The Future of Energy, Tax Deductions Paying Out, and More

The world’s response to Covid-19 can “reshape the future of energy” for years to come, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday in its annual World Energy Outlook report.

The IEA report underscored that most important of all is how the crisis will ultimately affect the transition to clean energy.

Lawmakers are wrangling over a new economic aid package to replace measures from the first pandemic relief bill, the CARES Act, which have mostly expired. But there are corporate tax breaks in the law that will continue to flow for years to come, today’s DealBook newsletter explains.

Among other things, the CARES Act allows losses from 2018, 2019 and 2020 to offset taxes in the previous five years. This means that companies can get refunds for years before the 2017 tax cut, when rates were higher, based in part on losses incurred before the pandemic. And those losses can also be applied, in full, to future years, relaxing a rule that limited this practice to reduce the cost of 2017 tax cuts.

U.S. stocks climbed on Monday as investors looked to Washington to unveil more fiscal stimulus to aid the economy and hoped that Wall Street’s largest banks would post decent quarterly earnings later this week.

Optimism that more U.S. stimulus was in the offing came in spite of indications that talks in Washington had stalled again, leading the Trump administration to call on Congress to pass a less ambitious coronavirus relief bill.

When the financial crisis struck in 2008, corporate America got bailed out while Main Street got left behind.

This year’s pandemic-related government rescues are following the same script.

The last time, Wall Street titans received billions in government bailouts, while millions of homeowners lost their homes to foreclosures that federal assistance programs failed to prevent.