Tag: United States

Oil prices surge above $102 as Saudi Arabia and UAE weigh joining Iran war
Global oil prices passed $102 a barrel on Tuesday morning after reports that U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf are inching toward joining the war against Iran.
Brent crude futures for May delivery were rising 2.8% to trade at $102.74 a barrel as of 8:40 a.m. Eastern time, while West Texas Intermediate contracts for May delivery were up 3.9%, to $91.56 a barrel.
Both oil benchmarks on Monday fell sharply after President Donald Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that the U.S. would be halting strikes on Iran’s power plants for five days “subject to the success of the ongoing meetings and discussions.” Both the Brent and WTI on Monday settled at their lowest levels since March 11, according to FactSet data.
Market optimism has faded since Iran refuted Trump’s claims that the U.S. has had “very good and productive” talks with Tehran, with Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf calling the announcement “fake news” used to “manipulate” markets.
“Obviously much now depends on the progress of any talks, and whether the more optimistic rhetoric is followed up by concrete action,” Jim Reid, head of global macro research at Deutsche Bank, wrote in a note on Tuesday, adding that “some nervousness” had crept back into markets, sending Brent crude back past the $100 threshold.
Investors’ concerns regarding the future of the war in Iran were also exacerbated by a Wall Street Journal report on Monday evening that U.S. allies in the Persian Gulf are edging closer to joining the conflict. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are mulling helping efforts as their economies continue to be disrupted by the strikes and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
The report notes that neither has deployed its military openly yet, but pressure is increasing as Tehran continues to exert control across the region, with energy infrastructure targeted.
“Investors are still unclear about what happens next. The fog of war is thick,” said David Morrison, senior market analyst at Trade Nation. “The Strait of Hormuz remains closed to just about everything, and that should continue to support energy prices. This in turn plays into fears of higher inflation, adding to concerns that were building even before hostilities began.”
U.S. stock futures were edging lower after all three major benchmarks on Monday booked their biggest daily percentage gains since early February. The Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were off 0.5%, while the S&P 500 futures were falling 0.4% and the Nasdaq 100 futures were dropping 0.6%, according to FactSet data.
March 24, 2026
Two pilots killed after jet collides with fire truck at New York’s LaGuardia airport
NEW YORK — An Air Canada jet carrying more than 70 passengers collided with a fire truck while landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport late Sunday, killing the pilot and copilot and injuring several others, officials said.
The impact severed the cockpit, and hurled a flight attendant — still secured to her seat — far from the crash site, her daughter told a Canadian TV station. The flight attendant survived.
The fire truck was crossing the tarmac just before midnight after being given permission to check on another plane that had aborted its takeoff. Before the collision, an air traffic controller can be heard on airport communications frantically telling the fire truck to stop.

Officials investigate the site, Monday, March 23, 2026, where an Air Canada jet came to rest after colliding with a Port Authority firetruck at LaGuardia Airport, shortly after landing Sunday night in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
Roughly 20 minutes later, the controller appears to blame himself. “We were dealing with an emergency earlier,” the controller said. “I messed up.”
About 40 passengers and crew members on the regional jet from Montreal, and two people from the fire truck, were taken to hospitals, some with serious injuries. Most were released by Monday morning, authorities said.
A key for investigators will be examining coordination of the airport’s air traffic and ground traffic at the time of the crash, said Mary Schiavo, a former Department of Transportation Inspector General. “This has been happening for years and sadly some of the most horrific air crashes in history happen on the ground at the airport.”
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said LaGuardia is “well-staffed” but faces a shortage of controllers. He said there are 33 certified controllers but the goal is to have 37. More than one controller was on duty at the time of the accident, he said.

“I can’t give specifics on what went wrong,” Duffy said, deferring to the National Transportation Safety Board, which is leading the investigation. Canada also sent a team of investigators.
The runway where the crash happened is likely to be closed for “days” during the investigation, NTSB chair Jennifer Homendy said at a Monday evening news conference. She said there was a “tremendous amount of debris” that investigators have to sift through.
Homendy said authorities recovered the plane’s cockpit and flight data recorders and drove them to the agency’s lab in Washington for analysis. Officials had to cut a hole in the aircraft’s roof to get to the recorders, because its tail was on the ground, she said, adding that the cockpit voice recorder was not damaged.
Homendy said it was too early in the investigation to answer many questions about the accident, and more information was expected to be released Tuesday.
The crash shut down LaGuardia — the New York region’s third busiest hub — during what was already a messy time at U.S. airports because of a partial government shutdown.
Flights resumed Monday afternoon on one runway and with lengthy delays. The shutdown caused some disruptions at other airports, too, especially for Delta, which has a major presence at LaGuardia.

An Air Canada Jet sits on the runway at LaGuardia Airport, Monday, March 23, 2026, after colliding with a Port Authority aircraft rescue and firefighting vehicle in New York. (AP Photo/Ryan Murphy)
Passenger says they helped each other escape the plane
Airport security camera video shows a convoy of emergency vehicles traveling across the tarmac with their lights flashing in the moments before the plane lands, according to a recording of the video shared online.
While most of the vehicles appear to stop at the edge of the runway, the lead vehicle keeps going, directly into the path of the aircraft.
A person familiar with the investigation confirmed the authenticity of the video. The person requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss details of an ongoing investigation.
The collision left cables and debris dangling from the mangled cockpit. Images show the fire truck flipped onto its side, with most of the damage to its back half.
Flight attendant Solange Tremblay suffered multiple fractures to one leg and will need surgery after being thrown from the plane, daughter Sarah Lépine told Canadian news station TVA Nouvelles.
Her survival is “a total miracle,” Lépine said. “I’m still trying to understand how all this happened, but she definitely has a guardian angel watching over her.”
Passenger Rebecca Liquori said the plane hit turbulence while descending, and she then felt it brake hard and heard a loud boom.
“Everybody just jolted out of their seats. People hit their heads. People were bleeding,” Liquori told News12 Long Island, a station where she once worked.
Liquori said passengers helped each other slide down a wing.
“I’m just happy to be alive,” said Liquori, who had gone to Montreal for a cousin’s baby shower. “I would have never pictured a one-hour flight that I’ve done countless times … ending like this.”
Passenger Clément Lelièvre credited the pilots’ “incredible reflexes” with saving his life and others’. The pilots braked extremely hard just as the plane touched down, he said.

