SYDNEY—The Reserve Bank of Australia suspending plans to taper its government bond-buying program in September is now a 50/50 proposition, with the central bank already moving to pulp the upbeat economic forecasts it published just weeks ago.

The debate around the RBA’s board table on Sept. 7 over the scheduled reduction in weekly government bond purchases is set to be vigorous as surging Covid-19 cases shutter key capitals, fueling recession fears.

In...

August surveys of purchasing managers in some of the world’s largest economies—including the U.S.—will offer the freshest indication of how the rapid spread of the Delta variant of Covid-19 is affecting economic activity. Economists expect to see a modest slowdown in the expansion of the services sector in both the U.S. and Europe and declines in activity in both Japan and Australia.

U.S. home prices hit a record in June amid a housing boom that is pitting low mortgage rates and strong demand against limited supplies of homes for sale. Economists are forecasting a small drop in existing-home sales in July, to an annual pace of 5.83 million from 5.86 million a month earlier, as price and supply constraints lock more would-be buyers out of the market.

TOKYO—Half or more of Japan’s huge government debt doesn’t really exist. And even if it does, the country needs a lot more of it.

Those are a couple of the arguments being heard in Tokyo as the rich world’s most-indebted government relative to its size prepares for a new round of spending this fall that could reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Japan often serves as a tryout venue for policies that later debut on the world economy’s biggest stage, the U.S. The Japanese central bank was a pioneer in introducing zero interest rates and buying large quantities of government bonds to stimulate a sluggish economy, tools subsequently used by the Federal Reserve.

In debt as well, Japan has led the pack. Its central-government debt first surpassed the size of the economy about 20 years ago. Now the U.S. is crossing that threshold too, and Congress is debating trillions of dollars more in proposed spending.

Tokyo’s central government is...

The bipartisan infrastructure bill approved by the Senate this month is the latest in a series of extraordinary infusions of federal money into public transit agencies. But all that money likely won’t buy what transit really needs: more riders.

Unless ridership recovers from its pandemic-induced drop, agencies will again confront large budget deficits once the federal money runs out in three or four years, analysts say. That could mean service cuts and fare increases, according to transit agencies.

“As soon as the money stops flowing, transit agencies are going to be in the same position as they were before,” said Baruch Feigenbaum, a transportation policy expert at the libertarian-leaning Reason Foundation.

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, for instance, expects to use up its $14.5 billion allocation of federal aid by 2024, at which point it will face a $3.5 billion two-year shortfall.

Transit ridership nationwide fell by 78%...

Spending at U.S. retailers fell sharply in July, amid cooling purchases of goods and signs of some pullback in consumer demand as U.S. Covid-19 cases tied to the Delta variant rose.

Retail sales—a measure of purchases at stores, at restaurants and online—fell 1.1% last month compared with June, the Commerce Department reported Tuesday. Excluding autos—a category where supply-chain issues have limited available inventory—sales declined 0.4%.

Tuesday’s report suggested Americans continued to shift spending toward services in July. Sales dropped across several categories, primarily autos—which was down 3.9%—but also clothing, sporting goods and furniture. The retail-sales figures capture spending mostly on goods, and don’t include services such as travel, entertainment and recreation.

Restaurants and bars were a bright spot, with sales rising 1.7% over the month, while sales at nonstore retailers—a proxy for online retail sales—fell 3.1%.

Retail...

A strengthening U.S. labor market added cushion to the economic recovery in July ahead of the surge in cases of the coronavirus’s Delta variant, with employers creating jobs at the best pace in nearly a year and the unemployment rate falling sharply.

Nonfarm payrolls rose by a seasonally adjusted 943,000 in July, the best gain in 11 months, the Labor Department said Friday.

The unemployment rate, derived from a separate survey of households, fell to 5.4% last month from 5.9% in June to touch the lowest level since the pandemic took hold in the U.S. in March 2020. The latest data also showed some additional workers were drawn off the sidelines, and wages rose at a strong rate.

