Aurelia Butler

(Reuters) – Citing high U.S. inflation and a job market that’s nearing its full potential at least while the COVID-19 pandemic continues, Federal Reserve policymakers on Friday laid out a case for raising interest rates soon after the central bank ends its bond-buying program in March.And it wasn’t just the Fed’s inflation-focused hawks who were doing it. San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly, who as little as a month ago was calling for the central bank to show patience in its policy stance to allow more workers to reenter the labor market, said she would support two or three rate hikes next year, and did not rule out raising borrowing costs in March when asked about a start date. “I have adjusted my stance,” Daly said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, noting the burden that rising prices could put on families and nodding to the difficulty firms are having hiring workers and the health fears that are keeping many from seeking jobs. “If we try to push the labor market now when clearly many Americans who are sidelined don’t want to come in … if we push too hard, and then we have to raise rates rapidly, then we end up with a really sharp pullback and historically a very sharp pullback on the part of the Fed, it results in a recession,” she said in the interview.”If we see that the economy is delivering high inflation, even if we expect that inflation to not persist past the pandemic, and we see the labor market is extremely tight, even though we don’t expect that to be true past the pandemic, then the policy action that would be appropriate is, after tapering, to raise the interest rate.”The remarks from one of the Fed’s most ardent supporters of an employment-focused monetary policy drove home the depths of the shift among Fed policymakers over the last several weeks, as measures of inflation have continued to run at more than double the central bank’s 2% target and the unemployment rate fell to 4.2%, near policymakers’ estimate of full employment.Earlier this week, Fed policymakers unanimously agreed to speed up the wind-down of the central bank’s bond-buying program, with a plan to end the asset purchases in March so as to allow time for the three interest rate hikes that most Fed policymakers now believe will be needed next year.The central bank initiated its bond-buying program in 2020 to shelter the economy from the fallout from the pandemic. Until it recently began tapering the purchases, it was buying $120 billion in Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities each month.Though Daly told the WSJ that the economy will be able to support more jobs once the pandemic fades, she added that “we are nearing that kind of maximum employment we can have today.”‘IN A GOOD POSITION’Fed Governor Christopher Waller, who has for months voiced worries about rising prices, told an economics group in New York on Friday that he was in favor of even more aggressive policy tightening. He said he thought a rate hike in March would be “very likely” given inflation’s persistence and what he expects will be a return by then to pre-pandemic levels of employment, after accounting for retirements.And, Waller added, that the central bank should also begin trimming its overall bond holdings by next summer, a move that could push up long-term borrowing costs and add an extra layer of policy tightening to slow the economy.Such a shift would mark a much sharper return to policy normalcy than after the 2007-2009 financial crisis and recession, when the Fed waited a year after ending its bond-buying program to start raising rates, and held its balance sheet steady for another two years by reinvesting the proceeds of maturing bonds.The Fed currently has about $8.8 trillion on its balance sheet.Speaking earlier on Friday, New York Fed President John Williams did not signal he would necessarily support such a fast withdrawal of policy stimulus, but he did say he felt the Fed’s decision to wrap up its asset purchases quickly would put the central bank in position to respond to incoming economic data. “It’s really about getting our monetary policy stance in a good position and also obviously creating the optionality at some point next year, likely, to actually start raising the federal funds target range,” he told CNBC.The Fed slashed its overnight benchmark interest rate to the near-zero level in March 2020 and has kept it there since then to nurse the economic recovery. More

