#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

Lawmakers rush to vote on new 5,593-page tax and spending bill before end of day (nationthailand.com)

Lawmakers rush to vote on new 5,593-page tax and spending bill before end of day

InternationalDec 22. 2020

By The Washington Post · Jeff Stein, Mike DeBonis

WASHINGTON – Congressional leaders on Monday introduced a mammoth 5,593-page tax and spending bill that packages together emergency economic relief, government funding, and tax cuts into what is one of the largest pieces of legislation ever considered by the U.S. Congress.

And it might pass by the end of the day.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/c/embed/6c83908b-ba0c-4864-a384-e451b27f5a14?ptvads=block&playthrough=false

The bill shows the urgent rush by the White House and Congress to complete numerous unresolved tasks before the holiday recess during a lame duck session of Congress.

The $900 billion economic relief component of the legislation has received the most attention, but the bill would do many other things, including funding of federal agencies through September 2021 and the extension of tax breaks for numerous businesses for at least the next year.

The House is planning to vote on the measure later in the day, though the Senate vote could come late at night. If they do not pass the bill or other measures to fund the government, a government shutdown would begin at midnight. Lawmakers reached a deal on the agreement Sunday.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Monday that lawmakers are “going to stay here until we finish tonight.”

The speed and scope of the legislative rush startled some lawmakers as details from the massive bill emerged Monday. The proposal includes numerous provisions – from Smithsonian American Women’s History Act, legislation to rein in surprise medical billing, and policies supporting Tibet – that appear to have nothing to do with the coronavirus pandemic or national economic emergency.

Lawmakers will have a short period of time to review parts of the bill before voting on it.

Senate leaders announced the breakthrough agreement on a coronavirus relief package Sunday night after several weeks of negotiations. The legislation brokered by congressional leaders includes about $325 billion in business relief, including about $275 billion for another round of Paycheck Protection Program funding. It would also extend federal unemployment benefits of up to $300 per week, which could start as early as Dec. 27.

The legislation also addresses dozens of other needs, including $45 billion for transportation needs such as state transportation departments and Amtrak, $82 billion for schools, $20 billion for vaccine distribution, and $13 billion for a major expansion in food stamps.

One of the main planks of the bill includes sending direct payments of $600 to Americans who earned less than $75,000 in the preceding tax year. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Monday said millions of Americans could begin seeing stimulus payments as soon as next week.

Although many lawmakers from both major political parties have said the bill would provide relief to businesses and households hammered by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, disagreements had sprung up about whether it would be enough.

Mnuchin said in a CNBC interview Monday that the package was “fabulous” and should see the United States through the other side of the economic recovery.

President-elect Joe Biden said in a statement Sunday that “this action in the lame duck session is just the beginning. Our work is far from over.”

In the CNBC interview, Mnuchin cited conversations with numerous business executives whose firms saw an immediate boost from the disbursal of stimulus payments. “The direct payments get into the economy very quickly,” Mnuchin said. “This is a large bill and it has a little bit of everything for everybody.”

Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., told CNBC on Monday that he opposed another round of stimulus payments, noting that many Americans have not lost their jobs during the pandemic but will still receive the government assistance. A bipartisan framework released this month excluded another round of stimulus payments.

Despite the breakthrough on the deal, market futures tumbled Monday as European countries implemented travel bans in response to a virus mutation in Britain.

The economic relief component of the bill would bring the total level of emergency government spending this year to over $3.3 trillion, illustrating the sheer volume of aid that the White House and Congress tried to use to address the coronavirus pandemic. In March, when the pandemic’s impact on the U.S. economy intensified rapidly, Congress passed the $2 trillion Cares Act. That law distributed $1,200 stimulus checks to more than 100 million people, created a massive small business aid program, extended money for airlines, unemployment benefits, provided rental and student loan assistance, and authorized a range of other programs.

Many economists say that law helped prevent a major economic contraction, but a number of the programs expired over the summer or later in the year, just as the pandemic began raging across the country again. After the November election, Democratic leaders also signaled that they would back down from their previous insistence on a giant spending bill after Biden won the election, expressing hope that he would be willing to pursue another package in early 2021.

The massive bill spotlights how many things were left unresolved by Congress and the White House this year, particularly as political brawls dominated Washington in the months leading up to the election. Many of the tax provisions inserted into the bill have to deal with expiring provisions that lawmakers have had all year to tackle. And they have had months to vote on a government funding bill to keep agencies operating through September, but those talks bogged down into debates about immigration, and lawmakers from both parties dug in before the Nov. 3 election.

