ZZZ Obamacare 01 Feature

The Federal Reserve, the nation’s central banking system, could step up to start buying municipal bonds, which would help keep the market functioning. Section 14 of the Federal Reserve Act gives it the power to buy short-term municipal bonds. On top of that, tucked 500 pages into the 800-page, $2 trillion relief package Congress passed last week, there’s a provision giving the Fed temporary powers to buy any kind of municipal bond during the COVID-19 crisis. The Fed has never exercised its power to buy municipal bonds, but these desperate times may be the catalyst.
“Buying state and local debt, for years and years that just wasn’t on the menu, it wasn’t even something to talk about, and now suddenly they’re talking about it,” says J.W. Mason, assistant professor of economics at the City University of New York’s John Jay College and a fellow at the left-leaning Roosevelt Institute.

Two critical issues of presidential power have immediately surfaced as the U.S. government moves to disburse staggering sums of cash and authorize vast credit lines to almost all sectors of the economy.
Despite some safeguards written into the law, in an astonishingly brazen move, President Trump wiped them aside by virtue of his signing statement.
First, the President clearly wants to control the major disbursements, especially to business, despite the letter of the new law. Second, the President aims once again to challenge Congress’s power and use the Justice Department to undermine the will of the U.S. Congress.

The United States appears to be moving ahead with new proposals to tighten the conditions for American semiconductor companies to do business with Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies, with cabinet officials agreeing at a meeting on Wednesday to tighten things up.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday that the new rule would mean that an export licence would be needed if companies wanted to sell to Huawei many semiconductors that are produced by chip-manufacturing tools designed in the US.

This would mean that the US Commerce Department could limit the sale of chips made by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company to Huawei, for use in the Chinese company’s HiSilicon chip-designing unit. Reuters was first to report this last month.

There are also two important groups of Americans that won’t get checks: those who make little or no income at all (they don’t file taxes) and undocumented immigrants (you need a Social Security number to qualify). Additionally, the bill does not include any student debt relief, rent relief, or mortgage relief, nor anything about free coronavirus testing and treatment, nor about universal emergency paid leave.