Most of the products in a popular Soap and Glory gift set are made in the UK. But the elaborate tins that contain the toiletries come from China, leaving Boots with a tricky logistical challenge. The Nottingham-based retailer needed to bring a delayed order of 80,000 tins into the UK and get them packed in time for the £32 product to launch on December 3.It ended up shipping them to Korea and then airfreighting them to the UK. The company also hired additional “assemblers” to make up for the time lost because of transport problems in order to put this and other popular sets together.Such challenges have been typical of one of the most unusual festive periods in recent memory. Although stores have remained open — unlike in 2020 when non-essential retail was shut for most of November — retailers have grappled with Brexit bureaucracy, global shipping disruption and shortages of warehouse workers and truck drivers.Boots’ managing director for UK and Ireland, Sebastian James, said ensuring seasonal ranges reached stores had been “an extraordinary effort” involving chartering its own ships — something Asda and John Lewis also did — and dispatching head office staff to shops.Another senior executive in the sector said there had “been a lot of compromises . . . everyone is struggling with next-day delivery and stock”.But dire predictions of sold-out toys, imported turkeys and shortages of pigs in blankets have failed to materialise. “We have increased our volumes of turkeys this year versus last and they are all British,” said Asda, the UK’s third-largest supermarket. “And there are plenty of pigs in blankets.”Grocers averted potential bottlenecks in distribution by hiring additional drivers in the autumn and sending products with longer shelf lives, such as Christmas puddings and festive drinks, to stores earlier than usual. That cleared as much delivery capacity as possible in the 10 days before Christmas for fresh produce.Non-food retailers have focused on maintaining availability of key product lines. “We have 15 per cent more stock this year than last year,” said Alex Baldock, chief executive of electricals retailer Currys. “But we are showing customers 100 large-screen TV options instead of 120.”Stock building for the festive trading peak began earlier than usual at many retailers. “Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but looking at our stock availability, it’s materially better than some competitors,” said Simon Arora, chief executive of variety discounter B&M.The company asked suppliers in Asia to ship earlier, with the first Christmas stock arriving in August and September.The chief executive of Poundland’s owner said ‘we didn’t dilly-dally around over pricing if it meant we got goods in reasonable time’ © Oli Scarff/AFP/GettyAndy Bond, chief executive of Poundland’s owner, Pepco, said it had sometimes been necessary to balance profit margin with availability. “We have negotiated hard, as we always do, but we didn’t dilly-dally around over pricing if it meant we got goods in reasonable time.”Scale helps enormously. Poundland has more than 800 stores in the UK. Halfords dominates cycles. Argos is the country’s biggest toy retailer and Currys is the market leader in electricals.“We are number one to our suppliers as well as our customers,” said Baldock.Such luxuries do not apply to Christow, a small online retailer of home and garden products, which faced significant challenges importing artificial Christmas trees.“The region of Vietnam where many of these trees are made was put into a severe lockdown, which pushed back production dates,” said Josh Piercy, ecommerce director of the Devon-based company. “That would have been OK if everything else had gone perfectly.”It did not, with shipping delays and driver shortages in the UK compounding the disruption to manufacturing.“It meant we had to be very flexible with our warehouse operations,” Piercy added. “If they could only deliver at two in the morning, or on a Saturday, then we ran an extra shift so we could take it.”Christow also added up to four weeks on to delivery times for pre-ordered goods, a form of expectation management widely employed elsewhere. Even John Lewis, which has a well-developed online offering, extended its standard delivery time to 10 days over the Black Friday period to build in some contingency.Shoppers helped by buying early. Total sales in the four weeks to November 27 were up 5 per cent against the same period a year earlier, according to the British Retail Consortium. Barclaycard said retail spending on payment cards rose 16 per cent in November, with toy, gift and jewellery sellers seeing particularly brisk trade.But keeping shelves stocked has come at a price. Having already raised pay rates for HGV drivers, Amazon is now offering more than £11 per hour for warehouse workers at many locations.Sea freight rates are considerably higher year on year and stocking up earlier has meant more cash tied up in inventory.But there has been less discounting in many sectors. This time last year, big chains such as Debenhams and Arcadia were set to be liquidated and were slashing prices to clear stock. The BRC’s shop price index for November showed prices rising by 0.3 per cent on average, the highest rate since May 2019.The challenges will not end on December 25. For some sectors such as furniture, Boxing Day marks the start of one of the most important periods of the year.Companies such as Made.com and DFS have warned of lengthening delivery times for large items such as sofas. They have responded by moving production nearer to