A new wrinkle has emerged on Capitol Hill, and if lawmakers aren’t careful, it might turn into a rip in the fabric: a fresh government shutdown looms at midnight tonight following resistance to pass a continuing resolution, which was designed to give Congress another week to hash out an agreement on a new stimulus bill. Procedurally, Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) is filibustering the NDAA, which has been amended to keep the president from initiating troop withdrawal from foreign lands.
Never mind that this doesn’t have anything to do with Covid relief — if the government shuts down, talks cease on pandemic relief allotments, including Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA), which is due to expire the day after Christmas and currently funds millions of Americans out of work due to pandemic-related shutdowns at their places of business. Obviously, this is a precarious situation for lawmakers, some of whom appear to be playing chicken with a house of cards.
Market indexes are down as a result, pointing to the first trading weeks in the red all month. Perhaps bullish exuberance was bound to take a breather after climbing to all-time highs in anticipation of a post-pandemic world, but Congress potentially shutting down is not helping matters.
The November
Producer Price Index (PPI)
was released this morning ahead of the opening bell, with results mostly in-line with expectations: +0.1% on the headline was exactly the consensus estimate, while stripping out volatile food and energy costs (“core”) also came in at +0.1% — 10 basis points lower than predicted. Year over year, headline PPI is +0.8%, while core year over year is +1.4% — the highest monthly read we’ve seen since January, pre-pandemic.
These numbers were a bit cooler than the
Consumer Price Index (CPI)
figures released yesterday morning, which came in a tad hotter than expected. Year over year CPI prices have risen faster than PPI as well, both on headline and core. Generally speaking, however, both are gaining incrementally and not too far out of whack with each other.
Meanwhile we still await the Food & Drug Administration’s (FDA) issuance of an emergency use authorization for
Pfizer
(
PFE
)-
BioNTech’s
(
BNTX
) Covid-19 vaccine. A federal advisory committee voted yesterday that the vaccine’s benefits outweighed its risks, which likely means the FDA passage will be forthcoming. Delivery of the vaccine is scheduled to start within 24 hours of the drug’s passage. The vaccine has already been treating patients in the U.K. all week.
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