Powell and Mnuchin Offer Starkly Different Views on Risks: Live Updates

Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, and Steven Mnuchin, the secretary of the Treasury, are testifying before the Senate Banking Committee. In prepared remarks, they painted starkly different visions of the challenges facing the United States economy in the months ahead, further exposing a rift that began to show earlier this month.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s decision to end a series of Federal Reserve emergency lending programs at the end of the year prompted a heated back and forth during a Senate hearing on Tuesday, with Democrats blasting Mr. Mnuchin as trying to undercut the economic recovery and Republicans applauding it as a prudent decision.

Mr. Mnuchin announced in November that he would end Fed programs that have kept credit flowing to state and local governments and medium-sized businesses and asked the central bank to return more than $400 billion in unused funds that Congress appropriated earlier this year.

Mr. Mnuchin, appearing alongside Jerome H. Powell, the Fed chair, at Tuesday’s Senate Banking Committee hearing, argued that lawmakers had never expected the programs to continue “in perpetuity.”

He said that Congress should reallocate the funds if they wanted the money to continue supporting the economy.

Fed officials have made clear during speeches that policymakers at the central bank were disappointed with Mr. Mnuchin’s decision to end the programs. Mr. Powell signaled in his remarks that he thinks the emergency conditions that warrant such programs still prevail.

Mr. Powell said he has appreciated the relationship the Fed and Treasury have had, and that while the decision about the funding was “entirely” Mr. Mnuchin’s to make, the central bank would have left the facilities in place as backstops.

He noted that the Congress gave “sole authority over its funds” to the Treasury secretary and that the Fed will give the money back, as Mr. Mnuchin has asked. But he also said that the programs are “available only in very unusual circumstances, such as those we find ourselves in today,” showing that he does not believe conditions have returned to normal.

Senators broke along starkly partisan lines as they assessed Mr. Mnuchin’s decision — which was based on a reading of the law that the Treasury secretary only cited once it was clear that President Trump had lost the election.

Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the top Democrat on the committee, assailed Mr. Mnuchin’s decision and accused him of “malpractice.”

“You appear to be trying to sabotage our economy on the way out the door,” he said.

Mr. Mnuchin defended his decision not to extend the programs, saying he negotiated the legislation that created them and insisting that Congress could not have intended for the facilities to be in place indefinitely.

“My decision not to extend these facilities was not an economic decision,” Mr. Mnuchin said.

He read directly from the legislation and argued that keeping the programs open would be forging a loophole in the law.

“I don’t believe that was the intent,” he said.

Republicans backed him up. Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania said that it is up to Congress, not the Fed, to figure out how to help “probably insolvent” companies and that the Fed’s emergency lending powers should not “morph” into something that serves as a supplement for fiscal policy — taxing and spending powers reserved for lawmakers.

Mr. Toomey said that markets are currently functioning smoothly, and while they could take a turn for the worse, that is always the case. Many critics of Mr. Mnuchin’s decisions have pointed out that risks are unusually elevated right now, as infections surge again and threaten the economy.

The chair of the Federal Reserve and the secretary of the Treasury painted starkly different visions of the challenges facing the United States economy in the months ahead on Tuesday, further exposing a rift that began to show last month.

While Jerome H. Powell, the Fed Chair, pointed to ongoing uncertainty over vaccine speed and distribution, the economic dangers of a surge in virus cases and the grim reality that many remain out of work while testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin painted a sunnier image of the economic recovery, emphasizing state and local lockdowns as the main threat to growth.

The contrast underlines the divide between two economic policymakers who, earlier in the crisis, worked closely as partners to usher in a sweeping economic response.

That cooperation has cracked. Mr. Mnuchin announced in November that he would end several Fed emergency loan programs, which are meant to keep credit flowing to state and local governments and medium-sized businesses alike. Now, the pair are voicing starkly different economic diagnoses.