An Air Canada jet and Port Authority fire truck sit on the runway at LaGuardia Airport, Monday, March 23, 2026, after colliding with each other after the jet landed Sunday night in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
US and Canada sending investigators to New York
The pilot and copilot who died were both based out of Canada, said Kathryn Garcia, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airport.
Jeannette Gagnier, the great aunt of one of the pilots, identified him as Antoine Forest. Forest looked at her as a grandmother figure and always wanted to be a pilot, she said. His LinkedIn page showed he had worked for two airlines the past five years.
President Donald Trump called it a “terrible” situation. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said in a statement the accident was “deeply saddening.”
The Port Authority identified the two people in the fire truck as Sgt. Michael Orsillo and Officer Adrian Baez. They suffered injuries not believed to be life-threatening, Garcia said. One was expected to be released Monday while the other will stay in the hospital for observation, she said.
The fire truck was traveling across the runway to respond to a United Airlines flight, whose pilot had reported “an issue with odor,” said Garcia.
It was the first fatal crash at LaGuardia in 34 years, Garcia said.
There were 72 passengers and four crew members aboard the Jazz Aviation flight operating on behalf of Air Canada, according to the airline. The flight originated at Montreal-Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport.
Hours after the crash, the plane remained on the runway with its crumpled nose tilted upward.

An Air Canada jet and Port Authority fire truck sit on the runway at LaGuardia Airport, Monday, March 23, 2026, after colliding with each other after the jet landed Sunday night in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)
LaGuardia has a system to spot runway encounters
The air traffic controller tried to warn the fire truck.
“Stop, stop, stop, Truck 1. Stop, stop, stop,” the transmission says. “Stop, Truck 1.” The controller can then be heard frantically diverting an incoming aircraft from landing.
Air traffic controllers are not impacted by the partial government shutdown that has caused long delays at airport security checkpoints in recent days. They have been affected by past shutdowns.
The FAA has been chronically short on air traffic controllers for years. Former FAA air traffic control chief Mike McCormick said LaGuardia has not had perennial staffing problems, but the tower would have been lightly staffed during the overnight shift at the time of the crash.

