Category: TRENDS ON THE U.S. ECONOMIC FRONT

After plummeting 93 percent at the depths of the pandemic last spring, ridership on New York City’s subway system has crawled back up to about 33 percent of 2019 levels, The New York Times reported. Federal aid, plus $6 billion more dollars earmarked for the system in President Biden’s newest stimulus plan, has enabled the...

Since the 1990s, Manhattan’s property prices have been rising, squeezing out many small businesses. Then the COVID War was launched last March and the City that never sleeps was put to bed by the governor and mayor of the state.  From 1 March to 1 September 2020, 7,100 businesses in the city closed permanently, review...

Businesses in New York state are calling on Governor Andrew Cuomo to not enact a range of tax increases the state’s legislature passed in mid-March. The legislature raised corporate franchise and income tax rates to add $6.5 billion to the state’s treasury next year; a proposed surcharge on capital-gains income would raise a similar amount....

From April through June 2020, 15 percent of homes sold were bought by multigenerational families, up 11 percent July 2019 through March 2020 and the highest rate since at least 2012, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR). The trend began in previous years with Millennials moving in with parents in a difficult job...

On 31 January, there were 1.04 million homes for sale in the U.S., according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 26 percent fewer than a year earlier and the lowest on record since at least 1982.  On the same date, the NAR listed 1.45 million members. The only other time agents have outnumbered houses...

A record 31.2 percent of people using real estate brokerage Redfin’s website to look for new homes in January and February were searching outside of their current residence areas, the company said. The number was 26 percent for the same period last year, which predated the COVID pandemic. As more employers allow workers to work...

Wall Street’s favorite new gimmick, which we noted in last week’s Trends Journal and this one – special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) – is drawing interest from regulators, which sent SPAC index prices tumbling last week. (See last week’s “U.S. MARKETS OVERVIEW” for more on SPACs.) A SPAC is a company that makes no product, performs...

The new $1.9-trillion stimulus Congress has pumped into the U.S. economy is unlikely to spark prolonged inflation, Jerome Powell, chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, told the House Financial Services Committee in testimony on 23 March. If inflation does pose a problem, the Fed has the tools it needs to control it, Powell added. “We...

Democrats in the U.S. Congress are considering raising corporate taxes and the marginal tax rate on individuals, in part to pay for President Biden’s upcoming proposal to spend about $1.5 trillion on a first-round infrastructure plan and the same amount for education programs and to reduce poverty, the Wall Street Journal reported. The tax hikes...

The U.S. government can manage its record new $28 trillion levels of debt, Jerome Powell, chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, said in a 25 March interview on National Public Radio. “Given the low level of interest rates, there’s no issue about the United States being able to service its debt at this time or...