COMMERCIAL REAL ESTATE IN A TAILSPIN. Akris, a Swiss luxury clothing company, has bought three vacant buildings along Madison Avenue’s retail strip for $45 million or about $1,340 per square foot. In 2014, at the island’s real estate peak, a building six blocks away sold for $7,589 a square foot. Akris’s 80-percent discount from peak...
Tag: oct 20 2020
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WORK FROM HOME = CITY REAL ESTATE DOWN
With the mass population gripped in COVID fear and afraid to go to work, plus the virus lockdowns that have turned cities into ghost towns, the major shift from employees working at a centralized location in major metro areas to a more spread-out workforce in the suburbs and rural areas has trended forward, just as...
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CHICKEN COMPANY FINED $110.5 MILLION FOR PRICE FIXING
Pilgrim’s Pride, the U.S.’s second largest chicken processing company, has agreed to pay $110.5 million in fines to settle federal charges it had colluded with competitors to fix prices and pass the higher cost to wholesalers, retailers, and consumers. In June, federal prosecutors indicted Jayson Penn, then Pilgrim’s President and CEO, and Roger Austin, the...
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AIRLINES DOWN, WILL TAKE YEARS TO RECOVER
Officials from two major airlines said last week that they expect that the industry will take years to recover from COVID and one warned, “Make no mistake – we’re still in the early miles of this marathon.” The Wall Street Journal reported these companies face two predominant challenges, which include getting would-be passengers over the...
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AIRLINE PROFITS CRASHING
As the COVID War still rages and nation and states impose a laundry list of draconian travel/quarantine regulations, airline profits are crashing. Delta Air Lines burned through $18 million every day in September and will continue to bleed cash into next spring, said CEO Ed Bastain. Delta has fired 18,000 workers; another 40,000 have opted...
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A NEW KIND OF ATOMIC POWER
Graphene, a sheet of carbon just one atom thick, is used for everything from cooling cell phone batteries to contactless key cards to making ink. Now researchers at the University of Alabama have proposed to use it as a power generator. Sheets of graphene ripple at room temperature as heat affects the microscopically thin material...
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SWEDEN: THE FUTURE OF ENERGY?
In a world moving away from fossil fuels, Sweden is demonstrating a workable path in that direction. A majority of the country’s homes are connected to one of more than 500 “district heating” systems, which generates heat in a central plant and pipes it to a network of buildings. Homes can still regulate their own...
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REVERSING THE HEART’S AGING PROCESS
It’s been known for a decade that when infant mice’s hearts are damaged, they can regenerate new heart tissue in the first seven days of life. Now researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have found their secret. It could be used to turn sick old human hearts young and healthy again. The...
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BIG BANKS, BIG PROFITS WARNING
JPMorgan Chase, the biggest U.S. bank, reported third-quarter profits up 4 percent from the same period a year earlier. Goldman Sachs boasted a $3.62-billion profit for the period, beating analysts’ expectation of $2 billion. Citigroup posted a milder loss for the period than expected. Goldman Sachs noted a 49-percent increase in profits from bond-trading and...
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CRYPTO EFTs COMING
The U.S. Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), Comptroller of the Currency, and Commodity Futures Trading Commission are in discussions to chart a course toward crypto versions of exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, said SEC chair Jay Clayton. The plan, so-called “tokenization,” would allow a designated cryptocurrency asset, similar to Bitcoin, to represent a single stock or fund,...