Graphic: Will Jarrett
LaGuardia is one of 35 major U.S. airports with an advanced surface surveillance system designed to help keep track of planes and vehicles crossing the airport.
An alarm heard in the background of the air traffic control audio was likely from the system and would have alerted the tower to the potential collision, McCormick said.
“It’s an aid in a situation like this,” he said, but the system doesn’t know if someone has given clearance for a vehicle to cross a runway.
FAA statistics show there were 1,636 runway incursions last year.
March 23, 2026
March 27 could be make-or-break day for U.S. travelers amid Government shutdown
The ongoing partial government shutdown has sparked long wait times at many airports around the country — and it could get much worse in a week, as Transportation Security Administration workers look set to miss another paycheck on March 27.
At the same time, the threat of even more delays at airport security checkpoints just might push Democratic and Republican lawmakers into making a funding deal that ends the shutdown, which began Feb. 14 and is hitting only the Department of Homeland Security. The TSA is a part of that agency.
U.S. lawmakers have March 27 circled on their calendars for another reason as well: It’s the last date that both chambers of Congress are slated to be in session in Washington before starting a two-week break.
It’s possible top lawmakers won’t let Congress leave town without a funding deal. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, suggested exactly that on Thursday. “I can’t see us taking a break here in the next week if DHS isn’t funded,” Thune told reporters.
The problems with airport security come as spring-break season has been hitting or is nearing for universities and school systems across the country, and as many families plan to travel for Easter or Passover.
Key Democratic and Republican senators huddled with DHS border czar Tom Homan on Thursday, but the meeting didn’t produce a deal. Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state told reporters that she was glad that the White House took part in the meeting, but said her party and the GOP were still “a long ways apart.”
Prediction markets aren’t forecasting that the DHS shutdown will end around March 27. Polymarket recently was giving a 72% chance that it would be over after March 31. (Polymarket has a business partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of MarketWatch.)
Transportation chief sees airports closing
TSA agents who run security checkpoints at airports have been skipping work because they’re missing out on paychecks while still being required to report for duty. That has led to longer-than-expected security lines at a number of busy airports, such as those in Atlanta and Houston, albeit not at all airports.
TSA workers got a partial paycheck on their Feb. 27 payday, then they missed their first full paycheck on March 13. They could miss another full paycheck on March 27.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy warned in a CNBC interview on Thursday that the next missed paycheck could lead to many more TSA agents not coming to work.
“They’re about to miss another payment. This is going to look like child’s play, what’s happening right now,” Duffy said. “You’re going to see small airports, I believe, shut down. You’re going to see extensive lines.”
About 10% of TSA employees have called out of work, Duffy said Thursday, which is five times the normal callout rate. “It’s getting worse day by day,” he said, adding that TSA agents’ starting salaries are about $45,000 to $55,000 a year.
As a result of staffing shortages, passengers have faced TSA wait times stretching for nearly three hours at certain airports. At points during the shutdown, New Orleans’ main airport encouraged travelers to get to the airport three hours before their flight, while passengers in Houston were advised to arrive as many as five hours early.
On Friday morning, LaGuardia Airport in New York urged travelers to get to the airport early due to long security wait times. The airport has “deployed additional customer-care staff into terminals to help manage queues, assist passengers and keep people moving as efficiently as possible,” the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates New York City-area airports, told MarketWatch.
National deployment officers from the TSA were deployed to Houston’s Hobby Airport on March 10, and they continue to assist with staffing shortages as of Friday afternoon, an airport spokesperson confirmed.
The TSA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The U.S. Travel Association and many industry partners, including airlines and hotel operators, sent a letter to the top four U.S. lawmakers on Thursday calling for pay for TSA agents. “Forcing these dedicated officers to work without pay — yet again— is not only unfair, it’s reckless. The security of travelers and the country is at stake,” the letter said.
What caused this partial shutdown
The latest partial government shutdown has hit because Democrats and Republicans in Washington remain at odds over potential reforms to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement practices. Only the Department of Homeland Security is getting left high and dry, but that’s still significant given its arms include the TSA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the U.S. Coast Guard.
A closure that ran from Jan. 31 through Feb. 3 ended thanks to a bipartisan spending package that provided funding only through Feb. 13 for DHS — which manages Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE — while negotiations continued over the reforms.
ICE and Customs and Border Protection are expected to weather the partial shutdown without much trouble. That’s because they scored big increases in funding in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the giant Republican tax and spending law.
Heightened calls for reforms to ICE and CBP practices come after the fatal shootings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis by federal agents in January.
Investors usually don’t have to worry that much about partial government shutdowns, as U.S. stocks typically aren’t hurt by them. Equities have been dropping this month, but that’s largely been blamed on soaring oil prices due to the conflict with Iran. The S&P 500 ended up gaining 2.4% and hitting new records during last fall’s record-breaking government shutdown, which lasted 43 days.
March 22, 2026
California GOP candidate seizes over 650,000 ballots, sparking election probe controversy
Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco, a leading Republican candidate for governor, has seized more than 650,000 ballots from last November’s election to determine, he says, whether they were fraudulently counted.
“This investigation is simple: Physically count the ballots and compare that result with the total votes recorded,” Bianco said at a news conference Friday.
The unusual probe drew a sharp rebuke from California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who said in a statement that it is “unprecedented in both scope and scale” and appears “not to be based on facts or evidence.”
Critics, meanwhile, said Bianco’s ballot seizure is a threat to democracy and another attempt by Republican election deniers to disenfranchise voters.
“There is no indication, anywhere in the United States, of widespread voter fraud,” Bonta said. “Counts, recounts, hand counts, audits, and court cases all support this.”
According to Bonta’s office, Bianco’s department on Feb. 26 seized about 1,000 boxes of ballot materials in Riverside County related to the November election for Proposition 50, which temporarily redrew the state’s congressional districts to favor Democrats in response to partisan redistricting in Republican states, including Texas.
In a March 4 letter to Bianco, Bonta said the seizure of the ballots “sets a dangerous precedent and will only sow distrust in our elections.” He threatened to seek legal recourse if Bianco does not halt his investigation.
Bonta also said he has “serious concerns” about whether Bianco had probable cause to obtain two warrants for the election materials and questioned whether Bianco had concealed important information from the magistrate judge who approved the warrants.
Bianco said his investigators are looking into allegations by a local citizens group that “did their own audit” and found that the county’s tally was falsely inflated by more than 45,000 votes — a claim that local election officials have rejected. He said that it’s his constitutional duty to investigate a potential crime and that he is not trying to change the election results.
Proposition 50 passed in Riverside County with 56% of the vote — a margin of more than 82,000 ballots. Statewide, it passed with about 64% of the vote and a margin of more than 3.3 million ballots.
Bianco’s investigation comes as President Trump, who remains fixated on his 2020 election loss, continues to amplify election conspiracy theories and has repeatedly called for the federal government to “nationalize” state-run elections to counter what he says is widespread fraud.
Bonta and California Secretary of State Shirley Weber, both Democrats, have vowed to fight federal interference that could affect voting in California, including efforts to seize election records, as the FBI recently did in Georgia.
Bianco is an outspoken Trump supporter who said in an endorsement video in 2024 that, after 30 years of putting criminals in jail, he figured it was “time to put a felon in the White House — Trump 2024, baby” — referencing Trump’s conviction by a New York jury for falsifying business records while paying hush money to a porn actor.
His investigation, which includes all the ballots cast in Riverside County in November, raises questions about how he would handle the election denialism movement if elected governor.
A poll released last week by UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and co-sponsored by The Times showed Bianco and conservative commentator Steve Hilton leading the crowded field of gubernatorial candidates by slim margins, with the Democratic vote split among multiple candidates in a left-leaning state.
Kim Nalder, a political science professor and director of the Project for an Informed Electorate at Sacramento State, said that Bianco’s ballot seizure is “the sort of thing that should not happen in a healthy democracy.”
The system has plenty of safeguards, she noted, including county registrars and the California Fair Political Practices Commission.
“It’s terrifying, honestly, that the jurisdiction over ballots and election processes and recounts should even be in question and that a sheriff should feel himself entitled to seize ballots,” she said.
On Saturday, former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democratic candidate for governor, said that Bianco appeared to be chasing “MAGA stardom” and called his investigation “a dangerous abuse of power and no different from what we’re seeing from Donald Trump and the extreme Republican efforts to disenfranchise voters nationally.”
A citizens group called the Riverside Election Integrity Team has said it performed an audit finding that 45,896 more ballots were counted than were cast.
In a lengthy February presentation to the Riverside County Board of Supervisors, Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco disputed that figure, saying it was based on a misunderstanding of raw data that had not been fully processed.
The actual discrepancy, Tinoco said, was 103 votes, a variance of 0.016%.
Bianco on Friday said that there “is no acceptable error, small or large, in our elections.”
The sheriff did not name the Riverside Election Integrity Team, but his description of the allegations brought to him by “a group of citizen volunteers” matched theirs.
Bianco said the investigation was “not a recount” for Proposition 50 and was “just as much to prove the election is accurate as it is to show otherwise — we will not know until the count is complete.”
Bonta said his office has “attempted to work cooperatively” with the Sheriff’s Department to understand the basis for the probe. The sheriff, Bonta said, “has delayed, stonewalled, and otherwise refused to work with us in good faith” and failed to provide most of the requested documents.
David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research and a former senior trial attorney overseeing voting enforcement for the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, said Bianco is spreading “false claims” about a fair election that was decided by a huge margin.
Becker questioned how warrants could have been issued for the ballots, “given that this likely implicates California laws requiring election officials to maintain chain of custody of all election materials for many months after an election.”
“For transparency, the Sheriff should share all affidavits and evidence offered in support of the warrant, as well as details about how/where the ballots are being stored,” he said in an email.
Bianco has said the warrants are now sealed.
In his March 4 letter, the attorney general criticized Bianco’s plan to use Sheriff’s Department staffers, “who are not trained and have no experience,” to count the ballots.
At his news conference Friday, Bianco fired back by calling Bonta “an embarrassment to law enforcement.”
Nalder, the Sacramento State professor, said vote counting is a more sophisticated, rigorous and regulated process than most people realize.
“That’s why any rando off the street can’t be asked to do something as delicate as counting ballots,” she said. “And law enforcement officers are trained in a very different way. It’s not their area of expertise.”
A Riverside County Superior Court judge, Bianco said, has ordered the appointment of a special master to oversee the ballot count.
In a statement Friday, Secretary of State Weber said “the Sheriff’s assertion that his deputies know how to count is admirable. The fact remains that he and his deputies are not elections officials and they do not have expertise in election administration.”
March 22, 2026
Iranian missile strikes hit Israeli towns, causing panic and widespread damage
Sheltering from an Iranian missile attack on his town in southern Israel on Saturday, 17-year-old Ido Franky heard “terrifying” blasts like nothing he had experienced before.
An Iranian missile hit Franky’s town of Arad, hours after another struck Dimona — home to a nuclear facility — wounding dozens and leaving entire apartment blocks with heavy damage.
Franky rushed to shelter with his family as air raid sirens sounded, warning of an incoming attack.
“There was a ‘boom, boom!’, my mother was screaming,” he said near the impact site, where an Agence France-Presse correspondent saw three damaged buildings and firefighters reported a blaze.

