Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Wednesday killed the idea of the federal government creating a 50-year bond to combat the coronavirus.
“Here’s my idea for the 50-year: We’re going to be auctioning off 30-years and 20-years; buy one of each, and it’s the 50-year … we appreciate your efforts,” Mnuchin told CNBC host Jim Kramer.
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The treasury secretary also said that he expects the federal government would rely on medical circumstances when deciding on when the stay-at-home orders would be lifted.
“My expectation is we’ll be opening it up based upon medical conditions … that places like New York are going to take a little big longer, but there’s many areas of the country that have very little disease and have been very effective at combating this, so I think we’ll be looking at [reopening the country] on a medical basis,” he said.
In addition, Mnuchin said that the federal government could soon announce details for loans going to medium-sized and large businesses. The recently enacted coronavirus relief bill gave $454 billion to the Federal Reserve to create lending facilities, including one to help struggling companies with between 500 and 10,000 workers.
“We hope to have an announcement this week with the details on that and get it up and running as soon as we can,” Mnuchin said, adding that “we’ve been having daily calls with the Fed … It’s not something we’re just thinking about, it’s something we’ve been actually working on for the last week.”
