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Powell Pledges to Maintain Economic Support: Live Updates


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Powell Testifies About Pandemic Economic Recovery Efforts

On Tuesday, Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, testified to lawmakers on the economic rebound from the pandemic recession and the threat of future inflation.

We’ve taken forceful actions to provide support and stability to ensure that the recovery will be as strong as possible, and to limit lasting damage to households, businesses and communities. The path of the economy continues to depend significantly on the course of the virus and the measures undertaken to control its spread. A resurgence in Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths in recent months is causing great hardship for millions of Americans, and is weighing on economic activity and job creation. Following a sharp rebound in economic activity last summer, momentum slowed substantially with the weakness concentrated in the sectors most adversely affected by the resurgence of the virus. In recent weeks, the number of new cases and hospitalizations has been falling, and ongoing vaccinations offer hope for a return to more normal conditions. Household spending on services remains low, especially in sectors that typically require people to gather closely, including leisure and hospitality. In contrast, household spending on goods picked up encouragingly in January after moderating late last year. The housing sector has more than fully recovered from the downturn, while business investment and manufacturing production have also picked up. We’ve all been living in a world for a quarter of a century or more where all of the pressures were disinflationary. You know, pushing downward on inflation. We’ve averaged less than 2 percent inflation for more than the last 25 years. Inflation dynamics do change over time, but they don’t change on a dime. And so we don’t really think how — see how a burst of fiscal support or spending that’s not, that doesn’t last for many years would actually change those inflation dynamics. You ask about the U.S. economy and the world economy, I do think, and many forecasters agree, that once we get this pandemic under control, you know, we could be getting through this work much more quickly than we had feared, and that would be terrific. But it’s not done yet. The job is not done.

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On Tuesday, Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, testified to lawmakers on the economic rebound from the pandemic recession and the threat of future inflation.CreditCredit…Al Drago for The New York Times

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.”

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.

If confirmed, Wally Adeyemo will be a pivotal player in America’s economic diplomacy efforts.
Credit…Leah Millis/Reuters

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.

Cameron Barr, a managing editor overseeing news and features, will serve as acting executive editor of The Washington Post.
Credit…Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post

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.

L Brands has said that it is weighing a sale or spinoff of Victoria’s Secret by August.
Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

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 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.

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, 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’s headquarters in Hong Kong. The bank, which is based in London, derives more than half of its revenue from China.
Credit…Jerome Favre/EPA, via Shutterstock

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.

Wall Street faced another day of losses on Tuesday, following European stock markets lower. Technology stocks continued to lead the decline.

Stocks have dropped recently as a rise in U.S. inflation expectations and bond yields has raised concerns that the Federal Reserve will tighten its monetary policy sooner than expected, upending the easy-money policies that have helped bolster stocks during the pandemic.

The central bank’s policymakers have said they would look past a short-term rise inflation and keep supporting the economy, a message that Jerome H. Powell, the central bank chair, repeated in testimony before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday.

  • The S&P 500 fell 1 percent on Tuesday. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite fell more than 2 percent.

  • Tesla shares dropped about 6 percent, after falling about 9 percent on Monday as Bitcoin prices also tumbled. Over the weekend, Elon Musk tweeted that prices of Bitcoin and Ether, the two largest cryptocurrencies, “do seem high.” A few weeks ago, the electric carmaker said it bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, sending prices of both soaring.

  • The Stoxx 600 Europe fell 0.4 percent.

  • The unemployment rate in Britain rose to 5.1 percent for the three months ending in December, 1.4 percentage points higher than it was a year earlier, official statistics showed on Tuesday. Job losses have fallen particularly hard on young people: The number of employees on company payrolls has declined by 726,000 in the past year, nearly three-fifths of these workers were under 25.

Ardagh’s can-making business has grown by working with several seltzer-based beverage companies, like White Claw and Truly Hard Seltzer.
Credit…Richa Naidu/Reuters

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.

Shelly Ross found herself in a bureaucratic nightmare after requesting a second loan via PayPal for Tales of the Kitty, her San Francisco cat-sitting business.
Credit…Anastasiia Sapon for The New York Times

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.



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