The Battle for $2,000 Checks

Here’s the S&P 500 lately: Four straight downs, three straight ups, three straight downs, four straight ups. At least, we’re on pace for our fourth-straight up day which would be another all-time high close for the S&P 500.

The Buy List and the S&P 500 are neck and neck this year. I’ll have all the details this Friday, on New Year’s Day. It looks like it may come down to the final trading day.

There’s not much economic news this morning. The Case-Shiller report said that home prices rose by 8.4% over the last year. The House of Representatives voted for $2,000 stimulus checks, in apparent agreement with President Trump. Now it’s up to the Senate to see what happens.

When asked whether the $600 payments were still on course to go out starting this week as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin previously said, a senior Treasury official said the department expects to make the payments on the same timeline he discussed. If Congress does approve the $2,000 checks, the department will then add to the already issued money.

In a statement explaining his decision to sign the legislation Sunday, Trump noted that the House and potentially the Senate could move to approve larger cash deposits. However, most Republicans in the GOP-held Senate have opposed even a $1,200 check.

Trump’s gambit caps a chaotic eight months of efforts in Washington to send another round of coronavirus relief. Americans waited months for more help after financial lifelines that aided them through the early months of the pandemic expired over the summer. Trump’s delays in signing the year-end bill may cost millions of jobless Americans a week of unemployment benefits after two key relief programs briefly expired.

Update: As I was writing this, the S&P 500 turned negative.

Posted by on December 29th, 2020 at 11:20 am


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