“This was terrifying… this town had never seen anything like this,” the teenager told Agence France-Presse.
Israel’s Magen David Adom emergency medical service said 84 wounded people were taken to hospitals from the Arad scene, including 10 in serious condition.
In the early hours of Sunday, dozens of people were still at the site, taking photos or calling friends and family to share details of the destruction, even as police warned residents on loudspeakers not to approach.

Security forces patrolled the streets with flashlights while rescuers searched the rubble to ensure all casualties had been recovered.
A crater around of around five metres (16 feet) was left amid the bombed-out buildings.
Police spokesman Dean Elsdunne told AFP that “the operation will take a few hours” before authorities can clear the scene and ensure all residents are accounted for.
An earlier missile attack hit the town of Dimona, about 25 kilometres (16 miles) southwest of Arad.
Dimona hosts a facility widely believed to possess the Middle East’s sole nuclear arsenal, although Israel has never confirmed possessing nuclear weapons.
Israel has maintained a policy of ambiguity about its nuclear programme, and the plant officially focuses on research.
The missile fell about five kilometres away from the facility, leaving about 30 people wounded according to rescuers.
Online videos showed the missile engulfed in a ball of fire, crashing into the ground.
AFP footage showed heavy damage to an apartment building, next to a crater formed in the ground. Two structures have collapsed with debris including concrete blocks littering the area.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said it was “a very difficult evening in the battle for our future”.
“We are determined to continue striking our enemies on all fronts,” Netanyahu told Arad’s mayor, according to a statement from the prime minister’s office.

The strike on Dimona — home to a nuclear facility — wounded dozens and left entire apartment blocks with heavy damage. (Jorge NOVOMINSKY)
Military spokesman Brigadier General Effie Defrin wrote on X that “air defence systems operated but did not intercept the missile, we will investigate the incident.”
Israeli media have shared footage from Arad and Dimona, capturing scenes that have replayed across the country in attacks since the war began on February 28 with US-Israeli air raids on Iran.
In security camera footage aired by Israeli networks, people could be seen being thrown to the ground by the force of the blast as glass windows shatter.
Iranian missile attacks since the start of the war have killed 15 people in Israel as well as four Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank.
While not the deadliest, Saturday’s hits on Dimona and Arad were among the Iranian attacks to have inflicted the greatest damage in Israel.
The launches came even as the United States and Israel keep pounding targets across Iran and say they have degraded the Islamic republic’s capabilities.
March 22, 2026
Iran threatens to target Middle East energy and water infrastructure amid U.S. escalation warning
Tehran has said it will “irreversibly destroy” essential infrastructure across the Middle East, including vital water systems, if the US follows through on Donald Trump’s threat to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants unless the strait of Hormuz is fully opened within two days.
As Iranian missiles struck two southern Israeli cities overnight, injuring dozens of people, and Tehran deployed long-range missiles for the first time, the developments signalled a dangerous potential escalation of the war, now in its fourth week, with both sides threatening facilities relied on by millions of people.

The speaker of the Iranian parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, said on Sunday that vital infrastructure in the region – including energy and desalination facilities – would be considered a legitimate target and would be “irreversibly destroyed” if his country’s own infrastructure was attacked.
Amnesty International said this month there was a substantial risk that attacks on systems providing essential services such as electricity, heating and running water would violate international law and “in some cases could amount to war crimes” because of the potential for “vast, predictable, and devastating civilian harm”.
The Iranian military’s operational command headquarters, Khatam al-Anbiya, said Iran would strike “all energy, information technology and desalination infrastructure” belonging to the US and Israel in the region.
The statement also said that if Trump’s threat was carried out, the strait of Hormuz would be “completely closed, and will not be reopened until our destroyed power plants are rebuilt”.
Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, said “threats and terror” were “only strengthening Iranian unity”, while the “illusion of erasing Iran from the map” showed “desperation against the will of a history-making nation”.

Guardian graphic. Source: Global Water Intelligence, desaldata.com
The US president said on Saturday that he was giving Iran 48 hours – until shortly before midnight GMT on Monday – to open the strait of Hormuz, a vital pathway for the world’s oil flows, or the US would “hit and obliterate” Iranian power plants “starting with the biggest one first”.
The US ambassador to the UN, Mike Waltz, defended Trump’s threat on Sunday, insisting that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) controlled much of the country’s infrastructure and used it to power its war effort.
He said Trump would start by destroying one of Iran’s largest power plants, but did not identify it. “There are gas-fired thermal power plants and other type of plants,” and “the president is not messing around”, he said.
A No 10 spokesperson said Keir Starmer spoke to Trump on Sunday evening about the need to reopen the strait of Hormuz.
Iran’s representative to the International Maritime Organisation, Ali Mousavi, said on Sunday that the strait was open to all shipping except vessels linked to “Iran’s enemies”, with passage possible by coordinating security arrangements with Tehran.
Iranian attacks have in effect closed the narrow strait, which carries about a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies, causing the world’s worst oil crisis since the 1970s and sending European gas prices surging by as much as 35% last week.
Only a relatively small number of vessels, estimated at about 5% of the prewar volume, from countries that Tehran considers friendly – including China, India and Pakistan – have been allowed to pass.

