Key Points - Mandatory ESG requirements could be an early priority for SEC chair nominee Gary Gensler, with increasing calls from within the SEC to require material ESG.
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As policymakers debate the scope of the next federal response to COVID-19 and the economic crisis, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projected a stronger recovery than it projected in July of 2020 partly due to previous relief legislation but highlighted the challenges to a full recovery. Without further fiscal relief, CBO projected, the economy won’t reach its full-capacity potential until 2025. Moreover, economy-wide statistics don’t fully capture the unmet human needs or extraordinary circumstances that COVID-19 created, so they aren’t an adequate guide for a full and robust response.
In a typical recession, fiscal policy aims to stimulate economic activity: when inadequate demand means emptier restaurants or fewer people traveling, fiscal stimulus can help return the economy to its full potential. But in a pandemic, the priority should be to limit the spread of the virus. Before pushing the economy back to its capacity and filling restaurants and airplanes,
By: Andrew Moran
A Reddit forum-turned-decentralized hedge fund is engaged in an all-out short-selling war over a video game store that nobody likes. The blank-check company craze continues with a record month for listings. The Dow Jones Industrial Average crossed the 31,000 mark. A tweet sent bitcoin prices up 20%. And the financial markets have entered only the second month of the calendar year! The chaos, the toxicity, and the volatility – is this normal market behavior? This is the stuff of nightmares when the Federal Reserve pumps trillions of dollars into the financial system and slashes interest rates next to nothing in less than a year. The U.S. central bank corrupts traders’ souls.