Direct deposits from the US$1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief legislation signed into law on Thursday by US President Joe Biden are to be made into people’s bank accounts as early as this weekend, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.
With the signing of the stimulus bill, Biden commemorated the one-year anniversary of a US lockdown to counter the pandemic with a measure designed to bring relief to Americans and boost the economy.
“People can expect to start seeing direct deposits hit their bank accounts as early as this weekend,” Psaki said. “This is, of course, just the first wave.”
Payments to eligible Americans are to continue throughout the course of the next several weeks, she said.
The relief package is to provide US$400 billion in direct payments of US$1,400 per person, helping individuals earning less than US$80,000 annually and couples making less than US$160,000.
Nearly 160 million households are expected to get payments, White House estimates showed.
The bill includes an expanded child tax credit of up to US$3,000 per child, or US$3,600 for each child under the age of six.
The US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is to pay part of that in monthly installments of US$250 or US$300 from July through December, adding a benefits distributor role to the revenue collection agency’s responsibilities.
Making one-off payments to those who regularly file tax returns should not be a struggle for the IRS, tax experts said.
White House communications director Kate Bedingfield said on CNN that the administration would avoid fraud in COVID-19 relief funds by exercising “extreme vigilance.”
“This is something, again, that President Biden has a lot of experience with, having overseen the implementation of the recovery act with less than 1 percent of waste, fraud and abuse,” Bedingfield said.
“It requires attention to detail, which is something that the president is extremely focused on,” she said.
KEEPING UP: The acquisition of a cleanroom in Taiwan would enable Micron to increase production in a market where demand continues to outpace supply, a Micron official said Micron Technology Inc has signed a letter of intent to buy a fabrication site in Taiwan from Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp (力積電) for US$1.8 billion to expand its production of memory chips. Micron would take control of the P5 site in Miaoli County’s Tongluo Township (銅鑼) and plans to ramp up DRAM production in phases after the transaction closes in the second quarter, the company said in a statement on Saturday. The acquisition includes an existing 12 inch fab cleanroom of 27,871m2 and would further position Micron to address growing global demand for memory solutions, the company said. Micron expects the transaction to
Nvidia Corp’s GB300 platform is expected to account for 70 to 80 percent of global artificial intelligence (AI) server rack shipments this year, while adoption of its next-generation Vera Rubin 200 platform is to gradually gain momentum after the third quarter of the year, TrendForce Corp (集邦科技) said. Servers based on Nvidia’s GB300 chips entered mass production last quarter and they are expected to become the mainstay models for Taiwanese server manufacturers this year, Trendforce analyst Frank Kung (龔明德) said in an interview. This year is expected to be a breakout year for AI servers based on a variety of chips, as
Global semiconductor stocks advanced yesterday, as comments by Nvidia Corp chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) at Davos, Switzerland, helped reinforce investor enthusiasm for artificial intelligence (AI). Samsung Electronics Co gained as much as 5 percent to an all-time high, helping drive South Korea’s benchmark KOSPI above 5,000 for the first time. That came after the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index rose more than 3 percent to a fresh record on Wednesday, with a boost from Nvidia. The gains came amid broad risk-on trade after US President Donald Trump withdrew his threat of tariffs on some European nations over backing for Greenland. Huang further
HSBC Bank Taiwan Ltd (匯豐台灣商銀) and the Taiwan High Prosecutors Office recently signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to enhance cooperation on the suspicious transaction analysis mechanism. This landmark agreement makes HSBC the first foreign bank in Taiwan to establish such a partnership with the High Prosecutors Office, underscoring its commitment to active anti-fraud initiatives, financial inclusion, and the “Treating Customers Fairly” principle. Through this deep public-private collaboration, both parties aim to co-create a secure financial ecosystem via early warning detection and precise fraud prevention technologies. At the signing ceremony, HSBC Taiwan CEO and head of banking Adam Chen (陳志堅)
RSS