Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

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...

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...

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,...

American consumers spent 1.9 percent more in September than in August, more than double the rate analysts were expecting. Clothing and department stores saw sales rise 11 percent, some of which analysts attribute to back-to-school purchases. Sales of health and beauty products, seen as non-essential during the shutdown, were up 1.5 percent. Grocery sales were...

The annual U.S. budget shortfall tripled to a record $3.1 trillion, or 16.1 percent of Gross Domestic Product, in the fiscal year ended 30 September, according to the U.S. Treasury department. The new debt resulted from efforts to fight the pandemic and recover from the ensuing economic shutdown that continues across large swaths of the...

One in every five businesses operating last January has stopped doing business entirely, according to Womply, a business services website that estimates most of those idle businesses have closed permanently. Of 6,325 small businesses surveyed by business network website Alignable, 40 percent reported being at risk of failure before 2020 is over. Bank loans are...

The U.S. jobs market will recover more slowly than the GDP, according to the consensus among 63 economists the Wall Street Journal surveyed in early October. “We’re substituting away from labor-intensive services,” said economist Leo Feler at the University of California at Los Angeles. The group expects the U.S. economy to contract 3.6 percent this...

If an unemployed person is defined as someone seeking a full-time job that pays a living wage but is unable to find one, the actual U.S. unemployment rate is 26.1 percent, according to a study by the nonprofit Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity. The official definition of unemployment is a person who is earning...

In the week ending 10 October, 898,000 workers filed new claims for unemployment benefits, more than the 830,000 expected by economists surveyed by Dow Jones. The tally was the highest in seven weeks, indicating employers are still shedding jobs in high numbers, with some bracing for a second virus wave to crimp the economy in...

The proportion of Americans living in poverty rose from 9.3 percent in June to 11.1 percent in September, according to a study by researchers at the University of Chicago, the University of Notre Dame, and China’s Zhejiang University. The number translates to about eight million more Americans who now are poor. The poverty rate was...