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Episode details

World Service,19 Mar 2020,53 mins

Emergency US economic measures signed into law

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President Trump has signed into law a package of emergency measures to deal with the coronavirus outbreak. The legislation provides sick leave, unemployment benefits, food and medical assistance to people affected by the pandemic. We hear from Louise Sheiner, a senior fellow and policy director at the Hutchins Centre at the Brookings Institute. The European Central Bank has announced an emergency bond-buying scheme worth 750 billion euros. The move came after panic selling of Italian bonds; we hear from Lorenzo Codogno, chief economist at LC Macro Advisers and a former Italian Treasury official. As market sell-offs continue we get the latest from Susan Schmidt at Aviva Investors. American car makers temporarily shut factories to protect workers from the spread of covid19; we hear from Paul Eisenstein, editor in chief of the industry site The Detroit Bureau. We hear how Italian life has changed after the country was put into coronavirus lockdown. Italy is by no means the only country where people are staying indoors to curb the spread of coronavirus. In the UK, from next week schools will be closed, which could pose a whole new set of challenges for parents, including Lottie Dunham, a project manager from Manchester. With factories closed and people staying home instead of driving their cars, there's been a noticeable reduction in pollution in some cities from Beijing to California. And in Venice the canals are clearer than they've been in a very long time as Vera Mantengoli a journalist at the daily, La Nuova Venezia, tells us. And joining us throughout the programme are Nicole Childers, Executive Producer of Marketplace Morning Report and Stepfanie Yuen Thio, joint managing partner at TSMP Law in Singapore. Photo of the New York Stock Exchange by Spencer Platt for Getty

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