The Supreme Court on Thursday lifted the latest federal ban on evictions during the Covid-19 pandemic, siding with landlords against a moratorium the Biden administration imposed this month despite questions about its legality.
The top 25 private-equity firms are sitting on $509.8 billion in uninvested cash, holding 22.3% of the global dry powder total of $2.29 trillion in August. That is a significant increase from December, when the worldwide total was just under $2 trillion; in December 2019, the figure was $1.63 trillion.
In the second quarter of 2021, $13 billion in hotel transactions have taken place — the highest ever and twice the amount of transactions as happened in 2019.
Shared office space firms are enjoying a rise in sales this summer as U.S. businesses grappling with the seismic changes in the workspace world sparked by the pandemic seek flexible and short-term solutions. Hundreds of companies particularly in the technology sector are taking spaces from these firms, ranging from a handful of desks to over 50,000 square feet for periods as short as one month. Many individuals are also doing this on their company’s dime as they wait for their employers to figure out when it is safe to require workers to return to pre-pandemic offices.
The private-label mortgage market—in which financial firms serve the middleman role of creating giant pools of loans and selling them to investors—had more than $42 billion of issuance in the second quarter. That is the most since the pandemic started and almost the most for any quarter since the last financial crisis.
Total margin debt contracted 4.3% in July, the first monthly decline in 15 months.
A divided Supreme Court lifted part of New York’s eviction moratorium, saying the state had gone too far in protecting tenants at the expense of landlords. The high court blocked a state measure that made it easy for tenants to invoke eviction protections by self-certifying that they were facing financial hardships during the Covid-19 pandemic. Landlords generally couldn’t challenge such certifications.
Investors poured $705 billion into exchange-traded funds through the first seven months of the year, pushing 2021’s world-wide tally to a record $9.1 trillion. Net flows so far this year have nearly eclipsed the $736.5 billion investors had moved into ETFs globally in all of 2020.
More than 20 million jobs were lost in March and April 2020, when pandemic-related restrictions caused the economy to contract sharply. By June 2021, economic output had returned to prepandemic levels, but employers had 6.6 million fewer jobs on payrolls.
