Free Republic

Shoppers, it may be time to find a new pharmacy. Walgreens is closing up to a quarter of its 8,600 stores within the United States. Walgreens CEO Tim Wentworth recently explained to the Wall Street Journal on June 27 that the closures would focus on locations that aren't profitable, too close to each other or stores struggling with theft. .... According to CNN, 75% of the company's U.S. stores account for 100% of its operating income. The company will examine the remaining 25% of its 8,600 stores for closure. That equates to roughly 2,150 stores closing shop across the country...

(The Center Square) – In June, nine Illinois companies announced a total of 1,017 jobs affected by mass layoffs. A policy analyst and economy expert says more people are relying on themselves for employment. A “mass layoff” under the Illinois Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act is a reduction in force at a single site of employment of 25 or more full-time employees if they constitute one-third or more of full-time employees at the site, or 250 or more full-time employees. Director of Fiscal and Economic Research at Illinois Policy Bryce Hill said Illinois has the least business-friendly state of...

Americans across all age groups have dramatically cut back on spending between April and June, a recent study from TransUnion found, as many remain concerned about the higher cost of living despite declining inflation. ... 39 percent of all respondents said they had cut back on discretionary spending in the past three months. ... Among respondents who said they were concerned about inflation, the share went up to 58 percent. Sixty-six percent of respondents said they were concerned about the rising price of gasoline; 40 percent were worried about takeout and meal delivery becoming more expensive; and 84 percent feared...

While the new year marks a time for new beginnings and a fresh start, millions of Americans entered 2024 with more debt and less to put in their checking and savings accounts. At the start of the year, U.S. household debt reached a record high of $17.3 trillion, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (NYFRB). ... Key Findings Overall, U.S. household debt increased by 4.8% from November 2022 to November 2023, with credit card debt as the highest increase at 16.6%. Around a third of Americans said they expected to go into debt for holiday...

Making ends meet is a concern for one-third of U.S. consumers, even those making $100,000 or more a year, according to a survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. This is up from 28.7% a year ago. Among those able to pay their bills in full, more than a quarter worry they will be able to continue to cover their bills in the next six months, up from one-fifth a year ago. Thirty percent of those making $150,000 or more are concerned about their finances in the next six months.

As Americans struggle to keep up with the rising tide of prices and feel the squeeze of high interest rates on housing, President Joe Biden continues to claim that the economy is good. “Bidenomics” is working, there’s no recession to see here, so shut up and enjoy the drag queen performances at the White House. That narrative took a hit back in 2022, however, when America experienced two consecutive quarters of decline in gross domestic product—the traditional definition of a recession. In the first quarter of 2022, inflation-adjusted GDP declined in the U.S. by 1.6%, and it declined by an...

Get ready for a recession that hammers consumers, squeezes companies, and drags down stocks, a veteran economist warned. "There is a very high probability of a recession," Nancy Lazar, Piper Sandler's chief global economist, told WealthTrack in a recent interview. Lazar, a cofounder of Cornerstone Macro and ISI, cited the delayed impacts of the Federal Reserve's interest-rate rises and credit drying up as two likely drivers of a downturn. "We just think this is a very risky economic environment," she said. "When banks are tightening lending standards, and you clearly have higher interest rates, you've never had a soft landing....

Mass migration has not delivered significant GDP growth per capita for the United Kingdom, but it has increased strain on the country, according to a new study. While illegal immigration recently hit record highs in the United States, legal immigration poses a significant issue for the U.K., where legal migration levels are more than 25 times the level of illegal levels, according to a report Wednesday from the Centre for Policy Studies, a U.K. think tank and advocacy group. The percentage of foreign-born people in the U.K. nearly doubled over two decades, with 9% of the population being foreign-born in...

Southwest Airlines issued a press statement Thursday declaring their intention to fire around 2,000 employees and cancel service to four airports following financial difficulties. “[W]e are implementing cost control initiatives, including limiting hiring and offering voluntary time off programs. We now expect to end 2024 with approximately 2,000 fewer Employees as compared with the end of 2023,” Bob Jordan, the president and CEO of Southwest Airlines ... Jordan also announced that the company was shutting down its service to three airports in the United States and one in Mexico. “[W]e have made the difficult decision to close our operations at...

I said over and over again, Bidenomics will be a drag.Larger cracks are appearing in the US commercial real estate market at a time when uncertainty around the regional bank industry flashes red. The latest report from real estate data provider ATTOM shows CRE foreclosures topped 625 in March, up 6% from February and 117% from the same period last year.Last month, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell testified on Capitol Hill, “We have identified the banks that have high commercial real estate concentrations, particularly office and retail and other ones that have been affected a lot,” adding, “This is a...

Deutsche Bank’s top minds put U.S. recession chance near 100%—and say avoiding a hard landing would be ‘historically unprecedented’ Output is expected to contract as early as October and continue shrinking during the all-important election year, making it the worst performing economy among G7 nations in 2024. It appears as if U.S. economists may have popped the Champagne corks on a soft landing too early—at least according to Deutsche Bank. The German multinational bank’s top research team believes Washington has sparked a boom-bust cycle that now is nearing its end stage. In its house view, the recession slated to arrive...

The stats are in, revealing that Biden has flooded the nation with over 6.4 million illegal immigrants who have entered the U.S., bringing the total to now 13.7 million that the government must support. They are bankrupting cities, raising crime like never before since countries are emptying their prisons and shipping them to Bidenville. The number of recorded immigrants flowing through the border is about 172,000 per month, and that does not count those whom Biden has been secretly flying in to hide the actual NUMBER. The true crisis is that the Democrats are allowing these people in to change...

The electronics retailer Best Buy is set to close 10 to 15 stores this year and into early next year, according to an earnings call last week where the CEO blamed declining sales. On the earnings call, Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said the company needs “to strike a balance between its workforce and consumer interest,” according to The Austin American-Statesman. The chain closed 24 of its more than 1,000 stores last year. Earlier this month, two Best Buy locations closed – one in Colorado and one in Minnesota.

It is 2024, and the State of the Union is broken. It’s been that way for a while, frankly, but the Biden-Harris regime has sped up the process. Every year, a man stands before Congress and delivers a State of the Union Address, as the Constitution requires; sometimes it feels like that’s the only constitutional requirement they obey in their entire term. They cheer the good things, as they see them, and they attack the things they consider bad. Then they often either disregard the most serious threats entirely, or they blame them on their political opponents. And all too...

That’s Bidenomics for you! The Conference Board’s Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) continued its decline in January, dropping 0.4% MoM (notably worse than the -0.1% MoM expectations), and December’s 0.1% declin e was revised down to a 0.2% decline. The biggest positive contributor to the leading index was stock prices (again) at +0.10 The biggest negative contributor was average workweek at -0.18 This is the 22nd straight MoM decline in the LEI (and 23rd month of 25) – equaling the longest streak of declines since ‘Lehman’ (22 straight months of declines from June 2007 to April 2008) “The U.S. LEI fell...

They were able to delay the U.S. economy’s day of reckoning, but they were not able to put it off indefinitely. During the pandemic, the Federal Reserve pumped trillions of dollars into the financial system and our politicians borrowed and spent trillions of dollars that we did not have. All of that money caused quite a bit of inflation, but it also created a “sugar rush” for the economy. In other words, economic conditions were substantially better than they would have been otherwise. Unfortunately, there will be a great price to be paid for such short-term thinking. From the federal...

This headline from Zero Hedge makes me so glad I have eaten heart-healthy Quaker Oats and Cheerios every morning for the last 20 years! Study Finds 80% Of Americans Exposed To Fertility-Lowering Chemicals In Cheerios, Quaker Oats. The chemical (chlormequat chloride) was detected in “92 percent of oat-based foods purchased in May 2023, including Quaker Oats and Cheerios.” But that was nothing compared to this Zero Hedge headline: EU “Suicide Pact” Threatens To Flood Continent With 75 Million More Migrants. Makes me wonder if Biden/Mayorkas are under orders from the UN/WEF/Soros to let immigrants pour across our southern border (including...

Six US Marine security guards stationed at US embassies overseas have died in the last two years... The latest political poll in Israel leading it the National Unity Party...War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz at 40 seats...Netanyahu's Likud Party which only gets 18... ..the Munich Security Conference underway China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi telling US Secretary of State... French journalist Vanessa Dougnac kicked out of India...linked to her reporting critical of the policies... Joe Biden making what many see as an election year trip to East Palestine, Ohio a year after a train derailment... Missile attack alerts early Saturday morning in...

The soft-landing dream is over; instead, the US economy is headed for a recession in the middle of 2024, Citi says. "There's this very powerful and seductive narrative around a soft landing, and we're just not seeing it in the data," Citi's chief US economist, Andrew Hollenhorst, said in a CNBC interview. "The question is where are these forward-looking indicators showing us that we're going to go," Hollenhorst said. One place the economy is showing a weakness is the labor market. January had a blowout jobs report, adding 353,000 jobs to the economy. But Hollenhorst noted that if you scratch...

NEW YORK (AP) — As some of the world’s biggest economies stumble into recession, the United States keeps chugging along. Both Japan and the United Kingdom said Thursday their economies likely weakened during the final three months of 2023. For each, it would be the second straight quarter that’s happened, which fits one lay definition for a recession. Yet in the United States, the economy motored ahead in last year’s fourth quarter for a sixth straight quarter of growth. It’s blown past many predictions coming into last year that a recession seemed inevitable because of high interest rates meant to...