Aurelia Butler

“The Federal Reserve, with all of the powerful tools at its disposal, can’t fully succeed unless Native people, and others that have existed on the margins of the economy, have the opportunity to become full participants,” Bowman said in remarks prepared for a virtual event on Indigenous economies organized by the Bank of Canada. Bowman did not comment on her outlook for the economy or monetary policy. Through research, meetings with tribal leaders and other outreach programs, the Fed seeks to learn how Indigenous communities can gain greater access to credit and other financial services, Bowman said. More

(Reuters) -U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Monday said he continues to expect inflation to recede over the next year as supply and demand come into better balance, but warned that the new strain of COVID-19 muddies the outlook, and prices could continue to rise for longer than earlier thought.”It is difficult to predict the persistence and effects of supply constraints, but it now appears that factors pushing inflation upward will linger well into next year,” Powell said in testimony prepared for delivery Tuesday at the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, and released Monday by the Fed. The economy continues to strengthen, and the labor market to improve, pushing up wages, he said.But the recent rise in COVID-19 cases and the emergence of the new Omicron variant “pose downside risks to employment and economic activity and increased uncertainty for inflation,” he said, noting that health-related concerns could “reduce people’s willingness to work in person, which would slow progress in the labor market and intensify supply-chain disruptions.”The Fed this month began reducing its support for the economy by gradually decreasing its asset purchases at a pace that would end them by next June. But with inflation registering more than double the Fed’s 2% target, Fed officials have increasingly said they are open to potentially speeding up the taper to clear the way for earlier interest rate hikes if needed. Powell did not mention the taper timeline in his prepared remarks, though he did say the labor market has “ground to cover” before reaching full employment, one of the conditions the Fed has set before it will consider raising interest rates from their current near-zero levels. The Fed, Powell promised, “is committed to our price-stability goal” and will use its tools both to support the economy and the labor market and to “prevent higher inflation from becoming entrenched.” More

BRUSSELS (Reuters) -The postponement of the World Trade Organization’s ministerial conference this week all but guarantees months of deadlock on fishing subsidies and a bid to spread COVID-19 vaccines more widely.Expectations of new agreements had already been muted ahead of the gathering, which was postponed late on Friday https://www.reuters.com/business/wto-postpones-major-meeting-over-covid-19-concerns-sources-2021-11-26 after new Swiss travel restrictions due to the Omicron variant meant many planned face-to-face meetings could not happen.WTO on Monday proposed to hold its ministerial conference in first week of March 2022, if conditions allow. However, no new date has been set.Dmitry Grozoubinski, executive director of the Geneva Trade Platform think tank, said ministerial meetings were key to any agreements because they put together political decision-makers and created deadlines.”It’s a significant blow. The gaps on issues such as fisheries and IP parts of COVID-19 are political gaps. It’s not a fatal blow though as they do plan to reconvene,” he said.WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said negotiations should not stop and that delegations in Geneva should seek to close as many gaps as possible.”This new variant reminds us once again of the urgency of the work we are charged with,” she said.Delegations indeed did set to work on Monday to debate a proposal by India and South Africa to waive intellectual property (IP) rights for COVID-19 vaccines and treatments and an EU counter-proposal to use flexibilities in existing WTO rules.Medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres said that the world could not waste more time, with millions of lives at stake.”We call on countries opposing and diluting this waiver to today halt the stalling tactics and take urgent measures to adopt a comprehensive waiver,” it said.The Omicron discovery supports one of the arguments of waiver proponents that failing to supply vaccines to poorer countries increases the risk of potentially dangerous new variants of the coronavirus emerging.U.S. President Joe Biden reiterated his belief in a waiver of IP protections for vaccines, saying the news of the new variant raised the importance of moving quickly. More

The Federal Trade Commission has asked retailers and consumer goods groups in the US, including Amazon and Walmart, to hand over information about their supply chains as it probes bottlenecks and high prices afflicting the economy. The move announced on Monday by the FTC, the US competition watchdog, will put pressure on corporate America to defend its prices and business practices and take additional steps to ease backlogs ahead of the holiday shopping season — a growing preoccupation for the Biden administration. “Supply chain disruptions are upending the provision and delivery of a wide array of goods, ranging from computer chips and medicines to meat and lumber,” Lina Khan, FTC chair, said in a statement. “I am hopeful the FTC’s new . . . study will shed light on market conditions and business practices that may have worsened these disruptions or led to asymmetric effects,” she added. The FTC is seeking information from nine companies, which also include grocery chain Kroger, consumer goods company Procter & Gamble, meat producer Tyson Foods and food company Kraft Heinz, along with several wholesalers. The announcement of the probe came as president Joe Biden met with a group of leading chief executives at the White House to stress the importance of smooth supply chain operations during the holiday season. Even though the US economy has been booming since Biden took office, public perceptions of the recovery and how the administration has handled it have been hit by the surge in prices and, in some cases, delays and difficulty in securing products. The FTC investigation risks increasing tensions between corporate America and the Biden administration, since it involves an extensive request for information, and suggests that corporate practices could be contributing to the backlog. The FTC said it would study whether supply chain disruptions are leading to “specific bottlenecks, shortages, anti-competitive practices, or contributing to rising consumer prices”.Biden was expected to deliver remarks on supply chains on Monday which were later delayed until Wednesday. Earlier this month, the FTC also launched an investigation into high petrol prices as the Biden administration sought to put pressure on oil companies to ease inflationary pressure in their sector.

Large retailers have expressed confidence that their efforts to bring goods into the country earlier than usual will help them meet strong consumer demand, which Matthew Shay, chief executive of the National Retail Federation, said had been “juiced” by historic levels of fiscal stimulus. “Overall, consumers are in a great place; they’ve got $4tn in savings, they’re out shopping, sales are up in a big way this year [and] we expect a great holiday season,” Shay told CNN on Friday. “Because retailers have got inventory in place [consumers] are going to find the gifts that they have on their lists.”Early data covering the long Thanksgiving weekend suggests that in-store spending rallied strongly from last year’s pandemic-depressed levels, but online spending came in at the low end of analysts’ expectations. More