Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, told lawmakers that the economic rebound from the pandemic recession had further to go and reiterated that the central bank planned to keep up its growth-stoking policies, which include rock-bottom interest rates and large-scale bond buying.
“The economic recovery remains uneven and far from complete, and the path ahead is highly uncertain,” Mr. Powell said in prepared remarks he delivered to the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. “Although there has been much progress in the labor market since the spring, millions of Americans remain out of work.”
Unemployment has come down sharply after surging last year, but the official jobless rate remains at nearly double its February 2020 level and probably understates the extent of weakness in the labor market. Likewise, consumer spending has bounced back but the service sector remains subdued.
The Fed slashed interest rates to near-zero last March and is buying about $120 billion in government-backed bonds each month, policies aimed at fueling lending and spending. Congress and the White House have also provided support in the form of enormous spending packages, and Democrats are now pushing for another $1.9 trillion in relief for workers and businesses.
Some economists have warned that inflation could take off as vaccines allow consumer activity to pick up and as the government pumps money into the economy, but Fed officials have generally played down those concerns. Mr. Powell said on Tuesday that inflation dynamics generally do not “change on a dime” and that if unwanted price pressures arise, the Fed has the tools to push back on them.
For now, “the economy is a long way from our employment and inflation goals, and it is likely to take some time for substantial further progress to be achieved,” Mr. Powell said, reiterating a pledge to keep up buying bonds at the current pace until “substantial further progress” has been made.
Senator Patrick J. Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, asked whether the Fed’s policies might be fueling higher asset prices. Mr. Powell acknowledged that there was a “link” but said “many factors” were contributing.
And Mr. Toomey pressed Mr. Powell on what would happen to the Fed’s bond-buying plans if inflation moved up before full employment was achieved, prompting Mr. Powell to reiterate that the Fed was looking for more progress before dialing back purchases.
Mr. Powell said at one point that he would avoid weighing in on fiscal policy — a comment he made not long after Mr. Toomey said the central bank should avoid moving beyond its narrow economic mandate and into areas like racial inequity and climate change. The Fed is politically independent and tends to avoid partisan issues, though it has been providing advice to policymakers in Congress and weighing in on socioeconomic disparities over the past year.
“I, today, will really stay away from fiscal policy,” Mr. Powell said when asked specifically about the gender gap in the labor market. “There is still a long way to go to full recovery, and we intend to keep our policy supportive of that recovery.”
The U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday chose Oshkosh Defense, a manufacturer of military vehicles, to build the next generation of postal delivery trucks, shunning an all-electric vehicle maker that had been in the running for the multibillion-dollar, 10-year contract.
Under an initial $482 million deal, Oshkosh will complete the design and then assemble 50,000 to 165,000 vehicles over 10 years, the Postal Service said.
Oshkosh was awarded the contract over two other bidders. One, the Workhorse Group, a small producer of electric delivery trucks based in Loveland, Ohio, was counting on the postal contract to provide a surge in revenue. At its height this month, the company’s stock was up more than tenfold in a year, in part on hopes it would win all or part of the postal contract. On Tuesday, after the Postal Service announced its decision, Workhorse shares lost nearly half their value. The other final bidder was Karsan, a Turkish maker of trucks and buses that was considered a long shot for the contract.
The choice of Oshkosh, which has no track record in producing electric vehicles, over Workhorse raised questions among some environmentalists over President Biden’s promised push to electrify the federal fleet. But some critics had also raised concerns that too swift a transition to plug-in trucks made by a fledgling company — and the buildup of charging infrastructure that would require — could burden a Postal Service already struggling with delivery delays.
Oshkosh has promised to shift to battery-powered vehicles if necessary, reflecting a wider push by automakers to bolster their offerings of electric vehicles to cut down on the industry’s carbon footprint. The new vehicles will be equipped with either fuel-efficient gasoline engines or electric batteries, and they will be retrofitted to keep pace with advances in electric vehicle technology, the Postal Service said.
The Post Office operates almost 230,000 vehicles and has one of the world’s largest civilian vehicle fleets, but its aging fleet — which federal data shows gets only about 10 miles a gallon — had also long been due for an upgrade.
After it rocketed higher last year, the United States’ official unemployment rate has fallen to 6.3 percent. But top economic officials are increasingly citing a different figure, one that puts the jobless rate at a far higher 10 percent.
The higher figure includes people who have stopped looking for work, and the disparity between the official rate and the expanded statistic underlines the unusual nature of the pandemic shock and reinforces the idea that the economy remains far from a full recovery.
