Raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2025 could lift 900,000 Americans above the poverty threshold—but the policy would cost 1.4 million Americans their jobs over the next four years, according to a study released by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget.
The leisure and hospitality sector lost 61,000 jobs in January, following a steep decline of 536,000 in December.
The percentage of U.S. online hotel bookings through hotel websites rose one percentage point last year to 49%, while OTA share fell to 51%.
Research from Moody’s Analytics and the Urban Institute estimates 9.4 million U.S. renter households owed an average of $5,586 in back rent, utilities and related late fees as of January, for a total burden of $52.6 billion.
The total active pipeline count is decelerating and is now below where it was a year ago, down 3% as compared to Q4 2019.
Real-estate co-working startup Knotel Inc. filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, agreeing for the company to be taken over by real-estate services firm Newmark Group Inc. Newmark is providing Knotel with $20 million in debtor-in-possession financing. New York-based Knotel, founded in 2016, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and in August 2019, Knotel said it had reached a valuation of more than $1 billion.
Households collectively saved $1.4 trillion in the first nine months of last year, about twice as much as what they saved in the same period a year earlier
The U.S. hotel industry reported all-time lows in occupancy and revenue per available room in 2020 with year-over-year declines the worst on record across the three key performance metrics. Occupancy averaged 44 percent, down 33.3 percent from 2019; average daily rate was $103.25, down 21.3 percent; and revenue per available room was $45.48, down 47.5 percent.
The Fed estimates U.S. economic output will grow 4.2% in 2021 and the unemployment rate will drop to 5% by year’s end from 6.7% in December. It sees the jobless rate falling further to 4.2% by the end of 2022.
