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Employers Cut Jobs in Unexpectedly Weak Report – The New York Times
Austan Goolsbee, the Chicago Fed president, also added in his interview that there were enough “question marks” around February’s data related to bad weather and strikes that could have had an impact on monthly jobs growth. He also stressed that the unemployment rate, at 4.4 percent, was basically unchanged from the same time last year. But any indication that the unemployment rate was continuing to rise would be a problem, he noted. “If you start to see that number rising the way it does traditionally at the beginning of recession, that would be a bad sign,” he said. Goolsbee added: “If the job market is getting worse and inflation is getting worse at the same time, it’s not obvious to me what the immediate response should be.”
The Oil Bottleneck Threatening the Global Economy – WSJ
President Trump’s promise to protect the Strait of Hormuz with naval escorts and provide government-backed marine insurance underscores the urgent need to restore flows of energy from the Middle East before soaring prices rip through the world economy.
As of Wednesday, day five of the war on Iran, several thousand ships were stuck inside and outside the Persian Gulf, trapping roughly a fifth of the oil and liquefied natural gas the world consumes each day. The blockage is cascading through the region’s industry as storage tanks fill up with oil that can’t set sail, forcing producers to slash output.
The problem is most acute in Iraq, the world’s fifth-biggest producer. Output has more than halved, oil officials in the country said, with cutbacks at the southern Rumaila and West Qurna 2 fields.