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The path to the pause will roll out in marquee monthly data on the key topics of jobs and prices, but also weekly series tracking emerging concerns about the financial industry. Here's a guide to what's ahead:JOBS: Next release May 5The data calendar will let the Fed receive two monthly jobs reports, covering April and May, before its June 13-14 policy meeting. For the Personal Consumption Expenditures price index, the measure used to set the Fed's 2% inflation target, only the April report will be available. Reuters Graphics Reuters GraphicsReuters GraphicsFEDSPEAK: OngoingThe Fed's internal communications rules set a "blackout" period around each policy meeting. The curtain of silence around the May meeting lifts on Friday, May 5, and Fed officials can speak publicly about their views through Friday, June 2.

As a member of the Fed's Board of Governors a decade ago, Powell called certain possible debt default responses by the Fed "loathsome." Accepting defaulted securities as collateral for Fed loans, or swapping "good" federal debt already held by the Fed for impaired debt held by private investors, would be an extreme variation on the theme - yet one that may prove less "loathsome" than the alternative economic collapse some predict would follow a default. To a central bank, with no budget constraint and an elastic time horizon, it's just a matter of waiting out the politicians. Powell joined the Fed in 2012 from a think tank where he focused on debt and deficit issues. A debt default may pose another tough decision for a Fed chair who's motto could well be to never say never.

Top of mind: inflation and the impact of a credit tightening Fed officials feel is still evolving in the wake of both higher interest rates and a financial sector rattled by the recent failure of three U.S. banks. "The case of avoiding a recession is in my view more likely than that of having a recession," Powell said. The shift in the Fed's approach was reflected in U.S. interest rate futures, which showed broad expectations for no hikes at either of the central bank's next two policy meetings. U.S. stocks initially held onto gains after the release of the Fed statement, but fell later in the afternoon and closed lower. "With the word 'determining' in place of 'anticipating,' (it) is essentially telling the markets that the Fed is now on pause."

The unanimous decision lifted the Fed's benchmark overnight interest rate to the 5.00%-5.25% range, the tenth consecutive increase since March 2022. Because of that, Powell said it's too soon to say the rate hike cycle is over. Economic growth remains modest, but "recent developments are likely to result in tighter credit conditions for households and businesses and to weigh on economic activity, hiring and inflation," the Fed said. The shift was reflected in U.S. interest rate futures prices, which showed broad expectations for no hikes at either of the Fed's next two meetings. "With the word 'determining' in place of 'anticipating' is essentially telling the markets that the Fed is now on pause."

Investors anticipate the U.S. central bank will follow through with a quarter-percentage-point rate hike at the end of its latest two-day policy meeting. The policy statement is due to be released at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT), with Fed Chair Jerome Powell scheduled to speak to reporters half an hour later. But the new statement, and Powell's elaboration on it, will have to reconcile a set of risks that have grown more into conflict. Between that consensus and other problems that have intensified in the meantime, the Fed is likely to at least open the door to the prospect that this hike will be the last of the current tightening cycle, absent a future inflation surprise. Doing otherwise might hint that those projections had changed, a hawkish tilt towards more rate hikes that the Fed won't want to close off but also won't want to guarantee.

New data for March showed the ratio of job openings to the number of unemployed job seekers fell for the fourth consecutive month and hit the lowest level since October 2021. At roughly 1.64 to 1 the number remains far above the levels around 1.2 seen before the pandemic. In recent months the relationship between job openings and unemployment has kept that prospect alive. The number of estimated job openings has fallen from a peak of 12 million in March of 2022 to 9.59 million in March this year. The openings rate, expressed as a percentage of filled and available positions, has fallen from a high of 7.4 last spring to 5.8 in March.

The Fed's meeting will be followed with expected rate increases by the European Central Bank on Thursday and the Bank of England next week. But the U.S. central bank is furthest along in the process, and may signal that this week's rate increase is the last, at least for now. Inflation has been edging down, gradually, with the main price index the Fed watches still more than double the central bank's 2% target. The anticipated quarter-percentage-point increase on Wednesday will put the target federal funds rate at roughly the same spot, between 5% and 5.25%. With this rate increase, Fed officials will hit a level that will be about 1 percentage point above the rate they consider to have a neutral impact on economic activity.

Government officials, worried about a constrained labor force in a state where population growth has stalled, have taken a cover-the-waterfront approach. After raising starting wages from $17 an hour to around $24 and overhauling hiring strategies, Drees still has 200 open jobs at this and two nearby facilities, where he is hoping to add to current staffing of 1,200. That reshuffling may be one reason the Fed is finding it harder than expected to slow a job market struggling to match workers into open positions. Minnesota has had a particularly large imbalance: The 12-month moving average of available positions last year reached 2.75 for every unemployed person. "Nowadays you look online and there are just hundreds of day-shift job positions," he said.

FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg has said the report, to be released at 2:00 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT) on Monday, will address options on deposit insurance coverage levels, excess deposit insurance, implications of risk-based pricing and the adequacy of the regulator's deposit insurance fund, which will take an estimated $20 billion hit from the failure of SVB and a smaller knock of about $2.5 billion from Signature Bank. The FDIC's deposit insurance fund helps to fulfill the agency's guarantee of bank deposits up to $250,000 per person. In the event an insured bank fails, the FDIC uses the deposit insurance fund to pay back customers who maintained accounts under the limit. U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told Republican lawmakers in March that Congress should re-evaluate limits on the size of federally insured bank deposits. Some analysts have floated a more targeted change: raising the insurance cap for small business accounts used to manage payroll and other transactions.

That surge is now driving debate inside the U.S. Federal Reserve about how much weight to give ongoing wage increases as policymakers assess the path of inflation. Reuters GraphicsThe Fed will also receive updated data on the personal consumption expenditures price index, the measure it uses to set its 2% price target. Reuters Graphics“The one thing that I think we’re spending too much time looking at is wage growth as an indicator of prices,” Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee told CNBC this month, citing recent research by Chicago Fed staff. He said he views rising wages as the result of that still- strong demand, something that should ease alongside price pressures once the money is gone. Reporting by Howard Schneider; Editing by Dan Burns and Andrea RicciOur Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Staffing shortages strained supervisory resources, particularly at the FDIC's New York regional office, in the years leading up to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in March, both regulators said. Both the Fed and FDIC highlighted that their oversight ranks grew leaner even as the institutions they were tasked with reviewing grew larger and more complex. At the Fed, supervisory hours at SVB declined at the same time the Santa Clara, California-based bank was experiencing rapid growth starting in 2017. While the Fed had 15 full-time employees staffed on the supervisory team for SVB, the bank received fewer supervisory resources through 2021 compared to similar banks. "Examination resource shortages, particularly in the New York region, are a mission-critical risk that will require a sustained whole-of-agency response," the FDIC said.

So how did India’s population get so big, and how long will it last? The rise in population despite a drop in the fertility rate can be explained by “demographic momentum.”“When the fertility rate drops, the population continues to grow for several decades. So, even with a replacement or sub-replacement fertility rate, India’s population will continue to grow slowly because of the considerable number of women entering their reproductive years. India’s population growth is slowing downIndia may have overtaken China in total population, but UN data also shows that its growth rate has slowed. Uttar Pradesh, for instance, is home to 17% of India’s population but has only 9% of its industrial jobs.

Signature Bank's failure took only marginally longer. "The number 36 has just been, you know, branded in my brain," Atlanta Fed President Raphael Bostic told Reuters earlier this month. "I think that any time you have a bank failure like this, bank management clearly failed, supervisors failed and our regulatory system failed," Barr told U.S. lawmakers in a hearing in March. "It's how do we allow a bank whose failure threatened the financial system to persist without being subject to more aggressive intervention?" "One thing for certain ... this was a very significant supervisory failure," Tarullo said at the Peterson Institute for International Economics event on Wednesday.

[1/2] Representations of cryptocurrencies and Voyager Digital logo are seen in this illustration taken, July 7, 2022. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/IllustrationsApril 25 (Reuters) - Binance.US has called off its $1.3 billion deal to buy assets of bankrupt crypto lender Voyager Digital, citing a "hostile and uncertain regulatory climate." "The hostile and uncertain regulatory climate in the United States has introduced an unpredictable operating environment impacting the entire American business community," a spokesperson for Binance.US said in a statement. "We are focused on creating a safe platform where our customers can participate in the digital asset economy." The company had initially agreed to sell its assets to major digital asset exchange FTX, but that deal fell apart when FTX imploded in November.

Indeed, the annual Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics report appears to show the pandemic was a trend-hastening event rather than a trend disrupter. A larger share of jobs reshuffled across occupations from 2016 to 2019 than was the case between 2019 and 2022, as the economy emerged from the pandemic. The highest rates of increased wages occurred in the lowest-paying jobs after the pandemic struck. The smallest median pay increases in that span came for management occupations, where the median wage rose by just 2.6% versus 8.6% in the three years before the pandemic. Some of the big occupation gainers reflect changes driven by the pandemic and other issues, such as the growth of the non-fossil fuel energy sector.

☆ NASA detects first seismic waves within Mars' core
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-24 | by ( Ashley Strickland | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

During these events, InSight detected for the first time seismic waves traveling through the Martian core. “More than a hundred years later, we’re applying our knowledge of seismic waves to Mars. With InSight, we’re finally discovering what’s at the center of Mars and what makes Mars so similar yet distinct from Earth.”The NASA InSight Mars lander studied the interior of Mars for four years. Planetary core offers clues on evolutionEarth has a liquid outer core and a solid inner core, but the Martian core appears to be made entirely from liquid. “We’ve made the very first observations of seismic waves travelling through the core of Mars.

☆ Inside the Wild World of Celebrity Keynote Speakers: Drugs, Alcohol
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-23 | by ( David Kushner | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +31 min

"I never saw myself as a speaker, let alone a motivational speaker," Leonard tells me while his assistant irons his jeans. 'When I ramble," Hunter told me, "hit me in the leg!" Every plane had been grounded, including the one stuck on the tarmac with an increasingly inebriated Hunter Thompson trapped inside. But by far the most all-consuming task was booking gigs for Hunter Thompson. Just before a debate with G. Gordon Liddy at Brown University, Hunter demanded that Betsy Berg, whom I now worked alongside at GTN, score him some crystal meth.

