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By Robert Schroeder, MarketWatch
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Sniping between Senate leaders over the fiscal cliff helped send stocks lower on Tuesday, even as the White House insisted that talks about averting tax hikes and spending cuts are on track.
Tuesday afternoon, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said there was “little progress” made on reaching a year-end deal to avert the cliff and said that it would be foolish to hatch a fiscal-cliff deal that didn’t also raise the U.S. debt ceiling.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, meanwhile, urged President Barack Obama to “turn off the campaign,” and come to Congress with a fiscal-cliff fix.
Comments from Reid, a Nevada Democrat, helped turn U.S. stocks lower on Tuesday afternoon. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was recently off 58 points and the S&P 500 was down 3 points. See Market Snapshot.
White House press secretary Jay Carney, meanwhile, tried to soothe naysayers and said that any talk of budget talks breaking down was “wrong.”
Both sides are in fact ramping up campaigning on their positions as the U.S. draws closer to going over the cliff.
On Wednesday, House Republicans are meeting with several chief executives of U.S. corporations. Obama has a separate meeting with CEOs and met Tuesday with small business owners to stress the importance of cutting taxes for the middle class — but not the top 2% of earners.
Despite the back and forth between the Senate leaders on Tuesday, most Wall Street analysts are still pegging the chances of going over the fiscal cliff as very low. |
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