Mr. Mnuchin touted the strength of the economic recovery and blamed continuing economic shutdowns in some parts of the country for impairing progress, saying those are causing “great harm” to American businesses and workers.

The Treasury secretary pointed to fact that many jobs have come back and said the unemployment rate had dropped far faster than many had expected. While he agreed that some industries, like restaurants, need support, he reiterated that any additional fiscal spending should be “targeted.”

Mr. Powell warned that ”the outlook for the economy is extraordinarily uncertain” given the ongoing surge in virus cases. He said the winter could be a “tough few months” and small firms might go out of business, even though the economy might rebound strongly in the medium-term as a vaccine becomes available.

“We do have a long way to go,” Mr. Powell said, noting that 10 million people remain out of work and that it is possible to both acknowledge the progress and pay attention to the remaining gap. “We’ll use our tools until the danger is well and truly past, and it may require help from other parts of government as well, including Congress.”

The Fed Chair reiterated that positive clinical trial results for several vaccine candidates spell good news for the medium term, but warned that there are still big risks on the horizon, including related to the vaccine.

“For now, significant challenges and uncertainties remain, including timing, production and distribution, and efficacy across different groups,” Mr. Powell said.

Their testimony came as a bipartisan group of lawmakers unveiled a $900 billion rescue package that Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia, called the “best effort” to reach a framework that both Democrats and Republicans can agree upon.

Asked by Mr. Warner if they believed this type of package was needed, both Mr. Powell and Mr. Mnuchin agreed some form of additional support was needed.

“It sounds like you’re hitting a lot of the areas that could definitely benefit,” Mr. Powell said.

“We all believe that there should be targeted, fiscal response,” Mr. Mnuchin said, adding that he would be speaking to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Tuesday afternoon.

As the busiest shopping period of the year gets underway, two of Britain’s largest high-street retailers have collapsed.

Debenhams, a chain of department stores with about 12,000 employees, said on Tuesday that the company would begin to close down. The company would keep operating to clear out its stock and then stores would probably close early next year. Debenhams had already gone into administration, a form of bankruptcy protection, in April but efforts to find a buyer for the chain didn’t succeed. JD Sports, a sporting goods retailer, confirmed on Tuesday that it had dropped out of talks.

It’s the second domino to fall after the collapse on Monday of Arcadia Group, which owns brands including Topshop and Miss Selfridge. Arcadia’s brands have a heavy footprint in Debenhams, selling clothes through stands in the department stores. Arcadia has appointed Deloitte as an administrator to handle its finances because it failed to secure a multimillion-pound lifeline. It said none of the 13,000 staff were being laid off but more than 9,000 are already having their wages subsidized by the government’s furlough program.

“The retail house of cards on the high street is in danger of collapse,” said Susannah Streeter, an analyst, at Hargreaves Lansdown. She said Arcadia’s brands were among the most prominent in Debenhams, “so its collapse into administration clearly put the frighteners on management.”

For a time, Britain’s fashion retailers enjoyed a golden period and were seen as a source of national pride. Marks & Spencer was a byword for quality for decades, while the Debenhams evening wear department was a middle-class destination for all of life’s major celebrations. In the 2000s, Topshop — once considered the jewel in the crown of Philip Green’s Arcadia — was a genuine style authority.

But all these brands have suffered for years. Fast-fashion giants from overseas, like Zara from Spain and H&M from Sweden, started selling cheaper, trendier clothes. They were followed more recently by online-only upstarts such as Boohoo and Pretty Little Thing.

Last year, Debenhams went into administration, wiping out some shareholders, and Arcadia entered into a so-called company voluntary agreement in Britain, where it closed stores and renegotiated debt terms, and filed for bankruptcy in the United States.

But the pandemic has hastened their demise. Lockdowns have twice shuttered clothing stores in England and accelerated the e-commerce revolution. Old guard retailers and department stores that were too slow to invest in their online operations have found themselves grappling with the costly fallout of real estate empires visited by fewer and fewer people. This summer M&S said it planned to lay off 7,000 employees.

