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Workers are slowly pulling away from unemployment assistance as a U.S. economic revival picks up speed, with initial filings for benefits holding near pandemic lows and the number of people receiving help dropping, the Wall Street Journal reported. Initial jobless claims, a proxy for layoffs, increased by a seasonally adjusted 16,000 last week to 744,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The four-week average, which smooths out volatility in the figures, rose slightly to 723,750 from 721,250. Claims are still well above the weekly average of around 220,000 in the year before COVID-19’s arrival. The continued high rate of filings comes amid other signs of recent labor-market improvement. U.S. employers added 916,000 jobs in March, and the unemployment rate slipped to 6.0%, from 6.2% in the prior month. Real-time data on job openings indicate a surge in labor demand. Postings on Indeed, a job-search site, are now 16% above where they were in February 2020. The pace of growth in job postings has accelerated in recent weeks and is now higher than during the summer of 2020 hiring rebound. Demand for workers in sectors that thrived during the pandemic is well above precrisis levels. Job postings on Indeed for manufacturing, loading and stocking positions are now up more than 50% from February 2020, just before the coronavirus was declared a pandemic.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said in an interview yesterday that the U.S. economy is at an “inflection point" due to widespread COVID-19 vaccinations and "strong monetary policy support," The Hill reported. “We feel like we’re at a place where the economy is about to start growing much more quickly and job creation coming in much more quickly, so the principal risk to our economy right now really is that the disease would spread again,” Powell told CBS's "60 Minutes." Reuters notes that recent economic data support Powell’s remarks, with 916,000 jobs created in March, better than expected and a possible indicator of 1 million jobs being created in a month later this year. Despite the increase seen in March, there are still 8.4 million fewer jobs than in February of 2020, Reuters added. And the economic recovery has been uneven, with unemployment rates for Black and Hispanic Americans and people without high school diplomas higher than the national average. Among white Americans and people with college degrees, the unemployment rate is below the national average.

The Biden administration again extended a federal moratorium on evictions last week, but conflicting court rulings on whether the ban is legal, plus the difficulty of rolling out nearly $50 billion in federal aid, mean the country’s reckoning with its eviction crisis may come sooner than expected, the Washington Post reported. The year-old federal moratorium — which has now been extended through June 30 — has probably kept hundreds of thousands or millions of people from being evicted from their apartments and homes. More than 10 million Americans are behind on rent, according to Moody’s, easily topping the 7 million who lost their homes to foreclosure in the 2008 housing bust. Despite the unprecedented federal effort to protect tenants, landlords have been chipping away at the moratorium in court. Six lawsuits have made their way before federal judges — with three ruling in support of the ban and three calling it illegal. The opposition started when landlords in Texas sued in the fall, arguing that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had overstepped its bounds in implementing the ban. Apartment owners argued in their complaint that they built and maintained apartment buildings “with the reasonable expectation that they would be legally permitted to realize the benefit of their bargain by collecting monthly rent from their tenants.” District Judge J. Campbell Barker agreed. “Although the COVID-19 pandemic persists, so does the Constitution,” he wrote. The National Association of Home Builders joined Ohio landlords in another suit. The judge in that case, J. Philip Calabrese, also ruled against the ban, writing March 10 that “the CDC’s orders exceeded the statutory authority Congress gave the agency.” Treasury Department officials have been armed with nearly $50 billion in emergency aid for renters who have fallen behind and are racing to distribute it through hundreds of state, local and tribal housing agencies, some of which have not created programs yet. The idea is to get the money to renters before courts nationwide begin processing evictions again. “We are running the Emergency Rental Assistance Program every day like we’re going to lose the moratorium tomorrow,” said a Treasury Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the program before any formal announcements. The moratorium was not overly controversial at first, and it has received bipartisan support from lawmakers. It was formed when President Donald Trump and Congress directed the CDC to create a form tenants can use to declare that they cannot pay rent because of the pandemic and that they have been unable to secure other housing. Filing the form generally halts eviction proceedings.

