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LA Fitness has lined up a $300 million loan from the government’s Main Street Lending Program, which provides emergency loans to help small- and medium-size businesses affected by the coronavirus pandemic, said Robert Wilson, the gym operator’s general counsel, and The Wall Street Journal reported. Moody’s Investors Service cut the company’s debt rating in August. The company’s lenders hired PJT Partners Inc. in August in anticipation of talks on a possible restructuring or to secure additional financing. The $600 billion Main Street Lending Program is jointly managed by the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve and was designed to support more lending to borrowers who were in solid financial condition before the pandemic hit. Under the program, the Fed will purchase 95 percent of eligible loans made by banks. Privately owned LA Fitness parent Fitness International LLC, which operates more than 700 clubs across the country, carries $1.7 billion in debt. LA Fitness was founded in 1984 in the Los Angeles suburb of Covina and grew both organically and through acquisitions, including through a 2011 buyout of Bally Total Fitness. 

The biggest Western Slope natural gas producer is buying Ursa Resources’ business and wells two months after the company filed for chapter 11 protection, the Denver Business Journal reported. Houston-based Terra Energy Partners LLC agreed to pay $60 million to acquire Denver-based Ursa Piceance Holdings LLC and its subsidiaries after a bankruptcy court sale. The sale includes its 41,000 acres of mineral rights and 579 operating wells. Privately held Terra Energy Partners succeeded with a bid at auction in federal bankruptcy court in Delaware that was declared the winning offer Thursday. The sale process is scheduled to be finalized in a Nov 19 court hearing. Terra Energy, which operates as TEP Rocky Mountain, produces natural gas from 5,300 wells on 370,000 acres in northwest Colorado’s Piceance Basin. The deal is the latest transaction in the oil and natural gas industry that has been shaken by a historic collapse in the demand for fuels triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. Coming off years of weak natural gas prices, the collapse of crude oil has pushed many companies into filing for bankruptcy protection, including at least four others in Colorado. Ursa Piceance Holdings and its operating and pipeline subsidiaries filed for bankruptcy protection Sept. 2 with $282 million in debt on its books. 

JCPenney Co.’s top landlords are betting on a comeback for department stores, some of the biggest pandemic losers, after clearing a final hurdle to buying the company out of bankruptcy, WSJ Pro reported. A bankruptcy judge signed off on a sale of the 118-year-old department store chain to Simon Property Group Inc. and Brookfield Property Partners LP, saving JCPenney from potential liquidation and keeping roughly 60,000 employees in their jobs. JCPenney’s ability to survive a bankruptcy at all is notable in a grim retail landscape where others that have filed for chapter 11 during the pandemic wound up liquidating. For Simon and Brookfield, the acquisition is coinciding with rising market optimism that consumer habits could return to normal next year after a coronavirus vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. and partner BioNTech SE showed promise in protecting people from COVID-19. Still, skeptics are questioning whether department stores like JCPenney should be saved. Simon Chief Executive David Simon told investors that he believes JCPenney can be made profitable again by following the mall owner’s playbook of reducing rent and overhead while leveraging the scale of Simon’s vast apparel retail holdings. Simon and Brookfield also teamed up to buy Forever 21 Inc. out of bankruptcy in February and Aéropostale Inc. in 2016.

Before the coronavirus arrived in New York, yellow taxis were an enduring symbol of the city’s hustle, crowding the streets of Midtown Manhattan, ferrying passengers to airports and carrying tourists to boutique hotels. But eight months into the pandemic, the industry lies almost entirely crippled, The New York Times reported. Revenue for the taxi industry is down 81 percent over the same period a year ago, according to the latest city data. That is better than in the worst days of the pandemic in March and April — but not by much. Even as some parts of city life have returned, reliable sources of taxi passengers have not. Offices, especially in Midtown, are closed. Tourism is virtually nonexistent, and the airports are mostly empty. Ride-hailing companies, such as Uber and Lyft, also took a hit when the city largely shut down in the spring. But they have bounced back more quickly. Revenue is now about a third lower than last year, and the chief executive of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi, said last week on a call with investors that city ridership outside of commuting hours had returned to normal. Bruce Schaller, a former city transportation official, said that customers might be using taxis less because they believed they were more of a health risk, even though that was not the case. Almost all drivers in every sector stopped working altogether during the peak, city data shows, in part because of the possibility of getting sick on the job, a threat that was magnified by the deaths of dozens of drivers. In a recent survey by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, nearly half of drivers said either they or someone in their home had contracted the virus. While many drivers were out of work, they relied on the federal government’s enhanced unemployment program, which paid $600 a week in addition to state benefits.

Two critical unemployment programs are set to expire at the end of the year, potentially leaving millions of Americans vulnerable to eviction and hunger and threatening to short-circuit an economic recovery that has already lost momentum, The New York Times reported. As many as 13 million people are receiving payments under the programs, which Congress created last spring to expand and extend the regular unemployment system during the coronavirus pandemic. Leaders of both major parties have expressed support for renewing the programs in some form, but Congress has been unable to reach a deal to do so. It remains unclear how the results of last week’s election will affect prospects for an agreement. That means that for now at least, people must prepare for the possibility that they are weeks away from losing their only income. The expanded unemployment programs are some of the last vestiges of the trillions of dollars in aid that Congress provided through a series of emergency measures in the spring. That spending — which included direct checks to most U.S. households, $600 a week in supplemental unemployment benefits and hundreds of billions of dollars in support for small businesses — offset the pandemic’s financial toll for many families, and helped fuel an economic recovery that was initially stronger than many forecasters expected. Much of that assistance expired over the summer, however. Economic gains have slowed significantly since then, and studies have found that millions of Americans fell into poverty as aid dried up. Employment data released Friday showed that the number of people out of work for more than six months, the standard threshold for long-term unemployment, rose 1.2 million in October, to 3.6 million.