WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and more than a thousand party activists, business executives, union leaders and lawmakers celebrated the Democrats’ landmark climate change and drug pricing law at the White House on Tuesday afternoon.
But even as Biden touted the new law, rebranded this summer as the Inflation Reduction Act, a worse-than-expected inflation report sent the Dow Jones industrial average tumbling to its worst day in two years.
Despite the rough economic news — some networks carrying Biden’s speech live ran a ticker at the bottom of the screen showing the Dow’s decline — the president, in shirtsleeves and aviator sunglasses, was ebullient as he addressed the supportive crowd on the South Lawn, declaring that in this instance, “the American people won and the special interests lost.”
