Ali Wong won a Golden Globe for best actress, respectively, in a limited TV series for her performance in Netflix's "Beef" on Sunday evening.
Why it matters: Wong is the first actress of Asian descent to win in her category.
The Globes initially declared that Steven Yeun was the first Asian actor to win in his category but later said that was wrong and that Darren Criss had been the first, in 2019.
America's labor marketis coming off a boil, but one unexpected corner of the jobs market is white-hot: construction.
That's not what you would expect, based on historical experience, at a time of sky-high interest rates and weak demand for commercial real estate.
Why it matters: The construction hiring boom points to one way in which the economy so far has very different trends than in decades past.
Demographic shifts, big federal investment in manufacturing and a shortage of housing supply have kept the sector humming, helping stabilize overall economic activity.
A new speech from the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas offers hints of when the Fed might be done with "quantitative tightening."
Why it matters: The Fed has shrunk its securities holdings by $1.3 trillion and counting, essentially draining that amount from the financial system at a clip of $95 billion a month, in order to reverse its crisis-era quantitative easing. That has contributed to a bumpy couple of years for asset prices.
If the Fed soon decides to wind down those policies, it would reduce that stress.
What they're saying: "In my view, we should slow the pace of runoff" of the Fed's securities holdings as usage of the "overnight reverse repo facility" — which provides short-term liquidity to the marketplace — approaches a low level, said Dallas Fed president Lorie Logan at the American Economic Association.
Uptake of the reverse repo facility, as it is known, has declined rapidly from $2.4 trillion a year ago to $900 billion last week.
"Normalizing the balance sheet more slowly can actually help get to a more efficient balance sheet in the long run by smoothing redistribution and reducing the likelihood that we'd have to stop prematurely."
Of note: Logan's comments on the Fed's balance sheet strategy carry extra weight. She was formerly head of the New York Fed's markets desk — carrying out the quantitative easing program that is now being reversed.
What's next: The question now is when Logan and her colleagues on the Federal Open Market Committee will judge that this threshold has been met.
Bank of America economists now predict the central bank will begin tapering the QT program at their March meeting before ending it this summer. The Fed-watchers at Evercore ISI put it later, with the taper starting this summer and QT ending near year-end.
Fresh disclosures from 10 Bitcoin ETF hopefuls including BlackRock and Fidelity on Monday show the race to zero on fees is already well underway.
Why it matters: With some dozen fund issuers primed for the SEC to fire the starting gun this week, this early battle for dollars may be pivotal for which ETFs stand the test of time.
President Biden's alliessee an opening: Americans are now getting a real pay boost, even after inflation.
Why it matters: Though the president's broader Bidenomics messaging has fallen flat among some voters, his team sees opportunity in fresh data showing Americans' real earnings are beating inflation once more.
The number of employees in child care services crept up by a few thousand to 1.023 million in December — but employment in the sector still isn't back to where it was in February 2020, according to data out Friday.
Why it matters: It's somewhat surprising because there is a record share ofparents — mothers, more specifically — in the job market. And their kids need child care.
If you're looking exclusively at public companies to assess the health of U.S. businesses, you're missing a big piece of the puzzle.
Why it matters: By many measures, public companies came out of the pandemic financially stronger than they were going into it; that paints a rosy picture of what's happening in the economy.
