Job seekers wait in line outside of Vertiport Chicago where Amazon was hosting a career fair on September 17, 2019. Scott Olson | Getty Images The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits fell last week, suggesting the labor market was on solid footing despite the coronavirus outbreak, which has stoked financial market fears of […]
Tag: Economy
‘Politics doesn’t enter the room,’ Fed’s Mester says after Trump tweets
Loretta Mester, president and chief executive officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images U.S. Federal Reserve policymakers are unmoved by political pressure, according to Cleveland Fed President and CEO Loretta Mester. The Fed announced an emergency 50 basis point cut to interest rates on Tuesday, in a […]
ADP Moody’s private payrolls February 2020 beat estimates
U.S. companies kept adding jobs in February despite the coronavirus scare, as private payrolls expanded well above the pace that Wall Street had anticipated. Employment excluding government jobs rose by 183,000 for the month, according to a report Wednesday from Moody’s Analytics, topping the 155,000 that economists surveyed by Dow Jones had expected. The job […]
Wall Street sees chance of interest rates falling to zero by summer
With the Federal Reserve expected to act soon in response to the coronavirus scare, there’s a chance that the central bank could take policy back to where it was during the financial crisis. Goldman Sachs economists said Sunday they see the Fed cutting rates by 50 basis points by its March meeting or sooner, and […]
Top economist Ed Hyman sees zero US growth next two quarters
Ed Hyman, a widely followed economist on Wall Street, said the coronavirus outbreak could end up causing a recession in the U.S. and slashed his U.S. GDP forecast to zero growth in the second and third quarters of this year “More cases are showing up in the U.S. and seem likely to be just the […]
US personal income January 2020
Daniel Acker | Bloomberg | Getty Images Americans pulled back on their spending in January, even as their incomes surged, a sign the economy was growing modestly before the threat of coronavirus arose. The Commerce Department said Friday that consumer spending increased 0.2% last month, down from 0.4% in December and smallest gain since October. […]
Square emerges as coronavirus hedge after earnings
Jack Dorsey, chief executive officer of Square Inc., second right, tours the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., on Thursday, Nov. 19, 2015. Yana Paskova | Bloomberg | Getty Images Square has been an outlier in this week’s payment stock wreckage. Shares of Mastercard, Visa, American Express and Paypal […]
Free trading fuels rampant speculation in stocks
Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveils the Cybertruck at the TeslaDesign Studio in Hawthorne, Calif. The cracked window glass occurred during a demonstration on the strength of the glass. Robert Hanashiro | USA TODAY | Reuters Small investors are flocking to high-flying growth stocks after the brokerage industry made trading free. In the months since major […]
Low rates have had only a ‘modest’ impact on stock market prices
The Federal Reserve’s extraordinary policy moves over the last 12 years have marched arm-in-arm with the biggest bull market in Wall Street history. But the central bank’s economists say the two really have little in common. As part of the ongoing discussion Fed officials are having about the effectiveness of past policy and the proper […]
Rate cut expectations will fade as coronavirus fear eases
Markets expecting an interest rate cut are reacting to the coronavirus scare and likely will reverse once the fear starts to fade, St. Louis Fed President James Bullard said Friday. Central bank officials have indicated that they are content to keep policy on hold as they watch economic developments play out. However, traders in the […]