A Tehran billboard featuring a portrait of the late supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. (AFP/Getty Images)
More than 2,000 people have been killed in Iran since 28 February, when the US and Israel began their attacks, and Tehran in turn has struck targets in Israel and the Gulf states. Lebanon was drawn in after Iran-backed Hezbollah attacked Israel.
Air raid sirens sounded across Israel from the early hours of Sunday morning, warning of incoming missiles from Iran after scores of people were injured overnight in two separate attacks on the southern towns of Arad and Dimona.
The Israeli army said on Sunday morning that it would strike Tehran in retaliation. The country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said during a visit to Arad that senior IRGC commanders would be pursued.
“We’re going after the regime. We’re going after the IRGC, this criminal gang,” he said. “We’re going after them personally, their leaders, their installations, their economic assets.”
The Iranian health ministry spokesperson, Hossein Kermanpour, said patients had been evacuated from the Imam Ali hospital in the south-west city of Andimeshk on Sunday after an airstrike a day earlier.

Bomb damage in Arad, Israel. (Amir Levy/Getty Images)
Israel’s military said it had not been able to intercept the missiles that hit Dimona and Arad, the nearest large towns to the country’s nuclear centre in the Negev desert, which houses what is widely believed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal.
Israel has never admitted to possessing nuclear weapons, insisting that the site is for research. The strikes marked the first time that Iranian missiles had penetrated Israel’s air defence systems in the area.

The strikes wounded about 200 people, including a 12-year-old boy and a five-year-old girl, both reported to be in a serious condition. The Israeli broadcaster Channel 13 reported early indications of possible deaths but there was no official confirmation.

Iran said the attacks had been launched in response to a strike on its main nuclear enrichment facility at Natanz on Saturday. Israel denied responsibility for the attack and the Pentagon declined to comment.
In Tel Aviv, 15 more people were injured on Sunday morning in a separate incident involving a cluster bomb. The attacks are adding to mounting pressure on Israel’s air defence systems as Iranian strikes increasingly test their limits.
The World Health Organization said that the war was at a “perilous stage” and called for restraint. “Attacks targeting nuclear sites create an escalating threat to public health and environmental safety,” the WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said.
Tehran also fired long-range missiles for the first time on Saturday, the Israeli military chief, Eyal Zamir, said. Two ballistic missiles with a range of 2,500 miles (4,000km) were fired at the US-British Indian Ocean military base at Diego Garcia, he said.

Guardian graphic
The British cabinet minister Steve Reed said one missile had fallen short and the other had been intercepted. There was no assessment backing claims that Iran was planning to strike Europe, he said.
The Israel Defense Forces had said Iran had missiles that could reach London, Paris or Berlin, but Reed said he was not aware of any assessment at all that Iran was even trying to target Europe, “let alone that they could if they tried”.
He said in a separate interview that Trump had been “speaking for himself” when he threatened to obliterate Iran’s power plants.
Analysts said Trump’s threat had placed “a 48-hour ticking timebomb of elevated uncertainty” over energy and financial markets, with a “black Monday” of plunging stock markets and surging energy prices looming unless it was rowed back.

Guardian graphic
At least six overnight attacks targeted a US diplomatic and logistics centre at Baghdad airport, Iraqi officials said, while Saudi Arabia said three missiles had been detected over Riyadh. The UAE said it had responded to Iranian missile and drone attacks.
In southern Lebanon, Israel said its military had raided Hezbollah sites on Sunday and killed 10 of the group’s fighters. It said it was expanding its ground campaign in Lebanon, warning of a lengthy operation. Hezbollah said it had attacked several border areas in northern Israel. One person was killed in an Israeli kibbutz, emergency services said.
At least 10 Palestinians were injured on Sunday night in attacks in the occupied West Bank by Israeli settlers who rampaged through nearby villages after holding a funeral for a settler killed in a car crash a night earlier.
Videos obtained by the Associated Press appeared to show cars and homes set ablaze as army flares lit up the sky near the village east of Nablus and next to the Israeli settlement of Elon Moreh.
Three Turkish nationals, including a soldier, and three Qatari service personnel were killed when a helicopter crashed in Qatar’s territorial waters, the country’s defence ministry said on Sunday.
According to an academic analysis seen by Reuters, an interceptor missile that injured dozens of civilians in Bahrain 10 days into the war was probably fired by a US-operated Patriot air defence battery.
Manama and Washington have blamed an Iranian drone attack for the explosion on 9 March, which Bahrain has said injured 32 people including children, some of them seriously.
March 22, 2026
China positions itself as ‘Harbour of Stability’ to global CEOs amid U.S.–Iran tensions
China sought to woo global chief executives including Apple’s Tim Cook, UBS’s Sergio Ermotti and HSBC’s Georges Elhedery in Beijing on Sunday, touting the country’s safety and reliability in stark contrast to a US bogged down in war with Iran.
Premier Li Qiang told more than 70 chief executives gathered in the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse for the government’s annual Davos-style forum that the world’s second-largest economy offered an unmatched supply chain and a predictable commercial environment.
The country was committed to being a “cornerstone of certainty” and a “harbour of stability” in the face of rising trade protectionism and upheaval in the rules-based international order, said Li.
“China will unswervingly promote high-level opening up to the outside, import more high-quality foreign goods and work with all parties to promote the optimised and balanced development of trade, jointly expanding the global economic and trade pie,” he told the audience.
The conference, the China Development Forum, is held every year in late March after the meeting of the country’s rubber-stamp parliament. It acts as the leadership’s vehicle for pressing its talking points on global CEOs.
This year, Beijing is selling its latest five-year economic plan to 2030 as an opportunity for foreign investment.

“Li didn’t name America . . . but the message is clear that China is now safer, more reliable and stable, and more focused on economic development rather than conflicts,” said George Chen, a partner at the Asia Group consultancy who was present at the meeting.

The conference comes amid widening concern over China’s huge trade surplus, which hit a record $1.2tn last year. In Europe, there are worries that low-cost Chinese imports are eliminating jobs.

The five-year plan largely doubles down on China’s manufacturing-oriented high-tech industrial policy, raising fears of an even greater shock to western factories.

People’s Bank of China governor Pan Gongsheng defended the country’s exports in a speech on Sunday about global economic “rebalancing”.

Pan rejected the claim that China’s competitiveness was a result of government subsidies, attributing it to economic reforms, the size of its domestic market and the strength of its supply chains and research.

