Why Nancy Pelosi may be acting like she wants a stimulus bill but really doesn't

Yahoo Finance's Rick Newman joins the On the Move panel to talk about the monster stimulus bill Democrats are planning if Joe Biden wins.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: And Rick, let's talk about your Word On the Street. It has to do with Nancy Pelosi and her strategy when it comes to the stimulus package. What's your take?

RICK NEWMAN: I think markets are missing what's really going on in Washington right now with regard to this fourth stimulus bill. So we're now one month away from the election. Joe Biden is in a strong position. And Nancy Pelosi knows there's probably at least a 50% chance and maybe higher that Joe Biden will win and Democrats will take control of the Senate. And we may have that outcome either a month from now or a few days or weeks after that.

So what is she thinking? She's acting like she wants a stimulus bill right now, but she doesn't. She wants to hold something out that she knows Republicans are not going to agree to. There are just enough trip wires in her $2.2 trillion bill that passed yesterday so that if this happens, Biden wins and Democrats take control of the Senate, Democrats get to call all the shots on stimulus spending next year, and it would probably be very early next year.

So if this happens, I think the Democrats will revive the $3.4 trillion spending bill the House passed in May.

So right now, markets don't like the fact that there's not even some compromise stimulus. But two or three months from now, we could have an even bigger stimulus, which, look, markets would like.

JULIE HYMAN: Yes, indeed, they likely would. Now, to end the show, I just wanted to bring everyone up to speed with all of the headlines that we've been getting over the past couple of hours. The latest has been the Notre Dame president, Father John Jenkins, has tested positive for COVID-19. He was at the White House Supreme Court announcement event on Saturday. He was not wearing a mask, this after we heard that Joe and Jill Biden have tested negative for coronavirus and that the president and first lady have tested positive for coronavirus.

Rick, we know that the news cycle is very short these days. But it seems like this story could stick around, in part because hopefully the president and first lady will make a full recovery, but they might not test negative for the virus for quite some time. In addition to that, even if some of the White House staff is testing negative currently, the virus doesn't always show up right away, right? So we could still get some more positive tests from some more folks.

RICK NEWMAN: Yeah, this has been an astonishing cavalcade of news during the last 12 hours. So what to look for during the next couple of weeks-- first of all, to my mind, one of the most important possible consequences of what's going on here is that Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump's Supreme Court nominee, she has been around some of these people who now say they're testing positive. If she were to test positive, it would probably delay hearings and probably a vote on her candidacy for the Supreme Court until after the election. Mike Isikoff was talking about that before and what a big deal that would be.

Second, Trump-- President Trump is not going to be campaigning for probably at least 10 days, at least not traditional campaigning, as you point out. If this virus drags on, it could be longer than that. That has profound implications for the election, with it being just one month away. So I think that is, for sure, a net negative for Trump.