Weekly jobless claims drop more than expected for a new pandemic low: Initial claims for jobless benefits totaled 444,000 last week, better than the 452,000 Dow Jones estimate.
WeWork Chairman Says Demand Exceeds Pre-Pandemic Levels - Bloomberg: A new focus on flexible work could boost the long-suffering company.
Retailers Couldn’t Stock Hand Sanitizer Fast Enough. Now They Can’t Give It Away. - WSJ: Once nearly impossible to find, bottles of sanitizer are now taking up shelf space and stores are trying promotions to get rid of them; ‘It’s worth more to us gone’
Certares-Knighthead Travel Distress Fund Raises $1.5 Billion - Bloomberg: The firms will deploy the capital into a seemingly tough environment for distressed investing: troubled U.S. company debt has shrunk to less than $80 billion, down from more than half a trillion a year ago, and easing pandemic restrictions are giving many travel companies a boost.
Cinemas are ready to fill up their seats again. Will audiences follow? - The New York Times: Some 70 percent of moviegoers are comfortable to returning to the theater, according to the exhibition research firm National Research Group.
Illinois Withstands Legal Challenge to $14 Billion Bond Deals - WSJ: The highest court in Illinois rejected litigation seeking to block the state from making further payments on $14.3 billion in municipal debt, saying a free-market advocate waited too long after the bonds were sold to challenge their legality.
UI Generosity and Job Acceptance: Effects of the 2020 CARES Act | Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Working Paper 2021-13: Direct empirical analysis of labor force transitions using matched Current Population Survey (CPS) data, linked to annual earning records from the CPS income supplement to form UI replacement rates, shows moderate disincentive effects of the $600 supplemental payments on job finding rates; this empirical framework also suggests small effects of the $300 weekly UI supplement available during 2021.
Hertz Rewards Its True Believers - The Journal. - WSJ Podcasts: A strange thing happened last year after the rental car company Hertz filed for bankruptcy: its stock took off. Old hands on Wall Street thought that the people buying the stock - individual investors with no ties to institutions - were making a bad bet. But now, WSJ's Alexander Gladstone says, the little guys are getting the last laugh and seeing a big windfall.
Current Reports (Form 8-K) Filed With the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) Regarding Material Impairments (Item 2.06) for the Week Ended Thursday May 20, 2021:
