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Lord & Taylor, the first department store established in the United States, is officially going out of business, ending a nearly 200-year run, CNN.com reported. The bankrupt company announced yesterday that all of its 38 remaining stores and website have begun liquidation sales — a reversal from last week's decision to keep 14 locations open. "While we are still entertaining various opportunities, we believe it is prudent to simultaneously put the remainder of the stores into liquidation to maximize value of inventory for the estate while pursuing options for the company's brands," Ed Kremer, Lord & Taylor's chief restructuring officer said in a statement. Lord & Taylor filed for bankruptcy on August 2, joining a string of upscale retailers filing for chapter 11 in recent months. It initially announced 19 stores were closing, then increased that number to 24 a few weeks later. Now every store will close for good. 

A telephone call on coronavirus economic relief between U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and an adviser to President Donald Trump ended yesterday with no breakthrough, and Pelosi said that talks would not resume until the Trump administration agreed to $2.2 trillion in aid, Reuters reported. Pelosi and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows spoke by phone for about 25 minutes, the first chance in weeks to resume stalled COVID-19 aid negotiations. But the two sides soon appeared to be as far apart as ever. Meadows and Pelosi are two of the four negotiators who were involved in talks on legislation to help Americans and businesses suffering from a coronavirus pandemic that has now killed nearly 180,000 people. The others are Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. The talks broke down on Aug. 7, with the sides far apart on major issues including the size of unemployment benefits for tens of millions of people made jobless by the pandemic, aid for state and local governments and funding for schools and food support programs. The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives in May passed a $3.4 trillion coronavirus relief bill, but Pelosi offered to reduce that sum by $1 trillion. The White House, which had proposed $1 trillion in aid, rejected the offer. Democrats have since demanded that the White House agree to “meet in the middle.”

A debate between the White House and the Treasury Department over President Trump’s payroll tax suspension has delayed crucial information about how the executive order will be carried out, leaving businesses across the country uncertain about how to proceed, the New York Times reported. The delay in releasing guidelines about the tax suspension comes amid broad business backlash to the idea, which was announced by Trump this month after talks with Congress over another economic relief bill stalled. The executive order aims to stimulate the economy by allowing companies to stop withholding payroll taxes until the end of the year, putting more money in workers’ pockets. But companies and trade groups have called the suspension an unnecessary complication since employees will be on the hook to pay the deferred taxes back when the tax holiday ends. Many companies are expected to opt out of participating to avoid sticking their employees with a giant tax bill next year. The White House, which is eager to push through a tax cut before the November election, wants the Treasury guidance to ensure that companies, not workers, are held liable for paying the employee portion of the tax when the tax holiday ends. It is unclear why the Treasury Department has not been willing to issue such guidance, but businesses, which have been fielding questions from their employees about when the tax cuts will begin, would prefer that Congress legislate any changes to tax policy. It is also not clear that the White House would have the legal authority to shift the tax burden in such a manner.

Hertz Global Holdings Inc. is on the hunt for a bankruptcy loan totaling as much as $1.5 billion after regulators blocked the rental car company from pursuing a sale of what likely would be worthless stock, MarketWatch.com reported. Hertz this week reached out to existing creditors, as well as potential outside investors, for a debtor-in-possession loan sized at $1.1 billion to $1.5 billion. The car rental company sought chapter 11 in May without a deal with creditors and without a bankruptcy loan to fund its business, unusual for a company of Hertz's size saddled with roughly $19 billion in debt. At the time, the company's finance chief said Hertz had enough cash on hand to fund its operations at least through the initial stage of the case. But as the company's bankruptcy case drags on amid the continuing coronavirus pandemic fallout on travel, the need for financing has become more acute. Hertz's need for cash became more critical after the company pulled the plug on its plan to raise up to $500 million through the sale of its stock during the reorganization.

While the overall amount of foreclosures continued its coronavirus-moratorium descent, Attom Data Solutions found that the share of zombie properties grew during the third quarter of 2020, National Mortgage News reported. In an analysis of data pulled the week of Aug. 17, Attom’s Vacant Property and Zombie Foreclosure Report showed 215,886 properties in the foreclosure process and approximately 7,960 — or 3.7 percent — sit vacant. The share rose from 2.97 percent in the second quarter and from 3.2 percent the year before. Meanwhile, zombie properties totaled 7,652 and 9,612 during those respective time periods. Overall, zombie foreclosures represent one in every 12,486 U.S. residential properties as of the week of Aug. 17. "Abandoned homes in foreclosure remain little more than a spot on the radar screen in most parts of the United States, posing few, if any, problems from neighborhood to neighborhood," Todd Teta, chief product officer with Attom Data Solutions, said in a press release. "But the latest numbers do throw a small potential red flag into the air, given the increase in the percentage of zombie foreclosures." New York again led the country in zombie properties at 2,136, though that total continues to tick down. Florida followed with 1,028, then 971 in Illinois and 887 in Ohio. By zombie share of total foreclosures, Indiana leads at 8.5 percent, followed by 6.8 percent in Kansas, 6.5 percent in Ohio and 6.3 percent in Rhode Island. About 1.6 percent of all 99.4 million homes sit vacant in the United States, totaling over 1.57 million single-family homes and condos.

United Airlines is preparing for the biggest pilot furloughs of its history after announcing on Thursday the need to cut 2,850 pilot jobs this year, or about 21 percent of the total, without further U.S. government aid, Reuters reported. Airlines, reeling from the devastating impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic on air travel, have asked the U.S. government for another $25 billion to cover employee payroll through March. The first tranche, which banned any job cuts until Oct. 1, expires at the end of September, but talks in Washington have stalled as Congress has struggled to reach agreement on a broader coronavirus assistance package. United’s planned cuts, released in a memo to employees and shared with the media, would run between Oct. 1 and Nov. 30. They are significantly higher than the 1,900 announced earlier this week by Delta Air Lines and 1,600 by American Airlines. Facing a shrinking industry in the years ahead, airlines have generally tried to mitigate the number of forced job cuts by offering early retirement or voluntary departure deals, but some carriers’ packages have been more attractive than others. “While other airlines have chosen to reduce manpower through voluntary means, it is tragic that United has limited those options for our pilots and instead has chosen to furlough more pilots than ever before in our history,” the union representing United’s 13,000 pilots said in a statement. United said the numbers were based on current travel demand for the remainder of the year and its anticipated flying schedule, which it said “continues to be fluid with the resurgence of COVID-19 in regions across the U.S.”

Cutting taxes during periods of high unemployment will produce fewer jobs than during more robust economic times, according to a new working paper from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO), The Hill reported. "I find that effects on hours worked, employment, and the unemployment rate become smaller in times of higher unemployment," the paper's author, U. Devrim Demirel, wrote. The reason, Demirel suggested, is that employers are less concerned about the costs of hiring at times of high unemployment, where labor is already relatively cheaper. In negotiations over COVID-19 emergency relief, Republicans have pushed to provide tax breaks for struggling businesses. The paper did not weigh in on whether such tools would help keep businesses afloat, but its findings suggest that it wouldn't be the best route to add jobs to the economy.

More than 300 malls in the U.S. are categorized as "Class B" malls, according to real estate research firm Green Street Advisors. With their middle-of-the-road sales productivity, mix of national and regional tenants and one or more anchor vacancies, Class Bs are right in that gray area: Some will weather the current storm, but many will not, Bloomberg News reported. Rent and occupancy at B malls were already falling before the pandemic, but they were less likely to have several anchor vacancies or poor sales like the worst-performing malls in the U.S., those Cs or Ds. About 11 percent of B and B+ malls now have two anchor vacancies, while nearly a third of B- malls have two empty anchors or more. When malls have one anchor vacancy and other anchors start to follow, “that’s when things start to accelerate to the downside,” said Zachary Klein, a real estate and leisure analyst at Fitch Ratings. Since many leases include so-called co-tenancy clauses that let other retailers break leases or pay less if key tenants leave, an anchor vacancy can spell more bad news ahead for middle-tier malls. Although many bankrupt retailers continue operating while restructuring under chapter 11, they’re planning to shut down droves of lower-performing stores. All in all, as many as 25,000 stores could close in the U.S. this year, mostly in malls, according to Coresight. That would demolish the previous record of about 9,800 closures, set in 2019.