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PayPal and partner Paxos, a financial tech start-up, will be able to buy, hold, and deal in various forms of cryptocurrencies under a “BitLicense” granted to PayPal on 21 October by the New York State Department of Financial Services. The license will allow PayPal to deal in Bitcoin, Etherium, Bitcoin cash, and Litecoin. Until now,...

Without $2.8 billion in emergency aid by December to “stave off bankruptcy,” Amtrak will cut as many as 2,400 jobs and delay crucial infrastructure projects, including the Gateway tunnel between New York and New Jersey and bridge improvements in Connecticut, CEO William Flynn told Congress on 21 October. After the pandemic and economic shutdown began,...

The state of New York, its agencies, and cities face a $59-billion budget chasm through 2022 due to the costs of coping with the COVID pandemic and the effects of the economic shutdown, state and city agencies have calculated. The $59 billion figure is more than half of the state’s current operating budget. The state...

Attempting to make a terrible situation sound better, although passenger traffic is down 60 percent, last week, the Transportation Safety Administration reported more people are traveling this month than at any time since March. American and Southwest Airlines reports reservations are moving up for the Thanksgiving and December holiday seasons, leading Southwest to resume selling...

About 200 of New York City’s 700 hotels are still closed, and those that are accepting guests have slashed room rates by an average of more than 60 percent, according to Al Jazeera. Most also have curtailed services, such as ending room service after breakfast and limiting concierges’ hours. October is usually a high-traffic month...

MORTGAGE DEMAND DOWN. The demand for mortgages slipped 0.6 percent during the week of 12 October, the fourth week in a row that fewer applications were filed, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) seasonally adjusted index. Applications to purchase a new home were off 2 percent; applications to refinance rose 0.2 percent, which is 74...

The economic shutdown roiled financial markets this spring, revealing weaknesses that regulators are working to fix, said Randall Quarles, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Vice Chair for Supervision, in a 21 October speech. The banking system withstood the turmoil well but non-bank sectors of the financial industry were shown to be “significantly more fragile,” he said....

Remember back in April, the month after the global lockdown, how economists predicted a “V-shaped” recovery, and the media was selling the line, “It will come back”? The economy did not come back. Any semblance of economic normalcy was created by the artificial monetary methadone injections into equity markets and the economy by the Federal...

Although the dollar is in decline, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s policy of cheap money and easy borrowing has strengthened the dollar’s dominance in the world economy even as China and Russia have sought to weaken it. As of 23 October, global entities from Nissan Motor Co. to Manila’s waterworks had sold $1.29 trillion in dollar-denominated...