US Treasury’s Yellen says Americans earning $60K should get stimulus checks
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Sunday that American workers who earn $60,000 per year should receive stimulus checks as part of the White House’s proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.
“The exact details of how it should be targeted are to be determined, but struggling middle-class families need help,” Yellen said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
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Yellen said the administration was considering the risk the stimulus plan could cause inflation, but said: “We have good tools to deal with that risk if it materializes.”
Yellen and other administration officials have warned repeatedly that the danger to the economy would be going too small with stimulus efforts, not too large.
Yellen also said that it is too soon to say whether new policies or regulations are needed to deal with recent market volatility.
“We really need to understand exactly what happened and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is working hard to assemble a report that gives us the facts, and when we have them we can look at whether or not there were issues that need to be addressed through new policy or regulations,” Yellen told CNN’s “State of the Union” program.
A swarm of buying by amateur traders over the past two weeks sparked big moves in shares of companies such as video game retailer GameStop Corp that hedge funds had bet against. Some framed it as a battle between Wall Street and Main Street.
Yellen convened a meeting on Thursday of the SEC, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to discuss retail trading and whether the U.S. government needed to take any action on the matter.
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