Jobless claims fell by 100,000 last week compared to the week before as per the latest Labor Department data. About 657,000 applied for new jobless claims last week, the lowest level since the pandemic’s first wave of joblessness hit the nation last year. In addition to jobless benefits Americans who qualify are surviving on one-time government payments of  $1,400 passed in the American Rescue Plan. Now, some lawmakers are pointing out that about 30 million people who are retired or disabled have not received their checks because Trump-era holdovers in the Social Security Administration have refused to turn over needed data on those individuals to the IRS. Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown and others have demanded that President Biden fire Social Security Commissioner Andrew Saul who was appointed by Trump. 

In other financial news, Senator Bernie Sanders on Thursday introduced a bill to close corporate tax loopholes and increase the corporate tax rate to 35%. The bill is called the Corporate Tax Dodging Prevention Act and would reverse a key provision of the Republican tax reform bill of 2017. Sanders also presented a bill called the For The 99.% Act which imposes a 45% tax on multimillion dollar estates. Those with assets worth over a billion dollars would be taxed at 65%. Senator Sanders presented the bills ahead of a hearing at the Senate Budget Committee which he chairs, that is focused on the inequities of the U.S. tax code. 

Meanwhile Senator Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday during a hearing where Janet Yellen testified, grilled the Treasury Secretary on why she has not taken on BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager that oversees a whopping $9 trillion in assets. Senator Warren is now the chair of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Economic Policy and the Finance Subcommittee on Fiscal Responsibility and Economic Growth. Warren challenged Yellen on why she has not labeled BlackRock with the designation “Too Big to Fail,” considering the potential damage to the U.S. and global economy if there is a crash. 

In news from the pandemic, the embattled vaccine manufacturer AstraZeneca released new data about the efficacy of its product a day after the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases challenged some of the figures it submitted for FDA approval, suggesting the company had cherry picked data. AstraZeneca resubmitted data on Thursday showing the vaccine to be 76% effective, slightly lower than the 79% figure it initially claimed. Covid infections in the U.S. have hit 30 million since the start of the pandemic and infection rates are disturbingly rising in many states after a decline and plateau. The race between virus and vaccines continues as 85.5 million Americans have so far received at least 1 or 2 vaccine shots. President...