The reality that labor market weakness lingers, a year into the pandemic, could come up again as Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, testifies before Congress starting on Tuesday. Mr. Powell is speaking before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday and the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics tallies how many Americans are looking for work or are on temporary layoff midway through each month. That number, taken as a share of the civilian labor force, is reported as the official unemployment rate.
But economists have long worried that by relying on the headline rate, they ignore people they shouldn’t, including would-be employees who are not actively applying for jobs because they are discouraged or because they are waiting for the right opportunity.
Now, key policymakers are all but ditching the headline statistic, rather than just playing down its comprehensiveness. In an alternate unemployment figure, they’re adding back people who have left the job market since last February, along with those who are misclassified in the official report.
“We have an unemployment rate that, if properly measured in some sense, is really close to 10 percent,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on CNBC last week. And a week earlier, Mr. Powell cited a similar figure in a speech about lingering labor market damage.
“Published unemployment rates during Covid have dramatically understated the deterioration in the labor market,” Mr. Powell said recently. People dropped out of jobs rapidly when the economy closed, and with many restaurants, bars and hotels shut, there is nowhere for many workers who are trained in service work to apply.
Wally Adeyemo, President Biden’s nominee for deputy Treasury secretary, foreshadowed the tough approach that the Biden administration intends to take with China on Tuesday, underscoring the need to mobilize American allies to curtail China’s unfair economic practices.
At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday, Mr. Adeyemo said the Treasury Department must use its full arsenal of tools to ensure that China is abiding by international laws. He called for a “holistic” view of the ties between the two superpowers, arguing that the economic and security relationships are intertwined.
“Where China is not willing to play on a level playing field, it’s important that we hold them accountable to the rules that they’ve agreed to in the international system,” Mr. Adeyemo said. “I believe this needs to be done, in some cases unilaterally but always best to do multilaterally, working with other countries, especially with our allies, to demonstrate to the Chinese that they are isolated when they violate the rules of the road.”
If confirmed, Mr. Adeyemo will be Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen’s top lieutenant. He will focus heavily on national security matters and international diplomacy, particularly as Ms. Yellen works to address the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic.
Mr. Adeyemo suggested that he would take a “critical look” at how Chinese companies were using America’s financial system to potentially threaten national security, as well as Treasury’s tools to address that risk. As part of a broad review, Mr. Adeyemo will study the restrictions that the Trump administration erected to block Americans from investing in companies with ties to the Chinese military.
Mr. Adeyemo was introduced at the hearing by Senator Elizabeth Warren, the progressive Democrat from Massachusetts. Before she joined the Senate, Ms. Warren established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where Mr. Adeyemo served as her first chief of staff.
Despite their close relationship, Ms. Warren asked Mr. Adeyemo tough questions, challenging him to commit to using the Financial Stability Oversight Council, a multiagency task force meant to identify broad risks to the financial system, to scrutinize the private equity industry.
After the Obama administration, Mr. Adeyemo went to work for BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, as a senior adviser and interim chief of staff to Larry Fink, its chief executive. Although that background might have caused a political issue for some nominees, Republicans and Democrats on the committee declined to question Mr. Adeyemo about his corporate experience.
Born in Nigeria, Mr. Adeyemo moved as a child with his parents to the United States, where his family settled outside Los Angeles. At the hearing, he spoke about his working-class upbringing and the need to ensure that low-income communities and communities of color, which have been hit hardest by the pandemic, receive relief.
The federal board leading Puerto Rico through its enormous bankruptcy case said Tuesday that the pandemic had forced it to further reduce how much it would pay on certain debts.
The board announced a preliminary deal affecting Puerto Rico’s general obligation bonds, which had a face value of $18.8 billion in 2015, when the island’s governor said it had far more debt than it could repay. At that point, its bond debt totaled $72 billion.
Under the deal — which requires approval by a vote of the creditors and the judge overseeing the case — the oversight board would pay just $7.4 billion of general-obligation debt, plus a $7 billion upfront payment. Even with the upfront payment, the island’s total outlay would be less than its previous plan, which would have required it to pay principal and interest on $11.8 billion in bonds.
The creditors would also receive a “contingent value instrument,” entitling them to additional cash payments if the island’s economic growth exceeds the oversight board’s projections.
General obligation bonds are the backbone of government finance, used extensively for public works projects. And the reduction in payments for them is notable, given their rock-solid reputation. Borrowers can be forced to raise taxes to make good on their guarantees, and in Puerto Rico the bonds were sold with an explicit guarantee, enshrined in the territory’s Constitution.
