Among 2,500 office buildings in 10 large U.S. cities, about 25 percent of workers had returned as of 18 November, reported Kastle Systems, a security firm that tracks access card swipes in those buildings. The rate has dipped from October’s mark of 27 percent but remains comfortably above the...
...platform of newly-forming political parties will anti-tax. For example, with schools closed and learning online, taxpayers will demand sharp decreases in school taxes. Far fewer teachers will be needed, and...
U.S. MEDIA WILL LOG RECORD LAYOFFS THIS YEAR. U.S. media outlets have cut an estimated 28,637 jobs through late October, according to data compiled by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas and cited by The Hill. The number is just shy of the record 28,803 workers lopped from media...
A peer-reviewed study published on 5 January in the European Journal of Clinical Investigation studied restrictive measures imposed to stop the spread of the coronavirus in ten major countries. Its conclusion: “We do not find any significant benefits on case growth of more restrictive NPIs (non‐pharmaceutical interventions). Similar reductions...
As reported in the Trends Journal since April, the executive director of the U.N. World Food Program, David Beasley, warned the U.N. Security Council that as a result of global lockdowns in reaction to the coronavirus, an additional 135 million people could suffer “crisis levels of hunger or worse.”...
As the Trends Journal has reported, The Great Barrington Declaration, first released on 4 October, is a call by medical and scientific experts to end the global lockdowns and start initiating a policy of “Focused Protection.” Every week since first posting online, thousands of additional scientists, physicians and public...
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SOUTHWEST AIRLINES REPORTS SLOWDOWN. After seeing bookings rise in August through mid-October, ticket sales slowed recently, the carrier reported. Third-quarter revenues declined 65 percent year on year, with about 55 percent of available seats sold; the airline had forecast a 65- to 70-percent drop. Year-on-year revenues for November and...
Modest gains in tourism over the summer were reversed in August and September, according to Booking Holdings, an online travel booking site. Third-quarter hotel reservations fell 43 percent in the third quarter but plunged 70 percent the week ending 4 November, Bookings CEO Glen Fogel said to the Wall Street...
As we’ve long been reporting in the Trends Journal, the 2015 Argentinian presidential election of Mauricio Macri, despite all the rousing cheers from the White Shoe Boys, who thought the former engineer would be the perfect business guy to straighten out the country’s never-ending financial crisis, made a bad...
Among the many leaderless demonstrations sweeping the globe protesting graft, corruption, political elite dominance, income inequality, declining living standards, lack of jobs, etc., the street demonstrations in Lebanon that began in mid-October have escalated. The protest that escalated last Wednesday, when some 250,000 were on the streets, many of...
Third-quarter GDP for India, Asia’s third-largest economy, fell to 4.5 percent from 5 percent in the second quarter, as households and companies pulled back on spending. India was hot last year, with growth exceeding 8 percent, but it’s down to its slowest pace in six years. Earlier in the...
Turkey’s central bank cut its interest rate for the fourth time this year, hoping to kickstart lending and revive economic growth. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan pressured the bank to cut rates by 10 points since July. Last week, the bank’s Monetary Policy Committee made another cut, dropping the...
These decentralized, unalterable records of transactions are easier to understand when you see one in use by something like the Brooklyn Microgrid. Some microgrid members have solar electricity panels on their roofs; some don’t. A household without panels can buy excess power generated by panels from households that have...
Following up on the 7 January Trends Journal Special Report detailing the U.S. assassination of Iran’s General Qassim Soleimani, the next day, Iran responded by firing over a dozen missiles at Iraqi military bases housing American troops. There were no deaths, nor any major casualties. It was reported that...
The new pact gives each side some, but not a lot, of what it wants. China has agreed to buy about $200 billion a year in U.S. goods, stiffen protections for intellectual property, and open its markets wider to American firms, especially in financial services. The deal leaves in...
PFAS – perfluoroalkyl substances, a family of more than 5,000 hardy chemicals used to make products ranging from firefighting foam to waterproof mascara – have widely pervaded the U.S. water supply, according to a new study by the private, nonprofit Environmental Working Group (EWG). Several of the chemicals have...
In this edition of the Trends Journal we highlight several of the hot spots around the globe where the public is rising up against long established rulers while other nations are being targeted by foreign governments in the never-ending battle of regime change based on any pretext that media...
One in every ten of the world’s central banks is planning to issue a national cryptocurrency before 2023, according to a 2019 survey by the Bank for International Settlements. The number almost doubled for banks planning to launch digital currencies by 2026. In theory, national cryptocurrencies could be used...
As we’ve been reporting, Americans are fattening up, ditching their morning bowl of cereal for junk food… or what the “marketers” label “high-protein items” that they gobble down at fast food joints. Kellogg, the giant manufacturer of such familiar cereals as Frosted Flakes, Special K, and Rice Krispies, reported...
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