1) The furniture retailer Wayfair is reducing its workforce by 3% or 500 jobs. The online furniture retailer has more than 17,000 employees globally. The stock for the company has dropped more than 24% in the last twelve months. Wayfair has yet to post a profit and has been criticized for its high costs to run its business. Shipping items like sofas and coffee tables can be expensive, even more so where there’s returns.
2) Newspaper publisher conglomerate McClatchy has filed for bankruptcy. Owner of banner newspapers such as Miami Herald, Kansas City Star, Star-Telegram, News & Observer and Charlotte Observer, a total of thirty newspapers has seen its revenue slide downward for the last six years as readership of newspapers continues to decline, migrating to newer technologies for their news.
3) The U.S. national debt continues to increase at an ever increasing rate. The debt, adjusted for inflation, of 1900-1904 was $65.37 billion dollars. The debt after World War I (1919) was $329.06 billion dollars, a result of paying for the war. Then debt started dropping down to $319.35 billion dollars and by the 1929 stock market crash was down to $253.44 billion dollars, the start of the great depression. By the start of World War II, 1940, it was at $788.68 billion dollars, but at the end of the war (1945) skyrocketed to $3.69 trillion dollars, slowly drifting down to $533.19 billion dollars by 1975. But after that, it started growing again until today its now at $22.72 trillion dollars, 348 times the debt at the start of the twentieth century.
4) Stock market closings for – 13 FEB 20:
Dow 29,423.31 down 128.11
Nasdaq 9,711.97 down 13.99
S&P 500 3,373.94 down 5.51
10 Year Yield: down at 1 .62%
Oil: down at $51.52