In this Placer Bytes, we dive into the pharmacy sector with a focus on Walgreens before taking a look at H&M following its announcement it’ll be closing 250 stores.
Leveraged Loans continue to divide investor opinion. Values declined as part of the High Yield rout earlier this year, but they have been slower to recover. Winnie Cisar, Head of Credit Strategy at Wells Fargo points to a simple lack of liquidity, which is only now filtering back into the Leveraged Loan space with prices closing the gap vs. general High Yield.
In addition to increased purchases of flour and furniture, the early spring lockdown in many states led to more consumption of video streaming services as consumers looked for alternative sources of entertainment under stay-at-home orders.
ATTOM Data Solutions’ just released Q3 2020 Special Report, spotlighting the U.S. housing markets more or less at risk of an economic impact related to the Coronavirus pandemic, shows that pockets of the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions were most vulnerable in Q3 2020, while the West and now Midwest fared less at risk.
Major economies in Europe, including the U.K. and those in the Eurozone, recently confirmed what we already suspected. Economies across the continent have entered an economic recession because of the impact of COVID-19—an impact that has been devastating for the hospitality industry.
With the U.S. elections and the coronavirus pandemic diverting consumers’ attention away from the national to the regional level, understanding who’s winning and who’s moving up the ranks is crucial for both publishers and advertisers. Our infographic visualizes which news outlets in each state are seeing the strongest traffic numbers for August 2020, as well as the top keywords driving traffic to their sites.
September ushered in another school year. But for many students and teachers, this required the adoption of virtual classes and digital tools. We saw this play out on mobile with homework-help apps– an Apptopia defined market of apps that provide immediate answers or explanations to homework questions. I'm sure you're thinking, "Back in my day, we called this cheating."
Campuses across the UK are fast becoming ghost towns as students swerve physical University attendance in favour of remote working. While Autumn traditionally sees universities buzzing with freshers week and the start of a new academic year, Huq’s data shows that attendance is struggling to get beyond 22% of normal term time.
The holidays often seem to sneak up on consumers. In fact, a 2017 survey found that over half of shoppers planned to buy gifts within two days of Christmas. Retailers, on the other hand, think about the holiday season year-round. Employers usually start their holiday hiring as early as September to deal with surges, as 21% of retail sales come during this time.
Typically this time of year finds our analysts at LinkUp pouring over our jobs data to get a preview of holiday labor demand. Generally, we’d be looking at when seasonal hiring begins, who is doing the most hiring, and what all this might mean for holiday retail. But if we’ve learned anything over the past months, it’s that 2020 is anything but typical.
With the overall economy slowly recovering and the country returning to ‘normalcy’, some sectors have been hit far harder than others. None more so than travel. So with a return en route, we dove back into this space to see how leading players are responding.
U.S. commercial real estate deal volume has fallen sharply in 2020 but there is still capital flowing into the sector, which supports asset pricing. More capital flowed to refinancing activity than into new acquisitions in the first half of 2020, the latest edition of US Capital Trends shows.
Most Vulnerable Counties in Third Quarter of 2020 Concentrated in States Running from Connecticut through Maryland; New York City, Baltimore, Washington, D.C. and Now Philadelphia Among Areas with Clusters of High-Risk Counties; Midwest Joins the West as Regions Less at Risk of Housing-Market Problems
While seemingly defying the odds, home price growth has persisted throughout the pandemic and showed little sign of slowing down even though the nation is facing a potentially bigger contraction than the Great Recession. According to the latest CoreLogic HPI, home prices have grown about 70% from their post-Great Recession nadir in 2011.
With less than a month until election day, the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic fallout continue to be defining issues of the campaign. Amid this continued volatility, we find that widespread struggles with housing costs have been troublingly stable since the start of the pandemic. And despite their pressing needs, we find that those who are struggling most are least likely to make their voices heard at the ballot box on November 3rd.
One of the trends that has emerged in 2020 is a flight to affordability, with expensive markets and properties being especially adversely affected in many cases. Today we take a closer look at third quarter performance for the five most expensive US markets based on average effective rent per unit. Those markets are San Francisco – Oakland, New York City, Boston, Los Angeles – Orange County and San Diego.
During Covid, many countries experienced atypical visitation patterns. Some countries experienced a 50% decline in park traffic while others experienced an increase of up to 90% year-over-year. As people adjusted to the new normal there was an acceleration in park visitation globally. Meanwhile, park traffic in tourist destinations suffered more meaningfully.
German investors have new incentives to look at commercial real estate investments in the U.S. This group of investors was the second largest source of cross-border capital for deals in the U.S. over the last 12 months, behind Canadian players. A short while ago it was difficult for German investors to look at U.S. because of hedging costs. Those costs are fading and can make U.S. investments look comparatively inexpensive.
At the onset of the pandemic, consumer spending on both grocery and food delivery services experienced large spikes. Several online grocery purchase platforms reported a massive increase of new customers making their first-ever purchase during the week of March 31. States like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois and Pennsylvania saw high growth in new customers opting for grocery delivery.
Staff-levels at manufacturing plants, a proxy for productivity, in the UK have caught up with those in the EU for the first time in 2020, with attendance even nudging higher than the EU for the first time since April in the last week. Both regions saw a gradual recovery in staffing following a sharp decline in March, but the start of summer saw the UK’s manufacturing recovery stagnate to around half of European levels.