“For a long time, the bond market thought general obligation bonds were the gold standard and they couldn’t be restructured,” said David Skeel, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who is the chairman of Puerto Rico’s federal oversight board. “The reality has become clear that they can be restructured.”
But, Mr. Skeel said, the upfront payment and the contingent value instrument are intended to help make good on the “full faith and credit” pledge of general obligation bonds, which gives them priority over other types of debt.
“They don’t have an absolute priority,” he said. “They’re not getting 100 cents on the dollar. But the priority was not completely ignored.”
Several other kinds of bonds, with lower priority, are expected to get smaller settlements, but the terms are still being negotiated.
The board sought to reduce bondholders’ value because it believes Puerto Rico’s recovery from a deep recession is bound to be slow because of an extraordinary series of setbacks — a catastrophic hurricane, an islandwide power failure, a series of earthquakes and finally the coronavirus pandemic.
Bondholders complained that the reduction was too steep, but if Puerto Rico recovers more quickly than expected, the contingent value instrument will pay them a reward for taking the risk.
As for the $7 billion upfront payment, the board’s executive director, Natalie Jaresko, likened it to a home buyer’s making a bigger down payment: It will mean reduced payments in the future. (Puerto Rico has the cash on hand in part because it hasn’t been making debt payments since declaring a moratorium in 2016, on the day that President Barack Obama signed a law allowing the territory to restructure its debt under court protection.)
The agreement could still face opposition. In addition to requiring approval by creditors and the court, it must be executed by the government of Puerto Rico. And the territory’s governor, Pedro Pierluisi, said he would oppose the deal if it meant cuts to pensions for government workers.
Martin Baron, who led a revival of The Washington Post in his eight years as executive editor, will leave a big hole in the newsroom when he retires on Feb. 28. To take his place until a successor is found, the paper on Tuesday named Cameron Barr, a managing editor overseeing news and features, acting executive editor. Mr. Barr, 57, has effectively worked as Mr. Baron’s No. 2 since 2015.
“The search for the next executive editor is actively underway with a broad and diverse group of exceptional journalists,” The Post’s publisher, Frederick J. Ryan Jr., wrote in a memo to the staff on Tuesday. “It will not be complete prior to Marty’s departure at the end of this month.” He also called on the staff to give its “full support” to Mr. Barr.
Mr. Baron’s decision to call it a career was not a surprise. But when he formally announced his retirement last month, giving five weeks notice, the hunt for his replacement had not begun in earnest. That made the appointment of an interim newsroom leader all but inevitable, and Mr. Barr, described by Mr. Ryan in the memo as the paper’s “longest-tenured managing editor,” was a natural candidate.
Mr. Barr started at The Post in 2004. Before he was named to a managing editor post in 2015, he worked as a reporter, the national security editor, the Middle East editor and the national editor. Before joining The Post, Mr. Barr worked at The Christian Science Monitor for nearly 15 years, with stints as a correspondent in Tokyo and Jerusalem.
Mr. Baron, 66, was the top editor at The Miami Herald and The Boston Globe before taking the top newsroom job at The Post. At all three stops, his newspapers collected at least one Pulitzer Prize. At The Globe, he oversaw a landmark investigation into sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church, a series that was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film “Spotlight,” with the actor Liev Schreiber playing Mr. Baron.
At The Post, he presided over an ownership change from the Graham family, which had run the paper for four generations, to the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who bought The Post in 2013 for $250 million. Under Mr. Baron, The Post’s newsroom has grown, as have its digital subscriptions.
The competition to succeed him will be fierce. Mr. Ryan, the publisher since 2014, will have the biggest say in naming his replacement, and Mr. Bezos is expected to have some input.
Less than a year after the pandemic thwarted an effort to sell Victoria’s Secret to the investment firm Sycamore Partners, the lingerie chain’s owner, L Brands, will again test private equity’s appetite for the business, according to the DealBook newsletter.
L Brands’ bankers at Goldman Sachs will begin formally pitching buyout firms about a potential takeover as soon as this week. L Brands said this month that it was weighing a sale or spinoff of Victoria’s Secret by August, as it focuses on its faster-growing Bath & Body Works division.
Victoria’s Secret had “substantially increased its valuation” and that L Brands was still evaluating all options for the business, Stuart Burgdoerfer, the chief financial officer of L Brands, said in a statement.
Victoria’s Secret has embarked on a turnaround effort since the Sycamore sale collapsed. A priority has been overhauling its brand, as younger customers shunned its overtly sexy products for alternatives focused on comfort and criticized its marketing as exclusionary.