☆ The worst bird flu outbreak in US history is 'wiping out everything in numbers we've never seen before.' Here's what you need to know.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-23 | by ( Bethany Dawson | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

A new strain of bird flu, also known as avian influenza, is spreading across the US. Bill Powers with his flock of white turkeys, kept under shelter to prevent exposure to bird flu, on November 14, 2022 in Townsend, Delaware. And we now have the highest amount of poultry loss to avian influenza, so this is a worst-case scenario," she added. Last week the US Government started testing four new bird flu vaccines to try and protect the poultry from this mass outbreak, per Reuters. Markets are in troubleFarmers and the markets are being hit hard by the ravages of avian flu.

☆ Pentagon leak spotlights surprising interplay between gaming and military secrets
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-22 | by ( Sean Lyngaas | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +5 min

CNN —The recent leak of classified US documents on social media platform Discord seemingly caught many at the Pentagon by surprise. The recent leaks on Discord exposed a shortcoming in how the US government alerts platforms that they are hosting sensitive or classified information, according to Discord’s top lawyer. The episodes point to vexing challenges for social media platforms like Discord – where 21-year Air National Guardsman Jack Teixeira allegedly began posting classified information in December – and the US military, which has used Discord for recruiting. The Pentagon is trying to tap into online youth culture without it backfiring spectacularly, as it allegedly did with Teixeira. Classified or sensitive documents are also a unique problem for content moderators on social media sites.

At the same time, hiring remained strong through March, and wages continue growing faster than Fed officials feel is sustainable. The ECI is only released quarterly and includes both worker pay and benefits like healthcare, giving what Fed officials regard as a clearer sense of employment-related cost trends. For Fed officials, it could influence their view of whether the economy and inflation are likely to slow more - perhaps much more - quickly than anticipated. Reuters GraphicsEconomists expect the upcoming survey will show conditions tightening further still, this time alongside data showing credit from banks in decline. "Banks may not be done tightening lending standards, which will restrict access to credit, hurt business investment, reduce business formation, and weigh on job growth and consumer spending."

Investors may see rate cuts in the Fed's near future, part of a recession-breeds-accommodation view of the world, but "the labor market just seems very, very strong. The bulk of Fed policymakers as of March felt one more rate increase, which would raise the benchmark overnight interest rate to a range between 5.00% and 5.25%, was all that would be needed. Some policymakers and analysts worry it is those final steps that could push the economy into a recession. Reuters Graphics Reuters GraphicsLIMIT GUIDANCEGiven how inflation and the economy are behaving, Bullard said, the fewer promises made the better. Recession forecasts "are coming from models that put too much weight on the idea that interest rates went up quickly," Bullard said.

Her comments were echoed by others who feel the narrative shared by three top central banks of relatively cost-free disinflation rests on shaky ground. Among the Fed, ECB and BoE, only the British central bank projects a recession will be needed to slow inflation - only a mild one at that. U.S. central bank officials have split the difference, projecting a modest one-percentage-point rise in the unemployment rate this year from its near-historic low of 3.5%, and slow, but continued, economic growth. Martins Kazaks, Latvia's central bank chief, said the risk of a recession was still "non-trivial," with a host of factors still putting pressure on prices. For the Fed, different policymakers offer different ideas about the forces that will lower inflation as high interest rates slowly cool demand.

April 17 (Reuters) - The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday charged cryptocurrency exchange Bittrex Inc and its former CEO William Shihara with operating an unregistered national securities exchange, broker and clearing agency. The SEC also charged Bittrex's foreign affiliate, Bittrex Global GmbH, for failing to register as a national securities exchange in connection with its operation of a single shared order book along with Bittrex. Shihara and a representative for Bittrex did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Seattle-based Bittrex had previously announced it would shutter its U.S. operations effective April 30 due to "continued regulatory uncertainty." Gensler has previously said that companies that help facilitate transactions in the cryptocurrency market should register with the SEC like other market intermediaries.

WASHINGTON, April 14 (Reuters) - The Federal Reserve's Board of Governors on Friday said it has approved UBS Group AG's acquisition of the U.S. subsidiaries of Credit Suisse, clearing another major hurdle for the completion of the Swiss-brokered rescue deal. UBS has committed to give the U.S. central bank an implementation plan for combining its U.S. business and operations with those of Credit Suisse within three months of consummating the deal, the Fed's Board said in a statement. UBS agreed to buy Credit Suisse for 3 billion Swiss francs ($3.3 billion), a fraction of its earlier market value. UBS has said it expects the deal to create a business with more than $5 trillion in total invested assets. Under the takeover deal, holders of Credit Suisse AT1 bonds will get nothing, while shareholders, who usually rank below bondholders in compensation terms, will receive $3.23 billion.

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