| China unveils major bureaucratic revamp. Powell warns of higher interest rates ahead. Singapore's Sea posts first-ever profit. Here's what you need to know today. President Xi Jinping unveiled the biggest overhaul of China's bureaucracy in decades, part of a sweeping push to make the economy more self-sufficient in the face of US efforts to prevent Beijing from obtaining advanced technology. The plan strengthened oversight of its $60 trillion financial system, created a new agency to manage data and restructured the Ministry of Science and Technology. The moves came as new Foreign Minister Qin Gang warned that US efforts to "contain and suppress" China posed risks to the future of humanity. Xi also made a major new military appointment. Chair Jerome Powell said the Federal Reserve is likely to lift interest rates higher and potentially faster than previously anticipated with inflation persisting. His remarks, in testimony before Congress, opened the door to officials lifting the Fed's benchmark lending rate by a half percentage point at the next meeting. Traders now see rates peaking close to 5.6% this year, up from about 5.5% yesterday. Meanwhile, Australia's central bank is approaching a point when a pause in its policy tightening cycle will be needed, according to Governor Philip Lowe, a day after raising interest rates to the highest level since 2012. Singapore's Sea Ltd.'s stock price jumped after the company unexpectedly reported its first-ever profit — a milestone in the Southeast Asian gaming and e-commerce giant's effort to convince investors of its money-making potential. The stock gained as much as 19% in US trading to its highest intraday level since August. Sea said net income was $426.8 million in the fourth quarter, while analysts expected a loss of $434 million on average. The company took brutal measures last year to convince investors of its profit-making ability, cutting thousands of jobs and freezing salaries. Twitter may break even on a cash-flow basis in the second quarter and has a shot at even going positive, according to owner Elon Musk. The company has been working on making its advertising more relevant, said Musk, who bought Twitter last year for $44 billion. He emphasized that Twitter's debt burden after the deal is quite high and the cost of servicing the debt is around $1.5 billion a year. Meanwhile, Musk exposed a former employee's disability when the worker took to Twitter to seek clarity on whether he had been sacked, and the US FTC plans to depose Musk as part of its probe into the platform's privacy and data security practices. Asian stocks are poised to fall after Powell's hawkish rhetoric rattled risk sentiment in the US and drove the dollar higher against all of its major peers. Equity futures for Japan and Hong Kong declined. All major US benchmarks slid more than 1%, with the S&P 500 Index falling the most in two weeks. An index of US-traded Chinese companies tumbled 3%. The two-year Treasury yield increased to 5% Tuesday, the highest level since July 2007, as the bond market doubled down on the prospect of a US recession. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell managed to sound even more hawkish than markets had feared, setting up the potential for a half-point interest-rate hike this month. While the dollar surged and stocks tanked, the Treasuries market was more nuanced in its reading of the implications. Short-end government yields soared to take into account the shift in the rates outlook, but longer-dated securities were in much better shape as investors priced in expectations for slower economic growth.  The 10-year closed flat on the day to send its discount to two-year yields past 100 basis points for the first time since 1981. Should Powell & Co. deliver an outsized policy move, and/or jack up the forecast path via the dot plot, there's plenty of scope for that gap to widen as they push short-end yields higher. That curve inversion could get significantly deeper as a result because the market is plainly convinced that 4% is about as high as 10-year yields can go, so investors are ready to pile in every time they hit that mark. Which tells us that bond managers are also increasingly concerned that the higher the Fed goes the faster the economy will fall down. Garfield Reynolds is Chief Rates Correspondent for Bloomberg News in Asia, based in Sydney. | 
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