Aurelia Butler

NEW YORK (Reuters) -St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President James Bullard said he sees the unemployment rate falling below 3% this year, a jobless rate the U.S. economy last saw in the early 1950s. “I think unemployment is going to go down below 3% this year,” Bullard said on Tuesday in a Reuters interview. He noted that the unemployment rate dropped by 0.7 percentage points over the past two months alone to 3.9%. The jobless rate could continue to fall as companies scrounge for workers and several factors, including early retirements, limit the share of people who are working or looking for jobs, he said. Bullard said the labor market is strong, despite the weakness it could experience in the near term because of a surge in COVID-19 infections. “I think the upcoming jobs report will probably be not very good because of Omicron, but don’t be fooled,” Bullard said. “This is quite the strong economy here and a very strong labor market.”The last time the U.S. unemployment rate was below 3% was 1953, when it fell to as low as 2.5% – the lowest since the Labor Department began reporting it regularly in 1948.Bullard said he supports raising interest rates in March to get monetary policy better positioned, but said future actions will depend on what happens with the economy and inflation. More

(Reuters) – St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard on Tuesday said he favors lifting rates at the U.S. central bank’s meeting in March and likely again in May, but he pushed back against the idea of kicking off the coming tightening cycle with a half-percentage point hike.”I don’t think a 50-basis point hike really helps us right now,” Bullard said in an interview with Reuters carried on Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) Spaces https://twitter.com/i/spaces/1lPJqmADBNQJb. More

The system, which is set to begin Tuesday night and last through Thursday, could dump 6 to 12 inches (15 to 30 cm) of snow over portions of the southern Rockies and central Plains, with record snowfall possible in the Midwest as well.”While typical in terms of the time of year that you might expect something like this, potentially atypical in terms of some of the snowfall amounts we may see in parts of the Midwest,” said Greg Carbin, the forecast operations branch chief for the NWS Weather Prediction Center. Snow could blanket Detroit in amounts not seen in years, Carbin added, while icy roads and bridges threatened to make travel “nearly impossible.” Power outages are also possible.A “corridor of heavy ice accumulation” will stretch from the Ohio River Valley down to Texas, according to the forecast.Winter weather advisories, storm watches and warnings are in effect in many of the areas in the storm’s path.In Texas, where a deadly deep freeze last year crippled the state’s electric grid, leaving millions without power in freezing temperatures, Governor Greg Abbott sought to reassure residents on Tuesday, saying the grid was prepared.”We’re all mindful of what happened last February in Texas,” said Carbin, the NWS meteorologist. “The event coming up is going to introduce a shot of cold air and it’s a mixed winter precipitation at this time, it looks nothing like what we saw last February in terms of both intensity and duration.”Extremely cold air caused by Arctic high pressure that is forecast to descend over the Plains on Wednesday will send temperatures plummeting 10 to 15 degrees below average in some areas, the NWS added. The storm threat comes days after fierce winter weather engulfed the northeastern part of the United States, dropping more than 2 feet (60 cm) of snow on some areas and packing high winds, prompting thousands of flight cancellations and curtailing access to the roads in some states. More

(Reuters) – A record amount of more than half a trillion dollars of debt was raised in January by companies as issuers scrambled to take advantage of attractive funding conditions before global central banks led by the U.S. Federal Reserve begin a tightening cycle.Including financial institutions, investment-grade companies raised $532 billion globally in January, the highest amount on record for the first month of the year, according to data from Refinitiv dating back to 2000, eclipsing the previous record at $530 billion last year. In the U.S., the most significant source of issuance, companies and financial institutions issued $153.5 billion in bonds respectively, the data showed, the highest since 2017. “The main driver is borrowing costs, which are very very low,” said Winnie Cisar, global head of strategy at research firm CreditSights.”With the Fed talking about tightening, rates markets moving higher I think issuers are very much trying to get ahead of whatever the next leg higher in yields is going to be.”The issuance is a sign of confidence for the credit markets, which delivered their worst monthly losses since March 2020 in January.The U.S. Federal Reserve signalled at the start of January that it may tighten monetary policy earlier than expected, which may also include shrinking its $8-trillion balance sheet. That has triggered a global sell-off in bond markets and risk assets with bond yields rising sharply as traders priced in nearly five rate hikes from the Fed over the remainder of 2022.U.S. banks and financial institutions were a key driver of issuance, raising $104 billion in the U.S. in a record January. “We had expected to see a deceleration from financials not needing to raise as much as capital as last year but a lot of these issues are among the most savvy in the market in terms of navigating borrowing conditions,” Cisar at CreditSights said. Despite a 40 bps yield rise on U.S. investment-grade corporate bonds in the U.S., according to BofA indexes, borrowing costs are still historically low, so companies can continue issuing cheap debt and bring down their overall funding costs. Companies in BofA’s U.S. investment-grade corporate index could see borrowing costs rise another 80 basis points before they exceed the coupons they pay, according to Refinitiv Datastream.In contrast were sub investment-grade companies, where after a record run in 2021, bond issuance more than halved compared to last January at $32 billion. (This story has been refiled to remove erroneous mention of euros in para 3) More