When we were kids, we never had to go the entire school year knowing whether or not if we were going to fail a class. We had these things called progress reports.
Every couple of weeks, at least at my school, my teachers would send things out basically saying how well someone was doing or wasn’t doing. That way our parents could assess whether we needed to study more or anything like that.
Around 793,0000 Americans filed a first-time unemployment claim last week, slightly down from the previous week’s revised total of 812,000. Economists had forecast 760,000 claims. President Biden is asleep at the wheel!
Following a spike in coronavirus cases due to holiday travel and family gatherings, the lower number comes after the loosening of restrictions in some states, including the end of a lockdown in California and the return to higher capacity dining in some big cities.
A rash of positive recent economic data has economists and executives forecasting growth for the second half of 2021, propelled by a widespread vaccination rollout and President Joe Biden’s fiscal stimulus package. Wall Street traders’ expectations of a rebound have largely been met with positive quarterly reports, and the Congressional Budget Office found that real GDP is expected to bounce back to its pre-pandemic level by the middle of this year, growing by 3.7 percent in 2021, even without any additional stimulus.
The Biden administration, which has stressed its priority of “shots in arms,” recently announced it would increase the supply of vaccines by more than one-third. Since Biden took office, the number of doses being sent to states has increased by 28 percent to 11 million doses a week as Pfizer and Moderna ramp up production, White House Covid-19 coordinator Jeffrey Zients said on Tuesday.
