Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

UNEMPLOYMENT AND DESPAIR RISING AMONG EUROPE’S YOUNG ADULTS. Italy’s unemployment rate sloped down from 8 percent in March to 6.3 percent in April. The decline came not from the country’s economy adding jobs but from people, especially young adults, who have stopped looking for work. Even before the pandemic, 27.8 percent of Italians ages 20...

As stores reopened across the country in May, shoppers flocked to restock needed items and to splurge on indulgences to celebrate softened restrictions. Although May’s monthly sales spiked up 17.7 percent from April’s, the largest month-to-month jump on record, sales were still 8 percent below February’s and 62 percent less than those in May 2019....

AMC Entertainment Holdings, the world’s largest movie theater chain, plans to reopen almost all of its U.S. venues by 24 July, in time for the planned release of movie studios’ postponed summer films. About 450 of the company’s 600-plus American theaters will open on 17 July, followed by another 150 on 24 July, after the...

When businesses go down, ad spending drops. In the U.S. advertisers will spend 13 percent less than they did in 2019 levels this year to $207.9 billion, predicts GroupM, a division of WPP PLC, the world’s largest ad buyer. Spending on television ads will decline 11 percent, the company expects, and 3 percent in digital...

To further illustrate the sharp decline in tourism and why, with COVID-Fear ingrained in people, it will not rebound quickly. Carnival Corp., with 27 ships and nine brands of cruise lines, reported a record preliminary loss of $4.37 billion for its quarter ending 31 May, compared to a profit of $451 million during the same...

With COVID Fear still running rampant among the general population and media spreading pandemonium of increasing virus cases and a second wave to hit, travel and tourism sectors, we forecast, will be hit harder than what the business media’s “experts” predict. To date, it is estimated that people will take about 30 percent fewer trips...

As New York City’s hotels begin to reopen after being shut for more than three months, about 25,000 rooms – roughly 20 percent or one in five – will never see another guest, according to interviews with hotel owners and a consensus among analysts. The 17-floor Blakely New York hotel had filed papers with the...

More than just jobs are being lost as a result of the U.S. lockdown. State and local governments will collect $16.8 billion less in taxes this year because hotels were closed during the shutdown, according to a report by Oxford Economics. But the tax dollar loss is indeed much greater. The study does not consider...

You read it first in the Trends Journal. Now it’s mainstream business news. And it’s happening right here, at the home of the Trends Research Institute, in New York’s Hudson Valley. Four exurban regions around New York City showed increased demand for homes relative to supply from March through May compared to a year previous,...

New York City’s small businesses, 62 percent of which employ five or fewer workers, account for more than three million jobs, city data says. Neither the city nor state, however, has proposed a plan to help these businesses recover from the economic shutdown. The greatest problem for most of the businesses is an inability to...