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Washington DC
The House of Representatives was set to pass a $1.9trn coronavirus relief package on Wednesday and send it to President Biden for his signature, say Andrew Duehren and Kristina Peterson in The Wall Street Journal. Democrats prepared to push through new payments to households and other aid measures without Republican support. The “new aid has buoyed expectations about the speed of the economy’s recovery” (see pages 4 and 18). It also builds on the jobs data from last Friday that showed US employers added 379,000 jobs in February, reducing the unemployment rate from 6.3% in January to 6.2%, the lowest rate since last April. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of developed countries, now sees US output expanding by 6.5% in 2021, “more than twice the pace it forecast in November and the fastest expansion since 1984”, says Paul Hannon in The Wall Street Journal. That should help
