Wall Street’s swings continue as investors agonize over the Fed’s next move. (Published 2022) (2024)

Wall Street’s swings continue as investors agonize over the Fed’s next move.

Investors are focused on the Fed’s next move as it focuses on slowing inflation by pulling back on its support for the economy. The central bank has already said it will soon stop buying government bonds, and investors expect it to start raising interest rates in March.

But stock investors were agonizing over what the Fed may say on Wednesday as it concludes a two-day meeting, and that has led to the big swings in prices this week.

“The market has been behaving incoherently, not knowing whether to go down because the Fed is tightening or go up because the Fed is actually taking action to rein in inflation,” said Anu Gaggar, a strategist for Commonwealth Financial Network. “That’s why tomorrow’s Fed meeting is important. It will provide some much-needed clarity on where the Fed officials’ heads are.”

The worry, which several analysts see as overblown, is that the Fed will decide it is starting its inflation fight too late and move more aggressively than investors anticipate. It’s a concern that belies efforts by the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, to signal changes well in advance so as not to surprise markets.

No matter, there’s no question that investors have become unsettled by the idea that interest rates will rise this year. Higher rates can slow the economy, making borrowing for houses, cars and business costs more expensive. They also discourage investors from bidding up risky assets like stocks.

Part of Wall Street’s concern is that the Fed has room to be aggressive in its fight against inflation because the Omicron variant of the coronavirus appears, by some measures, to be less severe than previous forms. Minutes from the central bank’s December meeting, which it published early in January, also showed that the Fed had discussed moving with more urgency.

Stocks, which hit a peak on Jan. 3, have climbed in only five of 16 trading days this month, and the S&P 500 is now down 9.2 percent from its high.

“This sell-off almost smacks of fears that this will lead to a recession, but the Fed hasn’t even started to tighten,” said Edward Yardeni, an economist. “There is an overreaction here.”

It’s telling, analysts say, that the bond market, which in many ways is more closely tied to the Fed and the economy in general, appears to be taking the current moment in stride.

Typically, when investors grow particularly nervous about the economy, they pile into the bond market — causing prices to rise and bond yields, which move in the opposite direction of prices, to drop.

That’s not happening now. Yields have dipped in the past week, but not by much. The yield on 10-year Treasury notes, for instance, was basically unchanged on Tuesday, and had fallen only slightly in the past week to 1.78 percent.

“The bond market is not willing to move decisively in one direction or another because the economy is still in pretty good shape,” said Vincent Deluard, a strategist at StoneX Group.

That’s not to say investors and the economy aren’t facing some risks. Disruptions are slowing output at factories, companies are struggling to find workers, and rising prices will eat into consumer demand. On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund reduced its estimate for global growth to 4.4 percent from the 4.9 percent it projected just three months ago.

The I.M.F. still expects the U.S. economy to grow 4 percent this year, but that would be slower than in 2021. The fund said the failure of the Biden administration’s $2.2 trillion social policy package and the Fed’s tighter monetary policy were among the reasons it had reduced the growth forecast for the United States.

The recent concern about the Fed is also colliding with earnings reporting season, with some of the biggest companies in the S&P 500 scheduled to update investors on the state of their businesses and their outlook for the year. Because of their size, those companies — Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Tesla — can influence the direction of market indexes like the benchmark S&P 500, which they lifted higher as they rose to astronomical valuations in 2021.

This month, all five of those stocks have dropped at least 10 percent, pulling the broad market benchmark lower.

On Tuesday, Microsoft reported sales and profits that were higher than analysts had expected. Its shares still fell more than 5 percent in after-hours trading, suggesting that investors were still disappointed in aspects of Microsoft’s report.

Tesla will report results on Wednesday, Apple on Thursday, and Amazon and Alphabet next week.

It hasn’t all been bad news for company earnings. IBM reported on Monday that its revenue rose 6 percent in the last three months of 2021, and its shares jumped 5.7 percent on Tuesday. Shares of American Express rose nearly 9 percent, making it the best performer in the S&P 500 on Tuesday, after it reported that revenue rose 30 percent from a year earlier to $12.1 billion amid growth in spending among its card members.