The stimulus component was debated for months and led to numerous fights between the White House and congressional leaders. House Democrats passed a $3.4 trillion measure in May that the White House and Senate Republicans largely dismissed. There was an effort to revive talks in July and August, but those also went nowhere amid a fight over whether to extend aid to states and cities.

The stimulus talks were revived in recent weeks after a bipartisan group of mostly rank-and-file lawmakers in the House and the Senate tried to push a more tailored bill into law, worried about what a new surge of coronavirus cases might mean for the economy. They decided to cut out two of the more divisive provisions to secure a broader agreement.

These include a demand from Democrats for more money for cities and states. That money that Democrats wanted was largely stripped out of the final bill. As was a push by many Republicans that companies have broad protection from employee-led lawsuits and regulatory actions if there are outbreaks at workplaces. Fights over those measures are expected to continue in 2021.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

Yellen pressed to back strong dollar in reversing Trump-era tone (nationthailand.com)

Yellen pressed to back strong dollar in reversing Trump-era tone

InternationalDec 22. 2020Janet Yellen, former chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, on Aug. 22, 2019, at the Jackson Hole economic symposium, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, in Moran, Wyo. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by David Paul Morris 

By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Saleha Mohsin, Liz Capo McCormick

Janet Yellen once touted the benefits of a weaker greenback for exports, but as the incoming treasury secretary, she faces pressure to return the U.S. to a “strong-dollar” policy — and may cause trembles on Wall Street if she doesn’t.

The greenback’s tumble this year — it’s heading for the second-biggest drop in the past decade — has already stoked foreign policymakers’ concerns, thanks to the competitive advantage it gives the U.S. Even a tacit endorsement of a weakening dollar could spur tensions with trading partners.

Yellen, President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for Treasury chief, if confirmed will take office about a month after her predecessor labeled two countries as currency manipulators and named 10 on a watch list for artificial interference. The moves, unveiled Dec. 16, capped a volatile period for currency commentary under President Donald Trump’s administration that heightens focus on Yellen’s approach.

The U.S. adopted a policy of favoring a “strong” dollar in 1995, marking an end to regular calls for other countries to drive their currencies higher. While the mantra did evolve from one Treasury chief to another, no administration from then until the Trump years communicated, as the president did in 2017, that the dollar was “getting too strong.”

While they sometimes did endorse a strong dollar — always from a long-term perspective — Trump and outgoing Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that a weaker currency would help American exports. Mnuchin also said an “excessively strong dollar” could have negative short-term effects on the U.S. economy.

It’s a sentiment Yellen herself has suggested she shared in the past.

As president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco in 2004, Yellen helped establish a view among investors that the U.S. central bank saw a weaker currency as a help in addressing the country’s current-account deficit. As the Fed’s chair a decade later, she continued to make that connection, saying repeatedly that dollar appreciation posed a drag for American exports.

A Biden transition spokesperson declined to comment on Yellen and dollar policy.

It’s the treasury secretary’s job to oversee currency policy, and at least two former holders of that title have urged Yellen to make clear she doesn’t favor dollar depreciation. That’s after Mnuchin went so far as to entertain Trump’s consideration to forcibly weaken the dollar in mid-2019.

“It would be unwise to appear actively devaluationist or indifferent to the dollar,” Larry Summers, who was treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and national economic adviser under Barack Obama, said last month.

Summers highlighted that the dollar’s dominant role in the global financial system puts the onus on the Treasury to manage its responsibilities carefully. Favoring a strong dollar is “prudent” for the incoming secretary, in particular given Biden’s plans for “expansionary policy,” said Summers, who is a paid contributor to Bloomberg.

Hank Paulson, who served as treasury secretary under George W. Bush, made the same point in a Wall Street Journal opinion column this month.

“Interest rates are at historic lows, and the federal debt is larger as a share of the economy than at any time since the end of World War II,” Paulson wrote. “It is critically important to bend down the steep trajectory of the rising national debt. Otherwise, the dollar will eventually be debased. Washington won’t be able to pay its bills.”

Those aren’t the kinds of concerns Yellen needed to focus on during her tenure at the Fed, which began in the 1990s as a board member. She instead looked at how the exchange rate factored into the economic outlook, and what the implications were for setting monetary policy. The following comments illustrate a consistent take over time:

– “We have a huge current account deficit, and that is a drain on demand in our economy. A lower dollar ultimately should feed through into more demand,” Yellen said in September 2004.

– The drop in the dollar from 2002 “will help to improve our gaping trade deficit and thereby offset some of the otherwise contractionary effects of the tighter credit conditions,” Yellen said in December 2007.