Without naming the US, he described some countries’ persistent trade deficits as being the result of “an international monetary system dominated by a single sovereign currency”.

Jeanine Pirro takes aim at the ruling by James Boasberg on Friday. (Reuters)
Other business leaders on the invitee list this year include Siemens’ Roland Busch, Volkswagen’s Oliver Blume, SK Hynix’s Kwak Noh-jung, Nestlé’s Philipp Navratil, Mercedes-Benz’s Ola Källenius, KKR’s Joseph Bae, Cargill’s Brian Sikes, Standard Chartered’s Bill Winters and Boston Consulting Group’s Christoph Schweizer.

US executives were well represented this year, accounting for 45 per cent of invitees, according to an analysis by Han Shen Lin of the Asia Group. Europeans made up 36 per cent with the remainder from Asia, Australia and elsewhere.

Financial services dominated, accounting for about 22 per cent of invitees, while those from the energy sector were only about 4 per cent.

Apple chief executive Cook delivered a speech after Li on opportunities in education and other areas in China.
Unlike in the previous two forums, President Xi Jinping is not expected to meet top executives this year, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Asia Group’s Chen said Li’s speech was the most confident he had seen in recent years, though the premier refrained from directly criticising US President Donald Trump.

Trump, who recently postponed a meeting expected on April 1 with Xi in Beijing, is still widely expected to be planning a visit this year.

On Saturday evening, vice-premier He Lifeng, the economic tsar running trade negotiations with the US, held a dinner with a group of mostly European executives to tout the country’s five-year plan.

The executives mostly praised China and talked up their own companies, said one of the people present at the dinner, but there was some discussion of Chinese overcapacity and the risks for European industry.
March 21, 2026
Oil price surge from Iran war threatens US growth and fuels inflation, economists warn
Soaring oil prices threaten to hit US growth, worsen inflation and keep the Federal Reserve from lowering interest rates, top economists have warned ahead of the central bank’s first rate decision since the Iran war began.
US oil prices have jumped almost 50 per cent since the US and Israel struck Iran at the end of last month to about $95 a barrel, sending the costs of petrol and diesel at the pump surging higher.
The majority of academic economists polled by the Clark Center for Global Markets on behalf of the Financial Times said that, if oil prices were to remain at $100 a barrel, slightly above their current level, US growth will decline markedly.
Tehran has largely closed the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which a fifth of the world’s oil flows, in retaliation for the strikes on Iran. The disruption has caused a global supply crunch and is hitting US consumers and businesses despite the US’s role as a major energy producer.

“The key question is the extent and duration of a blockage of the Strait of Hormuz,” said James Hamilton, professor at University of California San Diego and an energy market expert. “If it goes on for a month or so, then this is a very big deal. And I think it would lead to a significant downward revision in the kind of growth we’re expecting for this year.”
Some 68 per cent of respondents anticipated a significant hit to GDP growth this year of at least 0.25 to 0.5 percentage points should oil stay at $100 for the rest of 2026, compared with a scenario with $75 oil. Just 2 per cent thought the economic impact of high oil prices would be positive, with the rest expecting little to no impact in either direction.
The US economy expanded at a 0.7 per cent annualised clip in the final quarter of 2025, from the previous quarter’s 4.4 per cent growth rate.

Panellists’ growth warnings contrast with White House officials, who say the conflict will do little harm to the prospects of the world’s largest economy.

“If [the war] were to be extended, it wouldn’t really disrupt the US economy very much at all,” said Kevin Hassett, director of the White House’s National Economic Council, on Tuesday.

“It would hurt consumers, and we’d have to think about — if that continued — what we’d have to do about that, but that’s really the last of our concerns right now because we’re very confident this thing is going ahead of schedule,” he said in an interview with CNBC.

The Trump administration’s war on Iran has exacerbated the challenges facing Fed officials, who are set to make their latest policy decision on Wednesday.

Even before the conflict began, the central bank was facing a delicate balancing act over whether to prioritise its fight against inflation or the latest signs of a slowdown in the US labour market.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said the US economy lost 92,000 jobs in February while corporate America has laid off tens of thousands of workers this year.
At the same time, the jump in petrol and diesel costs — now at the highest levels in either of President Donald Trump’s White House terms — risks undermining the American public’s faith in the central bank’s commitment to stamp out inflation.

Headline personal consumption expenditures inflation (PCE) is 2.8 per cent and has been above the 2 per cent level the Fed targets since early 2021.

If oil stays near $100 for a prolonged period, it would lead to a rise in headline PCE inflation of at least 0.25 to 0.5 percentage points by the end of the year, according to more than 80 per cent of those polled.

The 47 economists — surveyed quarterly by the Clark Center, part of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business — also say the Fed will now need to wait longer before core PCE inflation falls to its 2 per cent goal. That category excludes food and energy prices.

Six in 10 participants in the survey now expect it will take until at least the first half of 2028 before price pressures return to 2 per cent — up from just under half in December.

Fed watchers widely expect the central bank to hold the federal funds target range at 3.5 per cent to 3.75 per cent on Wednesday. Markets are betting the oil price rise has pushed the next cut back until the spring of next year, after three quarter-point cuts in 2025.
Fed officials will also publish their latest economic and rate projections, known as “dot plots”, later on Wednesday.

The FT panel in the latest survey was less sure US benchmark borrowing costs would end the year lower than their current level. Roughly a third said they now expected no cuts for the duration of 2026, compared with 15 per cent in December.

