Bank of America Corp. CEO Brian Moynihan is calling for a federal stimulus package focused on helping those industries that rely on face-to-face interaction — and the people who work in those sectors — survive financially until after a Covid-19 vaccine is fully distributed.
Moynihan was the keynote speaker Monday for a Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce online event. The longtime Bank of America leader, a Boston-area resident, spoke on a range of subjects, including the bank’s diversity and inclusion efforts and the role that businesses can play in lifting people out of poverty.
Economists at Charlotte-based Bank of America project the U.S. economy should recover fully from the pandemic by the beginning of 2022, which is sooner than they had predicted earlier in the crisis, according to Moynihan. While a vaccine could be available on a limited basis as soon as this month, it could take well into 2021 for the vaccines to be widely distributed, he said.
In the meantime, the federal government should provide funding to the hotel, restaurant, airline and other sectors, including the nonprofit world, that require consumers to be physically present, Moynihan said. That should include large companies in those industries that are in need of aid, he said.
Workers in those industries should also have their unemployment pay supplemented, “to allow people to maintain a standard of living and allow them to keep going, so they're ready to be employed on the other side of this,” he said.
“We should have a stimulus aimed to help those people continue to get across the bridge to the other side of the river,” Moynihan said.
For businesses, such a package would differ from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act passed in the spring. Initiatives like the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) were open to firms in every sector.
A sequel to the CARES Act has been under discussion since the summer, but Democrats and Republicans have failed to come to a consensus on issues like state aid, liability protection for businesses and the size of the legislative package. Possibilities have ranged from the hundreds of billions of dollars, to the trillions of dollars.
Asked how large the package should be, Moynihan demurred, saying “I'm not sure it has to be as big as some people say,” but “it has to be bigger than the lowest numbers.”
“By the way, if it's not enough, we should come back and do it again. I think the debate about what it could be, it's not the right debate, the debate is to get the money flowing to keep the economy running,” he said.
Moynihan did, however, say that lawmakers should not allow concerns about the national debt to hold back the size of the legislation.
“It’s just not the time to be distracted by that,” Moynihan said. “We have to solve this problem to get the economy back to the size it was, get the unemployment back down. It's a human question. Are you willing to borrow from the future, to take care of the human question.”
He added that there’s still a lot of unspent money approved through the CARES Act.
As for new aid for state governments, “to the extent people spent money that was not planned for these (Covid-related) purposes, I think they should get some help," Moynihan said. "I am not a big believer that this should be used to cover up other fiscal issues.”