Friday’s report shows that the U.S. economy is facing any threat posed by the Delta variant with a strong tailwind. The economy has recovered rapidly this year with availability of vaccines, business reopenings, pent-up consumer demand and aid flowing from multiple rounds of...

The number of bankruptcy filings in the U.S. has fallen to a level not seen since 1985, thanks to government interventions that kept people afloat during the Covid-19 pandemic and allowed companies to raise cash through debt.

In a year marked by lockdowns and periods of high unemployment, 462,309 individuals and companies filed for bankruptcy in the year ended June 30, down 32% from the previous year, according to data compiled by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. That was the lowest tally for a 12-month period since 1985, the administrative office said.

Personal bankruptcy filings fell 33% to about 444,000, while business filings declined 17% to about 22,500.

The pace of bankruptcy filings has defied predictions early in the pandemic by economists and experts who had expected an avalanche of bankruptcy filings by both households and businesses. The numbers point to government stimulus and moratoria on home foreclosures and evictions keeping...

Inflation remained elevated in July as the economic recovery continued, but prices showed evidence of cooling amid pandemic-related supply problems and signs that the recent rise in coronavirus infections is starting to crimp some business activity.

Consumer prices rose 5.4% in July from a year earlier, the same pace as in June, the highest 12-month rate since 2008, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.

On a monthly basis, however, price pressures weakened. The department’s consumer-price index climbed a seasonally adjusted 0.5% in July from June, a significantly slower pace than its 0.9% increase in June from May, though well above the average 0.2% rate from 2000 to 2019.

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

The so-called core price index, which excludes the often volatile categories of food and energy, increased 4.3% from a year before, down from...

Apartment rents are rising fast, boosted by young professionals returning to cities and an expensive housing market that keeps many of them renting.

Stock prices of publicly traded apartment companies have jumped in stride. The FTSE Nareit Equity Apartments index, which tracks these landlords, is up 42% since January, trouncing the S&P 500’s 17% gain during the same period.

Median rent has risen more than 10% over the past year $1,244, according to homesearch website Apartment List. That figure is also 9.4% above where rents stood in March 2020, right before Covid-19 lockdowns began.

One big factor behind the recent increase: Soaring housing prices are forcing many would-be home buyers out of the for-sale market, and they have had little choice but to pay up for rent. As of June, median existing-home sales prices are up 23.4% from a year earlier to $363,300—a record high, according to the National Association of Realtors.

Job losses at the...

Small-business confidence dropped in August to its lowest level since early spring, as the rise in Covid-19 cases due to the highly transmissible Delta variant put a damper on expectations and turned entrepreneurs more cautious.

Thirty-nine percent of small-business owners expect economic conditions in the U.S. to improve in the next 12 months, down from 50% in July and 67% in March, according to a survey of more than 560 small businesses for The Wall Street Journal by Vistage Worldwide Inc., a business coaching and peer advisory firm.

The measure is one part of a broader confidence index that also tracks metrics such as small-business owners’ outlook for their companies and their investment and hiring plans. That overall figure remains positive, but fell to its lowest level since March.

At Wizard Studios, an event production company with 25 employees, bookings jumped in May after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lifted mask mandates. The...

U.S. business groups sued to block parts of a federal rule requiring insurers and employers to disclose prices they pay for healthcare services and drugs, the latest legal challenge to efforts to make public rates that have long been kept secret.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Pharmaceutical Care Management Association, which represents pharmacy-benefit managers, filed lawsuits against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and other federal agencies last week in federal courts in Tyler, Texas, and the District of Columbia. They claim certain provisions of the rule go beyond federal authority and could raise healthcare costs.

The Biden administration has backed healthcare pricing transparency as a way of boosting competition in the industry, as did the Trump administration, which instituted the rule. Much of healthcare pricing is set through confidential deals that have long kept rates under wraps, often leaving consumers in the dark about the...

