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Trending in 2026. Partial government shutdowns from Marketplace. I'm Sabree Benishore in for David Brancaccio. We literally just had one and now we are edging closer to another. A partial government shutdown. It would involve just one federal agency this time, the Department of Homeland Security. DHS will run out of money this Saturday if Congress doesn't reach a compromise over ICE and pass a funding bill. Marketplace's Nancy Marshall Genser has more.
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The Department of Homeland Security is home to, yes, ice, but also the Coast Guard, fema, the Secret Service and tsa, the Transportation Security Administration. They would all be shuttered during a shutdown with essential employees working without pay. The DHS spending bill is caught up in Democratic demands for reforms at ice, including requiring ICE agents to get a warrant from a judge before entering someone's home. Democrats also want to prohibit ICE agents from wearing masks and require them to wear body cameras and uniforms with name tags. Republican negotiators are rejecting the Democrats demands. If the two sides don't reach a deal by Friday, DHS will shut down in the wee hours of Saturday. And Congress is about to take a break. It marks President's Day with a week long recess next week. Ironically, ICE wouldn't be affected much by a DHS shutdown. It could keep going because it has tons of money from the big tax and spending bill lawmakers passed last summer. I'm Nancy Martin Marshall Genser for Marketplace.
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Money goes where money grows. Investors send it sloshing around the world looking for high interest rates or reliable returns. Governments, including the US's need that money. They borrow it in order to spend. A couple things happened the past few days that could affect where that money sloshes and how expensive it is for the US to borrow it. Julia Coronado joins us to talk about it. She's founder of Macro Policy Perspectives and professor at UT Austin. Good morning.
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Good morning.
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The government of China has told its private sector banks to not hold as many U.S. treasuries or at least be more careful about holding them. Should we be worried about that?
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It could mean upward pressure on interest rates. If the banks follow through with that guidance and invest less in Treasuries, then we would have fewer buyers and that would mean higher interest rates. There's also a Japanese election that could go in the same direction. A strong victory for the current prime minister probably means a strong economy in Japan and that could mean fewer Japanese investors buying U.S. treasuries. So both of those things are risks to the bond market. It's not really reacting very strongly this morning, but definitely something to keep an eye on.
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So the idea is Japan's gonna have to do a lot of borrowing.
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That's right. The idea is that Japanese interest rates should be rising. For years, Japanese investors have faced zero interest rates domestically and then instead they bought Treasuries to get some. Some return. And they've been a very strong, significant buyer of U.S. debt.
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We get a good chunk of pretty important economic data later this week. There's the inflation report, there's the jobs report. This jobs report in particular is special. Will you tell us why we get.
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An annual revision to the jobs numbers in January? We got a preview of that last September. It was a big downward revision and it got the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics fired. So. And what we'll see on Wednesday is all the detail and the sectors where job growth was lower than expected.
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Julia Coronado, founder and president of Macro Policy Perspectives. Thank you so much.
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My pleasure.
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Russian strikes on Ukrainian heating systems have left a million people freezing in the first month of this year. And the way that Ukrainian cities were built makes them especially vulnerable to these types of attacks. The BPC's Vitaly Shevchenko explains how Soviet urban planning plays a role.
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This is the result of how cities were built across the Soviet Union, including in Ukraine. The focus of huge construction programs back then was on cheap mass produced housing of apartment blocks which rely on communal central heating where water is heated up elsewhere and then pumped into their radiators. Look at any city in the USSR and its landscape will probably be dominated by ubiquitous nine storey residential buildings made out of prefabricated concrete panels known as PanelKE or smaller 5 storey blocks of flats known as Khrushchevki after Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader who oversaw their construction in the 1950s and 60s. They all need heating to be supplied from outside. Heating plants known as pets in Ukraine are huge and when they're targeted by Russia, this affects heat many thousands. The authorities say that all such power plants have now been hit. Yuriy Korolchuk is a Ukrainian energy expert.
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Ukraine inherited the Soviet heating system and it hasn't changed anything. It stays predominantly centralized. These heating plants were not designed to be attacked with missiles or drones. That's why these vulnerabilities came to the fore during the war. During the previous winters, there were no such strikes against the heating system. They happened only occasionally and they didn't directly target heating plants.
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For security reasons, Kyiv's local power company will not say exactly how many residents rely on communal heating in the frontline city of Zaporizhzhia. It's almost three quarters. The Ukrainian government is acutely aware of this vulnerability. But undoing decades of Soviet urban planning will not be quick or easy.
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That was Vitaly Shevchenko there with our newsroom partners at the BBC in New York. I'm Sabret Benishore with the Marketplace morning report from apm American Public Media.
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