– “The dollar has strengthened quite a lot over the last year and a half,” Yellen told lawmakers in December 2015. “The strength of the dollar is one factor that puts – means that monetary policy for the U.S. is more likely to follow a gradual path.”

– “A stronger dollar does have a depressing effect. It creates channels through which domestic demand is depressed. At the moment, net exports – well, for quite some time and probably going forward, they will be somewhat of a drag on U.S. growth,” Yellen said in June 2016.

“Yellen as a Fed person can talk about the benefits of a weaker dollar with regard to inflation and exports,” said Brad Bechtel, global head of foreign exchange at Jefferies LLC. “But as a treasury secretary the typical stance is a strong dollar policy.”

The dollar’s exchange rate has been set by the market since the 1970s, and official comments don’t tend to have more than a fleeting impact on the greenback, but they are still viewed closely by overseas policymakers, along with investors – who currently anticipate the U.S. currency will drop further in 2021. The Bloomberg Dollar Index is down 4.3% for 2020.

The new administration’s pronouncements will be keenly eyed after the Mnuchin Treasury’s latest report on overseas foreign-exchange practices. For a quarter century, the U.S. held off on declaring any trading partner as a manipulator of its currency.

Mnuchin applied that label three times – for China from August 2019 to January, and, in Wednesday’s announcement, for Switzerland and Vietnam.

Switzerland’s central bank quickly rebuffed Mnuchin’s demand for it to scale back intervention in the franc. Taiwan, which is on the so-called monitoring list, said the Treasury inaccurately represented its foreign-exchange purchases.

On that score, Yellen has previously indicated a more understanding view of exchange-rate movements. In 2019, she said, “It’s really difficult and treacherous to define when a country is gaming its currency to gain trade advantages.”

“She will likely advocate a high hurdle both to express and implement an active dollar policy and also to be cautious in accusing trade partners of currency manipulation,” Daniel Hui, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. global foreign-exchange strategist, wrote in a Dec. 14 report.

Regardless of whether she actively returns the U.S. to a strong dollar policy or tries to shy away from any comments, Yellen is seen bringing stability and predictability to any comments on the $6.6 trillion-a-day currency market. She underscored the importance of message discipline when, as Fed chair, she called on her colleagues in 2014 to be mindful of what they said about the dollar and highlighted that it’s the Treasury that speaks for the U.S. government on the currency.

“By long-standing agreement, the Treasury speaks for the U.S. government on international economic policy and the dollar,” Yellen observed in the late-October 2014 Fed policy meeting.

More than six years later, that’s just the role she’ll be expected to take on.

#SootinClaimon.Com : ขอบคุณแหล่งข้อมูล : หนังสือพิมพ์ The Nation.

U.K. virus mutation prompts more travel bans and major disruptions at ports (nationthailand.com)

U.K. virus mutation prompts more travel bans and major disruptions at ports

InternationalDec 22. 2020

By The Washington Post · William Booth, Rick Noack

LONDON – The British government scrambled Monday to dampen the impact of travel entry bans from more than 40 countries prompted by fear of a new coronavirus mutation believed to have originated in England.

Health officials said they do not believe the mutation is more deadly or vaccine resistant, but evidence that it spreads much more easily has alarmed governments in Europe and around the world.

Scientists advising the British government estimated that the new variant was 50% more transmissible.

As country after country shut their borders to people traveling from Britain, the greatest travel disruption emerged along both sides of the English Channel, after France imposed a far more comprehensive ban than the border closures during the first wave of the virus in spring.

The short passage from Britain to France across the channel is one of the most important transport corridors in Europe. On Monday, hundreds of trucks backed up for miles, prompting concern that food and other time-sensitive cargo might end up rotting on the roadside.

British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s warned: “If nothing changes, we will start to see gaps over the coming days on lettuce, some salad leaves, cauliflowers, broccoli and citrus fruit – all of which are imported from the continent at this time of year.”

The hashtag #lettuce trended on Twitter in Britain, as panicked shoppers tried to stock up on supplies for Christmas and beyond.

In a news conference at Downing Street on Monday evening, Prime Minister Boris Johnson played down the impact of border closures and batted away questions about the need for a national lockdown, while emphasizing progress on vaccines. More than 500,000 people in Britain have gotten an initial Pfizer-BioNTech shot.

Johnson said he understood the fears of other countries about the new virus strain, but was talking to French President Emmanuel Macron – who is self-isolating after coming down with covid-19 last week – about getting the ports moving again.

Meanwhile, Johnson reported, the line of trucks idling at the Dover port had been reduced from 500 to 170. And he said France’s travel ban affected only 20% of the trade going in and out of Britain – freight carried by trucks with drivers, who travel by ferry or tunnel.