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The U.S. budget deficit narrowed to $2.5 trillion during the first 10 months of the fiscal year from $2.8 trillion in the same period a year earlier, with the gap between spending and revenue shrinking as the recovery from the pandemic-induced slump boosted tax collection.

Outlays for the 10-month period rose 4% to a record $5.9 trillion, the Treasury Department said Wednesday. Spending has been boosted by pandemic-related costs that included tax credits, expanded unemployment compensation, emergency small-business loans and stimulus checks to households, but Treasury officials said such outlays are generally decelerating.

Federal revenue during the period rose 18% from the same period the previous year to a record $3.3 trillion, largely due to higher receipts from individual and corporate income taxes.

Revenue declined 54% to $262 billion in July from the same month last year. Treasury officials said revenue was unusually high last July because many...

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....

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis leader James Bullard doesn’t expect the surge in Covid-19 cases tied to the Delta variant to derail a robust U.S. economic recovery.

“We do track the pandemic every day. We’re still in a crisis and we do have to, you know, be nimble,” Mr. Bullard said Wednesday in a virtual appearance hosted by MarketWatch. “The most important thing about this is that the economy has clearly adapted to the pandemic situation,” the official said, and that suggests it can weather the current surge.

“You’ve...

Vaccination is increasingly a requirement to be hired, as employers ranging from accounting and software firms to schools and restaurants are asking applicants to be inoculated against Covid-19.

The share of job postings stating that a new hire must be vaccinated has nearly doubled in the past month, according to the job search site Indeed. The total number remains low, roughly 1,200 postings requiring a vaccination per million in the first week of August. But that is well up from about 600 in early July, and about 50 per million job postings in early February.

Many of the postings don’t explicitly name Covid-19 as the vaccine required for employment, said Indeed economist AnnElizabeth Konkel, who wrote the report, but broader context of the job descriptions suggested most employers were referring to the coronavirus vaccine, as opposed to other shots. Early this year, before Covid-19 vaccines were widely available in the U.S., very few job postings outside of...

Minutes of the Federal Reserve’s late July monetary policy meeting didn’t reveal much concern among central bank officials about the massive flow of cash into the Fed’s reverse repo facility.

As part of a broader debate over whether the central bank should pare its $120 billion a month in bond buying stimulus, Fed officials also mulled recent developments regarding the reverse repo facility, according to the minutes released Wednesday.

The...

Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said it remains to be seen how the U.S. economy will weather the recent Covid-19 surge, in comments that offered no views on the outlook for monetary policy.

“It’s not yet clear whether the Delta [coronavirus] strain will have important effects on the economy; we’ll have to see about that,” Mr. Powell told students and teachers Tuesday during a virtual event held by the central bank.

Mr. Powell’s comments on the health situation follow those he made on the topic after the Fed’s policy meeting in late July. He said then that “with successive waves of Covid over the past year and some months now, there has tended to be less economic—less in the way of economic implications from each wave, and we will see whether that is the case with the Delta variety.” He added, “We don’t have a strong sense of how that might work out. So we’ll just be monitoring it.”

Mr. Powell, in a question-and-answer session with students and...

SHENZHEN, China—Chinese authorities have shut down a U.S. labor auditor’s local China partner, escalating Beijing’s campaign to counter forced-labor allegations in its northwest Xinjiang region and potentially complicating efforts by multinationals to certify supply chains in the country.

China-based Shenzhen Verite, which is affiliated with U.S. labor rights nonprofit Verite Inc., was closed following an April raid on its offices by Chinese security forces, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Though Verite was a small player in China’s auditing industry, companies including Walt Disney Co. and Apple Inc. have hired the Amherst, Mass.-based company to consult on labor issues at Chinese factories. The closure of its Shenzhen-based partner means that Verite has effectively lost its ability to operate in the Chinese market, depriving companies of a potential channel to conduct labor audits and research in China.

