United States President Joe Biden has rejected a Republican proposal for a COVID-19 relief bill that would have seen $618 billion allocated to struggling American households and businesses.
Biden and newly appointed Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, dismissed the sum — just under the size of Bitcoin’s entire market capitalization — as insufficient for stimulating the economy amid the ongoing pandemic, Reuters reported.
Democrats voted along party lines in the U.S. Senate on Jan. 2 to push through Biden’s relief bill that would see the GOP’s proposed sum more than trebled to $1.9 trillion. Senate leader Chuck Schumer told reporters anything less would leave the country managing the crisis for too long. Referring to the GOP’s initial $618 billion proposal, Schumer said:
“If we did a package that small, we’d be mired in the COVID crisis for years.”
On the same day, the House of Representatives took a partisan vote on the relief bill renegotiation; democrats won 216-210, with no republicans pledging their support.
The Federal Reserve printed more money in 2020 than the nation had issued in its first two centuries of existence; total U.S debt nears $28 trillion at time of writing. That leaves the country with a debt-to-GDP ratio in excess of 130%, the highest in its history by a large margin.
Some posit that the Fed’s money-printing practices ultimately benefit Bitcoin by creating genuine fear, uncertainty and doubt regarding the U.S. dollar. Co-founder and CEO of the Gemini cryptocurrency exchange, Tyler Winklevoss, has previously expressed the view that the Fed essentially primes Bitcoin for a bull run every time it prints more money.
However, even a bull run may not be as bullish as it seems. The number of dollars created in 2020 was equal to almost a fifth of all the dollars ever printed. This inflation effectively robs Bitcoin and other associated cryptocurrencies of its buying power, since they are still valued against the U.S. dollar.
Biden’s…
