US stocks closed higher overnight after Treasury secretary nominee Janet Yellen’s Senate confirmation hearing. “The world has changed,” she said. “In a very low interest-rate environment like we’re in, what we’re seeing is that even though the amount of debt relative to the economy has gone up, the interest burden hasn’t.”

She gave a strong node to President-elect Joe Biden’s fiscal package, to be unveiled next month. “The most important thing we can do is to defeat the pandemic, to provide relief to American people and to make long-term investments that make the economy grow and benefit future generations,” said Yellen.

Yellen described China as the most important strategic competitor with its “abusive, unfair and illegal practices.” She also said China is “guilty of horrendous human rights abuses” in response to a question on whether China had committed “genocide” in treating of Uyghurs.

In a last-minute proclamation, outgoing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo determined China “has committed genocide against the predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang”, and “this genocide is ongoing”. Biden’s nominee for Secretary of State Antony Blinken also said in his confirmation hearing, “The forcing of men, women and children into concentration camps; trying to, in effect, re-educate them to be adherents to the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party, all of that speaks to an effort to commit genocide.”