U.S. retail sales fell at a record pace in March, and economists are scrambling to find the right words to illustrate the rapid deterioration of the U.S. economy amid the COVID-19 pandemic....
Retailer J.C. Penney explores bankruptcy as the business continues to struggle with the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic. Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi shares the latest....
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- It’s no surprise that President Donald Trump wants to let the U. S. Postal Service die.Remember in the spring of 2018, when Trump created a task force to “conduct a thorough evaluation of the operation and finances of the USPS?” His primary complaint then — and presumably now — was not so much that the Postal Service was losing billions every year but that it was aiding and abetting Amazon.com Inc., whose chief executive is Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, which Trump despises. According to Trump, the Postal Service was delivering Amazon packages at a discount, which was supposedly adding to its growing deficit. Needless to say, that was exactly the opposite of the truth. Indeed, the Postal Service’s package business was one of the few areas where it made a profit.Now it appears as if Trump is hoping to use the coronavirus crisis to finish off the...
In last week’s trading, stocks showed their best weekly gains in over 40 years, prompting a wave of confidence among investors. But it’s not clear that the bulls really want to start running – today, the S&P slipped 2.5%. Volatility indicators remain high, as daily trading results remain unpredictable.The market gyrations are the direct result of the strong reactions to the COVID-19 epidemic. New York City, the world’s financial center, is clearly at the center of the epidemic in the US, but social distancing, shutdowns, lockdowns, and quarantines are being applied in varying degrees throughout the country – and worldwide. Economic activity, the ordinary daily business of working, producing, buying, and selling, has ground to near-halt, and economists are debating not if we’ll see a recession – that’s clear already – but if it will turn into a Depression.In the meantime, stock market investors are looking for ways to rebuild and...
