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Coronavirus test site in El Paso, Tex. Most economists agree that combating the pandemic is a prerequisite for economic recovery. Joel Angel Juarez for The New York Times.
The government announced Thursday that 723,000 workers claimed unemployment benefits last week, the latest sign that the economy is struggling to cope with the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
In addition, 298,000 new claims were submitted under the federal emergency unemployment pandemic programme for freelancers, part-time workers and others who are generally not eligible for government benefits. None of these indicators has been adjusted for seasonal variations.
With the seasonal adjustment, the number of new government claims amounts to 709,000.
Technically it looks like we’re going to recover, said Diane Swank, chief economist at the accounting firm Grant Thornton, but we’re still in trouble.
The prospects for the excavation of the pits have been clouded by an alarming increase in the number of cases of the coronavirus throughout the country.
Despite the fact that the weekly data from the new surveys have collapsed from the several million values reached in the stratosphere in the spring, they are still ahead of previous records.
And many people who already have unemployment insurance have already reached the 26 week benefit limit in most countries.
These workers are entitled to an additional 13 week benefit under a federal program called Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation, although in several states the transition from one program to another is not automatic.
Most economists agree that the fight against the pandemic is a prerequisite for economic recovery, regardless of whether there is a government-organised shutdown.
The announcement of the development of a 90% effective vaccine this week has revived hopes – and the markets. But Mary Daley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, said Tuesday The current economy is driven by the existence of the coronavirus, and I think the potential for a vaccine is less great.
Several federal officials, including President Jerome X. Powell said the failure of Congress to agree on another package of aid for individuals and businesses would stand in the way of any recovery.
According to the National Statistics Agency, the UK economy grew by 15.5% in the third quarter compared to the previous three months, the strongest quarterly growth since official records began in 1955.
After a deep recession in the first half of the year, when barriers were lifted, schools and offices were reopened and the government funded a popular food discount program to encourage people to return to restaurants.
But the record expansion from July to September left the British economy 9.7 per cent lower than at the end of 2019 and was already overshadowed by the fact that, according to economists, the UK is at the epicentre of a new recession, with Britain facing a second national blockade. Britain set a grim record on Wednesday with more than 50,000 deaths from coronaviruses, the highest in Europe.
The economic recovery began to slow down at the end of the summer, with monthly GDP growth of only 1.1% until September. For the fourth quarter, the Bank of England predicts that the country’s economy will contract by 2%, slowing the pace of recovery. This has prompted the government to expand its wage subsidy and scholarship programme for the self-employed.
The British economy follows the same path as the rest of Europe, where the second wave of the pandemic interrupted the recovery that began last summer. But the data show that the UK is in a deeper recession than other countries.
One reason for this, as the Office for National Statistics notes, is that there are differences in the way the UK and the rest of Europe calculate changes in their health and education sectors. In the spring, the UK experienced a particularly sharp decline in these areas as non-surgical treatments in hospitals were delayed and schools closed.
Maya Segal and Ned Segal, Chief Financial Officer of Twitter, which plans an initiative to combat racial injustice and persistent poverty, Credit Suisse,… Drew Angerer/Getty pictures
Twitter plans to announce Thursday that it will invest $100 million in the development of community financial institutions as part of a new initiative to combat racial injustice and persistent poverty, reports the DealBook newsletter.
The pledge costs approximately 1 percent of the cash on Twitter and is used for loans from C.D.F.I.’s Group Financing Opportunities network throughout the United States. These institutions accept public funds, donations and other funds for business start-ups that banks in underprivileged communities will not process. More than 80% of the network’s customers are people on low incomes and about 60% are people with a different skin colour.
Twitter pursues similar business initiatives, including Netflix (black bank deposits), PayPal (investments by black and Latin American venture capital funds) and Square (C.D.F.I.s.), the latter also led by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. Ned Segal, the CFO of Twitter, said he was inspired by these companies and negotiated with non-profit groups and financial institutions on how to find a balance sheet for the benefit of these communities. Twitter wants to create a model that can be replicated by other companies, so that the network of financing opportunities can be expanded as other business investors join.
