Stocks moved up modestly this morning (modest considering the damage down in the last few days) with the Standard & Poor’s 500 up 0.99% at 1 p.m. New York time, the Dow Jones Industrial Average ahead 0.94%, and the NASDAQ Composite gaining 1.16%. The move seems to have been fueled by strong talk from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin that he and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would resume talks over the stalled (or dead as a doornail, if you prefer) next coronavirus stimulus bill that Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell testified in Congress yesterday was so necessary to continuing the recovery from the coronavirus recession. Pelosi and the Democrats in the House add a smidgen to optimism to the stew by saying that they were starting work on a $2.4 trillion stimulus bill. I’d note that $2.4 trillion is a big step down from the original $3.4 trillion bill passed by the House. You might be inclined to call it  compromise until you remembered that the initial Republican negotiating position was a $1 trillion package that was then scaled down to just $500 billion. By the afternoon, the stock market seems to have concluded that there wasn’t much there there in the morning’s “we’ll talk again” news.