Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

The COVID War has sped retailers’ conversion to automation, permanently dooming many of the 1.7 million jobs in leisure and hospitality and 270,000 retail slots that disappeared during 2020’s economic crisis. The Toast restaurant group and other eateries are moving to order management software that lets diners order from their tables over their phones instead...

The wave of diners returning to U.S. restaurants this summer has receded, leaving the industry dealing with labor shortages, rising prices for scarce supplies, and would-be customers who have chosen to bunker at home again amid the surging Delta virus, as we reported in “Worker Shortages, Virus Hobble Restaurants’ Recovery” (14 Sep 2021).  Eighty-four percent...

U.S. retail sales rose 0.7 percent in August from July, despite the Delta virus’s surge, Forbes reported. Sales were expected to slip 0.85 percent, according to a consensus of economists polled by FactSet. However, more of that spending was done online and less at restaurants. Online sales bumped up 5.3 percent, month over month, while...

U.S. apartment rents jumped an average of 10 percent in August, year over year, after climbing 13 percent from January through July, as we reported last week in “Rents Soar as Investors Buy Properties and Raise Rates” (14 Sep 2021). August’s hike, the first year-on-year double-digit increase in more than two decades, was reported by...

Go back some 20 years ago. As a result of the Dot.com bust—which we had forecast in the October 1999 Trends Journal that it would crash by the second quarter of 2020, which it did—the nation was in recession and equities were tanking.  Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. Federal Reserve began to prop up...

DOUBTS OVER FUTURE GROWTH CLOUD MARKETS As we have been forecasting since COVID War 2.0 was launched in July, there will be a sharp market correction.  Indeed, in addition to our Trends Journal forecasts, Gerald Celente has been on numerous interviews stating that a major stock market correction would occur this year and as early...

Drug giant Pfizer has offered $18.50 a share in an attempt to buy all shares of Trillium Therapeutics, a firm with two trials under way for drugs that spark the immune system to attack blood cancers, including leukemia and multiple myeloma. Pfizer’s offer places a value on Trillium of about $2.26 billion, a 118-percent premium...

Online payments pioneer Paypal will buy Paidy, a Japanese buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) app, in a mostly-cash, $2.7-billion deal, the Financial Times reported. Paidy launched its delayed-payments app only last year. It allows its six million users to spread payments over three equal monthly installments with no interest. The idea is a novelty in a country that...

Western Digital, a $19-billion U.S. chip company in San Jose, is in advanced talks to merge with Japan’s Kioxia, The Wall Street Journal reported. (See our early coverage in “Competitors Mull Purchase of Chip-Maker Kioxia,” 25 Apr 2021). Although the talks are well along, Western Digital could still decide to make an initial public stock...

From 1 January through August this year, companies, private equity firms, and special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) have announced mergers and purchases worth more than $3.6 trillion worldwide, with about half—more than $1.8 trillion—in the U.S., data firm Dealogic reported. Refinitiv, another research firm, pegs the total at $3.9 trillion, up from $2.6 trillion in 2019...