Since February 2020, the leisure-and-hospitality sector has shed nearly four million jobs, roughly a quarter of its workforce. As of January 2021, 15.9% of the industry’s workers remained unemployed; more than any other industry.

Shoppers boosted spending by 5.3% in January, the first increase in four months, buoyed by recent virus-related stimulus payments. The rise followed three consecutive months of declining sales during the 2020 holiday shopping season.

Lumber futures have climbed 47% over the past three weeks, to within a few dollars of records set in September. Lumber for March delivery ended trading Friday at $982.10 per thousand board feet, more than twice the price a year earlier.

The U.S. budget gap totaled a record $736 billion during the first four months of fiscal 2021, an 89% increase from a year earlier.

Households’ expected level of spending a year from now surged to 4.2%, the best reading since June 2015 and predict their future incomes would rise by 2.4%, a 0.2 percentage point increase from the prior month and the highest reading since February 2020.

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.

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 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.

Thirty-seven CFOs stepped down from S&P 500 companies, up 27.6% from 2019. The figure for 2020 is higher than the average number of resignations over the past decade, which totaled about 25 a year.