 crisis.

Since last December, Congress has appropriated a total of $46.6 billion to help tenants who were behind on their rent. As of June 30, just $3 billion had been distributed, though a senior official said the Biden administration hoped at least another $2 billion had been distributed in July.

While the program is overseen by the Treasury, it relies on a patchwork of more than 450 state, county and municipal governments and charitable organizations to distribute aid. The result: months of delays as local governments built new programs from scratch, hired staff and crafted rules for how the money should be distributed, then struggled to process a deluge of applications.

Often, tenants and landlords didn’t know money was available, and...

BEIRUT—In recent decades Lebanon has been a place of relative calm in a turbulent region. Now it is living through a once-in-a-century economic meltdown.

The collapse, rippling through all levels of society, has been accelerated by the lasting effects of the explosion in the Port of Beirut one year ago today.

Power outages have become so frequent that restaurants time their hours to the schedule of electricity from private generators. Brawls have erupted in supermarkets as shoppers rush to buy bread, sugar, and cooking oil before they run out or hyperinflation topping 400% for food puts the prices out of reach. Medical professionals have fled just as the pandemic hammers the country with a new wave of infections. Thefts are up 62% and murder rates are rising fast.

In May, Gaith Masri, a 24-year-old law student and gas-station attendant from northern Lebanon, was shot dead after a scuffle with a customer when he refused to go beyond a rationing limit....

WASHINGTON—The U.S. trade deficit widened to a record in June as the resurgent American economy drove strong demand for foreign-made goods ahead of the Covid-19 Delta-variant surge.

The trade gap in goods and services expanded 6.7% from May to a seasonally adjusted $75.7 billion, the Commerce Department said Thursday. Before the pandemic, the monthly trade deficit had hovered for years between $40 billion and $50 billion.

The trade report is another example of how American consumers and businesses have stepped up spending and investment as the economy has recovered to its pre-Covid-19 size, fueling demand for imports. Purchases from overseas climbed 2.1% in June to $283.4 billion, also a monthly record.

Exports have grown more slowly, reflecting weaker recoveries in some other regions that have made less progress against Covid-19. Exports rose in June by just 0.6% to $207.7 billion.

The trade data, and separate labor-market readings, come as the...

Inflation likely remained elevated but ebbed slightly in July, as the economy rebounded amid pandemic-related shortages of labor and supplies, economists say.

Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expect the Labor Department to report the consumer-price index rose 5.3% in July from a year earlier, a bit slower than June’s 5.4% surge and still close to the highest 12-month rate since 2008. The so-called core price index, which excludes the often volatile categories of food and energy, likely increased 4.4% from a year before, they estimate.

The CPI measures what consumers pay for goods and services, including groceries, clothes, restaurant meals, recreation and vehicles. Economists also estimate it rose a seasonally adjusted 0.5% in July from June, a cooler pace than its 0.9% increase in June from May.

Aneta Markowska, chief financial economist at Jefferies LLC, expects a monthly increase of 0.6%. “That would be a little less than we’ve seen but...

U.S. household spending bounced back in June as consumers shelled out more on services at the start of the summer, but a current upswing in Covid-19 cases related to the Delta variant is injecting uncertainty into the economic outlook.

Personal-consumption expenditures—a measure of household spending on goods and services—increased a seasonally adjusted 1% last month, the Commerce Department reported Friday. That followed a downwardly revised 0.1% drop in May, when consumers pulled back on purchases of goods but boosted spending on services.

The spending report reflects that the “economy is still very much on track,” said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James Financial. He said any potential impact of the Delta variant’s spread is difficult to predict, but added it would pose a significant risk to economic growth if consumers curtail activities such as traveling and dining out.

Americans’ personal income rose 0.1% in June, as wages and salaries...

Law school was once considered a surefire ticket to a comfortable life. Years of tuition increases have made it a fast way to get buried in debt.

Recent graduates of the University of Miami School of Law who used federal loans borrowed a median of $163,000. Two years later, half were earning $59,000 or less. That’s the biggest gap between debt and earnings among the top 100 law schools as ranked by U.S. News & World Report, a Wall Street Journal analysis of federal data found.