Billions of dollars in stimulus payments are being sent to Americans, and that makes them a target for fraudsters, the Washington Post reported. Coronavirus-related cons have given crooks another way into people’s bank accounts, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, whom President Biden named acting chair of the Federal Trade Commission, said in an interview with the Washington Post “People are desperate,” Slaughter said. “They are struggling financially. They’re worried about their health. They’re dealing with child-care issues. And that’s why it’s great that the money is coming, but bad guys are seeing that desperation, too, and are taking advantage of it as they do. We’re just looking out for people who are trying to take advantage of that stimulus money and other related programs.” The FTC received nearly 2.2 million consumer fraud reports last year, up almost 27 percent from the year before, including a surge of online shopping complaints in the early days of the pandemic. Consumers reported losing more than $3.3 billion to fraud, up from $1.8 billion a year earlier. Last year, the FTC introduced ReportFraud.ftc.gov, an updated platform for consumers to file fraud complaints. The FTC is seeing scams involving personal protective equipment (PPE). The agency has also pursued schemes involving the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), which provides money to businesses to help them make payroll during the pandemic. Tucked in the third round of stimulus aid, largely unnoticed, was $30.4 million allocated to the FTC to fight not just the old consumer scams but also new schemes with a pandemic twist. Under the American Rescue Plan, signed by Biden on March 11, $24 million went to fund full-time employees at the FTC to address unfair or deceptive acts or practices, including those related to the coronavirus. An additional $4.4 million would go to process and monitor consumer complaints received by the FTC’s Consumer Sentinel Network, including increased complaints about schemes related to the pandemic, and $2 million for consumer-related education to help consumers avoid coronavirus scams.

Predatory debt collectors would be barred from collecting any more money from the federal government’s Paycheck Protection Program under recently proposed U.S. legislation, the Washington Post reported. Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-Ore.) and Rep. Marie Newman (D-Ill.) introduced the measure last week, arguing that during the pandemic, abusive collectors had harassed consumers and that such firms should not be eligible for the federal relief. Their proposal would block firms that have violated federal debt collection laws from receiving the forgivable loans. The $670 billion Paycheck Protection Program offers forgivable loans of up to $10 million to small businesses. From its beginning, disputes have arisen about whether certain businesses should be eligible for the money. Many debt collection firms have thrived during the pandemic and consumer advocates question whether the operations of these firms should be subsidized by the federal government, especially during an economic downturn. According to a Washington Post analysis earlier this year, more than 1,700 debt-collection agencies and related businesses borrowed from the program, totaling more than $520 million in loans. Some of the recipients have been sanctioned previously for harassment or other abusive tactics.

The owner of Destiny USA, the largest shopping center in New York, is exploring a possible restructuring of the struggling property’s municipal and mortgage-backed debt obligations, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Pyramid Management Group has hired financial adviser Houlihan Lokey Inc. and law firm Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP to look into restructuring options for Destiny USA as pandemic regulations continue to affect the mall’s bottom line. A six-story structure in Syracuse, N.Y., by Onondaga Lake, Destiny USA owes roughly $286 million in municipal bond debt and about $430 million in commercial mortgage-backed securities. Bond insurer Syncora Holdings Ltd. guarantees more than a quarter of the tax-exempt debt and is being advised by investment bank Moelis & Co. and law firm White & Case LLP on the mall’s financial troubles.

The Biden administration said on Wednesday that 25 million more stimulus payments worth a total of $36 billion had been sent out to Americans from the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief legislation, Reuters reported. The announcement of a fourth batch of checks was made by the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service. It brings to 156 million payments the amount disbursed, with a total value of $372 billion. The latest payments of up to $1,400 began processing last Friday, with some people receiving direct deposits, Treasury said in a statement. The pandemic-hammered U.S. economy has been on the rebound, with 916,000 jobs created last month, bringing the jobless rate down to 6%.