Europe and holding more stock.For others, planning for Christmas 2022 will start towards the end of January. Piercy pointed out that raw materials prices have increased significantly since purchase agreements for the current year were struck and that these would feed through into prices next year.Nor are the global issues around container freight likely to ease off. “We have assumed that disruption will continue for the whole of next year,” said Pepco’s Bond. “We cannot see these issues going away anytime soon.” More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -An interest rate increase will likely be warranted “shortly after” the Federal Reserve ends its bond purchases in March, and the central bank should also begin reducing its bondholdings as soon as the summer to attack “alarmingly high” inflation, Federal Reserve Governor Chris Waller said on Friday.The Fed this week agreed to end its pandemic-era accumulation of government bonds by March, a precursor to raising interest rates, as policymakers acknowledged inflation was not easing as quickly as expected and required them to be ready to tighten monetary policy.”The appropriate timing for the first increase in the policy rate…will depend on the evolution of economic activity,” he said in prepared remarks to the Forecasters Club of New York. But with maximum employment close and inflation high, he said, “I believe an increase in the target range for the federal funds rate will be warranted” at the Fed’s March meeting.In response to a question later, he said the Fed should be tightening financial conditions as well with its second tool at hand, the balance sheet.The Fed until November had been buying $120 billion a month of Treasury bonds and mortgage backed securities during the pandemic, with its bondholdings now in excess of $8.2 trillion. Initially approved as a way to keep financial markets functioning at the outset of the health crisis, the program of quantitative easing also served to hold down long-term interest rates.During its last rate hiking cycle, beginning in 2015, the Fed held its balance sheet steady for two years by reinvesting the proceeds of maturing bonds, preferring to focus on raising interest rates only during what was then a sluggish recovery.No such restraint is needed this time, Waller said. Describing his approach to the upcoming withdrawal of monetary stimulus, Waller said the Fed should “do some hikes, see what the impact is. Does inflation back off like most of us think it will the second half?””If it doesn’t then we have to move faster, we have to do more. Balance sheet runoff would help in that” by allowing long term rates to rise.Waller spoke at a turning point for the Fed, and central banks globally, as they navigate away from offsetting the pandemic towards a head-on battle with inflation.While the new Omicron coronavirus variant poses the risk of slower growth, “cutting the other way, we also do not know if Omicron will exacerbate labor and goods supply shortages and add inflation pressure,” Waller said.The Fed this week signaled it may need to raise rates in three 0.25 percentage point steps this year in response to inflation running at multi-decade highs and well above the central bank’s 2% target.Waller was among the earliest Fed officials last year to argue that the turn away from pandemic-era stimulus should happen sooner than later because of the risk inflation would prove more persistent than initially expected – a view adopted by his colleagues as the fall progressed and price continued rising. More

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Federal Reserve’s more hawkish turn this week came amid heightened worries about economic recovery and inflation, but it has barely changed the bond market’s view that short-term interest rates could top out below the U.S. central bank’s estimated peak.Current betting even has rates staying below the inflation level the Fed projected over the next few years.Since the Federal Open Market Committee released its policy statement Wednesday, markets have priced the terminal rate where policy rates will stop going up, at between 1.4% to 1.7%, according to eurodollar futures’ view of U.S. rates in three years.The Fed does not forecast a terminal rate, but the market’s expectation of when the current hiking cycle will peak is well below the U.S. central bank’s view of 2.5%, and lower still than the revised core inflation estimate of 2.6% next year. The Fed’s neutral rate has been 2.5% for a couple of years after trending down from the time they first introduced its summary of economic projections. That rate is down 1 basis point in the last six years.”The market is penciling in a potential policy mistake by the Fed, wherein it hikes rates too aggressively near term and is unable to hike past 1.4%,” said Gennadiy Goldberg, senior rates strategist, at TD Securities in New York.”The recent price action is indicative of worries that Omicron will set back the recovery and will allow the Fed to moderate rate hikes,” he added, referring