Yesterday, Steve Mnuchin got poor treatment across social media because of a misleadingly cut clip of an interview he did on television.
In reality, he is referring to the entire relief package, which has big boosts to unemployment benefits, and contains a number of provisions to help workers stay on payrolls, or to help them to retain up to two-thirds of their salary while they return home to tend to children who have lost their schools and caregivers. Mnuchin has been an advocate of more and more direct economic relief for American businesses and families in this crisis. And even though the term “bridge liquidity” he is using is a bit of jargon to most people, it’s the kind of jargon that shows he has the right mentality. Legislators in Congress have talked about moral hazard and bailouts. But “bridge liquidity” is just cash that is provided to a firm with good fundamentals to get it through an event it could not (and should not) have planned to endure: a global pandemic and government-ordered lockdown. Basically, Mnuchin has demonstrated he understands that, at the start of this year, in general, the balance sheets of homes and businesses were healthy, and that current business failures and non-payments do not render some “verdict” on the soundness of the assets or enterprises in reality.






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