$20 a Barrel
The World
US crude oil price falls below $20: Fall in demand due to the virus creates surplus that risks overwhelming storage capacity. U.S. crude-oil prices came under renewed pressure as the restrictions on business activity in most economies—combined with the threat of elevated production levels from Saudi Arabia and Russia—raised the prospect of a longer downturn in fuel markets. Global oil demand is set to drop by 12 million barrels a day in the second quarter in the steepest decline on record, according to analysts at Bank of America. With production also set to pick up, the bank forecasts that both U.S. and global crude futures will fall below $20 a barrel in the coming months and that the world may run out of storage space for oil. (Financial Times & Wall Street Journal)
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party will propose a stimulus package totaling 16% to 17% of gross domestic product amid the coronavirus outbreak, its policy chief said on Monday. (Reuters)
Moscow imposed strict isolation measures on Monday after many residents ignored official requests to stay indoors, confining citizens to their homes unless for a medical emergency, to travel to essential jobs, shop for food or medicines or walk their dogs. The prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, asked authorities across Russia to prepare similar orders as the country began a “non-working” week declared by the president, Vladimir Putin. Facial recognition cameras will police the measures in the capital, which has reported more than 1,000 confirmed cases. On the other side of the world, the 21 million inhabitants of Lagos in Nigeria, which has recorded one death from Covid-19, enter a two-week lockdown on Monday evening, a measure experts have warned could prove difficult if not impossible to enforce in a city where millions live in poverty and rely on daily earnings to survive. (The Guardian)
Container shipping lines say they are moving from a supply shock in China to a demand shock as Western countries lock down their economies to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Ocean Network Express Chief Executive Jeremy Nixon tells the WSJ Logistics Report’s Costas Paris the Japanese container line is bracing for a second wave of disruption, one that could strand containers on ships and ports as importers in Europe and the U.S. and Asia cancel orders and rattling operations at ports and inland logistics companies. (Wall Street Journal)
The coronavirus pandemic is forcing the fastest reallocation of labor since World War II, with companies and governments mobilizing an army of idled workers into new activities that are urgently needed. In Germany, McDonald’s Corp. is lending staff to two big grocery chains desperate for workers. Becky Frankiewicz, president of ManpowerGroup North America, a staffing company, said the workforce shifts were shaping up to be the largest her company had seen since it was founded in 1948. “Tens of thousands of jobs open up overnight,” she said. “We have to move within hours.” Big companies that have seen pandemic-fueled spikes in demand, including Walmart Inc. and CVS Health Corp, are seeking nearly 500,000 new staff members in the coming weeks. (Wall Street Journal)
The FBI and the Securities and Exchange Commission are looking into stock trades by lawmakers made before the market plunged due to the impact of the coronavirus outbreak. (MarketWatch)
The US agriculture giant Monsanto and the German chemical giant BASF were aware for years that their plan to introduce a new agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms, internal documents seen by the Guardian show. Risks were downplayed even while they planned how to profit off farmers who would buy Monsanto’s new seeds just to avoid damage, according to documents unearthed during a recent successful $265m lawsuit brought against both firms by a Missouri farmer. The documents, some of which date back more than a decade, also reveal how Monsanto opposed some third-party product testing in order to curtail the generation of data that might have worried regulators. And in some of the internal BASF emails, employees appear to joke about sharing “voodoo science” and hoping to stay “out of jail”. (The Guardian)
The nationalist government in Hungary passed a law Monday granting sweeping emergency powers that Prime Minister Viktor Orban says are necessary to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
Those powers include sidelining parliament and giving Orban the power to rule by decree indefinitely. The law would punish those who spread false information about the pandemic with up to five years in prison. "Changing our lives is now unavoidable," Orban told lawmakers last week. "Everyone has to leave their comfort zone. This law gives the government the power and means to defend Hungary." (NPR)
The Wimbledon tennis championships will be canceled this week, according to German Tennis Federation (DTB) vice-president Dirk Hordorff. Were Wimbledon to be canceled, it would be the first time since World War II that the grand slam will not have been staged. (CNN)
Finance
China to open US$1.5 trillion distressed debt market as it braces for bad loan blowout: China’s distressed debt market could see an increase of sour loans this year as the economic impact of the coronavirus hits small businesses and the property sector. PwC estimated last week that China’s banks and asset management companies (AMCs) currently hold about US$1.5 trillion of NPLs and other distressed assets, up from US$1.4 trillion in 2018. Financial regulators appear to be accelerating efforts to tackle the bad debt by opening the market up to foreign participants in a bid to attract capital, tightening oversight of the sector, and establishing another national level AMC to join China’s big four. (South China Morning Post)
A hidden pile of debt threatens dozens of emerging-market countries as the global economy stalls and commodity prices tumble. An estimated $200 billion of emerging-market debt owed to China has gone unreported in official statistics in recent years. The money is upending assumptions made by yield-hungry investors who have poured roughly $2 trillion into risky emerging markets over the last decade. (Wall Street Journal)
Three Boston Consulting Group strategists think there is a chance for innovation to prevent a full-blown U-shape, keeping the shock’s path closer to a deep V-shape than would otherwise be possible. But the battle is underway, and without innovation the odds are not in favor of the less damaging V-shaped scenario. (Harvard Business Review)
The chief financial officer of Jefferies Group, Peg Broadbent, has died due to complications linked to the coronavirus, the company announced. He was 56. (USA Today)
Technology
Google is using AI to design chips that will accelerate AI. Throughout the field's history, progress in AI has been tightly interlinked with progress in chip design. The hope is this algorithm will speed up the chip design process and lead to a new generation of improved architectures, in turn accelerating AI advancement. (MIT Technology Review)
Phone users under coronavirus lockdown are reporting significant increases in the amount of time they are spending on their devices. (The Independent)
Understanding Gender Differences in Leadership:Using data from a large-scale field experiment, the authors show that while there is no gender difference in willingness to make risky decisions on behalf of a group in a sample of children, a large gap emerges in a sample of adolescents. The proportion of girls who exhibit leadership willingness drops by 39%, going from childhood to adolescence. They explore the possible factors behind this drop and find that it is largely associated with a dramatic decline in ‘social confidence’, measured by willingness to perform a real effort task in public. (The Economic Journal)
Facebook has struck a deal to buy all of the augmented reality displays made by British firm Plessey, as the social network looks to build AR glasses capable of overlaying virtual objects onto the real world. The deal could give Facebook an edge over Apple, which recently looked at buying Plessey, one of the few makers of AR displays, according to two people familiar with the matter. (The Information)
Scientists have created a new map of the Milky Way. The high-resolution surveys chart the spiral structure of the galaxy and the location of our solar system. (Scientific American)
Smart Links
Walmart have revealed that they are selling more tops than trousers, amid uptake of video conference calls during the coronavirus pandemic. (The Independent)
Kaiser Permanente shelves $900M headquarters build (Healthcare Dive)
The FDA has given emergency approval for a coronavirus test from Abbott Laboratories that can tell if someone is infected in as little as five minutes. (Los Angeles Times)
A Dutch museum says that a painting by Vincent van Gogh was stolen in a raid overnight. (Associated Press)
Next year’s Olympic Games will run from July 23, 2021 until Aug. 8. (The IOC)
What’s the history of the Defense Protection Act? (EveryCRSReport.org)