to the highly-transmissible coronavirus variant.On Wednesday, the Fed flagged three interest rate increases in 2022 and another three in 2023, with the policy rate climbing to 2.1% in 2024.The Fed typically lifts its benchmark rate higher until the economy is able to run on its own without any monetary policy action, typically hitting or exceeding what is known as the “equilibrium rate”.The previous Fed rate hike cycle in 2018 peaked at 2.25%-2.5%.”The Fed waited too long, certainly in our opinion, to wait for inflation to get here and fight it,” said David Petrosinelli, managing director and senior trader at broker-dealer InspereX in New York.”Because they’re running behind on inflation, the Fed has to raise rates faster with more rate increases front-loaded in 2022. The fear is that this is going to slow down the economy.”The U.S. Treasury yield curve typically bear flattens as the Fed shifts toward tightening, with smaller rises in long-term than in short-term yields. But recently, long-term U.S. Treasury yields have dropped from already very low levels, implying the historically low Fed terminal rate.”Perhaps this outcome reflects the limits to how much the Fed can tighten in a heavily-indebted, pandemic world,” said R.J. Gallo, senior portfolio manager at Federated Hermes (NYSE:FHI) with assets under management.DECLINING BOND YIELDSThe decline U.S. long-term yields has baffled market participants given a backdrop of persistent inflation pressure, stronger and tighter labor market, as well the Fed’s tapering of its bond buying.Jonathan Cohen, head of rates trading strategy at Credit Suisse (SIX:CSGN) in New York, said the decline in yields could be attributed, in part, to supply-demand factors, which include rapid buying of U.S. Treasuries by banks, the reduction in available supply even after accounting for Fed tapering, and the de-risking of pension funds as they gravitate toward bonds.Since late November, U.S. 10-year yields have declined by more than 30 basis points and was last down at 1.397%. U.S. 30-year yields, meanwhile, have fallen more than 20 basis points and last traded at 1.824%. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said on Wednesday though that he’s not too “troubled” about where the long bond is.”It’s not surprising that there’s a lot of demand for U.S. sovereigns in a world … a risk-free world … where they’re yielding so much more than Bunds or JGBs (Japanese government bond,” Powell added.Still, some analysts believe the terminal rate is way too low and may well end up higher than what markets expected.”The risks to the hiking cycle are numerous. But it is important to stress they are just that – namely, risks – and it seems strange for the Fed and markets to be positioned for a risk scenario,” said Andrea Cicione, head of strategy at TS Lombard.”In our view, it is more likely that the Fed and markets will move toward the economic reality once risks fail to materialize.” More

The Federal Reserve could raise interest rates as early as March in the face of “alarmingly high inflation”, according to a senior US central bank official.Christopher Waller, a Fed governor, on Friday endorsed the central bank’s decision this week to accelerate how quickly it scales back its asset purchase programme so that the stimulus ends altogether several months earlier than initially outlined in November.The revised schedule would bring the stimulus to an end in March, soon after which the Fed should raise interest rates, he said at an event hosted by the Forecasters Club of New York.“I believe an increase in the target range for the federal funds rate will be warranted shortly after our asset purchases end,” he said. “March is a live meeting for the first rate hike.”He later added that the Fed could begin shrinking the size of its balance sheet by the summer.Earlier on Friday, John Williams, president of the New York Fed, said speeding up the “taper”, or the reduction of the stimulus programme, was “exactly the right thing to do”, given that it would give the central bank more flexibility to raise rates earlier, but he stopped short of specifying a date for it to begin.“It’s really about getting our monetary policy stance in a good position and also obviously creating the optionality, at some point next year likely, to actually start raising the federal funds target range,” Williams said in an interview with CNBC. According to projections released by the Fed this week, officials expect three interest rate increases in 2022, followed by three more in 2023. A two-notch adjustment is also pencilled in for 2024, bringing the main policy rate closer to 2 per cent. The forecasts suggest a dramatically faster pace of interest rate rises next year than Fed officials were anticipating when they last released projections three months ago. They come after strong economic data and clearer signs that inflation is becoming a more persistent problem, spreading into sectors beyond those most sensitive to pandemic-related disruptions.