Tag: apr 28 2020

Economic activity in the U.S., Europe, and Japan simultaneously crumbled at a rate never before seen. The rate of businesses going dark and workers losing their jobs has led JPMorgan Chase to forecast the U.S. economy contracting in this year’s second quarter at an annualized rate of 40 percent, Japan’s by 35 percent, the Eurozone’s...

Tourists stay home. Tourists have disappeared from Europe and are planning to stay away as the summer season begins. Valencia, Spain’s third largest city and a beachgoers’ mecca, saw 95 percent of its summer hotel bookings cancel between mid-March and mid-April. Resorts are standing virtually empty across the Caribbean region, where tourism employs 2.5 million...

Despite focused government intervention, Europe’s jobless have now surpassed 18 million in number during the past 35 days. Figures show that as much as half of France’s labor force is idle and a third of workers in Ireland are off the job. About 59 million jobs in the EU and U.K., or about 26 percent,...

Retailers are swamped by unsold clothing.  Tens of billions of dollars’ worth of spring and summer clothing are sitting in warehouses and store displays with no customers to buy them. In most states and cities, “unessential” stores are still closed by government directive; and tens of millions of people are hoarding their money because they...

Chip Sales Up as Workers Shift to Home Intel, the largest U.S. chip maker, logged sales of $19.83 billion in 2020’s first quarter, a 23-percent jump from the same period last year. Earnings per share jumped 51 percent to $1.31. With millions of people suddenly working from home, Intel’s data-center division gained 43 percent in...

In a study released 23 April, the St. Louis Federal Reserve quantified the damage that the U.S. economic freeze is doing to those whose earnings are in the bottom 25 percent of incomes. A majority of these people work in the service industry, which pays front-line workers poorly and has been among the economy’s hardest-hit...

The new $484-billion installment of federal rescue funds will balloon this year’s federal deficit to about $3.8 trillion, or 18.6 percent of GDP, the highest proportion since World War Two, according to the private, nonpartisan Committee for a Responsible Budget (CRB). Adding that amount to the national debt bloats the number to 106 percent of...

Stung by the failure of its $2.2-trillion rescue fund to reach enough small businesses, the U.S. Congress has added $484 billion in new money, including $310 targeted again to the Paycheck Protection Plan. Here’s what’s included: $250 to replenish the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, which is designed to cover businesses’ payroll costs and keep...

Better late than never, finally mainstream market analysts from brokerage firms to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are parroting our trend forecast that the current economic crisis by far the worst since the Great Depression and perhaps even more disastrous in its impacts. But stock markets have gained more than 20 percent in value since...