Graduates from a host of other well-regarded law schools routinely leave with six-figure student loans, then fail to find high-paying jobs as lawyers, according to the Journal’s analysis of the latest federal data on earnings, for students who graduated in 2015 and 2016.

When Miami students asked for financial assistance, some graduates told the Journal, school officials often offered this solution: Take more loans.

“I had no work experience, life experience, anything...

Available jobs in the U.S. rose to another record high at the end of June, pushing openings above the number of unemployed Americans seeking work, a sign of an unusually tight labor market.

Unfilled job openings rose by 590,000 to a seasonally adjusted 10.1 million in June, the highest level since record-keeping began in 2000, the Labor Department said Monday. The increase was driven by industries such as professional and business services, retail and the accommodation and food services, as pandemic restrictions continued to ease that month and consumers were more willing to dine out and travel.

The June increase in job openings came ahead of an uptick in cases tied to Covid-19’s Delta variant. Private measures of job postings through July showed openings remained elevated, though they began to plateau as hiring improved. The continued high number of openings indicates that the variant, so far, isn’t affecting hiring plans.

The number of job openings in...

Even more encouraging than the better-than-expected growth in jobs and fall in unemployment in July were signs of the improving underlying health of the labor market. First, the broadest measure of unemployment, which includes people who want to work but aren’t looking, or working part time because they can’t find full time work, is falling much more quickly than the official unemployment rate. It dropped to 9.2% in July from 9.8%, just 2.2 points higher than before the pandemic began. Second, the number of people unemployed 27 weeks or longer fell 560,000 to 3.4 million, down 793,000 from its March peak. Among the unemployed, just 2.9 million had lost their jobs permanently, down 600,000 since its April peak. These trends all militate against “scarring” of the labor force, that is people left unemployed or underemployed for years because of the recession. —Greg Ip

Zhang Jianli used to hire only male workers on his construction sites throughout Chifeng, Inner Mongolia, specifying in online job ads, “Women workers please don’t contact us.” Now with abundant work but not enough hands, Mr. Zhang says he has relented.

He now offers daily wages of about 160 yuan, roughly $25, for women workers to move wood and bricks, about one-fifth less than their male peers, and up to 200 yuan a day for urgent jobs. His ads say that both men and women can apply.

“They work hard and have few complaints,” Mr. Zhang said of the women he hires, most in their 40s and 50s.

Chinese women are increasingly taking on heavy-labor jobs long dominated by men in construction, transportation and other sectors, bucking traditional gender roles in China’s vast workforce.

A labor shortage caused by low birthrates and an aging population is pushing employers to recruit more women to build high-rises, maintain rail tracks and drive trucks, among...

WASHINGTON—The clock is ticking for Congress to reach a deal to raise the federal borrowing limit, or debt ceiling, before the government runs out of money to pay its bills some time over the coming months. The ceiling was suspended in 2019 and was reinstated automatically at the beginning of this month. Top Senate Republicans, who object to President Biden’s spending agenda, have said the GOP may line up against any effort to raise the limit this year.

Here’s a guide to what that means, and how the issue may be resolved:

The Biden administration is extending the pause on federal student loan payments and interest through early 2022.

The Education Department said that it would uphold the moratorium, which the administration first extended earlier this year and suspends loan payments, interest accrual, and collections on defaulted loans. The pause was set to expire at the end of September 2021.

Here are the details on the extension, who will benefit and what lies ahead when it comes to student-debt legislation.

American gas-station owners are facing a tough decision over whether to invest in electric-vehicle charging stations, a costly bet that currently makes little financial sense but might help future-proof their businesses.

Some gas stations, convenience stores and truck stops are adding chargers to test the technology and protect their market share for the long run. Others say they crunched the numbers and decided they can’t justify the cost, given the small share of electric-vehicle drivers. Charging units and installation typically cost upward of $100,000 each, and might entail the expense of tearing up pavement to lay conduit.

Auto makers including General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. are aggressively expanding their lineups of electric vehicles, and President Biden last week set a target to increase U.S. sales of electric, plug-in hybrid and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles to 50% by 2030. However, electric vehicles made up only about 2% of new U.S. sales last...

