bunch. but the level of snow they re getting today may be something they don t see every year. the four-legged friends out too. brinn gingras in new york city where constantly foot traffic whether you have snow or nothing, and you still have a lot of people behind you. reporter: they re enjoying the snow. i m glad i m not where polo is. it s tapering off here. we re in central park and people are enjoying the snowfall. we ve seen people out to go sledding, tourists saying this is the first snowfall they ve seen in their lives, seen people taking photos running, jog, and as polo is seeing as well, seeing those dogs out. the you look at the roads in this area of the middle of manhattan, they don t look so bad. we ve seen a number of plows coming through this area to make sure they can see that black top, allowing any cars that are out able to pass through safely. again, though, as polo mentioned, as well, officials are saying please just stay off
us. i think the current chair - lead by jerome powell will have lead byjerome powell will have a long conversation today and i think they will be focused on not the tapering, which they will be done with by march, and the big question will be do they start raising rates immediately at the next meeting, will they announce that today, that they will be doing that? i don t know the answer to that, but i suspect that they will at least have some discussions along those lines as they try and catch up. they are a little bit behind the curve on getting rates up to take care of the inflation, so i know there will be a lot of pressure on them to do that. just to get your take on how effective increased interest rates will be in this current scenario we are in, because of course inflation is at 7%, that is extremely high, will putting up is extremely high, will putting up the cost of borrowing really have the effect of ringing it down? , ~ , down? yes, i think it will be effective down? yes, i
thursday. so, we ve got a couple days left and conditions go back downhill again later in the week. want to touch on this because the amount of snowfall as you noted is pretty impressive. record values in some cases, 10 inches above what was the previous record for the day. the airport, previous record sits at 1. you see the incredible disparity in most locations where about twice as much or more what was the above the record for the day. the satellite perspective kind of tells the tale as far as the significant amount of coverage around the northeastern u.s. of course, in some of these areas we saw as much as 30 inches come down. state maxim 31 inches. boston picked up 2 feet of snow which was the most they ve seen since 2003 for a single day s worth of snow. again, that s the element that s tapering off now, quieting down. we expect warmer temperatures mid week. but not the case across parts of florida. we do have freeze alerts, widespread across portions of
so just in moments ago, weekly jobless claims, cnn chief business correspondent christine romans has the numbers. what are they? they ticked up a little bit. these are layoffs, first time unemployment claims in a week. that is still near pandemic levels. numbers you want to see. when you look at the trend, you see the trend is very clearly a tapering off of these layoffs. this is a job market humming along and these numbers pretty much reinforce that. inflation, of course, is the big story. not the job market, the job market is so strong, it might be contributing to inflation in these higher wages that we re seeing across the board. but the inflation story overrun a little bit yesterday by retail sales. retail sales up 3.8% in january. this was a big surprise. this tells you the american
covid and underlining the baseline that we have underneath are the mitigations that does mean that hospitality is the safest base to socialise which is ventilation, hygiene and social distancing, that is what we will continue to focus on to keep our staff and customers say, that is what we did after reopening after we before we had that mass testing and many of our employees have involuntarily providing tests to their employees throughout that period is i think you will see a gradual tapering off of that as consumer confidence built. ., built. and with the ending of mandatory built. and with the ending of mandatory self built. and with the ending of mandatory self isolation, - built. and with the ending of mandatory self isolation, we j mandatory self isolation, we know that your members have been having all sorts of problems with staff shortages, does this help on that front? it help to reduce the pressure on staff absences, we have had difficulties with people not being able