WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The following is Tuesday’s status check of developments in the U.S. that can influence economic, health and political outcomes.
- First, it’s worth noting China’s little lander is running around on the Moon’s surface, scooping up stuff to ship back to Earth, an incredibly complicated mission. And that Elon Musk says his Space X spaceship company will have an unmanned mission landing on Mars in as soon as two years.
- Does news of humans hitting the Moon again rival news that Attorney General Bill Barr told The Associated Press “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election?” A close call. Also in The Hill’s pickup of AP’s exclusive interview, the writer found it necessary to explain that AP was “a wire service whose stories run in newspapers across the country,” Thanks for that. The Department of Justice spokesperson Tuesday night said neither the Department nor the AP story said the investigation of any voting wrongdoing has ended. President Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani tweeted that DoJ has not yet done the “semblance” of an investigation. Finally Barr said that back on Oct. 19 he conferred the status of special counsel on U.S. Attorney John Durham so he can continue his probe of the conduct of FBI agents who probed Russia connections to the incoming Trump administration.
- Checking in on Fox News, Sean Hannity and guests were raging about, of course, Georgia election counting. Judge Jeanine Pirro said all the corruption in Georgia is why Republicans don’t want to vote in the crucial runoffs Jan. 5. The corruption in the state is “teed up to perfection,” she said. Later Hannity had as guest James O’Keefe, head of Project Veritas whose recordings of CNN chief Jeff Zucker’s editorial calls stretch over the past two months. . Recordings of Zucker’s conference calls with reporters will play throughout the week, the latest upgrade to the Fox-CNN media war. Hannity repeated that because the Biden team is “nuts,” that the president should pardon himself and his children, preemptive blanket pardons that cover any possible future indictments. Trump and Giuliani denied that such preemptive pardons have already been discussed.
- There’s nothing like coverage of a heavily redacted court filing about unknown people pursuing a shadowy conspiracy – “shadowy” meaning we don’t know what it was about – that has as its saving grace that it’s about the power of the pardon the Constitution granted to President Trump. The AP lede: “The Justice Department is investigating whether there was a secret scheme to lobby White House officials for a pardon as well as a related plot to offer a hefty political contribution in exchange for clemency, according to a court document unsealed Tuesday.”
- President-Elect Joe Biden formally rolled out his economic team, perhaps bringing an end to the headline regenerated every day for a week that he is picking Janet Yellen to be the first woman Treasury secretary. “Help is on the way,” he said. The tick-tock of each introductory speech is back on the afternoon’s #MaceNewsMacro Twitter feed but it’s worth noting that Yellen did make passing mention of addressing the nation’s long neglected “structural” challenges.
- Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell renewed his call for some quick additional pandemic relief from Congress in his appearance before the Senate Banking Committee with Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin. The Treasury secretary defended clawing back the backup funds for most Fed emergency programs as of Dec. 31 saying his was a legal, not economic decision, based on the language of the CARES Act. Both he and Mnuchin departed from the coronavirus to agree that any privatization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should wait until they are bolstered by adequate private capital. The FHFA is pushing Mnuchin to sign off on privatization a lot sooner, before Inauguration Day. Steve Beckner recounts it all in a story elsewhere on this macenews.com site.
- Senate Republicans came up with a new $332 billion ”downpayment” on a relief package, a bipartisan House and Senate group proposed a $902 billion package, and Mnuchin talked again with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, apparently mostly about the omnibus budget measure needed to keep government running beyond nine days from now. And Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell said any pandemic measure would have to be tacked on to the budget legislation since there’s not enough time left in the Lame Duck session to do anything else.
- On the virus front, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn was summoned to the White House and the most popular narrative was that he was being hauled in to explain why it is taking so long to give the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine candidate an emergency use authorization so that vaccinations of the “1A” group of front-line medical personnel and nursing home staff can begin. Hahn has been making it clear that no one at the FDA is “sitting on their hands” and that he is not going to short-circuit usual vaccine protocols to rush the process. American Covid-19 patients are still dying at about a one-a-minute rate and most states are still reporting record increases in hospitalizations. If Thanksgiving gatherings have generated an additional surge it should start showing up as soon as five days from now, intensifying in the next two weeks.
- Tuesday night stock futures were on the moderately negative side but during the day the S&P and Nasdaq hit new record highs. The Dow has not been able to retop 30,000 but ended up 0.6% to 29823.92. Upcoming economic data is light Wednesday, including the MBA weekly total of new mortgage applications and the ADP estimate of private payrolls ahead of Friday’s monthly jobs report.