“Like Arcadia Group, Debenhams might have stood a better chance had its footprint of retail stores been smaller, but they were stuck with too many shops, on long leases they could not wriggle out of,” Ms. Streeter said.

The world will start to recover only gradually next year from a devastating global recession brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, but the revival is unlikely to repair an income divide that is leaving more people around the world poorer because of the crisis, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said Tuesday.

The organization, in its half-yearly economic outlook, forecast the global economy would grow by 4.2 percent next year. Led by a massive rebound in China, the momentum is likely to pick up only after the summer.

Even then, most economies will be smaller at the end of 2021 than they were at the end of 2019. That’s because lockdowns to contain the pandemic have carved $7 trillion out of global gross domestic product, Angel Gurría, the O.E.C.D.’s secretary general, said during an online news conference.

“The impact is massive,” Mr. Gurría said. “In human and economic terms this pandemic will have been extremely costly,” he said, adding: “There is hope, but we are not out of the woods yet.”

The notable exception is China, which curbed the pandemic with aggressive quarantine policies. It has rebounded quickly and will end the year with growth of around 10 percent, said Laurence Boone, the organization’s chief economist. South Korea, Sweden and India have also weathered the economic crisis far better than most European countries and nations in Latin America, which have at times struggled to contain the virus, the organization said.

The recovery in Western countries especially is likely to remain fragile as governments continue social distancing policies and keep borders partly closed through the first half of 2021. It may also take at least a year for governments to fully roll out campaigns to vaccinate citizens against the coronavirus, the organization said.

The O.E.C.D. urged governments to continue shielding their economies from the fallout by extending financial support programs and strengthening national health care and social safety nets.

But even with such support, it said, millions of small and medium-sized businesses that are the main drivers of job creation are facing mounting debt levels putting their survival and capacity to invest and create jobs at risk.

The crisis has also worsened income inequality. Today, nearly half of all low-income adults in the 37 countries that are members of the organization have trouble paying their bills, while a third have had to get food from a food bank.

Their children have also suffered disproportionately. While the children of well-off parents have been able to plug into remote schooling fairly easily, dropout rates from online schooling for children in low-income households have been massive, Ms. Boone said, leaving them far behind their peers.

Mr. Gurría said the cost to governments of maintaining social and economic support programs is worth it if it allows countries to ride out the storm until a vaccine is widely available and business activity can resume.

“With the availability of vaccines there is an even stronger case for large scale support of the economy in the remaining months of the pandemic,” he said.

• Stocks were on track to reach new highs on Tuesday, extending last month’s rally. Investors appeared to be looking beyond what is likely to be a bleak winter — with rising virus cases and businesses trying to survive lockdowns — and focusing instead on the prospect of the potential rollout of vaccines next year and renewed optimism around stimulus in the United States. European and Asian stocks were also higher.

• The S&P 500 index rose about 1.4 percent in early trading, a gain that would put it back in record territory. November was the strongest month since April for the S&P 500 and the second strongest month since 2011, as stocks were propelled higher by relief over vaccine development and the conclusion of a turbulent U.S. presidential election.

• Investors’ spirits were lifted by the introduction on Tuesday of a $908 billion stimulus proposal by a bipartisan group of senators that was aimed at restarting aid negotiations.

• Stocks tied to expectations for more stimulus fared well. The solar energy stocks NextEra Energy and Sunrun — well positioned for a climate-related infrastructure stimulus push — both rose. The machinery rental company United Rentals and asphalt makers Martin Marietta Materials and Vulcan Materials also jumped on hopes for a new road building program.

• Asian markets rose on Tuesday after data showed Chinese manufacturing activity expanded at its fastest pace in a decade, and exceeded analysts’ expectations, according to the latest report from Caixin and IHS Markit. The Shanghai composite index rose 1.8 percent, the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong was 0.9 percent higher and the Nikkei 225 in Japan gained 1.3 percent.