Twitter will reinvest the interest it receives on loans it claims are below market rates in Operation Hope, a non-profit organization dedicated to financial literacy and economic integration.
A social media company has been criticized for posting erroneous information on its platform, which it tries to contain. Mr Segal said Thursday’s announcement is consistent with the company’s broader mission to serve the public debate and its policy on what appears on the platform. We hope everything is worth its weight in gold, he said.
People are queuing up for a coronavirus test in Manhattan. The number of cases in the United States is increasing and casts a shadow over the markets. A loan… Hiroko Masuikae/The New York Times
- Thursday’s stocks have become less important due to the steady increase in infections, the wealth of potential success in the development of a coronavirus vaccine has disappeared. Lower estimates of oil demand also cast a shadow over the markets. Wall Street futures showed a slight loss when the auction started.
- The Stoxx Europe 600 index, the benchmark for European equities, fell by 0.3%, while the continent’s other main indices fell by around 0.5%. The Asian markets are closed in a mixed way: The Hang Seng in Hong Kong decreased by 0.2%, while the Nikkei in Japan increased by 0.7%.
- The recent rise in oil prices has come to a halt since the International Energy Agency issued a report stating that the combination of weak demand prospects and rising production in countries like Libya means that fundamentals are too weak to provide firm price support. Despite the promising prospects for a coronavirus vaccine, the agency said it does not expect any significant impact from such a breakthrough in the first half of 2021.
- The shares of the oil giants lost indices, Royal Dutch Shell – by 2.6% and Total – by 1.5%.
- Investors will follow the speech of the President of the Federal Reserve Bank, Jerome X. Powell at the European Central Bank conference on Thursday.
- The pharmaceutical company Soverena, which is developing a vaccine against the coronavirus, said Wednesday evening that it had collected enough data to start the first preliminary analysis of its drug. The results are expected within a few days, while Moderna’s share of pre-sales increased by almost 5%. On Monday, promising news from Pfizer and BioNTech about their vaccine in development caused a sensation in the market.
- However, the virus is spreading to many parts of the world, apparently untested. The total number of people hospitalized with the virus in the United States was 65,368, the highest number ever recorded during the pandemic. Globally, the number of new infections is increasing faster than ever before and many European countries are being hit particularly hard.
- The shares of the German mechanical engineering giant Siemens fell by 5%, as the company forecast only moderate profit growth for the coming year.
Sony’s PlayStation 2 opened in 1999… Yoshikazu Tsuno/French Press Office – Getty Images
Sony is preparing for the sales launch of the fifth main game console on Thursday in 25 years and has largely become a PlayStation company, reports Seth Shezel.
Mark Cherney, Sony’s architect for PlayStation 5 and consultant to the company for decades, said in an interview last week that the involvement of Sony Music in the creation of PlayStation was great. This brought respect for the creative process in the culture of the game unit and heralded the company’s transition to entertainment.
The second PlayStation game console released in 2000 was a success (and remains the best-selling game console in the world), thanks to the promotion of Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto III and Sony’s entry into new geographic markets.
The competition was dominated by the 2013 PlayStation 4, which sold more than twice as many copies as Microsoft’s Xbox One. This victory gave Sony the financial leeway it needed to get back on its feet and perhaps become a beacon for the Japanese electronics industry in general.
Sony’s shares have increased more than tenfold since 2012, profits have increased and the company is still one of the largest in Japan with about 110,000 employees and a market value of about $108 billion.
Game-based entertainment is the new face of Sony, the company’s new growth engine, says Kota Ezawa, analyst at Citigroup in Tokyo. There was a clear statement and a direct change of direction from Ken Yoshida regarding Sony’s transition from the traditional electronics box to the entertainment business.
Jason Kilar, the new CEO of WarnerMedia, denied on Wednesday that AT&T, Warner’s parent company, was interested in selling CNN.
No, it’s a short answer, he said on a virtual forum with employees. I think we’re just getting started.
