A look at some of the key business events and economic indicators upcoming this week:
TROUBLED KINGDOM
Walt Disney’s latest quarterly snapshot should provide clues to the impact that the COVID-19 outbreak is having on the entertainment giant.
The company shut down its Florida and California theme parks in March as the pandemic took hold in the U.S. It also pushed back most of its 2020 big budget movies to late this year or beyond. Wall Street expects Disney will report on Tuesday that its earnings fell in the January-March quarter from a year earlier, even as revenue increased.
JUST CHARGE IT
The Federal Reserve issues its March snapshot of U.S. consumer borrowing Thursday.
The tally, which excludes mortgages and other loans secured by real estate, is expected to show consumer borrowing increased by $15 billion, down from a gain of $22.3 billion the previous month. February’s gain lifted total consumer credit to a record $4.23 trillion.
Consumer credit, monthly change, seasonally adjusted, billions of dollars:
Oct. 13.4
Nov. 7.4
Dec. 21.0
Jan. 12.1
Feb. 22.3
March (est.) 15.0
Source: FactSet
JOB DESTRUCTION
The U.S. job market continued to shed hundreds of thousands of jobs last month due to the coronavirus.
Economists predict the Labor Department will report Friday that 210,000 nonfarm jobs were lost in April. That would follow a loss of 701,000 jobs in March - the worst month since the Great Recession - as the pandemic prompted the shutdown of large swaths of the economy. Companies furloughed or laid off millions of workers, driving the national unemployment rate from a 50-year low of 3.5% to 4.4%.
Nonfarm payrolls, monthly change, seasonally adjusted:
Nov. 261,000
Dec. 184,000
Jan. 214,000
Feb. 275,000
March -701,000
April (est.) -210,000
Source: FactSet
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