“We’re very focused on inflation; it is obviously too high right now,” Williams said on Friday. “We want to make sure inflation comes back down to our 2 per cent longer-run goal.”Waller, who characterised inflation as “alarmingly high”, said he thought the economy was “closing in on maximum employment” — the last condition to be met before the Fed will proceed with increasing rates. Current market pricing suggests that, by taking an aggressive stance early to counteract mounting price pressures, the Fed will be limited in its ability to raise rates significantly later on as economic growth falters.Implied rates on Sofr and Eurodollar contracts between 2024 and 2026 now hover under 1.5 per cent, well below the long-run 2.5 per cent target expected by a majority of Fed officials.Williams provided some reassurance on Friday, saying that he felt “confident” the Fed could deliver “stable low inflation” without causing a sharp contraction in economic growth.He said higher interest rates should actually be taken as an indication of how strong the economy was.

“I go into next year feeling [like] the baseline outlook is a very good one,” he said. “Therefore, actually raising interest rates would be a sign of a positive development in terms of where we are in the economic cycle.” Williams predicts continued “strong improvements” in the labour market, which is beginning to regain its momentum. The unemployment rate sits at 4.2 per cent. Fed officials expect it to drop to 3.5 per cent next year, with the inflation rate still elevated at 2.7 per cent and the economy expanding at 4 per cent.Waller flagged the Omicron variant as a “big uncertainty”.“We also do not know if Omicron will exacerbate labour and goods supply shortages and add inflation pressure, derailing the moderation of inflation next year that is my baseline,” he said. More

The writer is the UK’s Brexit ministerWhen I reached agreement with the EU on our free trade deal, this time last year, I hoped that 2021 could be about making the UK’s new relationship with the EU work. Away from the noise, much is indeed working well. But one issue remains difficult and I have spent most of the year managing it — the Northern Ireland protocol. Indeed, no one could have predicted a year ago how 2021 would develop. We saw the EU’s attempt in January to put in place a vaccines export ban across the land border in Ireland; their insistence upon interpreting the protocol as if it provided for a normal external EU border through the middle of the UK; the invocation of infraction proceedings against us that could by now have been before the European Court of Justice; and political turbulence including the departure of the longstanding first minister of Northern Ireland, Arlene Foster.Economically, supply chains started to change and trade started to be diverted. Despite the £500m we committed to make the protocol work, we saw reductions in the supply of goods, discontinuation of medicines, and increased prices for consumers.By the summer, the practical and political difficulties generated by the protocol were obvious to all. Fortunately, we managed to stabilise the situation by presenting, in our July command paper, a full and comprehensive solution to the problems. We also decided then that the best way through, if we could achieve it, was to get a negotiated outcome rather than use the safeguards contained in Article 16 of the protocol. Since then we have been engaged in detailed talks with the EU about the way forward, including on the EU’s own limited proposals put forward in October. Unfortunately we have not managed to make as much progress as I would have wished. With the exception of medicines, where we will look carefully and positively at the EU’s proposals now we have them, what Brussels has put on the table does not do enough to ease the burdens or cover the full range of problems faced by people in Northern Ireland. The burdensome customs arrangements for goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland need to be changed drastically, given the overwhelming importance to the Northern Ireland economy of links with the rest of the UK, far outweighing its links with Ireland. The simplest solution is to put in place substantively different arrangements for goods that all sides agree will stay in the UK and those that will not, and to manage any risks arising in a collaborative way. The EU’s proposals do not do this and our expert analysis does not support the ambitious public claims made for them when they were published. Similarly, Northern Ireland’s state aid rules need to reflect the reality that, since the protocol was signed, we have agreed entirely new subsidy control rules in our free trade agreement, and put in place a new and rigorous domestic regime. The rules in Northern Ireland should evolve to reflect this. And a solution must be found on governance — the undemocratic ways in which EU laws are applied in Northern Ireland, and the role of the ECJ. I know sometimes people dismiss this as an ideological demand. But no solution