Author: support

CANADIAN BUSINESSES FACE “L-SHAPED RECOVERY.” Canada’s small businesses will not see sales return to pre-pandemic levels until February 2022, and the hotel industry will not return to normal until 2029, if the nation’s economic recovery continues at its current “glacial” pace, warned the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) on 22 September. A new survey...

The CDC has warned consumers to avoid the usual crush of holiday shopping that begins on “Black Friday,” the traditional day on which shoppers push past each other and crowd together in store aisles to grab the season’s gifts of choice. Among the CDC’s holiday guidelines for sharing the upcoming holidays with the COVID virus:...

Landlords around the U.S. have filed at least 26 lawsuits challenging the federal ban on evictions, claiming the moratorium violates their property rights and places them under undue hardship. Seven landlords managing more than 5,000 apartments in Memphis, TN, are suing the federal government for denying them due process and pre-empting state laws. The National...

About 55 percent of all small U.S. travel-related businesses will either need more than six months to recover from the economic shutdown or will never be able to recover at all, the U.S. Travel Association has warned. Lodging and food service businesses employed one in ten Americans before the pandemic, with 95 percent of those...

As more people work from home, shop online, and avoid unessential travel, hotels, shopping malls, and office buildings are rapidly losing their value and their owners are scrambling to survive financially. Brookfield Property Partners, one of the U.S.’s largest mall owners, is laying off 20 percent of its 2,000 employees in its retail property division....

After talking with corporate clients, Amar Lalvani has concluded that business travel will not return to pre-pandemic levels “for multiple years.” Lalvani, CEO of Standard International, which owns two Standard hotels in New York City, says the Standard High Line inn’s weekday business trade – the core of its business – has fallen to a...

The economic recovery would accelerate “if there is support coming from Congress and from the Fed,” said Jerome Powell, Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, in testimony before Congress on 23 September. “The power of fiscal policy really is unequaled by anything else,” he contended. Although about half of the 22 million workers who lost...

The number of new applications for unemployment benefits has held steady through September at just below 900,000 a week, indicating businesses remain unable to hire back workers or are reluctant to do so before the COVID virus is contained. During the week ended 18 September, the number of new claims edged up to 870,000 from...

U.S. households added almost $119 trillion in net worth in this year’s second quarter, a 6.8-percent gain over the first quarter. About $5.7 trillion of the added wealth came from stock market gains (of which 10 percent of the population owns 87 percent and 1 percent owns 52 percent); appreciation in real estate added $500...

In August, U.S. home prices reached their highest median value ever, with sales equaling a pace not seen since December 2006. August sales rose 2.4 percent from July, totaling six million units, a 10.4 -percent jump from August 2019. The typical home remained on the market for just 22 days, compared to 31 a year...