Still, that good news hasn’t been enough to break the Fed’s grip on stock sentiment, though worries about the central bank could ease starting on Wednesday if investors get a better reading on what will happen next.

“The markets really want to have a clear understanding of what the Fed’s going to do and how fast they’re going to do it,” said Lindsey Bell, the chief money and markets strategist at Ally Invest. “Volatility will persist until that larger clarity is truly understood.”

Stephen Gandel and Kevin Granville contributed reporting.

Apple gets restraining order against a woman accused of stalking Tim Cook.

“Apple believes that respondent may be armed and is still in the South Bay Area and intends to return to Apple C.E.O.’s residence or locate him otherwise in the near future,” the company wrote. Apple declined to comment on Tuesday.

The restraining order prohibits the woman from owning guns or going near Mr. Cook’s residence or any Apple offices until March 29, when a hearing on whether to extend the order is scheduled. The order also prohibits her from contacting Mr. Cook or tagging him on social media.

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Microsoft’s profit continues to climb.

Microsoft had $125 billion in cash, almost $70 billion of which it hopes to spend on buying the video game powerhouse Activision in a deal announced this month. Bank of America analysts called the purchase a “savvy maneuver” and a “strategic and financial positive, which can accelerate Microsoft’s gaming business across numerous platforms.”

Sales of Microsoft’s cloud offerings to commercial customers, which includes Office 365 subscriptions and Azure, its cloud computing platform, grew 32 percent to $22.1 billion. Revenue is poised to grow further as price increases for Office 365, which includes Word and the Teams communications app, go into effect in March. The price increases could produce $5 billion in extra revenue this year, according to Wedbush Securities.

Azure is the second-largest cloud platform, after Amazon Web Services. It is part of a fundamental shift in how companies are moving more of their business online. Azure grew 46 percent, reflecting how customers across industries are signing larger, longer deals.

Brett Iversen, the head of Microsoft’s investor relations, said that despite turmoil in the stock market, the company was focused on long-term opportunities so it could cut “through the shorter-term, external noise that we don’t control as much.”

Mr. Iversen said Microsoft’s Windows business was particularly strong, with sales up 25 percent as corporate customers bought new computers for their employees.

Despite chip shortages that limited the supply of the new Xbox console during the holiday season, the company’s gaming business grew 8 percent, part of its personal computing segment, which grew 15 percent to $17.5 billion.

The so-called Great Resignation among workers also helped LinkedIn, the professional social network, which saw revenue increase 37 percent.

California leaders agree to once again require extra paid sick leave.

The agreement also calls for funding to bolster coronavirus testing and vaccination in the state and to battle misinformation, they said.

California law requires employers to offer a minimum of three paid sick days a year. When the pandemic hit, the state raised that requirement, exploiting state and federal laws and tax credits to add up to 80 hours of paid sick leave for workers who were infected or were caring for infected relatives.

That expansion was allowed to lapse Sept. 30 after the state reopened, but the advent of new surges in cases prompted calls from labor unions to reinstate it. Businesses struggling with staffing shortages protested that the eligibility threshold for paid time off was too lax, and that giving employees more paid sick leave deterred some from getting vaccinated.

Legislative officials said the new version would, if passed, require employers to offer up to 40 hours of paid sick leave to full-time workers, and extend that by 40 more hours if the worker supplies proof of a positive coronavirus test result. The requirement for part-time workers would be the number of hours the worker typically worked in a week, to start with, and then that same amount again if the worker tests positive.

California labor leaders applauded the agreement.

“U.F.C.W. members have been risking their lives and the lives of their family members” by reporting for work during the pandemic, Andrea Zinder, president of the Western States Council of the United Food and Commercial Workers, said in a statement.

Rheannon Ramos, a grocery store worker at Stater Bros. in Southern California, added that “the past two years have been filled with new stress after new stress, and today’s announcement means a real relief from shouldering these worries.”

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A fashion brand agrees to pay $4.2 million after F.T.C. says it suppressed negative reviews online.

While e-commerce has boomed, particularly during the pandemic, the ecosystem of online reviews remains relatively crude. The F.T.C. has sought to police companies like the skin-care brand Sunday Riley for posting fake reviews online in recent years, though this is the first instance of the agency’s challenging “review suppression.”

