On Friday the Senate narrowly escaped causing a government shutdown amid disputes on a broader government spending package as well as ongoing negotiations of a Phase 4 COVID relief bill.
The FDA cleared Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine for use following an expert panel endorsing the vaccine. The HHS secretary said, “We could see people getting vaccinated Monday, Tuesday of next week.” This follows the UK being the first nation to approve the vaccine last week.
Initial jobless claims popped last week with 853K new claims, versus 716K last week and an expectation of 725K.
Consumer sentiment rose in the University of Michigan’s index across both current conditions and future expectations, defying expectations of a slight dip. The partisan divide, similar to what we see around elections, was stark as well with Republican-identifying respondents’ sentiment falling and Democratidentifying respondents rising.
Brexit reared its head again this week with the EU laying out contingency plans if no deal is struck and UK Prime Minister Johnson saying there was a strong possibility that negotiations would fail with current agreements ending at the start of 2021.
AirBnb and Doordash held their IPOs this week with significant pops and pushing 2020 to be a banner year for IPOs based on total money raised, driven by strong tech performance throughout much of the year.