Market News

Shared office space firms are enjoying a rise in sales this summer as U.S. businesses grappling with the seismic changes in the workspace world sparked by the pandemic seek flexible and short-term solutions. Hundreds of companies particularly in the technology sector are taking spaces from these firms, ranging from a handful of desks to over 50,000 square feet for periods as short as one month. Many individuals are also doing this on their company’s dime as they wait for their employers to figure out when it is safe to require workers to return to pre-pandemic offices.

The private-label mortgage market—in which financial firms serve the middleman role of creating giant pools of loans and selling them to investors—had more than $42 billion of issuance in the second quarter. That is the most since the pandemic started and almost the most for any quarter since the last financial crisis.

Total margin debt contracted 4.3% in July, the first monthly decline in 15 months.

A divided Supreme Court lifted part of New York’s eviction moratorium, saying the state had gone too far in protecting tenants at the expense of landlords. The high court blocked a state measure that made it easy for tenants to invoke eviction protections by self-certifying that they were facing financial hardships during the Covid-19 pandemic. Landlords generally couldn’t challenge such certifications.

Investors poured $705 billion into exchange-traded funds through the first seven months of the year, pushing 2021’s world-wide tally to a record $9.1 trillion. Net flows so far this year have nearly eclipsed the $736.5 billion investors had moved into ETFs globally in all of 2020.

More than 20 million jobs were lost in March and April 2020, when pandemic-related restrictions caused the economy to contract sharply. By June 2021, economic output had returned to prepandemic levels, but employers had 6.6 million fewer jobs on payrolls.

The owner of Saks Fifth Avenue is converting parts of department stores into co-working spaces with WeWork, a strategy that marries the popularity of remote work with the struggles of bricks-and-mortar retail. The new venture is called SaksWorks.

Cushman & Wakefield will make a $150 million investment in the planned merger between WeWork and a public company later this year. That merger, expected to value WeWork at $9 billion including debt, will cap off the firm’s effort to reconstruct its balance sheet following the high-profile collapse of its planned initial public offering in late 2019.

Net wealth has risen by $18 trillion during the pandemic, thanks in part to expanded unemployment insurance and stimulus checks.

Firms sold $24.5 billion of CRE CLOs this year through July 31. That is already a full-year record for data going back to 2014, beating 2019’s previous $19 billion peak.