Company executives are starting to believe the “higher for longer” story about interest rates, Axios' Kate Marino writes.

• The evidence: They’re scrambling to tap the debt market now before borrowing costs go up even more. Call it a capitulation to the new reality.

Why it matters: It’s a behavior shift from last year when rising rates had many companies sitting on the capital markets' sidelines.

What’s happening: The investment grade bond market, where companies with higher credit ratings borrow, saw a record February for new bond placements — despite the fact that yields were soaring.

• The month's final deal tally of $147 billion was fairly surprising, considering estimates heading into it had been in the $90-to-$100 billion range, Blair Shwedo, head of investment grade trading at U.S. Bank, tells Axios.
• Executives wanted to "get a lot of their issuance out of the way, for fear that they could run into higher rates if they were to delay issuance," he adds. "I think there may be some nerves about whether corporate yields go back out to 6%."
• (A key index measuring the market went from yielding 4.9% on Feb. 2 to 5.56% at the end of the month.)

The big picture: The recent string of hot economic data, which started with the Feb. 3 jobs report, jolted investors and market watchers out of the theory that a pause in Fed tightening was close at hand.

Flashback: Bond issuance slowed drastically last year.

• That's because rate volatility made it difficult for bankers to place deals with investors — and companies balked at yields that were vastly higher than anything they'd seen over the last decade.

The bottom line: Companies are now coming around to the idea that we may not be returning to the low-rate world of the 2010s any time soon.

For those who’ve been hoping rates would eventually return to before-times levels once inflation is under control, it’s helpful to decide just what — or when — the before-times were, Kate writes.

The big picture: The 10-year Treasury, the main benchmark for corporate borrowing, sat below 3% for only two periods in modern U.S. financial history — the post-Great Depression and post-financial crisis eras. The latter is the one that started to feel normal for many who work in the markets now.

• “The level of rates that we had from 2012 to 2022, we've never seen that before except after the Great Depression and World War II,” says Robert Tipp, chief investment strategist at PGIM Fixed Income.

The intrigue: Tipp says all that recent data pointing to the strength of the economy and labor market amid the rapid rate hikes means the neutral interest rate may very well have moved up.

The bottom line: If the 10-year settles into a range that’s more in line with historical norms than the post-financial crisis decade, it could reshape borrowing strategies across corporate America, which got pretty accustomed to ultra-cheap money.

💰 Companies must now provide more details on CEO pay. (WSJ)

🛑 Another Norfolk Southern train derails in Ohio. (Axios)

🇨🇳 China targets 2023 GDP growth of 5%. (CNBC)

Some companies are going all out to entice workers back to the office, and, as new data on New York City shows, a super-fancy office might help do the trick, Emily writes.

Driving the news: Visits to Class A+ buildings in Manhattan, i.e. the swankiest places to work, far outpaced visits to Class B buildings, or the less flashy locales, according to an innovative new dataset from the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY).

Zoom out: This so-called flight to quality had been underway before the pandemic, said Keith DeCoster, director of market data and policy for REBNY. But the transition to remote work sped up the trend.

• Being at a prime location with great amenities "is going to give you at least a leg up in getting folks back to the office," he said.

Case in point: Occupants of SL Green's One Madison, a massive renovated office building in midtown south, for example, will have access to an in-house catering service attached to celebrity chef Daniel Boulud — among a host of other amenities.

Details: REBNY's new report looks at location analytics — from randomized Placer.ai cellphone data — to assess how many visits were made to 250 office buildings across midtown, midtown south and downtown Manhattan in 2019, 2021 and 2022.

• It found a big difference between visits to Class A+ buildings and the lower grades. And overall, average building visitation rates surpassed 60% of pre-pandemic baselines in 2022, compared to 48% in 2021.

Worth noting: A 10% increase in office occupancy could represent a potential return of 100,000-200,000 workers to the city’s office districts — each spending about $6,000 a year on everything from clothes to chopped salads, according to data cited by REBNY.

This week might be a big one for the stock market, which continues to hang onto gains for the year despite an ugly February, Matt writes.

Tomorrow, Fed chair Jerome Powell will head to Capitol Hill to deliver his semiannual monetary policy report before the Senate Banking Committee at 10am. (He'll reprise the performance in front of the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday.)

• The Fed chief will almost certainly keep saying that the central bank has more interest rate hikes to deliver before inflation conclusively comes under control.
• Recent reports have shown inflation is far from vanquished, and investors have shifted toward the view that the Fed is going to keep lifting interest rates at a rapid clip, weighing on stocks.

On Friday morning the February employment report from the Labor Department will shed fresh light on the surprisingly robust U.S. jobs market.

• After January's report, which showed 517,000 new jobs, economists expect a more muted 200,000 jobs will have been created in February, with unemployment standing pat at 3.4%. But hey, economists only expected 187,000 in January...

The bottom line: If the job market continues to show gangbusters growth, the markets could get interesting fast, as investors and traders try to balance good economic news against expectations that the Fed will have to deliver even sharper rate hikes, for a long time to come.