These actions by the F.T.C. tend to act as warning signals to other companies. The agency said on Tuesday that it had sent letters to 10 companies that offer review management services, telling them that they cannot avoid collecting and publishing negative reviews.

Fashion Nova said that the issue was caused by its reliance on a vendor and a complication involving an “autopublish” feature for certain star ratings.

Reviews that were not autopublished could be individually moderated and manually released. “At one point in time, the company inadvertently failed to complete this process given certain resource constraints during a period of rapid growth,” Mr. Fahn said. He said that Fashion Nova resolved the issue once it was made aware of it in 2019 and that the unpublished reviews had since been posted.

In addition to the $4.2 million settlement, Fashion Nova is barred from misrepresenting customer reviews or other endorsem*nts.

“Deceptive review practices cheat consumers, undercut honest businesses and pollute online commerce,” Samuel Levine, the director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a statement.

OSHA withdraws its workplace vaccine rule.

The Labor Department’s decision to withdraw the rule means that the outstanding legal proceedings will be dropped. The case was headed back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati for further consideration, though that court most likely would have followed the Supreme Court’s lead and struck it down.

OSHA could still try to move a version of the vaccine-or-test standard forward through its official rule-making process, such as one focused on high-hazard industries like meatpacking, but that would likely still face legal challenges, according to David Michaels, a former OSHA administrator who is a professor at George Washington University.

Without the Labor Department’s standard in effect, employers are subject to a patchwork of state and local laws on Covid-19 workplace safety, with places like New York City requiring vaccine mandates and other governments banning them.

“OSHA continues to strongly encourage the vaccination of workers against the continuing dangers posed by Covid-19 in the workplace,” the Labor Department wrote in the notice of its withdrawal.

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Slowdowns in the U.S. and China will hold back global growth, a report says.

The fund emphasized that the forecast was subject to a high level of uncertainty — about the course of Covid, the prospects of climate-related natural disasters, supply chain disruptions and rising political tensions, particularly around Ukraine. With the pandemic entering its third year, a note of pessimism underlay the report. “Risks overall are to the downside,” Gita Gopinath, the first managing deputy director, said.

Global economic losses related to the pandemic will total $13.8 trillion by the end of 2024, Ms. Gopinath estimated.

The dimmed economic prospects come at a time when governments have less room to maneuver in how they spend their money. Debt levels have soared over the past two years as countries struggled with the health crisis caused by the pandemic and funneled aid to their citizens. Public spending is unlikely to reach the same levels in the future.

The troubling rise in inflation that has doubled heating costs in much of Europe and made food less affordable in places like sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil has also lasted longer than anticipated.

The pandemic has changed the way people in many parts of the world spend their money, shifting funds that might have been used for dining, travel and entertainment to goods they can play with, sit on or consume at home. That increased demand, combined with persistent difficulties in moving goods from one city or continent to another, skyrocketing energy prices and labor shortages, has driven up costs.

Some of those pressures are expected to wane toward the end of the year — but not everywhere. “In the United States the story is different,” the fund noted. The exit of so many people from their jobs has created more persistent labor shortages and driven up wages much more than in other countries. Americans’ high level of spending has also created some of the worst supply chain disruptions.

The U.S. Federal Reserve has made clear that its primary focus has shifted from stimulating the economy during the pandemic to fighting inflation. The bank, which is set to release its next policy statement on Wednesday, is raising interest rates and reeling in its purchases of bonds that ensured money would continue to flow through the economy. Other central banks, including those in Mexico and Brazil, are taking similar actions.

The strategy is to discourage people from borrowing money to buy a car or invest in a business and ratchet back demand for products that are in short supply. Creeping interest rates, though, risk not only slowing economic growth but burdening poorer nations with even bigger debts far into the future.

“If interest rates rise more sharply, that then puts extra strain on vulnerable developing countries which have most of their debt in dollars,” said Creon Butler, research director at Chatham House, a London research organization. That means governments must use scarce resources to repay bulging loans instead of adding hospital beds or feeding hungry children.

