Biden’s new dawn: Illusion and reality
Biden is attempting to create a political framework within the US to wage war abroad. This is the essential significance of his administration’s aggressive promotion of the official trade unions, which are to be incorporated into a “national labor front” based on economic nationalism and militarism.
The IMF won’t let Venezuela access its share of new SDRs
Some Republicans in Congress, including Senators Pat Toomey and John Kennedy, have urged U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to oppose the creation of the reserves, saying they would reward Maduro, among other U.S. adversaries.
Five days before Congress passed the CARES Act on March 25 of this year, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Memorandum giving U.S. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin complete discretion to use $50 billion in the Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund (ESF) as Mnuchin solely saw fit. The Memorandum was dated Friday, March 20. On the prior Tuesday and Wednesday of that same week, Mnuchin had already used $20 billion of the Exchange Stabilization Fund to bail out Wall Street. As Mnuchin’s letter of November 19 to Fed Chair Jerome Powell confirms, he gave (or committed) $10 billion from the ESF to the Fed’s Commercial Paper Funding Facility on March 17 and another $10 billion to another Fed emergency lending program, the Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facility, on March 18.
— “Janet Yellen’s nomination to be Treasury Secretary is a win for the establishment and a loss for progressives and modern monetary theory proponents. So far, the Biden team is mostly establishment types, which should ease the concerns of investors who feared a more leftward tilt. Although we were skeptical that Mr. Biden was going to pick Sen. Elizabeth Warren for the Treasury job, that risk has been completely removed for now.” — Brian Gardner, chief Washington policy strategist at Stifel.
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— “She is well within the orthodoxy of the economics community, and I suspect that fact along with her familiarity will lead to a largely positive response from financial markets. More broadly, from what we have seen so far, Biden appears to be mainly choosing old Democratic hands to fill his most vital Cabinet and White House posts, people from the Obama (and in some cases, even the Clinton) years. Progressives had hoped to wield major influence in the next administration, but if Biden’s personnel choices so far are any indication, he intends to govern more from what constitutes the middle of the Democratic Party today than to push the envelope far to the left.” — Stephen Stanley, chief economist at Amherst Pierpont.
Related:
The Wall Street Journal Nominates Janet Yellen as Treasury Secretary
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