• In Europe, Britain’s FTSE 100 climbed nearly 2 percent, while benchmarks in Germany and France were about 1 percent higher.

• The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development presented a counterargument to the optimism in financial markets on Tuesday. It lowered its forecast for global growth next year to 4.2 percent, saying the economy will “gain momentum only gradually” and China will account for more than a third of the growth.

• Tesla rose about 4 percent in early trading, after S&P Dow Jones Indices said it would add the stock to the S&P 500 in a single step later in the month. S&P Dow Jones had been weighing adding Tesla to the index in a two-step process because of the company’s large market capitalization.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris are set to introduce key members of their economic team on Tuesday, as they prepare to assume the White House at a moment when the economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic is slowing and millions remain out of work.

The nominees are expected to speak in detail about their biographies, continuing an effort by Mr. Biden’s selections to lean on personal stories to make a case for confirmation in a Senate where several Republicans have already promised a rough road for Mr. Biden’s picks.

Mr. Biden is poised to enter the White House at a time of national crisis amid the worsening virus outbreak. The Department of Labor and Department of Commerce have reported an increase in applications for state jobless benefits and a decrease in personal income. Coronavirus cases have soared in recent weeks, a development that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell called “concerning” in testimony before lawmakers on Tuesday, saying it “could prove challenging in the next few months.”

Mr. Biden has warned of a “very dark winter” ahead and called on Congress to pass relief to help workers, businesses, and state and local governments. Mr. Biden’s advisers are preparing for what could be another economic downturn in early 2021. But another economic stimulus package has languished in Congress, where Democrats and Republicans have been unable to reach a deal, though leaders of both parties have called for compromise in recent days.

A bipartisan group of senators rolled out a potential compromise plan on Tuesday morning that appeared to fit the contours of what Mr. Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, have said must frame any stimulus deal in Washington. They include additional aid to the unemployed and small businesses, along with money to help state and local governments patch budget holes that have been ripped open during the pandemic.

Tuesday’s slate of nominees and appointees includes several women in top economic roles. The selections, markedly different from Mr. Trump’s cabinet, which has been overwhelmingly white and male, follow Mr. Biden’s campaign promise to build an administration that looks like America.

He has chosen Cecilia Rouse to lead the Council of Economic Advisers; she would be the first Black woman in the role. Ms. Rouse is a Princeton economist who worked on the Council of Economic Advisers during part of the Obama era and on the White House’s National Economic Council during the Clinton administration.

His pick for the Office of Management and Budget — Neera Tanden, the chief executive of the Center for American Progress — would be the first Indian-American to lead the office if confirmed. Mr. Biden also selected Janet L. Yellen, a former Federal Reserve chair, to be his Treasury Secretary. If confirmed, she would be the first woman to fill the position.

Ms. Tanden has met immediate resistance from Republican senators who have criticized her for attacking Republicans publicly, including on her Twitter feed. She previewed the group’s likely emphasis on personal stories in a Twitter post on Monday, after her nomination was announced: “After my parents were divorced when I was young, my mother relied on public food and housing programs to get by,” she wrote. “Now, I’m being nominated to help ensure those programs are secure, and ensure families like mine can live with dignity.”

Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris are also scheduled to announce their picks for deputy treasury secretary, Adewale Adeyemo, and members of the Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey.

Mr. Adeyemo served as a senior international economic adviser under former President Barack Obama, and Mr. Bernstein was Mr. Biden’s first chief economist when he was vice president. Ms. Boushey, a top policy adviser to Hillary Clinton in 2016, leads the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a liberal think tank focused on inequality.

The introductions will follow a similar event last week, when Mr. Biden publicly introduced members of his foreign policy and national security team.

