Furloughs in the federal government totaled 216,215 for the month, part of a total 275,240 reductions overall in the labor force. The monthly total was surpassed only by April and May of 2020 in the early days of the pandemic when employers announced combined reductions of more than 1 million.
Government Contracts
The 10 biggest U.S. consulting firms to the federal government have offered to cut billions of dollars from their contracts with agencies but face pushback from the Trump administration to deliver even deeper savings. Companies including Accenture, Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte, IBM and others met the General Services Administration deadline to justify their contracts and identify potential cost cuts to existing projects.
New Build Retail
A near-record-low 30 million square feet of net-new retail was built nationwide last year, compared with 221 million square feet in 2006.
Recession Outlook
The prospect of a radical escalation in the global trade war in coming days has nearly doubled the probability of a recession in the U.S. economy in the next 12 months to around 35%, according to Goldman Sachs.
MSP Distress
The Twin Cities again has the highest level of commercial real estate distress among all major U.S. metros. The Minneapolis-St. Paul MSA, had a 49.7% distress rate, which measures the current balances of CMBS loans that are distressed against all such loan balances. Behind Minneapolis, the metro areas of Providence, Rhode Island, saw a distress rate of 45.4%, while Rochester, New York, experienced a 35.7% distress rate. The overall distress rate for all loans across every metro was 10.8%, as of last month.
Hotel Bookings
An estimated 60% of hotel bookings are completed online.
Family Dollar
Dollar Tree agreed to a sale of its Family Dollar business to a consortium of private-equity investors for roughly $1 billion. Dollar Tree outbid its rival Dollar General to acquire the Family Dollar chain in 2015 for roughly $9 billion.
Golf Courses
The average sale price of golf courses tracked reached more than $6.87 million last year, up 38% from an average of just under $5 million in 2023. The last time the average price reached that level was 2007, shortly before the financial crisis and Great Recession.
Park Avenue
Park Avenue’s vacancy rate has fallen to 8.9%, its lowest rate since the end of 2018. Manhattan and U.S. office vacancy overall sits at 16.1%.
FOMC
The FOMC voted to hold the federal funds rate at 4.25% to 4.5%. In its quarterly economic projection, the committee lowered its full-year 2025 GDP growth expectation to 1.7%, down from the 2.1% it forecast in December. The current unemployment rate is 4.1%, and the committee expects the median rate to be 4.4% at the end of the year.