Tag: aug 17 2021

State Street, a $12-billion banking and financial services firm with $3.5 trillion under management, is vacating its two offices in midtown Manhattan as it allows employees to work from home much of the time. The change frees about 500 employees from a daily commute, CNN Business reported. The company is adding a shared workspace in...

With ticket sales slipping and cancellations climbing with the surging rate of COVID cases, Southwest Airlines no longer expects to make a profit in this year’s third quarter, despite turning a profit in July, the airline said in a statement. The revised outlook is a dramatic change from earlier this summer, when several airlines reported...

Although the demand for new homes remains strong, many builders are limiting sales to catch up on building the houses they already have promised, The Wall Street Journal reported. Low interest rates, the desire to escape cities during the COVID War, and newfound freedom to work from home has pushed home sales to record rates...

Again, as the COVID War 2.0 began to heat up in May, we had forecast an economic slowdown. Today the U.S. Commerce Department reported that consumer spending in both retail and in restaurants declined in July. While still up and growing, restaurant and bar sales increased at lower rates than they did in June. After...

The median price of U.S. homes held steady at $385,000 from June through July, according to the online Realtor.com.  That figure shows a 10.3-percent increase above July 2020’s median, a slower pace than the 12.7-percent yearly gain posted in June, the realty website noted. In this year’s second quarter, home prices rose at least 10...

We had forecast this would happen when governments began ramping up the COVID War 2.0 in May.  Two new surveys have found small businesses’ confidence in the economic future has plummeted. The COVID virus’s surging Delta variant is forcing six in ten small businesses to alter their plans and outlook for the rest of this...

High inflation, low interest rates, and strong economic growth make this “a terrible time for savers,” a New York Times headline declared last week. Because a savings account is now earning interest at a rate below the pace of inflation, money saved is losing purchasing power day by day. The U.S. Federal Reserve has tied...

Consumers’ outlook for the economy turned its gloomiest since 2011, according to a monthly survey by the University of Michigan.  Consumer sentiment fell from July’s 81.2 to 70.2 this month, below the 71.8 notched in April 2020 as the economic collapse was under way. Observers had expected a consensus reading of 81.3 for August. “Over...

The U.S. month-to-month inflation rate fell from 0.9 percent in June to 0.5 percent in July, the U.S. labor department reported. The core inflation rate, which ignores the always-volatile prices of food and fuel, was 0.3 percent for the month, compared to 0.9 percent in June, the department said, which gives a more accurate snapshot...

When investors are optimistic, they lose interest in the safety of bonds and sell them so they can buy stocks, which are riskier but offer higher returns. When a lot of people sell bonds, bond prices fall as supply is greater than demand. As a result, bond yields go up to attract investors. Conversely, when...