Nasdaq asked the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday for permission to adopt a new requirement for the companies listed on its main U.S. stock exchange: have at least one woman and one “diverse” director, and report data on boardroom diversity. If companies don’t comply they would face potential delisting, reports the DealBook newsletter.

If approved, Nasdaq will require boards to have at least one woman and one director who self-identifies as an underrepresented minority or L.G.B.T.Q. (Those categories are not, of course, mutually exclusive.)

It would be the first time a major stock exchange demanded more disclosure than the law requires, which Nasdaq’s chief executive, Adena Friedman, described as “an unusual step.” It raises questions about whether exchanges could use their listing rules to force action on other hot-button issues, like climate change.

To give Nasdaq-listed companies time to comply, they will need to publicly disclose their diversity data within a year of S.E.C. approval, and have at least one woman or diverse director within two years. Bigger companies will be expected to have one of each type of director within four years.

Companies that report their data but don’t meet the diversity standards would have to publicly explain why. Over the past six months, Nasdaq found that more than 75 percent of its listed companies did not meet its proposed diversity requirements.

Any potential rule changes would take months to come into effect: After Nasdaq files its request, the S.E.C. will solicit public comments. That typically lasts several weeks, and then the commission will decide how to proceed.

Nasdaq had lobbied the S.E.C. to make diversity disclosure a rule for all companies. “The ideal outcome would be for the S.E.C. to take a role here,” Ms. Friedman said. “They could actually apply it to public and private companies because they oversee the private equity industry as well.”

Nasdaq cites research showing the benefits of board diversity, from higher-quality financial disclosures to the lower likelihood of audit problems. “Diversity of the board is an important element of giving investors confidence in the future sustainability of the company,” Ms. Friedman said. “It’s not like we’re saying this is an optimal composition of a board, but it’s a minimum level of diversity that we think every board should have.”

Kohl’s, the affordable apparel chain, will install Sephora cosmetics shops in its stores beginning in the fall of 2021, the companies said on Tuesday, the latest sign of retail power shifting away from malls and department stores.

The announcement came after Target said it would host Ulta shops, which sell beauty products, within its stores next year. And it followed the bankruptcy this year of J.C. Penney, which has hosted hundreds of Sephora shops inside its department stores for more than a decade. Sephora, which reached a settlement with J.C. Penney over the shops earlier this year, said that partnership was scheduled to wind down in early 2023.

Kohl’s, which has 1,100 stores that are often located in strip malls, plans to open 200 “Sephora at Kohl’s” locations next fall and operate more than 850 of the shops by 2023. The Sephora shops are designed to be 2,500-square-foot spaces located at the front of Kohl’s stores, and the brand’s products, which include makeup, fragrance and skin care items, will also be available on the Kohl’s website.

Kohl’s has also given up space in its stores to Amazon in recent years, accepting and processing returns on behalf of the e-commerce giant, in an effort to attract new and younger customers into its physical locations. Sephora is owned by LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

• Arcadia Group, the British retail company owned by Philip Green that includes the Topshop clothing chain, has gone into administration, a form of bankruptcy, the company said Monday. It is one of the biggest retail collapses in Britain since the start of the pandemic. Deloitte has been appointed as the administrator. Arcadia, which has 444 stores in Britain, 22 overseas and about 13,000 employees, said it would keep operating during administration.

• Meredith Corporation has parted ways with J.D. Heyman, the editor in chief of Entertainment Weekly magazine, the company confirmed on Monday. A Meredith spokeswoman said that the end of the editor’s tenure at the publication would go into effect “immediately.” The reason was not disclosed.

• DoorDash said on Monday that it hopes to raise up to $2.8 billion from its initial public offering, in a sale that could value the company at as much as $31.6 billion, including all shares and options. It has set a price range of $75 to $85 a share for the I.P.O. The fund-raising goal, disclosed in the food-delivery company’s latest I.P.O. prospectus, signals the company’s ambitions as it begins pitching prospective investors. It was valued at $16 billion in a private fund-raising round in June.