Business

As I write this, I’m sitting in my home office in the South End neighborhood of Boston. Since I’m self-employed, this is where I report to work every morning—usually around 8 a.m., or a little later, if I decide to treat myself with something from Starbucks, a short two-minute walk from my apartment. Though work-from-home…

After rising more than 7% on Monday, the S&P 500 closed roughly 21% off all-time highs seen in late-February. The past two weeks or so have seen a bounce of more than 19%, which makes returns over the past year look none too bad, down just 6%. The same can’t be said about small cap…

Goldman Sachs has revised its coronavirus projections, seeing an even bigger impact on GDP and employment. The firm sees the jobless rate topping out at 15% and GDP sagging by a record 34% in the second quarter. That will be followed, though, by a 19% rebound in the third quarter that would be the highest…

Faced with the deadly covid-19 pandemic governments must decide how much economic disruption to tolerate in order to suppress the disease, or at least to slow its spread. President Donald Trump may have had the economic costs in mind when he tweeted on March 23rd, “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem…

Economists are serving up a menu of alphabet soup in trying to forecast the world economy’s recovery from what is set to be the deepest recession since at least 2009 and perhaps since World War II. “There is a complex relationship between the path of the virus, the effectiveness of virus containment and economic support…

Prefab construction isn’t new. From Sears Catalog Homes to the Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian Automatic concrete homes, prefab homes have a rich history in the U.S. Amid today’s mounting housing costs and environmental concerns, however, prefab—or assembling a structure from components produced off-site—continues to offer alluring possibilities. Prefab home manufacturers bill their houses as cheaper,…