The forum took place the day after Warner had reduced its workforce from 5 percent to 7 percent of its 25,000 employees. (The abbreviations were announced in August.) Kilar, who was appointed chief executive officer in May with the directive to reorganize the various units of WarnerMedia around the HBO Max streaming service, discussed the abbreviations in an e-mail Tuesday, which he described as a painful letter.
We’ve found some difficult solutions that have reduced the WarnerMedia team, he writes. This is a function of removing layers and the effect of consolidating previously separated organizations.
Mr Kilar refused to say in the forum which services had been most affected by the redundancies.
Please note that these acronyms in no way reflect the quality of the team members involved or their work. It’s just a function of the changes I think we need to make to better serve our customers.
M. Kilar, 49, confirmed his commitment to Max HBO, which he says added 2.1 million subscribers in the last quarter, bringing the total number of subscribers to 38 million since the service was launched in May. He also expressed confidence that the company will eventually make arrangements with Roku and Amazon Fire to make HBO Max available on their devices, but did not mention a timeline.
Mr. Kilar, founder of Hulu, has long argued that Hollywood should put the consumer first by giving him more control over how and where he consumes his media. WarnerMedia will be a place where he can put his theories into practice.
Nearly deserted outdoor shopping mall in Salt Lake City. Recent jobs in restaurants and shops are vulnerable to increasing cases of coronavirus … credit. Lindsay D’Addato for the New York Times…
With the coronavirus pandemic entering its ninth month, economists warn that a prolonged recession could have a lasting negative impact on employment prospects in the United States.
There is a risk of constant damage to the labour market, according to Rubeela Farooqi, chief economist of the US high-frequency economy, who refers to redundant workers who eventually fall out of the labour market, and to sectors such as restaurants, entertainment, travel and hospitality that cannot return to full strength.
About a third of the unemployed remain unemployed for 27 weeks or longer, compared to 4.1% in April. The longer someone is unemployed, the harder it is for them to get back to work.
Recently, more jobs have been won than lost, and the unemployment rate dropped to 6.9% last month from 7.9% in September. However, much of the progress has been made by the hospitality and retail sectors, which are most vulnerable to losses due to the increasing number of coronaviruses.
The government’s lists of unemployed have fallen in recent weeks, but part of this fall is due to the programme’s limitations: In most states, benefits expire after 26 weeks.
Many of the workers who have reached the limit of their government benefits have joined the Emergency Unemployment Compensation Pandemic, a programme launched by Congress in March to provide 13 weeks extra benefits to those who have exhausted government assistance. In the week until the 24th. On 1 October, the number of applications under the programme rose to 4.14 million, compared with 3.98 million in the previous week.
You see the wounds fester and you worry about the depth and extent of the evil they will do to us, said Diane Swank, chief economist at the accounting firm Grant Thornton.
Media event dedicated to the Alibaba Singles Day shopping festival. This week, the Chinese government has made new proposals to curb the power of Alibaba and other technical giants…
Chinese internet titans such as Alibaba, Ten percent and Maituan gathered on Thursday after the publication of new proposals to regain power in Beijing earlier this week. But their market value is still much lower than before the announcement, suggesting that the long-term impact of the rules will be more difficult to undermine, according to the DealBook newsletter.
China’s potential new rules focus on online platforms that offer restrictions on exclusivity requirements, sell products below cost price and treat partners differently depending on the algorithms. They are following new rules for financial technology companies such as Ant Group, a subsidiary of Alibaba, whose I.P.O. blockbuster was suddenly disrupted by Chinese regulators last week.
The Chinese regulatory authorities could further tighten controls. We need to learn from international experience, strengthen our antitrust controls and ensure fair market regulation, said Liang Tao, vice-chairman of the Chinese Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission, in his speech to the conference on Wednesday. (Officials also rejected the P.I.O. software developer that day)
Silicon Valley assesses the possible consequences. In recent years, some Washington leaders have warned against taking a harder line on the nation’s technology giants for fear of losing out to ever-growing Chinese rivals.
So far, according to antitrust experts and business leaders, Beijing is unlikely to have a strong influence on US efforts to contain the technology giants. In the long term, however, they see this as another sign that regulators around the world are preparing to limit their powers.
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