The slowdown in China, which is both a major supplier and buyer of goods traded with other countries, is also setting off reverberations around the world. The once exuberant real estate market has plunged. The government has imposed the world’s most stringent restrictions and lockdowns to contain Covid, and unexpected power outages have further hindered industrial production.

Growth in the euro area was revised down 0.4 percentage points to 3.9 percent, but for some countries, the drop was much steeper. Clogs in the supply chain, especially those affecting the auto industry, prompted the I.M.F. to estimate that growth in Germany — the largest economy in Europe — would decline by 0.8 percentage points, twice as much as the average of all countries that use the euro.

Covid continues to maintain its grip and the threat of a new variant remains, but the fund expects severe illnesses, hospitalizations and deaths to drop to low levels by the end of the year.

Claus Vistesen, chief eurozone economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said the impact of this latest surge had not been as devastating: “We’re seeing evidence that Omicron is holding back economic activity, but nowhere near to the same extent as the virus did before.”

Although the fund raised its growth expectations for 2023, it emphasized that the small improvement would be insufficient to counteract the slowdown in 2022.

Ms. Gopinath of the I.M.F. emphasized that however difficult the recovery had been in wealthier nations, emerging economies had been hit the hardest, with weak growth and low vaccination rates.

With 70 million more people living in extreme poverty than before the pandemic, the fund called for more international cooperation to work out debt relief for struggling nations as well as more equitable distribution of Covid vaccines, tests and treatments.

G.M. will spend $7 billion on Michigan plants to further its electric-vehicle aims.

Ford Motor has already overhauled a plant in Dearborn, Mich., and is set to begin making an electric version of its F-150 pickup this spring. Ford also plans to spend $11.4 billion to build two battery plants in Kentucky and a third battery plant and an electric-truck plant in Tennessee.

G.M. has battery plants under construction in Ohio and Tennessee, and has retooled a plant in Detroit, where it recently started making an electric Hummer truck. It also plans to make electric vehicles at a plant in Ontario and at another in Mexico.

G.M. has said it aims to phase out production of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035, but so far, Ford is ahead of G.M. in E.V. sales. Ford has been selling an electric S.U.V., the Mustang Mach E, for more than a year, and has taken in more than 200,000 reservations for the electric F-150 Lightning.

Ford developed those models by using battery packs developed by a supplier. G.M. decided to take extra time to develop its own modular battery packs that it believes will provide a cost advantage over competitors in the long run.

G.M.’s new Michigan battery plant, like G.M.’s other battery plants, will be a joint venture between the automaker and LG Electric. It will be built on the site of an existing plant in Lansing, at a cost of $2.6 billion to be shared between G.M. and LG.

G.M. will also invest $4 billion to enable a plant in Orion Township, Mich., to make electric versions of its Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickups. The company expects to add 2,350 jobs at the Orion factory and to retain 1,000 other jobs at the plant when pickup production starts.

The plant has been making the Chevrolet Bolt, an electric compact car, although production has been halted for several months because of a recall that requires G.M. and LG to replace the battery packs in all Bolts made since 2017.

Mr. Reuss declined to say whether G.M. would continue to produce the Bolt as it prepared the Orion plant to make pickups.

G.M. expects the Orion plant and the Detroit plant, known as Factory Zero, to eventually be able to make 600,000 electric full-size trucks a year. The company said that by the end of 2025, it planned to have a total annual manufacturing capacity of one million electric vehicles.

G.M. also said it would spend $510 million to upgrade two vehicle plants in Lansing.

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Berkshire Hathaway plans to hold its next annual meeting in person.

Berkshire’s meeting, when held in person, has also provided a boost for Omaha’s economy, including the local outposts of retailers that the company owns, like the jeweler Borsheim’s.

Details of how this year’s meeting will proceed, including any coronavirus testing or vaccination requirements for attendees, were not disclosed. The company said it will provide additional information when it publishes its annual report next month.

Among the questions that Berkshire may face in staging the meeting in person is how to protect the health of its leaders: Mr. Buffett is 91 and Mr. Munger 98.

Google introduces a new system for tracking Chrome browser users.

