recession

The case for higher wages during coronavirus recession

By Tommy Flemm 1 year ago

Raising the minimum wage during the coronavirus pandemic is smart policy, according to the Economic Policy Institute. 

Corporate America is getting slammed by the coronavirus recession. More than 45 million people were cut from their employers’ payrolls over the past three months. Business groups have turned their focus to planned minimum wage increases, pressuring city and state officials to postpone them. 

California’s Chamber of Commerce has asked Governor Gavin Newsom to roll back the planned $1 minimum wage hike planned to take effect in January 2021. The current minimum wage is $12 per hour for businesses with fewer than 26 employees, and $13 for those with more. 

Barring an intervention by officials, the minimum wage in several states is set to increase by $1 or less on July 1 – including Illinois, which will raise its minimum wage from $9.25 to $10, Nevada from $8.25 to $9, and Oregon from

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The US economy is officially in recession

By Tommy Flemm 1 year ago

The National Bureau of Economic Research said Monday that the COVID-19 crisis has officially launched the U.S. economy into a recession, thus ending the longest economic expansion on record.

The NBER’s business cycle dating committee calls recessions based on broad checks on employment and production activity. 

The committee said that it had determined that economic activity had peaked in February, citing sharp drops in employment and personal consumption following that month. The recession declaration ended the 128-month economic expansion that began in June 2009, which eclipsed the 1990s recovery as the longest on record.

When the NBER declares a “peak,” it essentially marks the beginning of a period of “significant decline.”

Since the first cases of Coronavirus took form in the United States, over 42 million Americans have lost their jobs and turned to unemployment benefits. Stay-at-home measures and businesses closures have halted economic activity on an unprecedented scale.

The

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A three-phase recession will be ‘unlike anything we have seen in modern history’: Morning Brief

By Tommy Flemm 1 year ago

Thursday, May 21, 2020

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It’s a long road ahead for the U.S. economy

As of Wednesday, all 50 states had begun to loosen coronavirus-related restrictions in some form or fashion. But the road ahead for the U.S. economy coming out of this pandemic induced recession is a long one.

And according to economists at Bank of America Global Research, things will be even more challenging than initially thought.

“The damage to the economy from this historic shock has been hard to grasp,” the firm wrote in a note to clients published Wednesday. “Indeed, we now believe we have understated the extent of the decline and are revising down the path of GDP.”

The firm now sees the recession playing out in three phases: lockdown, transition, and recovery.

Bank of America thinks the

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The mandated coronavirus recession means big government is back for years to come

By Tommy Flemm 1 year ago

Whither, limited government?

Unprecedented U.S. policy stimulus to combat the effects of the coronavirus pandemic — and resulting lockdowns decimating jobs and growth — are ricocheting across the economy in multiple and long-lasting ways.

Among the best minds in business and government, there’s currently a lack of consensus over how large a tab the government will have to run (now over $2 trillion and climbing), what impact skyrocketing levels of debt will have on interest rates and inflation, or how long it will take to unwind restrictive stay-at-home orders that brought the economy to a grinding halt.

The outlook is complicated by the growing risk of a new wave of infections that could trigger another round of lockdowns. Moreover, the same government that deliberately engineered a recession to combat a public health crisis is having an inordinately difficult time figuring out how to spur a recovery

However, even

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US recession will only ignite more cord-cutting and streaming: Roku exec

By Tommy Flemm 1 year ago

The streaming content movement is gaining more ground, and at a faster clip.

Investors opted to take profits on red-hot Roku (ROKU) shares in the wake of first quarter-earnings on Friday amid concerns about weak advertising spending on the platform during the COVID-19 pandemic. But aside from that, the shift to streaming content players such as Roku from linear programming that comes with a monthly giant cable bill remains strong.

In fact, with most everyone quarantined at home finding new ways to consume content, and many newly unemployed looking to cut costs, the transition to streaming perhaps got pulled up a few years in the matter of three months.

BRAZIL – 2019/09/11: In this photo illustration the Roku Streaming Player logo is seen displayed on a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

“Given the health and the economic crisis, at Roku we feel fortunate that

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