“The stock market closing up on a day the nation witnesses the closest thing to a coup and/or modern-day civil war it has ever seen will forever stand as testament to the allure of money printing,” writes Danielle DiMartino Booth bracingly in her Weekly Quill commentary. “The Federal Reserve’s Jerome Powell has already committed to effectively monetize any and all government spending. One could argue, as investors clearly did Wednesday, January 6, 2021, that multiple medium-term threats to the economy have vanished overnight,” she adds.
With both houses of Congress, along with the White House, in the control of the Democrats after their candidates’ dual victories in Tuesday’s Senate runoff elections in Georgia, odds of additional relief spending popped higher. Indeed, President-elect Joe Biden on Friday reiterated his call for boosting the payments to most Americans to $2,000, from the $600 contained in the $900 billion stimulus bill enacted in late December.
Stocks Rise to Records as Tech Shares Recover
Investors look beyond U.S. political discord as Nasdaq advances after Wednesday decline A congressional exercise in the peaceful transfer of power devolved into deadly chaos when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol. Hours after the riots, Congress reconvened and certified President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Photo: Lev Radin/Pacific Press via ZUMA Wire By Updated Jan. 7, 2021 4:40 pm ET
Political unrest in Washington didn’t dent the stock market’s ongoing rally Thursday, with shares of U.S. companies big and small closing at fresh records.
Investors largely looked past Wednesday afternoon’s violent clash between pro-Trump protesters and law enforcement in the Capitol building, instead focusing on what the shift of political power from Republicans to Democrats means for the market.
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Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images
After millions of words, I never expected my life’s work to be reduced to an economic indicator. Yet that’s what it has come to, according to researchers at Australia’s central bank. And you can blame Covid-19 for this, as well.
In their quest to gain better and more timely insights into the economy, economists Kim Nguyen and Gianni La Cava of the Reserve Bank of Australia have constructed a “news sentiment index,” or NSI, from articles about the economy in major papers Down Under, Bloomberg reported this past week. They posit that news accounts not only provide a real-time indicator of the economy, but also have some “causal” role (their word, not mine) in shaping sentiment among businesses and consumers.