WASHINGTON — The House voted on Friday to avert an estimated $36 billion in cuts to Medicare next year and tens of billions more from farm subsidies and other social safety net programs, moving to stave off deep spending reductions that would otherwise be made to pay for the $1.9 trillion stimulus bill enacted last week. The action, opposed by the vast majority of Republicans, would effectively exempt President Biden’s pandemic aid package from a deficit-reduction law that requires that all spending be offset by automatic, across-the-board cuts to certain government programs. It passed by a vote of 246 to 175, with 29 Republicans joining Democrats to support it. In passing the virus aid plan, Democrats used a fast-track budget process to push past Republican opposition, arguing that urgent needs brought on by the pandemic outweighed concerns about running up the national debt. But the maneuver meant that Congress had to act separately to prevent the automatic cuts, which would go …
More Consumers Complain About Errors on Their Credit Reports
Add this to the financial fallout from the pandemic: More consumers are complaining about errors on their credit reports , and many are frustrated when trying to fix the mistakes, according to federal complaint data. In 2020, consumers filed more than 280,000 complaints about credit reporting issues — more than half of all complaints received last year by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said Syed Ejaz, a policy analyst for Consumer Reports. The number of credit-reporting complaints more than doubled from 2019, according to the agency’s online complaint database . “They certainly have ballooned over the past year,” Mr. Ejaz said. Credit report errors have long been a problem for American consumers. Accuracy matters because the contents of your credit report help determine whether you can qualify for loans and credit cards, and what interest rate you’ll pay. Common mistakes include loans that have been repaid but appear as unpaid; debts incorrectly reported …
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The Tiny Bank That Got Pandemic Aid to 100,000 Small Businesses
From its address on the west side of the Hudson River to its tiny balance sheet, Cross River Bank is nothing like Manhattan’s Wall Street behemoths. But as part of the government’s efforts to stave off an economic catastrophe, it stands among giants. Cross River has churned out loans to more than 106,000 businesses through the Paycheck Protection Program , a centerpiece of the government’s $2 trillion CARES Act. That puts it just behind three of the country’s most prolific lenders: Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. Cross River’s size — it has a single branch, in Teaneck, N.J., and just a few billion dollars in assets — means it’s generally described as a community bank. But it’s anything but a small-town lender: Cross River has spent the past decade carving out a lucrative business as a bank for the financial technology start-ups trying to compete with traditional banks. When the coronavirus pandemic ground businesses to a halt, the government wanted to use banks …
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A Top Official Says the Fed Will ‘Grapple’ With a Faster Bond-Buying Taper
John C. Williams, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said the latest variant of the coronavirus could prolong the bottlenecks and shortages that have caused inflation to run hotter than expected, and is a risk Fed officials will assess as they “grapple” with how quickly to remove economic support. It is still too soon to know how the Omicron variant, which public health officials in southern Africa identified just last week, will affect the economy, Mr. Williams said Tuesday in an interview with The New York Times. But if the new version of the virus leads to another wave of infections, it could exacerbate the disruptions that have caused prices to rise at their fastest pace in three decades. “Clearly, it adds a lot of uncertainty to the outlook,” Mr. Williams said of the new variant. He later added that a risk with the new variant is that it “will continue that excess demand in the areas that don’t have capacity, and will stall the recovery in the areas where we …
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The Disconnect Between Biden’s Popular Policies and His Unpopularity
Over the past few years, many Democrats argued that there was a simple secret to electoral success: enact popular legislation. President Biden tried to make that theory a reality. He enacted a big stimulus plan, a bipartisan infrastructure bill and he’s made progress toward pushing through an ambitious $2 trillion spending bill that has finally passed the House. But so far, popular policies haven’t made for a popular president. His approval ratings have slipped into the mid-40s, even though virtually all of his legislation commands majority support in the same surveys. In poll after poll, voters seem to give Mr. Biden no credit for his agenda. They say he hasn’t accomplished much . They even say he hasn’t helped them personally , even though he sent direct stimulus payments to most households and even more to parents. If anything, voters say he’s made things worse. The disconnect between Mr. Biden’s popular policies and his personal unpopularity is a little hard to …
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Powell says Fed will consider faster taper amid surging inflation
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said Tuesday that high inflation has spread beyond areas of the economy most affected by COVID-19 and may prompt the bank to pull back on stimulus sooner. In a Tuesday hearing before the Senate Banking Committee, Powell said that stronger economic growth and faster price increases across the U.S. economy could push the Fed to taper its monthly bond purchases at a faster rate than initially planned. “We’re now looking at an economy that's very strong and inflationary pressures that are high,” Powell said, flanked by Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Janet Louise Yellen Schumer: 'Goal' is to pass Biden spending bill before Christmas The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by Facebook - Biden to update Americans on omicron; Congress back No deal in sight as Congress nears debt limit deadline MORE . He added it may be “appropriate to wrap up our purchases a few months earlier” than expected. ADVERTISEMENT Powell …
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The U.S. gave $3.7 billion in relief to likely ineligible businesses, auditor finds.
