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Here’s what you need to know about the impact of Covid-19 to navigate the markets today.
• U.S. stocks are set to open mixed but effectively flat on Monday morning, with
Dow Jones Industrial Average
futures dropping 24 points, or less than 0.1%, on Sunday evening.
S&P 500
futures also dipped less than 0.1%, while
Nasdaq Composite
futures gained just over 0.1% as investors ready themselves for earnings season to kick off this week and for a flurry of activity on stimulus negotiations in Washington, D.C.
• The White House might increase its offer for a new round of coronavirus stimulus beyond $1.8 trillion and could even propose a package bigger than House Democrats’ $2.2 trillion, Larry Kudlow, the director of the United States National Economic Council, said Sunday.
“Secretary Mnuchin is up to $1.8 trillion,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union, referring to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who has been the chief White House negotiator. “So the bid and the offer is narrowing somewhat between the two sides. President Trump actually has always said—I mean, I’ve heard him say it in the Oval [Office]—as far as the key elements are concerned, the checks, the unemployment assistance, the small business assistance, we’ve got to help airlines out, he would go further. He’s always said that.”
Even after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said he doubted there were enough Republican votes to pass a $1.8 trillion bill, let alone one with $2.2 trillion or more in spending, and Senate Republicans lambasted the $1.8 trillion proposal in a call with the White House, Kudlow claimed that if the Trump administration struck a deal with House Democrats, Senate Republicans would “go along with it.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) rejected the White House’s $1.8 trillion counter offer to her $2.2 trillion package on Saturday and said in a Sunday letter to House Democrats that talks are at an “impasse” on funding for nationwide Covid-19 testing, on top of disagreements she’s already laid out on state and local aid, unemployment payments, tax credits and child care.
• White House physician Dr. Sean Conley said in a statement late Saturday that President Donald Trump now meets criteria laid out by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “for the safe discontinuation of isolation” and “is no longer considered a transmission risk to others.” Dr. Conley did not say whether the president had tested negative for Covid-19 or if he was still receiving any medicine to treat his infection or symptoms. Trump held a rally at the White House Saturday, his first public event since being hospitalized with Covid-19. The former head of the Food and Drug Administration Dr. Scott Gottlieb said Sunday that “on the whole it is probably a safe assumption that [President Trump] is no longer contagious,” even if he continues to have symptoms and is likely now shedding dead virus cells, meaning he won’t test negative for Covid-19.
• The U.S. reported just over 57,000 new cases of Covid-19 on Saturday, according to data compiled by the Covid Tracking Project, the highest number since mid-August when the surge in infections across the Sun Belt was beginning to taper off. Cases are on the rise in 44 states and, so far in October, deaths have averaged about 700 a day, more than were reported during the worst of the summer spike, according to data reviewed by the New York Times
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Write to Ben Walsh at [email protected]