Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

As more people work from home, shop online, and avoid unessential travel, hotels, shopping malls, and office buildings are rapidly losing their value and their owners are scrambling to survive financially. Brookfield Property Partners, one of the U.S.’s largest mall owners, is laying off 20 percent of its 2,000 employees in its retail property division....

After talking with corporate clients, Amar Lalvani has concluded that business travel will not return to pre-pandemic levels “for multiple years.” Lalvani, CEO of Standard International, which owns two Standard hotels in New York City, says the Standard High Line inn’s weekday business trade – the core of its business – has fallen to a...

The economic recovery would accelerate “if there is support coming from Congress and from the Fed,” said Jerome Powell, Chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, in testimony before Congress on 23 September. “The power of fiscal policy really is unequaled by anything else,” he contended. Although about half of the 22 million workers who lost...

The number of new applications for unemployment benefits has held steady through September at just below 900,000 a week, indicating businesses remain unable to hire back workers or are reluctant to do so before the COVID virus is contained. During the week ended 18 September, the number of new claims edged up to 870,000 from...

U.S. households added almost $119 trillion in net worth in this year’s second quarter, a 6.8-percent gain over the first quarter. About $5.7 trillion of the added wealth came from stock market gains (of which 10 percent of the population owns 87 percent and 1 percent owns 52 percent); appreciation in real estate added $500...

In August, U.S. home prices reached their highest median value ever, with sales equaling a pace not seen since December 2006. August sales rose 2.4 percent from July, totaling six million units, a 10.4 -percent jump from August 2019. The typical home remained on the market for just 22 days, compared to 31 a year...

The Dow ended the week 1.7 percent below where it began. The S&P rose 1.6 percent on Friday but still was down 0.6 percent for the week, failing to fully recover from stock prices’ plunge in earlier trading sessions. The NASDAQ was the week’s winner, up 2.3 percent to break a three-week downtrend. The word...

About 20 percent of U.K. companies and more than 16 percent of Germany’s are classified as “zombie firms” – the living dead. A zombie company is one that has over-borrowed, is at risk of default, and must keep borrowing new money to pay off existing loans. The ranks of zombies have been growing for two...

RAYTHEON CUTS 15,000 JOBS. Citing “all the uncertainty in the recovery of commercial air traffic,” Greg Hayes, Raytheon CEO, revealed the company would more than double the number of layoffs from its corporate and commercial aerospace divisions that it had announced previously. The company sees air travel gradually recovering, finally returning to pre-pandemic levels in...

During the year that will end on 31 March 2021, India’s economy will contract by 9 percent, said ratings agency Standard & Poor’s (S&P), not the 5 percent the agency had predicted earlier. The pandemic and shutdown will rob India’s GDP of 13 percent of its potential growth over the next three years, S&P added....