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U.N. BOOSTS 2020 WORLD TRADE FORECAST. The volume of global trade this year will fall 5.6 percent from 2019’s level, according to the U.N. Conference for Trade and Development (UNCTAD), not the 9 percent plunge the group had predicted previously. The drop is the second largest on record, behind 2009’s 22-percent crash when the Great...

Starbucks is remodeling stores, expanding into suburbs, and deploying artificial intelligence to extend its reach deeper into consumers’ coffee habits, CEO Kevin Johnson told the Financial Times in a 9 December interview. The disruptions wrought by the economic shutdown and public fears of the COVID pandemic have only paused, not halted, the company’s growth, he...

The stock market was once considered by many Americans of all income levels as an accurate gauge of how well the overall economy is performing.  Those days are over. The widening gap between the top 10 percent and the rest of society has changed that view. Some 57 percent of respondents told a CNBC All-America Economic survey...

New York State will need to raise taxes to cope with the budget chasm left by caring for COVID patients and the damage done by the economic shutdown, Governor Andrew Cuomo said on 9 December. The speaker of the state assembly and the senate’s majority leader, both Democrats, have agreed with Cuomo’s assessment. Republicans in...

By December, 110,000 U.S. restaurants – roughly one in six – had gone out of business this year, according to new data released by the National Restaurants Association (NRA). Ten thousand closed permanently during September, October, and November alone, the NRA reported.  Of the eateries that have closed this year, 17 percent had been in...

Workers filing new claims for unemployment benefits shot up to 853,000 during the week of 30 November, climbing by 137,000 from the week before, according to U.S. Labor Department data. The weekly number of new claims was the highest in two months. Companies have been hiring recently but at a slower pace than in the...

One in every five working Americans – and one in four Gen X’ers, born between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s – expect to retire later than planned because of the economic shutdown, a survey by the Northwestern Mutual insurance company has found. A third of survey respondents have had to adjust their future financial plans...