Victoria’s Secret has overhauled its marketing, introducing a campaign last year that featured transgender, plus-size and older models. It is bringing back its much beloved swimwear brands to select stores.
The company has also changed up its management after former top executives were accused of misogyny and sexual harassment. New hires have included Martha Pease as chief marketing officer and Patti Cazzato as head of merchandising.
The lingerie market is in demand. A recent investment valued Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty brand at $1 billion, for example. For prospective buyers, Victoria’s Secret remains a well-known label with a sizable market share.
Still, potential acquirers may have one lingering concern: the continuing investigations and shareholder lawsuits about the ties between L Brands’ chairman, Les Wexner, and Jeffrey Epstein.
Sapna Maheshwari contributed reporting.
On the second day of the DealBook DC Policy Project, we will hear from more policymakers and business leaders about the challenges for the coronavirus vaccine rollout, the future of financial regulation and the outlook for bipartisanship in polarized times.
Here is the lineup (all times Eastern):
12:30 P.M. - 1 P.M.
Karen Lynch of CVS Health on the vaccine rollout
Karen Lynch took over CVS Health this month as the pharmacy chain takes center stage in efforts to fight the pandemic. It is working with the government to distribute the coronavirus vaccine in its stores, as well as in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. To aid in those efforts, the company hired 15,000 employees at the end of last year, staffing up to deal with what President Biden has called “gigantic” logistical hurdles to the vaccine rollout.
2:30 P.M. - 3 P.M.
Vlad Tenev of Robinhood and Jay Clayton, former S.E.C. chairman, on the markets
At the center of the recent meme-stock frenzy was the online brokerage firm Robinhood, which has attracted millions of users with commission-free trades but drew outrage among its users when it halted trading in GameStop and other stocks at the height of the mania.
Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s chief executive, is fresh from facing hours of hostile questioning at a congressional hearing last week about his company’s business practices. Joining him to discuss what regulators should now do — if anything — is Jay Clayton, the veteran Wall Street lawyer who led the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Trump administration. From the beginning of his tenure, Mr. Clayton said that his mission was protecting “the long-term interests of the Main Street investor.”
5:30 P.M. - 6 P.M.
Senator Mitt Romney on finding common ground
Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, crossed party lines to vote to convict President Donald J. Trump on articles of impeachment, twice. He is also drafting a bill with Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, that would raise the minimum wage while forbidding businesses to hire undocumented immigrants. This is typical of Mr. Romney’s approach, speaking to concerns on both sides of the aisle in an era of stark partisan divisions.
HSBC is deepening its focus on Asia as it looks to unload some of its troubled Western operations, the bank said on Tuesday.
Noel Quinn, the chief executive, said the bank would invest $6 billion to expand its wealth management and wholesale banking business in Hong Kong, China and Singapore over the next five years. He also said he was considering relocating some of the bank’s top executives to Hong Kong because it would be “important to be closer to growth opportunities.”
Underscoring the turn toward Asia, the bank, which is based in London, also said it was considering the sale of its U.S. retail banking network and was in talks with potential buyers for its French consumer banking unit.
HSBC, which derives more than half of its revenue from China, has come under increasing political pressure from China and Britain over its business operations in Hong Kong, the former British colony. Pro-Beijing lawmakers in the city have publicly pressured it to embrace the Communist Party’s firmer grip on Hong Kong. When some executives have pledged support to Beijing, British members of Parliament have hammered the bank.
The political focus on HSBC is unlikely to ease and any future public statement about plans to move top executives to Hong Kong could prompt further criticism from British lawmakers.
“We haven’t firmed up our plans yet,” Mr. Quinn said on a call with reporters. “But the majority of executives will remain in London.”
HSBC, which reported its profit before tax in 2020 fell by 34 percent to $8.8 billion compared with a year earlier, blamed the pandemic for its financial performance.
The company that makes the aluminum cans used by LaCroix, White Claw and other beverage giants is spinning off that business in a deal that values the new company at $8.5 billion, the company announced Tuesday.
The deal by the Ardagh Group, which is based in Luxembourg, would be in the form of a merger with a special-purpose acquisition vehicle, or SPAC, backed by an affiliate of the Gores Group, a private equity firm based in California.
It is a bet on the continued growth of the can business, as companies increasingly weigh the environmental consequences of their products. Nestlé announced the sale of its water business for $4.3 billion this month, in part a move to shift away from water packaged in plastic. Aluminum cans are far easier to recycle than plastic bottles.