Apple has also cracked down on advertisers, limiting their ability to track users as they browse the web. Last year, the company introduced App Tracking Transparency, which allows users to block apps from tracking them, a decision that caused concern at Facebook and other major advertisers.

Since marketers rely heavily on cookies to target ads and measure their efficacy, Google’s privacy proposal led to worries that it would strengthen the company’s hold on the industry because Google already knows so much about the interests and habits of its users. Privacy experts feared that the cohorts could expose users to new forms of tracking.

Google’s proposal also caught the eye of regulators. The European Union said it was investigating the plan as part of an inquiry into Google’s role in the digital advertising market. Last year, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority reached an agreement with Google to allow the regulator to review changes to trackers in Chrome as part of a settlement of another investigation.

Topics will address some of the concerns raised by privacy advocates about FLoC, preventing more covert tracking techniques, Google said. It aims to preserve user privacy by segmenting its audience into larger groups.

Google said there had been tens of thousands of potential cohorts under the previous plan, but that it would reduce the number of Topics to fewer than a few thousand. The company said users would be able to see what topics were associated with them, and remove them if they chose.

“It’s slightly more privacy-protective than FLoC,” said Sara Collins, a senior policy counsel at the public interest nonprofit Public Knowledge. The larger topic groups would grant users more anonymity, but Google’s plan could still be circumvented by fingerprinting techniques meant to track individual users, she said.

Google said Topics would use human curators rather than allow machine learning technology to generate user groups, as the FLoC plan did. This will eliminate the possibility that groups might be based on sensitive characteristics like sexual orientation or race, Google said.

“There were a couple of research studies that showed concern over this happening,” Vinay Goel, who oversees the Privacy Sandbox initiative at Google, said in an interview. “We didn’t find evidence that it was happening.”

Peter Snyder, director of privacy at Brave, a privacy-minded search engine, said the changes with Topics did not address the core issues with Google’s previous proposal.

“At root is Google’s insistence on sharing information about people’s interests and behaviors with advertisers, trackers and others on the web that are hostile to privacy,” Mr. Snyder said in a statement. “These groups have no business — and no right — to learn such sensitive information about you.”

Google’s Topics plan echoes a revision made to its search product several years ago. In 2019, the company gave users the ability to set up their search history to automatically purge every three or 18 months. That made it harder for advertisers to target individuals with highly personalized ads based on their web traffic. Google also gave users the ability to disable it from recording search histories altogether.

Critics noted that the privacy controls were ineffective because they were difficult for the average person to find, and by default, Google continues to keep a permanent record of people’s search histories.

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President Biden has harsh words for Peter Doocy of Fox News.

“It’s a great asset,” the president said in a sarcastic tone, seemingly to himself. “More inflation. What a stupid son of a bitch.”

Mr. Doocy is a reliable needler of Mr. Biden, although the president often appears more amused than angered by their jousts. Their sometimes spiky exchanges have become a regular feature of Mr. Biden’s public appearances.

On Monday night, Mr. Doocy said on Fox News that the president called his cellphone about an hour after the incident and, in his words, “cleared the air.”

“He said, ‘It’s nothing personal, pal,’” Mr. Doocy told the host Sean Hannity. “We were talking about just, kind of, moving forward. And I made sure to tell him that I’m always going to try to ask something different than what everybody else is asking, and he said, ‘You got to.’”

When Mr. Hannity pressed on whether Mr. Biden had apologized, Mr. Doocy laughed and demurred. “Sean, the world is on the brink of, like, World War III right now with all this stuff going on,” he said. “I appreciate that the president took a couple minutes out this evening while he was still at the desk to give me a call and clear the air.”

It was hardly the first time that harsh language intruded on the typically PG-rated interactions between powerful politicians and reporters.

George W. Bush, while running for president in 2000, was caught on a live microphone using an epithet to refer to a New York Times reporter. (His running mate, Dick Cheney, was overheard affirming Mr. Bush’s observation: “big time.”)

During his vice presidency in 2010, Mr. Biden was heard using an expletive to convey to President Barack Obama that the signing of the Affordable Care Act was a big deal.