can work if the European Commission can get the ECJ to sit in judgment upon any of our actions, as happened in March. That kind of hair-trigger response is not the right way to achieve sustainable solutions in Northern Ireland and it is anyway obviously unfair and unreasonable for disputes between us to be settled by the court of one of the parties. We would prefer to find a comprehensive solution to these and the full range of other difficulties. But, given the urgency, we have been ready to consider an interim agreement covering the most acute problems — trade frictions, subsidy control, and the ECJ. We have proposed various possible ways forward, but so far we have not found consensus — even on the content of an interim agreement. The situation remains highly problematic. A protocol that was meant to support the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement is now undermining it. The Northern Ireland institutions are clearly at serious risk. The most recent polling last week showed that 78 per cent of people in Northern Ireland want at least some change to the current arrangements. As long as there is no agreed solution, Article 16 safeguards remain on the table. They may turn out to be the only way of dealing with the problems. But it is still better to find a negotiated way through if we can. Time is short. So the talks need to resume with renewed urgency in the new year if we are to reach an outcome that delivers for everyone in Northern Ireland. The UK will work for that.   More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – It took an unemployment rate nosediving below 4%, years into the last U.S. economic recovery, to raise the country’s labor force participation rate, and Federal Reserve officials are banking on a similar response in new projections that couple a renewed fight against inflation with a historic run of low joblessness.It’s an outlook that has struck some analysts as contradictory – unemployment sitting at 3.5% for several years might be expected to raise price pressures – but it is consistent with recent research showing a long lag between rising employment and an eventual increase in labor supply and participation rates.Fed officials expected a participation rebound would happen fast this time. So far it hasn’t.But it appears wired into the U.S. central bank’s latest economic projections, which were released on Wednesday, and is what allows low unemployment to develop alongside falling inflation and a policy interest rate that over coming years remains below the level that would actually restrict economic activity.It’s a scenario that seems to involve the Fed still viewing inflation as “transitory” even though that word disappeared from this week’s policy statement, and anticipating labor supply will improve and help keep prices at bay, said Vincent Reinhart, a former top Fed staffer and now the chief economist at Dreyfus & Mellon.”Even though they no longer use the word ‘transitory,’ they believe it … This is not a policy path that brings inflation down. It is one that observes inflation coming down,” he said.Given the low unemployment rate and projected slowdown in inflation, Reinhart said Fed officials also appear to expect “labor force participation is increasing and getting back to pre-pandemic levels,” with the additional flow of workers helping moderate wage and price increases.On the surface, the Fed’s Dec. 14-15 policy meeting reflected a hawkish turn towards higher interest rates – it signaled three rate hikes were coming in 2022 – in a shift that could also be read as the central bank abandoning its promise of maximum employment in order to slow the economy and tame price increases currently running at twice the Fed’s 2% target.In his post-meeting news conference on Wednesday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell bluntly acknowledged that he had been surprised by the level and persistence of inflation this year. Fed officials planned to court higher inflation to offset years when it was below their target. The inflation they got, however, nearly closed a decade of misses in one quick jump. LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATIONBut Powell was also clear on another point: The current bout of price increases is “different” than what was expected and is being driven by dislocations still linked to the coronavirus pandemic.Though it was proving more difficult and taking longer, those problems still should be resolved over time, he said.One of the issues is the labor force participation rate, which fell more than three percentage points at the start of the pandemic, from 63.4% to 60.2%, before rebounding quickly through the first summer of the health crisis.Then it stalled just below 62%, leaving the workforce still around 1.6 million people shy of the pre-pandemic peak.Those former workers may have retired. They may be waiting on better health conditions. They may be waiting on child care.But a study presented at the Fed’s premier research conference this year by Bart