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Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin moved Friday to downplay his department's decision to pull the plug on several Federal Reserve programs, saying there's plenty of money around to provide funding where it is needed. "This was a very simple thing. We're following the intent of Congress," Mnuchin told CNBC's Jim Cramer during a "Squawk on the Street" interview. After working together through much of the year on a series of lending and market liquidity programs, the Treasury and Fed found themselves at odds Thursday after Mnuchin said Treasury would not be seeking to extend a handful of lending programs instituted during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Funding for the programs is set to expire at the end of the year. They cover corporate bond buying, loans to state and local go...

Times of stress tend to amplify our human nature, including the way that we spend and save money. While stuck at home during Covid-19, for example, some might be itching to spend or take advantage of upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales — experts say that stress-shopping is one way we attempt to feel in control of our lives. Others might be more anxious about finances or worried about job security. Even when there's no pandemic, the way that people spend or save says more about a person than whether they have self control. Experts don't exactly know why you end up with a propensity to splurge or save, but part of it likely has to do with your family upbringing, says Scott Rick, associate professor at the Michigan Ross School of Business, whose research focuses on the emotional caus...

BRUSSELS: The European Union and the United States should resolve their trade disputes after US President-elect Joe Biden takes office in January in a "new transatlantic agenda", the EU executive said on Wednesday (Dec 2), laying out its wish-list for better ties. After four years of US President Donald Trump's "America First" agenda during which Washington imposed tariffs on Brussels on national security grounds, the EU is now looking for close cooperation with Biden on almost all issues. The United States and the EU "must work closely together on solving bilateral trade irritants", the European Commission said in a proposal to EU governments, noting that EU-US commerce accounts for a third of world trade. However, the 12-page document presented by EU foreign policy chief Josep Bor...

Pretty impressive move in the 10-year Treasury note yesterday; the yield jumped above 0.95% and is holding there this morning. That puts us back to nearly the highs we reached on election night. We haven't been above 1% since March. It wasn't just there that we saw some big bond-market moves; investors also piled into high-yield a.k.a. "junk" bonds and drove the yield on the Barclays' index down by the same amount as Treasury yields rose, about 10 basis points. That's a pretty big "risk-on" signal, as analyst Brian Reynolds of Reynolds Strategy pointed out; what's more, it's the second such day in a month of such combined moves (the first being Nov. 9th, on Pfizer's vaccine announcement). That means we've got a "cluster" now of risk-on credit days, which is historically a bullish thing. ...

After a down day for stocks in Wednesday's session, CNBC's Jim Cramer said the market is giving investors a chance to buy individual stocks now that Wall Street has broken away from the "tyranny of the index funds." "There's been a move to own individual stocks led by younger, often novice investors who've been captivated by a world of commission-free trading," the "Mad Money" host said. "It took me a little while to realize it, but the no-commissions — it's been revolutionary." The comments came after stocks traded lower for the second day in a row, with the Dow and S&P 500 pulling back from record levels as state and local governments put new restrictions in place to mitigate the second wave of the coronavirus and researchers continued to post optimistic results from late-stage vaccine...