No accident was required for Americans to hear the insults lobbed by former President Donald J. Trump at his interlocutors in the press. Mr. Trump deemed Jim Acosta of CNN “a rude, terrible person,” called Jonathan Karl of ABC “a disgrace,” and said April Ryan, now of TheGrio, was a “loser,” to name but three examples. Among other moments, Mr. Trump once mocked the physical disabilities of a Times reporter to entertain his supporters at a campaign rally.

On Monday, Mr. Doocy shouted his question after Mr. Biden finished brief remarks at the start of a cabinet meeting focused on increasing the country’s economic competitiveness. When another journalist yelled out a query about Ukraine, Mr. Biden briefly complained that the reporters should ask questions about the topic at hand rather than about unrelated foreign policy.

Mr. Doocy, who along with the rest of the press corps was being led out of the room by White House staff members, pivoted to an economic query. Mr. Biden, who was still seated, appeared not to realize that the microphone in front of him was still broadcasting audio.

Speaking afterward on Fox News, Mr. Doocy recounted what happened with a lopsided grin. “I couldn’t even hear him because people were shouting at us to get out,” he said.

Dana Perino, a Fox News host who served as White House press secretary under Mr. Bush, told Mr. Doocy that he should embrace the moment. “You might even have a book title,” she joked.

Last week, at another White House event, Mr. Biden expressed frustration with another Fox News reporter, Jacqui Heinrich, who had shouted out a question about the president’s approach to the tensions between Russia and Ukraine.

“Why are you waiting on Putin to make the first move, sir?” Ms. Heinrich asked. Mr. Biden quietly replied: “What a stupid question.”

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

Omicron is jolting the lucrative touring market for Broadway shows.

“Hamilton” has been particularly hard hit: This month it halted all four of its American touring productions, in Buffalo, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and San Antonio, because of positive coronavirus tests.

The phenomenon is in some ways similar to what happened on Broadway, where so many theater workers tested positive in December that half of all shows canceled performances on some nights. But there is a key difference: Whereas on Broadway, there has also been a damaging drop in ticket sales, elsewhere in the country, producers say, attendance has generally remained steady.

“Touring, when we can perform, is going great — the audiences are showing up, and the audiences are enthusiastic,” said Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton.” “Touring is not going great when Covid sweeps through our company, which has happened to every one of our tours.”

For actors, touring now involves less sightseeing, and more risk management, than it once did.

“It’s the highest of highs, because we’ve been waiting for a year and a half to be back doing what we love to do, but it’s not the same,” said Saxer, who tested positive for the virus in November when her tour was in Spokane, Wash., and recovered while quarantining there.

“It’s not like we can say ‘Let’s go check out this cool bar,’ because actors all around are losing their jobs because someone tests positive,” she added. “It does raise the stakes.”

Christine Toy Johnson, an actor in the “Come From Away” tour, said she had not eaten inside a restaurant since July.

“In some cities, we’re in hotels and we’re the only people wearing masks,” she said. “It’s very stressful — I’m not going to lie. But it’s also been an exciting time to be back in the theater, making art again.”

There are currently about three dozen shows moving from venue to venue, stopping at a mix of nonprofit performing arts centers and for-profit theaters in nearly 300 North American cities, according to Meredith Blair, the president and chief executive of the Booking Group, an agency that arranges touring shows. The shows bring in a lot of money: those featuring union actors (there are also tours with nonunion casts) grossed $1.6 billion at the box office in 2018-2019, which was the last full season before the pandemic; that’s just slightly less than the $1.8 billion spent by theatergoers attending Broadway shows in New York City during the same period, according to the Broadway League.

There appear to be several reasons the touring audience has remained more stable than the Broadway audience. Most of the venues that present touring productions depend on locals, rather than visitors, so they are less vulnerable to the drop in tourism that has walloped Broadway. Many of the touring venues have large numbers of subscribers who, remarkably, retained their subscriptions throughout the pandemic. And some venues are in parts of the country where residents have been less inclined to make changes to their routines because of Covid.

“There’s a huge difference between New York and the audience on the road,” said Rich Jaffe, a co-chief executive of Broadway Across America, which presents Broadway tours in 48 North American markets. “On the road, they consider these venues their theaters — it’s a big part of their communities, supporting jobs and creating economic ripple effects for local downtowns that are quite significant. If we have a show, the audience is there.”