“Which means the vast majority of food, medicines and other supplies are coming and going as normal,” Johnson said, adding that British supermarket supply chains are “strong and robust.”

British scientists advising the government said Monday that this coronavirus mutation first arose in England in September, but it wasn’t until December that researchers saw how quickly it began to dominate. Today, 80 percent of newly diagnosed cases in London, for example, were likely caused by the new mutation.

A review of the latest data underscored “high confidence” that new strain has a transmission advantage over earlier versions of coronavirus seen in Britain, said Peter Horby, professor of emerging infectious diseases at the University of Oxford.

The scientists said that in nasal and throat swabs taken from patients, there appeared to be more virus particles present, compared to earlier versions.

Researchers on Monday also flagged early evidence that children appeared to be more susceptible to the new strain, although they cautioned it did not make the children more likely to have symptoms or become sick.

The new strain may make children “as equally susceptible as adults,” said Wendy Barclay, head of the infectious-disease department at Imperial College London.

Adam Finn, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Bristol, said Monday that the new strain was being tested to see if it might be more resistant to vaccines. “It is a matter of immediate interest,” he said, adding that predictions are it will “have either no effect or a minor effect” on the efficacy of vaccines.

In the interim, scientists said Britain’s vaccine rollout should continue as quickly as possible.

The World Health Organization sought to temper panic. Chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan said the coronavirus is mutating at a much slower rate than seasonal flu. “And so far, even though we’ve seen a number of changes and a number of mutations, none has made a significant impact on either the susceptibility of the virus to any of the currently used therapeutics, drugs, or the vaccines under development, and one hopes that that will continue to be the case,” she said.

Tobias Kurth, director of the Institute of Public Health at Berlin’s Charité University Hospital, said the decision by numerous countries to “pull the emergency brakes” and suspend travel with Britain is “understandable.”

But Kurth cautioned that the mutation is “certainly already in continental Europe, and likely in Germany.”

“We won’t be able to stop it,” even though travel restrictions may slow the spread of the mutation, he said.

French Health Minister Olivier Véran acknowledged Monday morning that the new variant may already be in France. Italy, the Netherlands and Denmark said they have identified the mutation among recently discovered coronavirus cases in their countries.

Mutations of the virus that share traits with the British variant have also been detected in South Africa and are responsible for an increases in infection there.

In Britain, officials on Monday announced 33,364 new coronavirus cases and 215 deaths.

With cases soaring, some stoked by the new variant, Johnson ordered London and parts of the southeast England into Tier 4 lockdown over the weekend, telling 18 million people to “stay at home” and only venture out to shop for food and medicine, attend medical appointments or do outdoor exercise.

The travel bans compounded the upheaval. They come less than two weeks before Britain is set to cut its last membership ties with the European Union. The two sides have yet to agree on a post-Brexit trade deal, and the disruptions on Monday provided a preview of what could happen if Britain crashes out of the bloc without one.

Johnson tried to suggest that anticipation of a possible no-deal Brexit offered an advantage when faced with pandemic-related border closures. “The government has been preparing for a long time for exactly this kind of event,” he said.

British Transport Minister Grant Shapps said the government was providing portable toilets for stranded lorry drivers and rerouting trucks at Britain’s southern port, where tens of thousands of trucks normally converge every day to board ferries or travel through the Eurotunnel to France. Authorities made contingency plans to deliver medicines by military helicopter if necessary.

Earlier Monday, French Transport Minister Jean-Baptiste Djebbari had tweeted that in the coming hours, in coordination with other European nations, the country would “put in place a robust sanitary protocol to allow traffic flows from the United Kingdom to resume.” But no announcement had been made by evening.

Even though the European travel restrictions do not ban trucks from entering the United Kingdom, industry representatives cautioned that few companies would be willing to take the risk of then becoming stranded there, meaning trade was impacted in both directions.

“No driver wants to deliver to the U.K. now, so the U.K. is going to see its freight supply dry up,” said Vanessa Ibarlucea, a spokeswoman for the French road haulage federation, according to Reuters.

Beyond the ports, many passengers were left stranded, as more countries canceled flights to and from the United Kingdom.

Beth Gabriel Ware, a British citizen who lives in Turkey, found herself stuck at her parents’ home in Kent after the Turkish government banned flights from Britain on Sunday. She had surprised her family with a visit after they had been apart for 10 months.

“I will be sleeping on the couch for the foreseeable future,” said Ware, 23.

Hind Mrabet, 21, who planned to move from Britain to Paris for school at the end of this week, now does not know when she will be able to cross into France.

“They seem to be making last-minute decisions that leave people in panic,” she said of the British government.