Wednesday, 11 December 2024
by BD Banks
Conway Gittens: I’m Conway Gittens reporting from the New York Stock Exchange. Here’s what we’re watching on TheStreet today.
A new report released Tuesday showed small business optimism hit at a 3-year high in November. According to a survey by the National Federation of Independent Business, respondents were confident the incoming Trump administration will usher in a period of fewer regulations and lower taxes.
Related: Taylor Swift breaks her own streaming record in just 12 hours
In other business headlines – It turns out that a Taylor Swift concert is more than just a music event, it is an economic event. According to the U.S. Travel Association, Swifties, as her fans are known, spent an average of $1300 on travel, hotels, food, and other items not including the actual tickets to her show. That kind of spending rivals what football fans spend each year at the Super Bowl. Now multiply that number by 62 nights across 23 U.S. cities over a five month period.
Swift’s “The Eras Tour” is going into the history books as the highest-grossing tour ever, bringing in an estimated $2.2 billion. The economic impact, however, goes well beyond the time she was on stage. Estimates on the money injected into the U.S. economy, directly or indirectly, range from $5 billion on the low end to $10 billion on the high end.
Some cities credited the tour for dragging their local economies out of the post-pandemic doldrums. Pittsburgh, for example, said that when her concert was in town it had the highest weekend hotel occupancy since the pandemic and the second best ever, according to CNN.
Lyft provides another snapshot on Swift’s economic impact. The ride-hailing app said in a blogpost that whenever a city played host to one of her concerts, it saw ridership jump by an average 8.2 percent.
That’ll do it for your Daily Briefing. From the New York Stock Exchange, I’m Conway Gittens with TheStreet.
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