Many North American tours are bypassing Canada because of government-mandated capacity restrictions there. But in the United States, where there are generally no capacity limits, venue operators seem pleased with how things are going, despite the bumpiness of Omicron.

“We’ve already presented five weeks of touring Broadway, and we’ve had great attendance — our audiences are showing up enthusiastically,” said Joan H. Squires, the president of Omaha Performing Arts, which hosted touring productions of “Cats” and “Hamilton” in the fall and then “Dear Evan Hansen” in the days before and after the New Year’s holiday. Squires wound up scanning tickets at the door for “Dear Evan Hansen” because too few volunteer ushers were available, but she attributed that more to winter weather than Covid concerns.

The biggest brand names, as always, are selling the strongest. And “Hadestown,” which won the Tony Award for best musical in 2019 and began its tour in October, is starting strong. “‘Hadestown’ arrived just as we were starting to see Omicron spike, and it far exceeded our targets for attendance and sales,” said Maria Van Laanen, the president and chief executive of Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in Appleton.

Presenters in some cities describe a softening of sales as Omicron hit. “We certainly noticed a slower pattern of buying over the holidays — in any other year, we would have been completely sold out, but that obviously wasn’t the case because there was some hesitancy,” said Jeffrey Finn, the vice president of theater producing and programming at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. “That said, I’m watching a big upturn as we head toward the spring with the hope and expectation that Omicron won’t be as present.”

Safety precautions vary across the country. Most shows are requiring that audiences wear masks, except in cities where such requirements are barred; vaccination rules for audiences follow local government protocols (actors and other theater workers are required to be vaccinated).

Keeping tours going has required shows to add staff members. “Hamilton” now employs seven “universal swings,” who are versatile performers ready to travel anywhere they are needed to fill in, up from four before the pandemic; “The Lion King” has brought in three additional swings.

“Come From Away” offers a particularly vivid case study in the creativity also required to keep shows afloat. The company got hit by Covid earlier this month as it arrived in Minneapolis, where it was scheduled to spend two weeks.

“We went 15 weeks without any problems, but then Omicron came and started to wreak havoc,” said Johnson, who has been with the tour since 2018. “At one point half the cast was sidelined.”

The producers canceled three performances, which bought them enough time to bring in actors from California, New York and Toronto, and the show then resumed with a blended cast that included alumni not only from Broadway but also from productions in Australia, Canada and Britain.

“It’s the never-ending Rubik’s Cube of trying to keep a show up and running,” said Sue Frost, a lead producer of “Come From Away.”

Among those who flew in was Happy McPartlin, a standby in the Broadway cast, who had just recovered from her own case of Covid. “I said, ‘Of course,’ because that’s what we do here,” she said. “I knew the state we were in. We had a couple of bad weeks where the numbers were not in our favor, and one of the people from the tour came in and saved us. I said, ‘If you guys need me, I’ll do the same for you.’”

Not all of the cancellations have been short-lived. In December, “Ain’t Too Proud” canceled two weeks in Washington; “The Lion King” missed 12 performances in Denver, while “Wicked” canceled six performances in Cleveland. “Hamilton” shut down for a month in Los Angeles, and upon its reopening next month, it is now scheduled to stay just six more weeks, rather than running into the spring as initially anticipated.

“I almost forgot about Covid for a little bit because we got so used to it, and it was so much fun to do the show, but then Christmas Eve we had so many positive tests we couldn’t do the show, and we canceled a half-hour after it was supposed to start,” said Nicholas Christopher, who plays Aaron Burr in the Los Angeles production of “Hamilton.” Christopher had moved from New York to Los Angeles for “Hamilton”; he, his wife, and their new baby all tested positive in December, and then he found out the show’s Los Angeles run was ending.

“It’s very eye-opening, and very humbling, and makes me appreciate what we do even more, because it’s been taken away so many times,” he said. “It’s almost like PTSD, having the show be shut down again. It still feels like a dream that I’m ready to wake up from.”

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With prices surging, some are questioning whether the Fed moved rapidly enough.

Catch up: Unilever will cut 1,500 management jobs.

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