Is Biden stimulus dead?

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Goldman with the note. By year-end, it’ll be back to secular stagnation. A tragedy for the US.

After negotiations on the Build Back Better (BBB) Act stalled late last year, the outlook for fiscal legislation is particularly unclear. While we think the Senate is very unlikely to pass a comprehensive bill similar to the House-passed BBB, a scaled down reconciliation bill combining energy/climate and perhaps a much smaller set of benefit expansions (universal pre-k and expanded health insurance subsidies) is still possible. However, at this point the odds of even a scaled down package look slightly less than even.

We expect Congress to pass legislation boosting spending in other areas. The most likely is research funding and manufacturing incentives the Senate passed last year as part of its economic competitiveness legislation. A modest COVID-relief package also looks likely, though the amount of funding would likely be small.

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About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.