Hobijn, an economist who has worked at the New York Fed and San Francisco Fed and teaches at Arizona State University, and Aysegul Sahin, an economics professor at the University of Texas at Austin, documented that the “participation cycle” wasn’t driven by workers reentering from the sidelines of the labor market, but by those already participating choosing to stick it out through spells of unemployment and continuing to look for work.It took much longer, Hobijn and Sahin noted, for that rising labor market attachment to be reflected in the participation rate than it did for the unemployment rate to fall. The lag, they said, could be substantial this time because of the complicating health and childcare issues.Rising participation was one of the forces Fed officials said helped the economy during the last, decade-long recovery to reach a hoped-for state where the unemployment rate was low, wages increased, and yet inflation remained tame.Along with their move against inflation this week, Fed officials projected the U.S. will move back to that sort of optimal state, locking into a 3.5% unemployment rate that, since the 1950s, has only been hit about 15% of the time.”To get back to where we were, the evidence grows that it is going to take some time. And what we need is another long expansion,” Powell told reporters on Wednesday. “We’ve had a shock to labor force participation that is not unwinding as quickly as many had expected … We would all … expect that the level of maximum employment that’s consistent with price stability would increase further over time, for example, through increasing participation.”^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^The Fed’s inflation “make up” https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-FED/INFLATION/zjvqkygmzvx/The Fed’s inflation “make up” https://tmsnrt.rs/3EWunQdFrequency of unemployment rates https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-FED/JOBS/xmpjonjjrvr/Frequency of unemployment rates https://tmsnrt.rs/33nBSC1Labor force (eventually) follows jobs https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-FED/JOBS/znpneeqebvl/Labor force (eventually) follows jobs https://tmsnrt.rs/2XTgsJY^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > More

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Senate steered toward an end-of-year recess on Friday as Democrats were unable to pass President Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion domestic investment program and major election reforms by a self-imposed Christmas deadline.The deadlock over these two high-profile bills put in jeopardy the continuation of an expanded child tax credit for some 3.6 million poor families, which expires on Dec. 31.Democrats had hoped to extend for another year this six-month-old pilot program as part of Biden’s “Build Back Better” legislation that would expand an array of social programs and battle climate change.Now, with many senators already out of town, the debate on these is expected to resume in January. Meanwhile, Democratic senators were expected to continue negotiations. Moderate Democratic Senator Joe Manchin has been a key holdout and his support is crucial in a chamber where the Democrats have the slimmest margin of control.Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer acknowledged the Democrats’ setbacks in a speech in which he said: “The president requested more time to continue his negotiations (on Build Back Better) so we will keep working…to bring this bill over the finish line.”Schumer did not say when that work might conclude.Rank-and-file Democrats were resigned to missing Schumer’s year-end deadline for passing the domestic investment and voting rights bills. They had particularly wanted the latter approved promptly so that states have more time to prepare for the November, 2022 congressional elections, in which Republicans hope to win back control of Congress.”There’s no reason to put it up on the floor and fail” before enough votes are nailed down, Democratic Senator Tim Kaine said of the Build Back Better plan.The voting rights bill comes in the face of many Republican-controlled states pursuing legislation to reduce voters’ access to the ballot.’MORE TIME’ THAN ANTICIPATEDEven as the Senate on Friday debated a long list of Biden nominees for ambassadorships, federal judges and other high-level administration jobs, 20 senators, mainly Republicans, already had left town to begin their breaks.Earlier, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters that recent talks with Manchin were encouraging.”The president’s going to get this done and we’re going to get it across the finish line. And yes, it’s going to take more time than we anticipated,” she told reporters aboard Air Force One as Biden traveled to South Carolina.Psaki also raised the possibility of the Treasury Department making double monthly child tax credit payments in February if Congress is not able to renew that program until early next year so that none of the recipients lose money. More