Author: wazup

“I think we’re going to have an incredible following year,” Trump said from the Lincoln Memorial. “We’re going to go into a transition in the third quarter, and we’re going to see things happening that look good. I really believe that. I have a good feel for this stuff.” It was a classic split-screen moment for the Trump administration, with the president leaning so heavily on his economic message...

“We have to execute the last package. And the numbers are very strong. These are the small-business loans,” Kudlow said. “One hundred seventy-five million Americans have received federal assistance in one form or another. That includes the direct checks, of course, and the unemployment compensation and the small business assistance,” he continued. Now, he said, administration will “see what the re...

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...