The legislation is expected to include paid family and medical leave, subsidized child care, an extension of an expanded child tax credit, universal prekindergarten for three- and four-year-olds and two years of tuition-free community college. It will also provide green cards to millions of immigrants.

It would also extend expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies approved earlier this year in the Covid-19 aid package.The plan would broaden Medicare benefits to cover dental, vision and hearing—and would aim to reduce the cost of prescription drugs by allowing Medicare to negotiate prices, among other steps.

The biggest wildcard for U.S. inflation over the next year doesn’t come from used cars or airline fares. Instead, it is housing.

Officials at the Federal Reserve and the White House have highlighted what many forecasters expect will be the temporary nature of elevated price readings stemming from the reopening of the economy following pandemic-related restrictions.

But the degree to which 12-month inflation readings fall back to the central bank’s 2% goal could rest on the behavior of rents and home prices. In recent months, housing-cost trends point to more persistent, rather than transitory, upward price pressures in the coming years.

Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy costs, rose 3.5% in June from a year earlier, according to the Fed’s preferred gauge, the personal-consumption expenditures price index. That was the highest rate of growth in 30 years. Rising prices over the April-to-June quarter largely reflected disrupted supply...

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WASHINGTON—President Biden is expected to nominate María Luisa Pagán, a longtime government trade negotiator, as a deputy U.S. trade representative and ambassador to the World Trade Organization, a critical role for accelerating the administration’s engagement with the multilateral organization that has faced multiple challenges in recent years.

According to administration officials, Mr. Biden is also expected to name Christopher Wilson, another veteran of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative, as the agency’s chief negotiator for innovation and intellectual property, a job tasked with solving increasingly thorny IP disputes in digital and pharmaceutical industries.

Their nominations will come as frustration builds over the slow pace of the appointments of key trade officials among business executives and trading partners who are eager to see disputes resolved and new agreements initiated. Katherine Tai, U.S. trade representative, has been working...

WASHINGTON—The Senate passed a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure package with broad bipartisan support Tuesday, advancing a central piece of President Biden’s economic agenda that would amount to one of the most substantial federal investments in roads, bridges and rail in decades.

With 19 Republicans including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) joining all 50 Democrats to pass the bill 69 to 30, the legislation sailed through the Senate. The bill will face a more complicated path in the House, where Democrats have yoked the fate of the infrastructure effort to the passage of a broad $3.5 trillion antipoverty and climate effort.

A bipartisan group of 10 senators and the White House hashed out the agreement over weeks of painstaking negotiations. It both reauthorizes spending on existing federal public-works programs and pours an additional $550 billion into water projects, the electrical grid and safety efforts, among many other projects.

The biggest wildcard for U.S. inflation over the next year doesn’t come from used cars or airline fares. Instead, it is housing.

Officials at the Federal Reserve and the White House have highlighted what many forecasters expect will be the temporary nature of elevated price readings stemming from the reopening of the economy following pandemic-related restrictions.

But the degree to which 12-month inflation readings fall back to the central bank’s 2% goal could rest on the behavior of rents and home prices. In recent months, housing-cost trends point to more persistent, rather than transitory, upward price pressures in the coming years.

Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy costs, rose 3.5% in June from a year earlier, according to the Fed’s preferred gauge, the personal-consumption expenditures price index. That was the highest rate of growth in 30 years. Rising prices over the April-to-June quarter largely reflected disrupted supply...

The economy is on track to later this year satisfy the Federal Reserve’s threshold to begin reducing its $120 billion in monthly asset purchases, a top central bank official said Tuesday.

Chicago Fed President Charles Evans said he expected recent employment gains to continue, which would allow the Fed to declare that the economy has achieved the “substantial further progress” it laid out last December.

“I’d like to see a few more employment reports” before making that determination, Mr. Evans told reporters during an online news conference. “We’re coming upon a time where it’s definitely going to be appropriate to start” reducing the pace of asset purchases.

“There’s a sense in which you want to be careful that you don’t start prematurely [and] you don’t start too late,” said Mr. Evans, who is a voting member of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee this year.

Mr. Evans said he expects the unemployment rate to fall to 4.5% by...