Author: wazup

That would be, by a breathtaking margin, the bleakest quarter since such records were first compiled in 1947. It would be four times the size of the worst quarterly contraction on record set in 1958. In just a few weeks, businesses across the country have shut down and laid off tens of millions of workers. Factories and stores are shuttered. Home sales are falling. Households are slashing spending...

But economists from a broad range of ideological backgrounds are encouraging Congress to keep spending to combat catastrophic job losses — and say now is not the time to focus on the deficit. They emphasize that the federal government can borrow at near-zero interest rates, as investors seek the safety of U.S. bonds and the Federal Reserve buys up tens of billions of dollars worth of Treasury secu...

Big hospital chains that see the most elderly patients have so far received the most federal funds; executives of the for-profit conglomerate HCA Health Care told investors this week they received a whopping $700 million. Health officials have defended their decision to use a formula relying on total Medicare revenue as a speedy way to push money out the door, but individual hospitals still don’t ...

POLITICO Illustration/Getty Images What’s coming? We haven’t seen an economic crisis like this since before WWII or a health crisis like this in a century. And an unsettling reality is setting in: We’re not doing enough to ease the pain on either front so far. Senior economic correspondent Ben White talks to Scott about the economy, coronavirus testing and more, and tries not to give h...

Last month, Square’s Dorsey prodded the government (via tweet, of course) to let his payments company and others in the fintech industry help figure out how to get Americans their money in a hurry. Schulman, of PayPal, says he pitched a business acquaintance, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, about distributing government funds via PayPal. This week, the Treasury Department approved both PayPal a...

POLITICO Illustration/Getty Images President Donald Trump is talking about reopening the economy — and slinging around old movie references. But mid-pandemic, what does “reopening” the economy even mean? White House reporter Nancy Cook talks to host Scott Bland about Trump’s desire for a booming economy even amid warnings from his health advisers, and why this is so complic...

The last-minute nature of the task force and the call set off a scramble among members to figure out what it was and whether they wanted to participate. Trump has also gathered leaders of the business community to advise him on when to reopen the economy, and that effort was criticized by some participants as being somewhat disorganized. Democrats are hopeful it’s a sign that Trump will seek buy-i...

The mass of jobless workers struggling to get through to state unemployment offices remained concentrated among lower-wage occupations, but it’s also starting to include middle and professional classes as quarantines and lockdowns spread economic misery upward. The International Monetary Fund forecast earlier this week that the U.S. economy will shrink by 5.9 percent in 2020. “Records are be...

The Get My Payment portal will also allow people to track the status of their payments. More than 80 million Americans have received payments since they started flowing last weekend, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in announcing the launch of the portal. To set up direct deposit, taxpayers will have to provide their adjusted gross income from their 2018 or 2019 returns, whichever they filed...

Moynihan indicated that Bank of America is in no rush to call its employees back to the company’s offices. Since early March, the bank has moved more than 150,000 people to work-from-home status and deployed 90,000 laptops, he said. Moynihan said the bank is stable, under control and “serving customers at volumes that are pretty remarkable.” For example, the bank helped launch th...

Feroli added that he thought activity could begin to ramp up slowly starting in June, “but not quite to where it was before. We do see growth down for the year by 7 percent.” This suggests Trump is not likely to get his wish, issued on Twitter on April 8, that once he enters the relaunch codes, all damage from the coronavirus will suddenly evaporate and the economy will rock once more. “Once we OP...

Stay-at-home orders have reconfigured daily life so thoroughly that many businesses have had to adapt in creative and surprising ways, even in sectors not staring down imminent disaster. Workers and employers in a variety of under-the-radar industries around the country told POLITICO about how they’re struggling or managing to change. Private investigators Stay-at-home orders have made many aspect...