Ardagh will retain a roughly 80 percent stake in the company after the deal. Investors are contributing a $600 million private placement, while Gores is putting in $525 million in cash. The new company, Ardagh Metal Packaging, will issue $2.65 billion of new debt. Those proceeds will go to Ardagh.
The deal, involving an already-public company carving off a unit with the backing of a SPAC, is the latest twist on a SPAC transaction. The Gores Group’s experience in SPACs was part of its appeal to Ardagh as a buyer, said Ardagh’s chair, Paul Coulson.
The Gores SPAC, named Gores Holdings V, is the seventh such deal the group has done. “You don’t really want to be going to a surgeon and have him perform his first surgery,” Mr. Coulson said.
Ardagh generates more half its roughly $7 billion in annual sales from making cans for beverage companies. This past year, sales by the unit grew 2 percent, fueled by beverage sales and environmental awareness, while earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortization grew 8 percent. Ardagh will keep its glass packaging business.
For beverage companies, cans have become an increasingly important tool for branding, providing colorful and sleek packaging.
When Ardagh acquired its canning operation in 2016 for $3 billion, it did most of its business with legacy brands like large soda and beer companies. It has since worked with younger and faster-growing seltzer-based brands like White Claw, LaCroix and Truly Hard Seltzer to help charge its growth. To prepare for further expected expansion in the United States, it bought a factory in Huron, Ohio.
Globally, the company is considering growth in Europe and Brazil, where beer sales remain strong as consumers are increasingly shifting from tap to cans.
Nearly a month into the second run of the Paycheck Protection Program, $126 billion in emergency aid has been distributed by banks, which make the government-backed loans, to nearly 1.7 million small businesses.
But a thicket of errors and technology glitches has slowed the relief effort and vexed borrowers and lenders alike, Stacy Cowley reports for The New York Times.
Some are run-of-the-mill challenges magnified by the immense demand for loans, which has overwhelmed customer service representatives. But many stem from new data checks added by the Small Business Administration to combat fraud and eliminate unqualified applicants.
Instead of approving applications from banks immediately, the S.B.A. has held them for a day or two to verify some of the information. That has caused — or exposed — a cascade of problems. Formatting applications in ways that will pass the agency’s automated vetting has been a challenge for some lenders, and many have had to revise their technology systems almost daily to keep up with adjustments to the agency’s system. False red flags, which can require time-consuming human intervention to fix, remain a persistent problem.
Numerated, a technology company that processes loans for more than 100 lenders, still has around 10 percent of its applications snarled in error codes, down from a peak of more than 25 percent, said Dan O’Malley, the company’s chief executive.
Nearly 5 percent of the 5.2 million loans made last year had “anomalies,” the agency revealed last month, ranging from minor mistakes like typos to major ones like ineligibility. Even tiny mistakes can spiral into bureaucratic disasters.
Adam Neumann, the flamboyant co-founder of WeWork, and SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate that rescued the co-working company in 2019, have in recent weeks made significant headway toward settling their drawn-out legal dispute, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. That battle has stalled SoftBank’s efforts to take WeWork public.
As part of its multibillion-dollar bailout of WeWork, SoftBank offered to pay $3 billion for stock owned by Mr. Neumann and other shareholders. Several months later, after the coronavirus pandemic had emptied WeWork’s locations, SoftBank withdrew the offer. Mr. Neumann then sued SoftBank for breach of contract.
SoftBank was already a big investor in WeWork when it withdrew plans for an initial public offering in 2019. Now, SoftBank has plans to combine WeWork with a publicly traded special-purpose acquisition company, a type of deal that has recently become a popular way of quickly bringing private companies public. The legal dispute between Mr. Neumann and SoftBank is a threat to such a deal because it leaves unresolved the question of how much control SoftBank has over WeWork.
The settlement talks, which were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, could still fall apart, the two people said. Under the terms being discussed, SoftBank would buy half the number of shares that it had originally agreed to, one of the people said. As a result, it would pay $1.5 billion, not $3 billion. Mr. Neumann would get nearly $500 million instead of almost $1 billion, but he would retain more of his shares.
Under Mr. Neumann, WeWork grew at a breakneck pace and was using up so much cash that it was close to bankruptcy before SoftBank stepped in. Under the management team SoftBank installed, WeWork has tried to cut costs by slowing its growth and negotiating deals with the landlords it rents space from.
"complete" - Google News
February 24, 2021 at 07:24AM
https://ift.tt/37Hv4hF
Powell Pledges to Maintain Economic Support - The New York Times
"complete" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2Fvz4Dj
https://ift.tt/2YsogAP
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Powell Pledges to Maintain Economic Support - The New York Times"
Post a Comment