The bottom line

■■ Spending by consumers who make less than $60,000 a year jumped by more than 20 percent in the week after the Treasury Department began electronically sending stimulus payments of $600 per adult and $600 per child. A study of the effects of the earlier March 2020 stimulus found that a $1,200 stimulus check raised spending by $604 in the following two weeks—with $94 of that going to Walmart.

The Wall Street Journal

■■ U.S. airlines carried 58.7 percent fewer passengers in 2020 compared with 2019, according to U.S. data released this week. The number of people flying internationally dropped 70.4 percent.

Axios.com

■■ The Disney+ streaming service passed

94.9 million subscribers, up from roughly 74 million last quarter. Disney now says it expects to have 230 to 260 million subscribers by 2024, quadrupling its initial projections.

CNBC.com

■■ Detective Chinatown 3, the latest installment in a longrunning buddy-cop series with tepid reviews, raked in an estimated $397 million over three days in China, a world record for the largest opening weekend in a single market. The previous record holder, Avengers: Endgame, took in $357 million in its weekend opening in the United States and Canada in 2019.

The New York Times

■■ The federal debt is expected to rise to a record 107 percent of economic output by 2031. For 2021, the Congressional Budget Office projects the deficit will total $2.3 trillion. The federal deficit hit

14.9 percent of total national output for fiscal 2020 and is projected to be 10.3 percent for 2021, the highest numbers since the end of World War II.

The Wall Street Journal