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Illness caused by COVID-19 shrank the U.S. labor force by around 500,000 people, a hit that is likely to continue if the virus continues to sicken workers at current rates, according to a new study released today, the Wall Street Journal reported. Millions of people left the labor force — the number of people working or looking for work — during the pandemic for various reasons, including retirement, lack of child care and fear of COVID-19. The total size of the labor force reached 164.7 million people in August, exceeding the February 2020 pre-pandemic level for the first time. The labor force would have 500,000 more members if not for the people sickened by COVID-19, according to the study’s authors, economists Gopi Shah Goda of Stanford University and Evan J. Soltas, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If we stay where we are with COVID infection rates going forward, we expect that 500,000-person loss to persist until either exposure goes down or severity goes down,” said Mr. Soltas. That assumes that some of those previously sickened eventually return to work. The authors “provide the most credible evidence to date about labor-market impacts for a large set of workers,” said Aaron Sojourner, an economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, who wasn’t involved in the study. The study, which hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed, was based on a representative population of more than 300,000 workers followed over 14 months in the Census Bureau’s monthly household survey. The analysis covered the period from January 2010 to June 2022. The authors used health-related, weeklong absences as a proxy for probable COVID illnesses. From March 2020 to June 2022, approximately 10 workers per thousand missed a week of work due to health reasons, on average, up from six per thousand on average over the decade before the pandemic.

Cineworld Group Plc explored options including a secondary U.S. listing, selling non-U.S. assets, merging with a rival and an SPAC deal, but ultimately had no choice but to file for bankruptcy with less than $4 million cash on hand, according to Deputy Chief Executive Officer Israel Greidinger, Bloomberg News reported. The world’s second-largest cinema chain filed for chapter 11 protection in Texas on Wednesday to pay off heavy debts, finance future operations and “rationalize its theater portfolio,” Greidinger said in the court documents. Enforced COVID-19 theater shutdowns froze the group’s income stream and its ability to pay for costs, including billions of dollars in debts incurred when it bought U.S. company Regal in 2018. Cineworld’s biggest rival, AMC Entertainment Holdings, Inc., had a very different pandemic experience, benefiting from a more-than-2,500% surge in its share price in the first half of 2021, fueled by retail investors on social media platforms like Reddit piling into so-called ‘meme’ stocks. The U.S. theater chain replenished its coffers by issuing equity at heightened prices, and although AMC has now lost a lot of the gains from that rally, the business remains more valuable than before the pandemic struck. London-based Cineworld publicly floated the idea of a secondary U.S. listing in August 2021, but never went ahead with the possible plan.

After more than two years, six laws and more than $5 trillion were intended to break the deadly grip of the coronavirus pandemic. The money spared the U.S. economy from ruin and put vaccines into millions of arms, but it also invited unprecedented levels of fraud, abuse and opportunism. In a year-long investigation, the Washington Post attempted to follow the COVID money trail to figure out what happened to all that cash. The federal government cannot fully track this historic distribution of federal aid. The investigation found that billions were misspent or stolen, but officials aren’t sure exactly how much. Even where wrongdoing is apparent, experts say that the cash may never be recovered. While the economy was in free-fall early in the pandemic, lawmakers and many agencies opted for haste over precision, opening the door for waste, fraud and abuse. For example, the Small Business Administration rescued hundreds of thousands of firms from collapse, but it also sent billions of dollars to firms that probably shouldn’t have obtained the money. Congress at one point sent about $500 billion directly to cities, counties and states to shore up their budgets. But the money often came with few rules. The vast sums of cash that spared some families from financial ruin also attracted sophisticated criminal networks. For example, criminals stole the identities of thousands of innocent Americans and obtained unemployment checks in their names — making the funds hard to access when people legitimately needed help.

The British movie theater chain Cineworld, weighed down by a mammoth debt pile, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. yesterday, having failed to rebound from the pressure inflicted by the pandemic, the New York Times reported. Cineworld, the world’s second-largest theater chain after AMC Theaters, will seek to significantly reduce its debt through reorganization, the company said in the filing. The company, which is based in London and operates Regal Cinemas in the United States, reported $8.9 billion in debt at the end of 2021, including $4 billion in lease liabilities. Some of the debt was taken on in the pandemic as the company sought to outlast lockdowns that had sapped its revenue. Cineworld said yesterday in its filling that it had secured $1.94 billion in debtor-in-possession financing that would allow it to keep up its operations while it restructures its obligations. “The pandemic was an incredibly difficult time for our business, with the enforced closure of cinemas and huge disruption to film schedules that has led us to this point,” Mooky Greidinger, the company’s chief executive, said in the filing. Shares of Cineworld, which are traded on the London Stock Exchange, have lost close to 86 percent of their value since the beginning of the year and the company reported a loss of $565.8 million in its most recent earnings report. Before the pandemic, Cineworld had entered an agreement to acquire the Canadian company Cineplex, but it backed out of the deal in June 2020 after the pandemic hit. Cineplex sued for breach of contract, winning a fine of close to $1 billion from a Canadian judge, which Cineworld has yet to pay.

