Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

China Drops Yuan’s Value. On 26 May, China lowered the official value of its currency, the yuan, to 7.13 per dollar, the lowest official exchange rate since February 2008. China sees a cheap yuan as making the country’s products more affordable abroad, boosting exports as it seeks to recover from its economic shutdown. The yuan...

EC Announces Recovery Plan. The European Commission, the governing body of the European Union (EU), has laid out its plan for the continent’s economic recovery. The commission proposes a €750-billion recovery fund, with €250 billion available as loans to individual nations and €500 billion given as grants with no repayment required. Giuseppe Conte, Italy’s prime...

Hertz, the global car rental giant that filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 22 May, which we have been reporting on in the Trends Journal, celebrated their failure by giving $16.2 million in cash bonuses to top employees. CEO Paul Stone pocketed $700,000 and Jamere Jackson, CFO, collected $600,000. Hertz is not the only company...

Two additional retailers filed for bankruptcy last week. Tuesday Morning, a Dallas-based discount home-goods retailer with 687 stores in 39 states, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on 27 May. The stores were shuttered by the economic shutdown but about 80 percent have now reopened and are showing sales roughly 10 percent higher than a...

The Disney Co. will reopen its Disney World theme park in Florida next month. The Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom areas will open on 11 July; EPCOT and the Disney Hollywood Studios portions will reopen on 15 July. Workers and guests will be required to be masked and submit to temperature checks before entering. Plexiglass...

More than 75 percent of employees working at home during the economic lockdown would like to continue doing so to some degree, according to a survey by the IBM Institute for Business Value, with more than half saying they would choose it as their primary way to work. More than 60 percent of corporate hiring...

The owner of Miami’s 66-year-old Fountainbleu Hotel, an icon of glamour for much of its time, is asking lenders to suspend interest payments on the hotel’s $975 million in bonded debt because of “cash flow problems” since the hotel closed during the economic shutdown. The bonds, sold last November by Goldman Sachs, carry a $4.3-million...

American Airlines, the world’s biggest carrier by passenger miles, announced plans to cut about 5,100 employees from its management and support staffs. “We will be a smaller airline with fewer flights,” said Elise Eberwein, American’s vice president for people and global engagement. Delta, the second biggest carrier, is offering buyout and early retirement incentives to...

Consumer spending continued to slump, more jobs disappeared, and few signs of economic recovery were visible, business owners told a U.S. Federal Reserve System survey in mid-May. Restaurants and stores remained mostly closed at the time but many have since begun limited reopenings in several states. In the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s jurisdiction,...

New York City, one of the hardest-hit COVID hotspots, is beginning to lift its economic lockdown, allowing construction, manufacturing, and “unessential” retail sales for curbside pickup to resume on 8 June. As if it would have any effect of the economic devastation that has destroyed so many businesses, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, America’s newly...