Aurelia Butler

(Reuters) – A lethal blizzard paralyzed Buffalo, New York, on Christmas Day, trapping motorists and rescue workers in their vehicles, leaving thousands of homes without power and raising the death toll from storms that have chilled much of the United States for days.At least 30 people have died in U.S. weather-related incidents, according to an NBC News tally, since a deep freeze gripped most of the nation, coupled with snow, ice and howling winds from a sprawling storm that roared out of the Great Lakes region on Friday.CNN has reported a total of 26 weather fatalities.Much of the loss of life has centered in and around Buffalo at the edge of Lake Erie in western New York, as numbing cold and heavy “lake-effect” snow – the result of frigid air moving over warmer lake waters – persisted through the holiday weekend.Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said the storm’s confirmed death toll climbed to 13 on Sunday, up from three reported overnight in the Buffalo region. The latest victims included some found in cars and some in snow banks, Poloncarz said, adding that the death tally would likely rise further.”This is not the Christmas any of us hoped for nor expected,” Poloncarz said on Twitter on Sunday. “My deepest condolences to the families who have lost loved ones.”New York Governor Kathy Hochul called it an “epic, once-in-a-lifetime” weather disaster that ranked as the fiercest winter storm to hit the greater Buffalo area since a crippling 1977 blizzard that killed nearly 30 people. “We have now surpassed the scale of that storm, in its intensity, the longevity, the ferocity of its winds,” Hochul told an evening news conference, adding that the current storm would likely to go down in history as “the blizzard of ’22.”RESCUING THE RESCUERSThe latest blizzard came nearly six weeks after a record-setting but shorter-lived lake-effect storm struck western New York.Despite a ban on road travel imposed since Friday, hundreds of Erie County motorists were stranded in their vehicles over the weekend, with National Guard troops called in to help with rescues hindered by white-out conditions and drifting snow, Poloncarz said.Many snow plows and other equipment sent on Saturday and Sunday became stuck in the snow, “and we had to send rescue missions to rescue the rescuers,” he told reporters.The Buffalo police department posted an online plea to the public for assistance in search-and-recovery efforts, asking those who “have a snow mobile and are willing to help” to call a hotline for instructions.The severity of the storm was notable even for a region accustomed to harsh winter weather.Christina Klaffka, 39, a North Buffalo resident, watched the shingles blow off her neighbor’s home and listened to her windows rattle from “hurricane-like winds.” She lost power along with her whole neighborhood on Saturday evening, and was still without electricity on Sunday morning.”My TV kept flickering while I was trying to watch the Buffalo Bills and Chicago Bears game. I lost power shortly after the 3rd quarter,” she said.John Burns, 58, a retiree in North Buffalo, said he and his family were trapped in their house for 36 hours by the storm and extreme cold that he called “mean and nasty.” “Nobody was out. Nobody was even walking their dogs,” he said. “Nothing was going on for two days.”Snowfall totals were hard to gauge, he added, because of fierce winds that reduced accumulation between houses, but piled up a 5-foot (1.5-meter) drift “in front of my garage.”Hochul told reporters on Sunday that the Biden administration had agreed to support her request for a federal disaster declaration. About 200 National Guard troops were mobilized in western New York to help police and fire crews, conduct wellness checks and bring supplies to shelters, Hochul said.ELECTRICITY HIT HARDThe larger storm system was moving east on Sunday, after knocking out power to as many as 1.5 million customers at the height of outages late last week and forcing thousands of commercial flight cancellations during the busy holiday travel period.More than 150,000 U.S. homes and businesses were without power on Sunday, down sharply from the 1.8 million without power as of early Saturday, according to PowerOutage.us. In Buffalo, 15,000 residents were still without electricity on Sunday evening, Poloncarz said.He said one electrical substation knocked offline was sealed off by an 18-foot-tall mound of snow, and utility crews found the entire facility frozen inside.Christmas Day temperatures, while beginning to rebound from near-zero readings that were widespread on Saturday, remained well below average across the central and eastern United States, and below freezing even as far south as the Gulf Coast, National Weather Service (NWS) meteorologist Rich Otto said.Nearly 4 feet of snow was measured at Buffalo airport by Sunday, according to the latest NWS tally, with white-out conditions lingering south of Buffalo into the afternoon as continuing squalls dumped 2-3 inches of snow an hour.In Kentucky, officials confirmed three storm-related deaths since Friday, while at least four people were dead and several injured in auto-related accidents in Ohio, where a 50-vehicle pileup shut down the Ohio Turnpike during a blizzard on Friday. Other deaths related to extreme cold or weather-induced vehicle accidents were reported in Missouri, Tennessee, Kansas and Colorado, according to news reports.(The story has been refiled to remove extraneous word in headline) More

