Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

About 200 of New York City’s 700 hotels are still closed, and those that are accepting guests have slashed room rates by an average of more than 60 percent, according to Al Jazeera. Most also have curtailed services, such as ending room service after breakfast and limiting concierges’ hours. October is usually a high-traffic month...

MORTGAGE DEMAND DOWN. The demand for mortgages slipped 0.6 percent during the week of 12 October, the fourth week in a row that fewer applications were filed, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association’s (MBA) seasonally adjusted index. Applications to purchase a new home were off 2 percent; applications to refinance rose 0.2 percent, which is 74...

The economic shutdown roiled financial markets this spring, revealing weaknesses that regulators are working to fix, said Randall Quarles, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Vice Chair for Supervision, in a 21 October speech. The banking system withstood the turmoil well but non-bank sectors of the financial industry were shown to be “significantly more fragile,” he said....

Remember back in April, the month after the global lockdown, how economists predicted a “V-shaped” recovery, and the media was selling the line, “It will come back”? The economy did not come back. Any semblance of economic normalcy was created by the artificial monetary methadone injections into equity markets and the economy by the Federal...

Although the dollar is in decline, the U.S. Federal Reserve’s policy of cheap money and easy borrowing has strengthened the dollar’s dominance in the world economy even as China and Russia have sought to weaken it. As of 23 October, global entities from Nissan Motor Co. to Manila’s waterworks had sold $1.29 trillion in dollar-denominated...

Yesterday, U.S. equity markets sunk on news of rising COVID cases and Washington unable to agree on a money pumping scheme to help boost the sagging economy. And with virus cases rising in Europe and governments imposing new rounds of lockdown measures, equities were down sharply there as well. Today, it’s more of the same...

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...

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...

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...

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...