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​Millions of Americans who qualify for coronavirus relief funds could see payments as soon as next week, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Monday. “The good news is this is a very, very fast way of getting money into the economy. Let me emphasize: People are going to see this money at the beginning of next week,” he said on CNBC. Mnuchin encouraged people who receive the payments — which could be as much as $600 — to spend the money and give the economy a much-needed boost.

We live in a bizarro world where the ECB, Japan, Turkey, and China - which explicitly manipulate their currencies for economic and political reasons - do not "manipulate" their currencies... but Vietnam and Switzerland do. At least that's the opinion of the Treasury's Department which spared China the currency manipulator label again but in its semi-annual currency manipulation report found that Switzerland and Vietnam were "currency manipulators" and added three new names to a watch list of countries it suspects of taking measures to devalue their currencies against the dollar.In what Reuters said "may be one of the final broadsides...

Former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen will serve as the 78th Treasury Secretary of the U.S., the Wall Street Journal reported Monday afternoon, citing people familiar with President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team. Yellen, 74, will have her work cut out for her, with the U.S. economy in the midst of the deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression. But Yellen’s deep experience with macroeconomics, in addition to her familiarity with the inner workings of Washington, could prove to be useful tools as the Biden administration takes a swing at a fiscal response to the crisis. If confirmed, Yellen will be...

House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jim Jordan (R-OH) on Wednesday, during a contentious exchange at a hearing, asked fellow committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) why his wife, a former Treasury Department official, unmasked Michael Flynn. Jordan had just finished questioning Google CEO Sundar Pichai over the search engine’s bias against conservatives and whether he would commit to not interfering in the upcoming election to help Joe Biden. After Jordan finished his questioning, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon (D-PA) called his concerns “fringe conspiracy theories.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury Department on Tuesday issued a new license to Chevron Corp, the last major U.S. oil company still operating in Venezuela, giving it until June 3 to wind down its joint ventures in the OPEC member nation. The United States last year imposed sanctions barring imports of Venezuelan oil and transactions made in U.S. dollars with Venezuela's state-run oil company PDVSA, a move designed to starve the country of oil dollars and oust socialist President Nicolas Maduro. Chevron has had a special U.S. operating license exempting it from sanctions on Venezuela's vital oil sector since...

Former Fed Chair Janet Yellen appears to be front-runner for Treasury secretary under a Biden administration, The American Prospect reports.Her credentials as a former head of the Fed, before Trump named Jerome Powell to the post, would make it hard for Senate Republicans to block, writes American Prospect's Robert Kuttner, a professor at Brandeis University's Heller School.Also, "Yellen is just liberal enough for the liberals, just conservative enough for Wall Street," Kuttner wrote.Recently, Yellen has been sounding more dovish than she did before she left the Fed.Lael Brainard, a member of the Fed's board of governors, has also been considered...

In the short term, should Joe Biden win the election and move into the White House, he would take office with a Democratic Party unified in its opposition to all things Trump. The question is how long would that last before leaders of every liberal interest group circling the new administration begin to get restless. In answer to this question, Carter Eskew, a top strategist on Al Gore’s 2000 campaign, wrote by email that Biden became a unity candidate in response to an overwhelming, almost feral desire to limit Trump’s damage to one term. When Trump leaves, Democratic unity, I...

Senate panels investigating whether law enforcement, US intel turned blind eye to concerns. A Treasury Department agency that polices financial threats such as money laundering flagged several foreign transactions to Hunter Biden-connected businesses as “suspicious” during the end of the Obama administration and the beginning of the Trump administration. The concerns from the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) concerns were highlighted in Suspicious Activity Reports turned over to Senate committees over the last year in conjunction with investigations into the Russia and Ukraine scandals, according to several officials familiar with the evidence. As those Senate investigations wind toward the issuance...

(CNN)The Treasury Department has so far withheld in 2020 approximately $1.5 million from a New York City Fire Department health care program for those who worked at Ground Zero following the September 11 terrorist attacks, according to letters from New York Rep. Peter King. The Republican congressman wrote to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in June and on September 10, urging him to reimburse the FDNY's World Trade Center Health Program for its services. He wrote that the department apparently withheld the funding due to "a range of issues dealing with different New York City offices and programs that have nothing...

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Saturday that Republicans were set to roll out the next COVID-19 aid package Monday and assured there was backing from the White House after he and President Donald Trump's top aide met to salvage the $1 trillion proposal that had floundered just days before. Mnuchin told reporters at the Capitol that extending an expiring unemployment benefit - but reducing it substantially - was a top priority for Trump. The secretary called the $600 weekly aid “ridiculous” and a disincentive for people to go back to work. He also promised a fresh round of $1,200 stimulus...