U.S. President Joe Biden will request $11.7 billion in emergency funding from Congress to provide lethal aid and budget support to Ukraine, and $22.4 billion for COVID-19 relief ahead of a potential fall case surge, the White House said on Friday, Reuters reported. The emergency funding request will also include $2 billion to address the impact of Russia's war in Ukraine on U.S. energy supplies, Shalanda Young, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), wrote in blog post. The $47.1 billion request comes ahead of the conclusion of the 2022 fiscal year on Sept 30. Congress has not yet passed a 2023 funding bill, and Young said lawmakers would likely need to pass a stopgap funding measure allowing them more time to negotiate a more comprehensive fiscal package. The White House's requests for the stopgap measure, known as a continuing resolution (CR), will also include $3.9 billion in funding to fight against an outbreak of the monkeypox virus and $6.5 billion for natural disaster relief, Young wrote. Congress is expected to grapple with CR discussions to keep the government fully operating beyond Sept. 30 when lawmakers return from summer recess next week.

Inflation-weary U.S. shoppers have been skimping on clothing purchases, prompting retailers to slash prices to clear inventory off the racks, YahooFinance.com reported. Gap was the latest retailer to report a slump in apparel shopping for the second-quarter, saying on Thursday that net sales slumped 8% from a year earlier to $3.86 billion. Earlier this month, executives at U.S. giants Walmart and Target offered deep discounts and rollbacks on clothing. Gap is “taking actions to sequentially reduce inventory, rebalance our assortments to better meet changing consumer needs," Katrina O’Connell, Gap Inc. chief financial officer, said in a statement. Deep discounts on apparel, especially at Old Navy, hurt the company's margins. Old Navy stores were not able to sell certain sizes and styles, while Gap struggled with mix imbalances. Shoppers may see more promotions as the company keeps clearing inventory. Sales at U.S. apparel and accessory retailers have largely flatlined. Over the 12-months through July they averaged month-over-month growth of just 0.2%, according to Census Bureau data.

In 2020, when the U.S. announced emergency loans to help small businesses struggling under Covid-19 shutdowns, funding went disproportionately to the higher-income zip codes of Louisiana’s capital. Better-resourced firms such as medical and legal offices collected most of the relief aid. But in 2021, more loans went to lower-income neighborhoods of the city — to beauty salons, barber shops, day care centers and other more vulnerable enterprises, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Small Business Administration data updated last month. By 2021, the Small Business Administration, the program’s administrator, had admitted about 600 new lenders, including small community banks that serve minorities, and allowed more sole proprietors and self-employed people to participate. The SBA also kicked off its later round of lending in 2021 by prioritizing applications from businesses with fewer than 20 employees during the first two weeks. In communities across the country, these changes resulted in smaller-sized loans going to a much larger number of smaller businesses, many of whom didn’t have established ties to the big banks that dominated the early part of PPP. In total, businesses have received 11.5 million loans through the $800 billion aid program, which is one of the biggest in U.S. history. Data about the program also provides unprecedented insight into small business lending, particularly into racial demographic data not previously collected on a large scale.

For the better part of last year, the pandemic eased its grip on Oregon’s economy. Awash in federal assistance, including direct checks to individuals and parents, many of the state’s most vulnerable found it easier to afford food, housing and other daily staples. Most of that aid, which was designed to be a temporary bridge, has run out at a particularly bad moment, the New York Times reported. Oregon, like states across the nation, has seen its economy improve, but prices for everything from eggs to gas to rent have spiked. Demand is growing at food banks like William Temple House in Northwest Portland, where the line for necessities like bread, vegetables and toilet paper stretched two dozen people deep on a recent day. “I’m very worried, like I was in the first month of the pandemic, that we will run out of food,” said Susannah Morgan, who runs the Oregon Food Bank, which helps supply William Temple House and 1,400 other meal assistance sites. In March 2021, President Biden signed into law a $1.9 trillion aid package aimed at helping people stay afloat when the economy was still reeling from the coronavirus. In addition to direct checks, the package included rental assistance and other measures meant to prevent evictions. It ensured free school lunches and offered expanded food assistance through several programs. Those programs helped the U.S. economy recover far more quickly than many economists had expected, but they have run their course as prices soar at the fastest pace in 40 years. The Federal Reserve, in an attempt to tame inflation, is rapidly raising borrowing costs, slowing the economy’s growth and stoking fears of a recession. While the labor market remains remarkably strong, the Fed’s interest rate increases risk slamming the brakes on the economy and pushing millions of people out of work, which would hurt lower-wage workers and risk adding to evictions and food insecurity. Several factors have driven prices higher in the last year, including a shift in spending toward goods like couches and cars and away from services. Supply chain snarls, a buying frenzy in the housing market and an oil price spike surrounding the Russian invasion of Ukraine have also contributed. While gas prices have fallen in recent months, rent continues to rise, and food and other staples remain elevated. Another factor fueling inflation, at least in small part, is the stimulus spending that helped speed the economy’s recovery and keep people out of poverty. More money in people’s bank accounts translated into more consumer spending. While the extent to which the rescue package fed inflation remains a matter of disagreement, almost no one, in Washington or on the front lines of helping vulnerable people across the country, expects another round of federal aid even if the economy tips into a recession. Lawmakers have grown increasingly concerned that more stimulus could exacerbate rising prices.