(Reuters) – Head of Dutch Central Bank Klaas Knot said with five policy meetings between now and July 2023, the ECB would achieve “quite a decent pace of tightening” through half percentage point rises before borrowing costs eventually peaked by the summer, the Financial Times reported on Monday. “The risk of us doing too little is still the bigger risk,” Knot told the newspaper in an interview. “We are just at the beginning of the second half.” More

A veteran member of the European Central Bank’s rate-setting council believes it has only just passed the halfway point of its tightening cycle and needs to be “in there for the long game” to tame high inflation.After more than a decade of aggressive easing, 2022 was the year when many leading central banks began to raise rates in response to soaring prices. The ECB increased borrowing costs by 2.5 percentage points, capping the year with its fourth rise in a row to leave its benchmark deposit rate at 2 per cent. Klaas Knot, head of the Dutch central bank and one of the governing council’s more hawkish rate-setters, told the Financial Times that, with five policy meetings between now and July 2023, the ECB would achieve “quite a decent pace of tightening” through half percentage point rises in the months ahead before borrowing costs eventually peaked by the summer. In the eurozone, consumer price inflation hit a record high of 10.6 per cent in the year to October — more than five times the ECB’s 2 per cent target. In the Netherlands, inflation has been higher still, peaking at 17.1 per cent in September. However, growth in the bloc is grinding to a halt, leaving central bankers facing a delicate balancing act between fighting inflation and exacerbating the slowdown. “The risk of us doing too little is still the bigger risk,” Knot said. “We are just at the beginning of the second half.” Deciding when it had tightened policy enough would be the “main challenge” for the ECB next year. Knot is the longest serving member of the governing council and the only eurozone rate-setter who was part of the central bank’s previous round of rate rises in 2011 — moves that were widely criticised after the bloc entered a sovereign debt crisis just months later. Knot said financial stability risks were “much clearer on our radar screen now”. It was no coincidence, he said, that before starting to raise rates in July the ECB had set up a new bond-buying tool to counter the risk of fresh turmoil.The Dutch central banker acknowledged that, in 2011, the ECB should “probably have paid a little bit more attention” to low levels of underlying inflation — excluding more volatile energy and food costs — before raising rates in response to surging oil prices. This time around, however, core measures are at a record high of 5 per cent and are forecast by ECB economists to stay above its 2 per cent target even by 2025. Persistence of price pressures is now Knot’s “main concern”. Looking out over the Amstel river from the Dutch central bank’s temporary offices, where it is based until a revamp of its headquarters is finished, Knot acknowledged the ECB had been too late to respond to price pressures and should have stopped asset purchases in late 2021, instead of March 2022. However, he added that since the summer, rate-setters had “already made up for it” with a series of large rate increases.The 55-year-old, who joined the bank in 1995, said it surprised governing council members when he supported a step down to a half-point rate rise at its latest meeting — after two larger moves previously.More than a third of council members argued for continuing with 0.75 percentage point rises, but Knot said that by shifting to smaller rate moves, “we grant ourselves a little bit more time along the way as we tighten into 2023 to evaluate the effects of our tightening”.Knot acknowledged there was a communication challenge for the ECB to convince businesses and households of the benefits of raising rates during a downturn. But he said much “depends on the depth of the recession and we have to keep in mind that even if inflation is falling, it is coming off incredible peaks”. Many economists think the ECB is underestimating how quickly inflation will fall next year and how deep the recession could be. But Knot said recent data indicated any recession would be “short and shallow”. He added that in certain parts of the region, such as Germany, recent data showed “the worst . . . may already be behind us”. Sharp wage rises would keep inflation high. The ECB expects pay growth to hit 5.2 per cent next year before falling back just below 4 per cent in 2025. Knot said he expected “lots of labour hoarding, even in a recession” would keep eurozone jobless levels near a recent record low of 6.6 per cent. “For many of the companies that used the pandemic to lay off workers . . . that was not the smartest move.” He predicted that a record 6.4 per cent annual growth in Dutch wages in November “might happen in other countries with a certain delay”. “Why would workers settle for a hit to their purchasing power in current labour market conditions?”Politicians in Italy have criticised the ECB’s latest rate rise for causing unnecessary economic pain. He acknowledged that the war in Ukraine created “genuine uncertainty” that was beyond the ECB’s control, but said the best it could do was to focus on bringing down inflation, which he called “a regressive tax that nobody voted for”.The Dutch central bank recently warned that it expected €9bn of losses over the next four years because rising rates mean it will pay far more on bank deposits than it earns from its bond holdings. Knot said it was “uncomfortable that the central bank is taking the hit”, though he estimated it could “plug the hole” without a bailout by withholding dividend payments to the government for “years, if not decades”. More