WASHINGTON: Increased transfer payments and expanded liquidity measures aimed at companies should help buffer U.S. households and businesses from the worst of the economic crisis unleashed by the coronavirus pandemic in coming months, the White House Council of Economic Advisers said in a report on Thursday.
The report said the U.S. government acted with"unprecedented scale, speed, and coordination, surpassing past efforts to mitigate previous crises," and said it had helped ameliorate a stark economic contraction while improving expectations for a recovery in 2021. The U.S. government's Paycheck Protection Program, which provided loans that could be converted to grants if small and medium-sized businesses met certain conditions, had helped stabilize labor markets, the report said, with an estimated 80.6per cent of layoffs likely to be temporary rather than permanent.
In the retail sector, which lost 1.3 million jobs from February to June, for instance, nearly 83per cent of workers could receive more from unemployment than from working, it said.