Biden Unveils $1.9Tn Covid-19 Relief Bill, Targeting to Raise Minimum Wage to $15/hr

According to Xinhua report, U.S. President-elect Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled a 1.9-trillion-dollar COVID-19 relief bill, which includes another round of direct payments to individuals, aid for state and local governments, increased unemployment benefits, as well as more funding for testing and vaccine distribution.

 

Calling the recently approved 900-billion-dollar bipartisan relief package “an important first step,” Biden said in a speech in Wilmington, Delaware Thursday night that “we need more action, more bipartisanship, and we need to move fast.”

 

“Just as we are in the midst of a dark winter of this pandemic as cases, hospitalizations, and deaths spike at record levels, there is real pain overwhelming the real economy,” the president-elect said in the speech to the nation.

 

Asia Wealth Securities (AWS) stated, from this point, Joe Biden’s US$1.9 trillion-economic stimulus package (American Rescue Plan) with the goal of helping the household sector and businesses to be able to cope with the spread of the COVID-19 virus, looks positive on the overall investment. Even the U.S. stock market will not follow much positive feedback due to the amount of economic stimulus measures which it did not go beyond the framework that Market consensus had previously expected. 

 

The focus of the stimulus is to (1) provide assistance to the U.S. citizens of approximately US$2,000 per person (2) increase the weekly unemployment benefit to US$400 by extending the assistance period until the end of Sep 2021 (3) Financial assistance to schools and educational institutions totaled US$130 billion and (4) a minimum wage hike from US$7.25 per hour to US$15 per hour.