“My prediction right now is that you’re not going to see much action [from the Fed] for a while,” said Stephen Cecchetti, a Brandeis University professor. “The uncertainty is so high that you have to wait. I would be waiting. But I would be unhappy that I had to start from here.”
March 20, 2026
Trump praises Japan’s support in Iran war during White House meeting with PM Sanae Takaichi
In an apparent awkward moment at the Oval Office on Thursday stateside, U.S. President Donald Trump referenced Pearl Harbor in his first meeting with Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi after her landslide electoral victory.
When asked by a Japanese reporter on why the U.S. did not inform allies such as Japan before carrying out the attacks against Iran on Feb. 28, the U.S. president said it was to maintain the element of surprise.
“Who knows better about surprise than Japan … Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”
Trump was referencing the surprise Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in 1941, which saw the deaths of over 2,400 personnel and drew the U.S. into World War II.
Takaichi appeared to draw a deep breath and lean back in her seat with an uneasy expression.
“Who knows better about surprise than Japan … Why didn’t you tell me about Pearl Harbor?”
Donald Trump U.S. President
Trump said that the surprise attack on Iran had helped the U.S., adding that it “knocked out 50% of what we anticipated” in the country within the first two days.
During the meeting, Trump praised Japan for “stepping up” to assist in efforts to secure the Strait of Hormuz, “unlike NATO.“
Before the meeting, Japan, as well as Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands had released a joint statement expressing their readiness to “contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait.”
Trump had called on Japan and other countries to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, but Takaichi had reportedly said Monday that there were no plans to dispatch naval vessels to escort boats in the Middle East.
Her office also said in a post on X that there was “no specific request from the United States to Japan for the dispatch of vessels.”
Japan’s prime minister on Tuesday said that the government was considering what could be done within the framework of the country’s law. Japan’s Self-Defense Forces are governed by its pacifist constitution, that renounces war and the threat or use of force for settling international disputes.
Trump had taken aim at NATO allies earlier this week, saying that the alliance was “making a very foolish mistake” by not getting involved in the war.
In response, German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius reportedly said on Monday that “This is not our war, we have not started it,” a stance that was also adopted by French President Emmanuel Macron.
Subsequently, Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on Thursday that “we have declared that as long as the war continues, we will not participate in ensuring freedom of navigation in the Strait of Hormuz, for example, by military means,” according to Reuters.
March 19, 2026
Donald Trump White House tries to sell war and death as a game
The White House has found a new recruit to sell the US war on Iran to an increasingly sceptical American public: SpongeBob SquarePants.
In a video posted by the White House on X, a clip of the cartoon character says, “do you want to see me do it again?” as unclassified footage of US missiles blowing up Iranian jets and trucks appears. The caption reads: “Will not stop until the objectives are met. Unrelenting. Unapologetic.”
An unlikely warmonger, SpongeBob SquarePants is just one of the internet memes harnessed by US officials in a propaganda campaign that has drawn heavily on video games, action movies and cartoons to celebrate American military prowess in Iran.
Will not stop until the objectives are met.

Unrelenting. Unapologetic. 🔁 pic.twitter.com/iM9fqjn1zc
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) March 5, 2026

Donald Trump’s White House has deployed a galaxy of pop-culture icons to hype up American martial virtues and divert attention from the growing human and economic devastation of the war.
“This is a memification and a gamification of war,” said Nick Cull, a historian of propaganda at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. “It’s an appalling way to represent conflict.”
It is unclear how effective it’s been. An Ipsos poll this month found only 29 per cent of Americans approved of the US strikes in Iran and 43 per cent disapproved.
But Roger Stahl, professor of communications studies at the University of Georgia, said the purpose of the videos wasn’t necessarily to win over voters unconvinced about the wisdom of going to war against Iran.
“It’s to galvanise the Maga base with a kind of thrilling, easy-to-digest version of that conflict that appeals to the base instincts of gamers and people who think that war is just a series of one-liners from Hollywood,” he said. “But to probably 70 per cent of the population, a good majority at least, it’s just shocking.”
Perhaps the most striking video put out by the White House depicts the war as a Nintendo game, mixing footage of missile strikes with images from Wii Sports.
To a sprightly soundtrack, a cartoon player is shown scoring a bullseye, hitting a hole in one and bowling a strike, with each shot cutting to footage of missile strikes in Iran. An announcer bellows sporting clichés: “It’s Out of the Park!” “Slam Dunk!” and “Knockout!”
Another video along the same lines, entitled “JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY”, includes clips from Top Gun, Braveheart, Breaking Bad and the anime Dragon Ball Z, and ends with a voiceover saying “flawless victory”, lifted from the video game Mortal Kombat.
White House deputy communications director Kaelan Dorr reposted the clip with the caption “Wake up, Daddy’s Home”.
“They’re like ads for a knock-off Tom Cruise movie,” said Peter Loge, director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University.
“It hides the gruesome realities of conflict and war,” he went on. “You don’t feel the grief, you never see the aftermath of the conflict or the violence.”
The Justice video has drawn angry responses from some in Hollywood. Director and actor Ben Stiller, whose film Tropic Thunder was featured in the montage, demanded the White House remove the clip.
“We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine,” he wrote on X. “War is not a movie.”
Even former members of the military have expressed disgust. “Sorry to be Debbie downer,” Connor Crehan, an Iraq war veteran and BarStool Sports host, wrote on X. “War isn’t a video game. The consequences of war are final. I wish we didn’t treat it with such a cavalier approach.”
The White House denied that it was trying to reduce the war to a game. “The legacy media wants us to apologize for highlighting the United States Military’s incredible success,” said spokeswoman Anna Kelly.
“But the White House will continue showcasing the many examples of Iran’s ballistic missiles, production facilities, and dreams of owning a nuclear weapon being destroyed in real time.”
The videos mark a big departure from the high moral tone normally adopted by US administrations entering into a global conflict.
When President Woodrow Wilson took the US into the first world war, he famously argued that “the world must be made safe for democracy”. In framing Operation Desert Storm in 1990, George HW Bush hailed the prospect of a “new world order” emerging from “these troubled times”.
“Traditionally the US government has spoken about war as something regrettable and necessary for a carefully considered diplomatic objective,” said Cull.
“They’ve sought to carry the American public with them . . . and persuade the world that it is in the best interests of humanity. And I don’t think those sorts of priorities are detectable in [Trump’s] messaging here.”
On the contrary, the videos seem squarely aimed at the president’s core supporters, especially the young men who voted for him in huge numbers in the 2024 presidential election.
Posts by White House officials over the past three weeks have been sprinkled with gamer and streamer slang. “W’s in the chat boys,” wrote Steven Cheung, Trump’s director of communications, above a video mixing strikes in Iran with an animation from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.
“Based Department? Yes. I’ll hold,” wrote Kaelan Dorr as he reposted another propaganda video on X, using the Gen Z word that means “bold” or “unapologetic”.
The clips build on a tradition established by the Department of Homeland Security last year. One viral video with the caption “Gotta Catch ‘Em All” showed ICE agents blowing in doors, and handcuffing and leading away undocumented immigrants to a song from the Pokemon cartoon. The clip was viewed 75.5mn times.
Loge compares Trump’s messaging style to pro wrestling. “He’s embracing the spectacle [of war] more than any of his predecessors have,” he said. But he warned that there was a risk for the White House that public support could collapse when the reality of the conflict hits home.
“It’s like turning on the lights on an amusement ride,” he said. “You can only suspend disbelief for so long.”
March 19, 2026
Bond Market Flashes Warning Signal Not Seen Since Before 2008 Financial Crisis
Troubling developments unfolded in the U.S. bond market on Thursday that had some investors drawing comparisons with the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis.
The current problems start with rising oil prices as a result of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, which is raising the risk of stagflation and the prospect of a 2026 interest-rate hike by the Federal Reserve. Brent crude the global oil benchmark, briefly blew past $119 a barrel on Thursday as attacks escalated on oil-and-gas infrastructure in the Persian Gulf. West Texas Intermediate crude-oil futures briefly crossed $100 a barrel.
But even as oil prices have spiked and stock prices come down, Treasurys, often seen as a haven during times of market unease, haven’t rallied on a continual basis. Instead, fears that the war in the Middle East could morph into a full-blown energy crisis pushed the policy-sensitive 2-year Treasury yield above the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate target on Thursday. Bond yields move inversely with prices and rise during selloffs.
Thursday’s bond-market selloff caused the Treasury yield curve to exhibit what traders describe as a “bear-flattening” pattern. This actually began back in early February. Typically, the pattern emerges when bond traders are bracing for a difficult economic environment ahead.
The confluence of these three developments — oil above $100 a barrel, a 2-year yield above the fed funds rate, and a bear-steepening dynamic in the bond market — is making some investors nervous.
The last time all three things unfolded simultaneously was in the late spring of 2008, according to Bloomberg data. About four or five months later, Lehman Brothers collapsed, ushering in the most acute phase of the 2008 financial crisis. The S&P 500 declined 38.5% that year. Widespread mortgage defaults also resulted in many Americans losing their homes.
The current environment includes both similarities and differences to that troubling time. Whereas the 2008 crisis was triggered by the bursting of a housing bubble and the subsequent collapse of the subprime mortgage market, investors are currently focused on the continued war with Iran, which began on Feb. 28, as well as signs of increasing stress in the private-credit industry.
Already, investors have been impacted by twin declines in stocks and bonds, which amount to a double-whammy for anybody holding their retirement savings in a 60-40 portfolio.
The backdrop now “does remind me of 2007-2008, when you did have cracks in the financial system,” said economist Derek Tang of Monetary Policy Analytics in Washington. The bad news now is “we are going into an energy-price shock and the Fed’s hands are tied because of inflation risks, which make it harder to cut rates.” This is all happening as the chance of a U.S. recession is growing, which is “not healthy” for risk assets. “That’s why people are on a knife’s edge right now.”
All three major U.S. stock indexes closed lower on Thursday, despite attempting to climb during the final hour of trading.
Earlier in the day, the 2-year yield, which is tied to expectations for the path of interest rates, jumped by as much as 21.8 basis points to an intraday high of almost 3.96% as the underlying government note aggressively sold off. The rate rose 8.8 basis points to 3.83% by 3 p.m. Eastern time, leaving it above the Fed’s interest-rate target of between 3.5% and 3.75%

