Aurelia Butler

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate on Thursday unanimously passed a bill to improve oversight of ocean shipping, a step supporters say will help ease export backlogs.The Ocean Shipping Reform Act, led by Senators John Thune and Amy Klobuchar, would strengthen the investigatory authority of the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC (NYSE:FMC)), the U.S. agency that oversees ocean shipping, and boost transparency of industry practices.Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the legislation “will reduce costs for the American people, by reforming unfair shipping practices hurting exports and consumers alike.”Schumer noted “supply chain backlogs have made it harder for goods to leave these ports and get to their international destination. Every single day that goods lie idle on our ports, it costs producers more and more money.”The legislation would prohibit ocean carriers from unreasonably declining opportunities for U.S. exports that would be determined by the FMC, which would write new rules.It would also require ocean common carriers to report to the FMC each calendar quarter “on total import/export tonnage” making port in the United States.It would allow FMC to begin investigations of ocean common carrier’s business practices and apply enforcement measures. Klobuchar said “Congestion at ports and increased shipping costs pose unique challenges for U.S. exporters, who have seen the price of shipping containers increase four-fold in just two years, raising costs for consumers and hurting our businesses.” Thune said the legislation would make “it harder for ocean carriers to unreasonably refuse goods that are ready to export at U.S. ports.”Similar legislation passed the U.S. House 364-60 in December but lawmakers must resolve differences before it can go to President Joe Biden.On March 15, the White House unveiled a pilot information sharing effort to help clear supply chain bottlenecks at congested U.S. ports.This month, the National Retail Federation said imports at major U.S. retail container ports are expected to be at near-record levels this spring and summer as consumer demand and supply chain challenges continue to spark congestion. More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Senate negotiators on Thursday were nearing a deal on a $10 billion COVID-19 bill to help the federal government acquire more vaccines and medical supplies as it prepares for future variants of the virus that upended American life.Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat, said senators were “close to a final agreement” on a bill aiming to shore up stockpiles to be used both domestically and internationally.If a deal is finalized in coming days, the Senate might be able to pass the bill and send it to the House of Representatives before the start of a spring recess at the end of next week.”We need more money right away so we have enough vaccines and testing and life-saving therapeutics,” Schumer said in a speech to the Senate.The amount is a tiny fraction of the $4.6 trillion Congress has approved since early 2020 to fight the virus, much of which was devoted to offsetting its heavy economic hit.Early this month, Congress failed to pass a $15.6 billion relief bill amid Republican opposition to new federal spending. Many Democrats, meanwhile, rebelled against taking back some money earmarked to help state and local governments in order to pay for the new round of coronavirus relief.Schumer said a failure to adequately prepare for a possible new coronavirus variant could reverse progress in fighting the pandemic and reopening most American institutions.Republican Senator Roy Blunt told reporters that nearly half of the financing for the bill would come from recapturing funding from previous COVID aid laws that were intended to help performing arts venues recover from being shuttered during long periods of the pandemic and for aid to aviation manufacturers. COVID-19 has caused 6.5 million deaths globally, with 980,000 in the United States alone. While the pandemic has been showing signs of easing, prompting many to shed the medical masks that had become part of daily life, U.S. deaths still lead the world with an average of 710 per day. More

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Which market has it right? With the first quarter of 2022 over, the U.S. stock and bond markets appear to be conveying drastically different assessments of the growth outlook, leaving investors to decide which view will prevail. The S&P 500 has come roaring back from a near-13% decline and finished the quarter off 4.9% after a rebound that has defied worries over tighter monetary policy and geopolitical instability stemming from the war in Ukraine. Many stock investors have even shrugged off a brief inversion of a closely watched section of the U.S. Treasury yield curve – a phenomenon that has predicted past recessions. Bond investors appear far more pessimistic on the economy, with the ICE (NYSE:ICE) BofA index on track for its worst start to the year ever on worries that the Fed will cause recession by aggressively tightening monetary policy in its bid to fight surging inflation. Yields on the benchmark 10-year Treasury are up 81 basis points this quarter and stand near their highest level since May 2019. Illustrating the countervailing forces in markets, the CBOE Volatility Index – viewed as a gauge of fear in equity markets – stands not far from its lows of the year, with investors pinning the reversal in stocks on everything from quarter-end rebalancing to buying from retail investors. At the same time, the ICE BofAML MOVE index, which tracks Treasury yield volatility, remains elevated. “Rates markets are very consistent in telling a story where the Fed is going to do some damage to the economy, (while) risk markets have not really done a good job of pricing any significant damage to the growth outlook,” said Edward Al Hussainy, senior interest rate and currency analyst at Columbia Threadneedle. “One of these stories is wrong.” Different roads https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/mkt/akvezjnjypr/Pasted%20image%201648745384426.pngOne source of contention among investors has been the yield curve, where rates for two-year Treasuries briefly rose above those for 10-year Treasuries earlier this week. Such an inversion is concerning because it has preceded six of the seven recessions since 1978, according to data from Truist Advisory Services. Some investors, however, have given a broad range of reasons why the signal’s predictive power may not apply this time, including the potentially distortive effects of the Fed’s massive COVID-19 stimulus on rates markets. In any case, recessions have followed past inversions with an average lag of 16 months, and the S&P 500 has averaged an 11% gain in the 12 months following inversions, Truist’s data showed. Overall, the S&P 500 has lost an average of 8.8% during the four recessions since 1990, according to CFRA data. “We would take this (equity) rally as a sort of a gift,” said Sameer Samana, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo (NYSE:WFC) Investment Institute. “If you weren’t able to reduce your exposure to some of the speculative areas of the market before the correction, now is your time.” Mark Haefele, chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, cautioned investors against over-interpreting the exuberance in stocks or the gloom in the bond market. Still, the firm has scaled back its outlook for global earnings growth and now sees a more modest upside for stocks with a year-end target of 4,700 on the S&P 500. The index closed at 4,530.41 on Thursday.Others have pointed out that the gap between yields on the 3-month and 10-year Treasuries – another closely followed measure – is positive by approximately 180 basis points. That’s a sign there is still room for the Fed to shift gears before the market starts to price in a recession, said Gary Cloud, a portfolio manager at Hennessy Funds. Though policymakers have said they could raise rates by as much as 50 basis points in a single meeting if warranted and investors are pricing in some 200 basis points of tightening this year, “the Fed doesn’t want to tighten so much that it causes a recession,” Cloud said. [L2N2VW1SG]Others, however, are skeptical the Fed will be able to engineer a soft landing. Tim Murray, a capital markets strategist in the multi-asset division at T. Rowe Price, is moving into commodities and defensive sectors of the stock market while increasing allocations to longer-duration Treasuries, assets he believes will thrive during a downturn. “Once the Fed starts hiking, there’s a good chance that we will have a recession in the relatively near future,” Murray said. “I get a sense that investors are not worried enough about this.”Rocky quarter for stocks, bonds as Fed begins rate hikes https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-MARKETS/QUARTER/egpbkblozvq/chart.png More