Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said during an appearance on "Squawk Box" Tuesday morning that all businesses receiving $2 million or more from the federal 'Paycheck Protection Program' will be audited, while encouraging any major or public companies to return the money if they aren't a true "small business".
Mnuchin is doing damage control as it becomes increasingly clear that most of the hundreds of billions of dollars in public loans that could convert to grants public money intended to save the economy has instead gone to companies that don't really need the money, companies like the LA Lakers.
He also insisted that while giving federal money to states to reimburse their coronavirus-related expenses was undoubtedly the "right thing to do," the secretary said poorly managed states (like, say, Illinois) shouldn't be rescued from the poor financial decisions they made before the crisis.
“This isn’t just going to be a federal bailout of the states,” Mnuchin said early Tuesday on CNBC. “States that had specifically large expenses because of the coronavirus, like New York and New Jersey, it was the right thing that the federal government gave them money.”
After defending the administration's small business loan program, which has been plagued with issues from the very start, Mnuchin fielded a question on the Federal Reserve ahead of the central bank's upcoming post-meeting press briefing. Asked by Andrew Ross Sorkin about the "raucous debate about whether the Federal Reserve should buy stocks", the Treasury Secretary said he believes this is "highly unlikely", though of course he refused to "specifically comment on what the Federal Reserve should or shouldn't do."
"I'm not going to specifically comment on what the Fed should or shouldn't do in...