The nonprofit also had a...

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Macy’s Inc., Kohl’s Corp. and Coach parent Tapestry Inc. reported big quarterly sales gains on Thursday, but it is unclear how long the shopping spree will last in the face of new pandemic restrictions to counteract rising coronavirus cases.

Macy’s sales at stores open at least a year jumped 62% in the three months to July 31, compared with a year ago. Same-store sales also grew slightly compared with the same period in 2019. Net sales of $5.65 billion exceeded both 2020 and 2019 levels.

“We’ve come through what I hope is the worst of the pandemic,” Macy’s CEO Jeff Gennette said. Macy’s shares rose more than 12% in morning trading after nearly tripling over the past year through Wednesday’s close.

Sales at Kohl’s and Tapestry also returned to pre-pandemic levels. Both companies reported sales and earnings that beat analyst expectations and Kohl’s, like Macy’s, raised its guidance for the full year.

The gains for all three companies follow big...

The Biden administration is wiping out more than $5.8 billion in student loans for more than 323,000 borrowers who are permanently disabled, the latest step in the government’s piecemeal effort to lessen the burden for millions of adults struggling to repay their debts.

The Education Department said Thursday it will automatically discharge loans for borrowers with total and permanent disabilities by matching borrower files with Social Security Administration records. A similar policy has been in place since 2019 for those deemed disabled via the Department of Veterans Affairs. Borrowers found to have total and permanent disabilities are generally limited in their ability to work and to repay the loans.

The government will also stop asking such borrowers to provide earnings records going forward; currently, failure to respond can lead to loans being reinstated. A 2016 report by the Government Accountability Office found that 98% of reinstated discharges were...

If the Federal Reserve’s management of the economy were all that mattered, Chairman Jerome Powell would probably be cruising toward reappointment. His response to the pandemic and focus on full employment have drawn bipartisan praise.

But the Fed is also a financial regulator, an inherently more political role than monetary policy. Mr. Powell’s shot at another term when this one expires in February is now threatened by progressive Democrats whose priority is a more activist Fed on regulation and other nonmonetary matters.

Mr. Powell almost certainly has enough votes from both parties to be confirmed; the question is whether the holdouts can persuade President Biden to nominate someone else. Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Biden’s economic team generally supports giving Mr. Powell a second term, but resistance from Democrats including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) could lead to his replacement. “Over and over and over he has weakened a...

If the Federal Reserve’s management of the economy were all that mattered, Chairman Jerome Powell would probably be cruising toward reappointment. His response to the pandemic and focus on full employment have drawn bipartisan praise.

But the Fed is also a financial regulator, an inherently more political role than monetary policy. Mr. Powell’s shot at another term when this one expires in February is now threatened by progressive Democrats whose priority is a more activist Fed on regulation and other nonmonetary matters.

Mr. Powell almost certainly has enough votes from both parties to be confirmed; the question is whether the holdouts can persuade President Biden to nominate someone else. Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that Mr. Biden’s economic team generally supports giving Mr. Powell a second term, but resistance from Democrats including Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) could lead to his replacement. “Over and over and over he has weakened a...

Jobless claims fell to a new pandemic low last week, suggesting the labor market continues to heal even as the Delta variant causes uncertainty.

First-time applications for benefits, a proxy for layoffs, fell by 29,000 to a seasonally adjusted 348,000 in the week ended Aug. 14, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was the lowest level of claims since the pandemic took hold in the U.S. in March 2020.

The four-week moving average, which smooths often volatile data, fell to 377,750 last week, also a fresh pandemic low. New jobless claims have fallen for four straight weeks and are down more than 50% since January.

The Delta variant has caused recent increases in new Covid-19 cases and hospitalizations throughout the country. But while that might cause the pace of growth to ease, some economists say the dynamic between Covid-19 and economic activity has evolved over the past year.

“We shouldn’t necessarily assume that rising cases are going to...