The 2-year yield climbed at a faster pace than the benchmark 10-year yield which rose just 2.5 basis points to 4.28% —producing a bear-flattening pattern of the Treasury curve. The difference between 2- and 10-year Treasury yields shrank to around 45.1 basis points on Thursday from 51.5 basis points a day ago, and it is down from 74 basis points in early February.
The curve’s bear flattening is already hurting financial institutions, which rely on borrowing at short-term rates to lend at long-term rates, and retirement-age investors who held the 2-year Treasury note because of its cash-like qualities. As the note sells off, its yield rises so those older investors could have waited to buy at a lower price and higher yield. The bear-flattening’s significance to investors more broadly rests in the signals it sends about the likely upward path for interest rates and a negative economic outlook.
The 2-year rate is pricing in a scenario in which “the Fed will have to move into a rate-hiking cycle for the next few years,” said Ben Emons, founder of the New York-based investment management firm FedWatch Advisors, who added that he does not share this view.
However, a repeat of the 2008 financial crisis is not necessarily in the cards because “we’re not in stagflation yet and the economy is not as reliant on oil prices as it was back then,” Emons said in a phone interview. “We have private-credit issues, but there’s a difference between that and the subprime crisis at the time. The banking system is far more resilient than before.”
Fed-funds futures traders currently see a 93.8% chance of no change in borrowing costs this year and a 6.2% likelihood of one rate hike by December. On Wednesday, Fed Chair Jerome Powell lent some credence to the idea of a hike by saying officials have deliberated on whether their next move should be to lift rates, though this is not currently the central bank’s base-case scenario.
March 19, 2026
Jerome Powell Says US Job Creation Near Zero as Fed Signals Steady Unemployment
Job creation in the US has slowed to essentially zero, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday as the Fed released its latest economic projections, which included slightly higher economic growth than previously projected and little change to the unemployment rate.
Altogether, Powell said, central bankers see “a degree of stability” in the labor market.
“But the thing that I think a good number of people on the committee are concerned about is just the very, very low level of job creation,” Powell said in a press conference following the Fed’s decision to hold interest rates steady.
“Effectively, there’s zero net job creation in the private sector,” after accounting for revisions over the past six months, Powell said. “But actually, that looks like that’s about what the economy needs, in terms of dealing with very, very low — nonexistent, really — growth in the labor force, which of course we’ve never had in our history.”
Indeed, the country may not need as many jobs as it once did amid lower labor force participation rates and immigration declines. But Powell also noted that “labor demand has clearly softened as well.”
The job market hasn’t shifted dramatically since Powell’s last press conference in late January. But whatever brief glimmers of optimism existed are now in doubt. The unemployment rate, now at 4.4%, ticked back up in February as the economy shed 92,000 jobs, while December and January’s job gains were revised lower by 69,000, meaning there’s been barely any job growth in three months.
In their new policy statement, Fed officials removed language that noted the “unemployment rate has shown some signs of stabilization,” saying instead that “job gains have remained low, and the unemployment rate has been little changed in recent months.”
March 19, 2026