And now to the business headlines,
you need to know today is Federal Chair Jerome Powell's second day
of congressional testimony and today's testimony
before the Senate banking committee,
Powell reiterated that the board is considering
further interest rate hikes later this year.
The committee broadly feels that
while monetary policy has gotten to an appropriately restrictive level,
um if the economy performs about as expected,
that it will be appropriate to raise hikes
again this year and perhaps twice,
a strong majority of the committee feels that it will be appropriate again,
assuming that the economy performs as expected two
times before the end of this year.
Ah not again, say it ain't.
So while Powell also spoke about the need to learn from recent banking failures,
we are committed and I am personally committed to learning the right lessons
from what happened in uh Silicon Valley Bank and the other two failures
and implementing vigorously implementing appropriately.
I I think there's a clear need to strengthen
both supervision and regulation of banks of that size.
What we saw was an unexpected bank failure overnight
led to contagion and and threatened the broader
banking system and that's not supposed to happen.
And we're going,
we're going to take appropriate measures to reduce the chances of something like
today's testimony comes after Powell spoke before
the House Financial Services Committee yesterday.