A rushed emergency aid program for small companies devastated by the pandemic improperly sent nearly $3.7 billion to recipients prohibited from receiving federal funds, according to a government audit released on Tuesday. The finding adds to a mountain of evidence chronicling what the Small Business Administration’s inspector general, Hannibal Ware, called an “unprecedented amount of fraud” in the agency’s pandemic relief efforts. In October, Mr. Ware’s office chastised the agency for improperly doling out billions in relief money to self-employed people who made “flawed or illogical” claims of having additional workers on their payroll. Its Economic Injury Disaster Loan program distributed more than $210 billion last year in loans and grants. The program was organized in a hurry by the Trump administration as millions of businesses temporarily shut down because of the coronavirus and was designed to quickly send out money to help companies keep up on their bills. But the …
BART faces ‘crisis without precedent’: $1 billion in lost revenue with few daily commuters
5 BART expects ridership won’t be close to rebounding to pre-pandemic levels for years and is grappling with “a crisis without precedent in our history,” the transit agency’s staff told its board Thursday. The pandemic is expected to cost the train system more than $1 billion in revenue losses through fiscal year 2022. Ridership plunged to 12% of pre-COVID levels under shelter-in-place and has barely budged for nearly a year. Before the pandemic, two-thirds of BART trips had an origin or destination at a Market Street station in downtown San Francisco. Board President Mark Foley said BART “can’t assume” all its five-day commuters will come back. Staff expects ridership to rebound to between 65% and 90% of pre-pandemic levels by fiscal year 2027. “The pandemic has triggered a huge drop in BART’s operating revenue, leading to both a near-term fiscal crisis and extraordinary uncertainty for the years ahead,” BART’s financial planning …
Dystopia, ‘she-cession,’ TikTok dances: We’re over you, 2021
The pandemic, politics, pervasive anxiety over the climate and the economy. Did 2021 leave us any time to ponder anything else? As we limp our way into a new year, there are a few more things we'd like to leave behind, from pop culture's obsession with all things apocalyptic to the well meaning but exhausting lay dancers on TikTok A list of what we're over as we look for renewal and hope in 2022: DYSTOPIA PALOOZA War, destruction, disaster: Popular entertainment has certainly reflected, expanded upon and imagined the very doom of it all. But must it continue at the same rapid clip? The latest, “Squid Game,” was a huge score for Netflix. Its creator can't imagine a future without a second season of the deadly Korean series. Fans rejoiced. Dystopia is merely one genre, however, one storytelling technique. Would we not benefit from an equally heavy dose of stories that focus on solutions and, dare we say it, inspiration? We're talking that middle ground between zombies and “The …
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Biden Meets With Capito as Deadline for Infrastructure Deal Looms
WASHINGTON — Nearing a self-imposed deadline for a bipartisan infrastructure deal, President Biden met again on Wednesday with the lead Republican negotiator to try to resolve major differences over the size, structure and financing of an expansive public-works plan. The roughly hourlong meeting in the Oval Office between Mr. Biden and Senator Shelley Moore Capito , Republican of West Virginia, did not end with any public breakthroughs, but they agreed to continue their discussions on Friday. The two were pressing to find a compromise before Congress returns next week, when Democratic leaders and administration officials have suggested they want to see clear movement toward a bipartisan deal, or they may begin pursuing their own plan without Republicans. The latest talks came days after Ms. Capito and other Republicans proposed an overall $928 billion infrastructure package that would include about $257 billion in new funding for roads, bridges and other physical projects, …
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