Cool! 1.4 million unemployment benefits in the United States have been frozen! Biden: $600 is not enough!

The California Employment Development Department (EDD) said it reviewed about 3.5 million applications for unemployment benefits from people who claimed they lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic and found that they were "likely to be fraudulent," KTLA5 reported.

Nearly 2 million of those claims have been disqualified, and payments for about 1.4 million have been held until they can be verified. The EDD said it will contact applicants to tell them how to prove their identities.

California, the most populous U.S. state, has paid out more than 16 million unemployment benefits since March as a byproduct of the pandemic that prompted Gov. Gavin Newsom to order business closures.

EDD has been working hard to meet the needs of applicants, but due to many reasons including too many applicants, the backlog of applications once exceeded 1.6 million.

California has acknowledged that the EDD was defrauded of hundreds of millions of dollars in COVID-19 unemployment benefits, much of which went to prison inmates, including some on California's death row.

Last month, Bank of America, which issues EDD benefit cards, told state lawmakers it had identified about 345,000 fraudulent applications worth about $2 billion , though the actual amount is likely much higher.

This week, Biden plans to release an economic stimulus package worth trillions of dollars.

At the end of last month, the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate just passed a spending package totaling approximately $2.3 trillion, including a $1.4 trillion budget bill and an approximately $900 billion coronavirus economic relief bill.

The latter plans to directly distribute $600 to each adult and child, increase unemployment benefits by $300 per week for 11 consecutive weeks, provide more than $300 billion in relief funds to small businesses, and allocate more than $50 billion for the distribution, testing and tracking of new crown vaccines.

Biden said he would increase the amount of checks for individuals from $600 to $2,000. However, many institutions and media believe that the Democratic Party's advantage in Congress is not enough to allow all its policy proposals to "go unimpeded."

At the end of December last year, the House of Representatives passed a bill for an epidemic subsidy of $2,000 per capita, but the bill has been delayed after being submitted to the Senate.

According to China Securities Network, on January 11, the onshore RMB exchange rate against the US dollar opened slightly lower by more than 40 points to 6.4761; at the same time, the offshore RMB exchange rate against the US dollar fluctuated in a short-term range. As of 9:33, the onshore and offshore RMB exchange rates against the US dollar were 6.4790 and 6.4746 respectively.

On the same day, the central parity rate of the RMB against the U.S. dollar was lowered by 56 basis points from the previous trading day to 6.4764.

Hang Seng China Chief Economist Wang Dan believes that in 2021, the RMB exchange rate will be strong in the first half and weak in the second half. In the first quarter, there is a high probability that the RMB will rise above the 6 mark against the US dollar. There are three main reasons. First, the market is optimistic about China's growth in 2021. In addition, the interest rate gap between China and the United States remains high, and the momentum of capital inflows into China is very strong; second, the trade surplus between China and the United States is expected to remain high; and the weak US dollar situation is likely to continue until 2023 .