Following the enactment of the $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief bill, the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stated that Americans would begin receiving $1,400 relief payments in their bank accounts this weekend.
In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Yellen said, “We’re working hard first to get the direct payments out.” She has vowed to speed up assistance for vaccinations.
President Joe Biden signed the bill into law triggering help for families, businesses, state and local governments, and she made her remarks just hours later. On the one-year mark of the Covid-19 virus isolating Americans, Biden gave a speech from the White House on Thursday evening. The illness impacted negatively on the economy and killed more than 500,000 people in the United States.
Vaccinations at a rate of more than 2 million per day have begun to show signs of recovery in the economy. On Thursday, Joe Biden issued an executive order requiring states to make all adults eligible for doses by May 1.
According to Labor Department data released on Thursday, applications for unemployment compensation in the US dropped more than expected last week, to the lowest level since early November. Despite this, there are 8.5 million fewer working Americans than there were previous to the pandemic, many of whom have stopped searching for work and therefore may not appear in unemployment figures.
“This is a package that addresses the pandemic while still helping individuals in surviving the crisis,” Yellen said. “We don’t want families to be scarred by long periods of unemployment or being unable to work because their children are unable to attend school. We want to get the economy back on track and working normally,” he added.
A separate report released on Thursday, by the Federal Reserve found that US household net worth increased to a new high in the final months of 2020, owing to increasing stock prices and residential real estate values. Hundreds of billions in stimulus checks are expected to provide Americans with far more spending power in the coming weeks and months.
Yellen said, “I don’t believe we have overshot the mark” in terms of the relief bill’s duration. “I assume this package is the right size”.
