Economic bounce backs, an investing platform gaining steam and more!
Band of merry investors: A handful of companies have experienced a boom in the post-Covid world, including tech giants like Apple and Amazon, newcomers like Zoom, and retail brokerage app Robinhood. Robinhood has been following in the footsteps of other household names like Merrill Lynch, Charles Schwab and E-trade by leveraging a decades old sales pitch centered on democratizing finance. Quartz cites that Robinhood had more than 4.3 million daily average trades in March by leveraging the concepts of fractional share trading and “stay-at-home order” resulting from the pandemic. But does the app have the staying power of its industry rivals?
A Trading Rebound: Global trade is making its rebound much more quickly than it did after the 2008 financial crisis, reports The Wall Street Journal. International trade hit lows earlier this year that had not been seen since the Great Depression, and while trade may not be at pre-pandemic levels, it had recovered almost half of the year’s historic losses by June. Unfortunately, the recovery is not being felt evenly in all affected countries with economies reliant on trade experiencing a faster bounce back than those centered on service industries.
Approved communications: A federal judge has issued an injunction against President Trump’s executive order banning the Chinese social media app, WeChat, from operating in the United States. The app, which the president labeled a national security threat, has been downloaded nearly 22 million times in the United States since 2014 and acts as a primary means of communication for the Chinese community, according to The New York Times. The executive order signed on August 6 would bar any commercial transactions with WeChat or the social media app TikTok, which the government had previously also declared a threat.
Surprising economic growth: Is the recession over? This piece by Axios claims that it might be. The Federal Reserve has released projections for rapid economic growth in the third quarter of 2020 that outpace any other quarter in history. Current forecasts show sustained economic growth throughout 2021 and into the future, with estimates of almost 3 million extra jobs and more than $600 billion in spending despite current unemployment levels and small business closures.