Ten of the country’s 25 largest metropolitan areas lost population during the one-year period. The gainers were all in the South or West, with the exception of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, which recorded a small gain after losing residents the year before.
Cancelled Flights
Cancellations were a major headache for travelers in 2022 with about 181,000 flights scrapped by the largest U.S. airlines. Only 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, and 2020, the start of the pandemic, had more flight cancellations over the past two decades.
SVB Cost
The FDIC estimated the failure of SVB will cost a federal insurance fund it oversees about $20 billion, or roughly 10% of the bank’s assets before its failure.
Maturing Office Loans
Within the next three years, loans are maturing on more than 9,500 office buildings and 17% of all U.S. office stock.
Commercial Mortgages
This year will be critical because about $270 billion in commercial mortgages held by banks are set to expire—the highest figure on record. Most of these loans are held by banks with less than $250 billion in assets.
Delinquency Rate
The delinquency rate for commercial mortgage-backed securities increased 0.18 percentage point in February to 3.12%, the second-largest increase since June 2020.
Airfares
Airlines say red-hot travel demand is driving higher prices. The average U.S. round-trip ticket price booked in February was $571, up 23% from a year earlier and 8% from January.
Understaffed
Despite a recent jump in the hospitality sector’s hiring, hotels and restaurants are still understaffed. The accommodation and food-services sector had nearly 1.5 million job openings as of January.
Blackstone Cvent
Blackstone has made a big bet acquiring meetings and events technology provider Cvent for $4.6 billion. A fully-owned unit of the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority will become a significant minority investor along with Blackstone in the transaction.
Tiger Global
Tiger Global marked down the value of its investments in private companies by about 33% across its venture-capital funds in 2022. The markdowns erased $23 billion in value from Tiger’s giant holdings of startups around the globe.