Tag: nov 17 2020

SOUTHWEST AIRLINES REPORTS SLOWDOWN. After seeing bookings rise in August through mid-October, ticket sales slowed recently, the carrier reported. Third-quarter revenues declined 65 percent year on year, with about 55 percent of available seats sold; the airline had forecast a 65- to 70-percent drop. Year-on-year revenues for November and December are likely to fall below...

Modest gains in tourism over the summer were reversed in August and September, according to Booking Holdings, an online travel booking site. Third-quarter hotel reservations fell 43 percent in the third quarter but plunged 70 percent the week ending 4 November, Bookings CEO Glen Fogel said to the Wall Street Journal. Winter’s drop in business will...

John Stumpf, former CEO of Wells Fargo Bank, has agreed to pay the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) $2.5 million to settle charges that he lied to investors about the bank’s retail operations as it was enmeshed in a scandal over fake accounts. The penalty resulted from charges of negligence rather than fraud, which...

Pharma giant Pfizer’s stock price soared as much as 15 percent on 9 November on news that it and German partner BioNTech had created a COVID virus vaccine that is more than 90 percent effective. The happy news prompted Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla to sell 132,508 shares of the company’s stock he owns at a...

Bill Ackman, Founder of the Pershing Square hedge fund, has again bet big in the futures market on companies not being able to pay their debts. The fund collected about $2.6 billion in profits from a similar strategy Ackman used last February before the economic shutdown began. He bought a package of large insurance policies...

Again, we have been reporting about the enormous budget deficits that would continue to grow as politicians close down businesses and people flee big cities. As reported by the New York Post last week, more than 295,000 New York City residents have moved out of town since February, according to data from the U.S. Postal...

Deeming California governor Gavin Newsom’s shutdown rules “arbitrary,”  Disney CEO Robert Chapek called on the state to allow Disneyland to reopen. The company has reopened theme parks in Hong Kong, Orlando, Shanghai, and Tokyo following health and safety protocols that “are all science-based and have the support of labor unions representing 99 percent of our...

It comes as no surprise to Trend Journal subscribers. Since the COVID War broke out in February, we have been forecasting that hotels, shopping malls, and urban storefronts would be hard hit by draconian lockdown rules and the media’s 24/7 selling COVID Fear & Hysteria. Now, those sectors are losing market value by double digits....

New York City’s hotel crisis – with occupancy rates languishing at 20 percent below last year and a growing number of inns closing permanently – is making investors nervous about the $4 billion in hotel mortgages that have been packaged into securities backed by commercial mortgages. More than four out of five hotels included in...

Private equity firms ended 2019 with a record $2.5 trillion in cash on hand, according to Bain Capital, and have even more now, Manoj Mahenthiran, private equity chief at accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, told Bloomberg. The pandemic and economic shutdown gave them a windfall. As the U.S. Federal Reserve and other central banks drove interest rates...