June 30 (UPI) -- The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service say the tax filing deadline won't be extended beyond July 15. The normal April 15 deadline was postponed to July to help taxpayers facing hardship due to the coronvirus pandemic. There have been some calls for another extension, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the agencies mulled delaying it until September. "The IRS understands that those affected by the coronavirus may not be able to pay their balances in full by July 15, but we have many payment options to help taxpayers," IRS Commissioner Chuck Rettig said in a...

NEW YORK - Investors expect robust demand for the Treasury Department’s new $20 billion issue of 20-year bonds, set to launch Wednesday, from U.S. institutions, foreign investors and other market participants. The government’s borrowing needs have jumped dramatically in recent weeks, after Congress authorized trillions in spending to fend off an economic hit from the coronavirus pandemic, which has slammed U.S. growth. The U.S. plans to sell a total of $54 billion of the 20-year bonds over the next three months. The Treasury said earlier this month it intends to increase auction sizes across all nominal coupon tenors over the...

President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department regularly surveilled retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn’s financial records and transactions beginning in December 2015 and well into 2017, before, during and after when he served at the White House as President Donald Trump’s National Security Director, a former senior Treasury Department official, and veteran of the intelligence community, told the Star Newspapers. ... Only two names are listed in the whistleblower’s official paperwork, so the others must remain sealed, she said. The second name is Paul J. Manafort Jr., the one-time chairman of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. The other names include: Members...

President Barack Obama’s Treasury Department regularly surveilled retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn’s financial records and transactions beginning in December 2015 and well into 2017, before, during and after when he served at the White House as President Donald Trump’s National Security Director, a former senior Treasury Department official, and veteran of the intelligence community, told the Star Newspapers. “I started seeing things that were not correct, so I did my own little investigation, because I wanted to make sure what I was seeing was correct” she said. “You never want to draw attention to something if there is...

<p>Even the top federal agencies in the country couldn't find a clear-cut cause that triggered the whiplash in the U.S. Treasury bond market last October 15. The conclusion came from a report published Monday by five federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve and Securities and Exchange Commission.</p>

The Federal Reserve has offered more than $3 trillion in loans and asset purchases in recent weeks to stop the U.S. financial system from seizing up, but it has not yet directly helped large swaths of the real economy: companies, municipalities and other borrowers with less than perfect credit. That is partly because America’s central bank is not allowed to take much credit risk itself, and loans to lower-rated borrowers have a higher chance of losses. The risk is exacerbated by the spread of coronavirus which have brought economic activity to a screeching halt. To alleviate that constraint, the U.S....

According to the U.S. Treasury, as of February 29, 2020, there was $16.9 trillion in marketable U.S. Treasury securities outstanding. Of that amount, at the end of February, the Federal Reserve held $2.47 trillion or 14.6 percent – making it, by far, the largest single holder of U.S. Treasuries anywhere in the world. ...But exactly how can a so-called “free market” function smoothly if the country’s own central bank is cornering the market. Salomon Brothers paid a $290 million fine and came close to getting slapped with criminal charges by the U.S. Department of Justice in 1992 for manipulating prices...

axpayers will get a three-month reprieve to pay the income taxes they owe for 2019, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Tuesday at a news conference. As part of its coronavirus response, the federal government will give filers 90 days to pay income taxes due on up to $1 million in tax owed, Mnuchin said in Washington. The reprieve on that amount would cover many pass-through entities and small businesses, he said. Corporate filers would get the same length of time to pay amounts due on up to $10 million in taxes owed, Mnuchin said. During that three-month deferral period,...

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration has temporarily shelved a proposed rule change that would further restrict American sales to Huawei, the Chinese telecom giant, after some officials in the Defense Department and other agencies argued that the measure, which was intended to protect national security, could actually undermine it, according to people familiar with the matter. The rule change, which multiple government agencies were reviewing, would close a loophole that allowed technology companies like Intel and Micron to continue shipping chips, software and other products to Huawei despite a ban that prevented the Chinese company from buying some American products....

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates rejected the idea of voluntarily donating to the U.S. Treasury after calling for the U.S. government to raise taxes on the wealthy. "When I say the government needs to raise more money, some people ask why Melinda and I don’t voluntarily pay more in taxes than the law requires," Gates, the second-richest person in the world, wrote in a recent blog post. "The answer is that simply leaving it up to people to give more than the government asks for is not a scalable solution. People pay taxes as an obligation of law and citizenship, not...