The World
The Trump administration is pushing to reopen much of the country next month, raising concerns among health experts and economists of a possible covid-19 resurgence if Americans return to their normal lives before the virus is truly stamped out.Behind closed doors, President Trump — concerned with the sagging economy — has sought a strategy for resuming business activity by May 1, according to people familiar with the discussions. In phone calls with outside advisers, Trump has even floated trying to reopen much of the country before the end of this month, when the current federal recommendations to avoid social gatherings and work from home expire, the people said. (Washington Post)
Jay Powell said the Federal Reserve would use its powers “forcefully, proactively and aggressively” until the economy recovers from the coronavirus shock, as the US central bank moved to offer an extra $2.3tn in credit and support the market for high-yield corporate debt. In remarks by webcast to the Brookings Institution on Thursday, the Fed chairman said the emergency measures being rolled out in recent weeks were necessary given the “very unusual circumstances” of severe economic and financial dislocations, but would be rolled back once the crisis eased. “We are deploying these once lending powers to an unprecedented extent, enabled in large part by the financial backing of Congress and the Treasury. We will continue to use these powers forcefully, proactively, and aggressively until we are confident that we are solidly on the road to recovery,” Mr Powell said. (Financial Times)
JPMorgan economists issued an even more dire forecast, now foreseeing a 40% decline in the nation’s gross domestic product for the second quarter and a surge in April’s unemployment rate to 20% with 25 million jobs lost. In an earlier forecast, they said second-quarter GDP would be down 25%. The economists, however, continue to see a second-half recovery, based on the assumption that disruptions from the pandemic fade by June. (CNBC)
EU finance ministers have agreed a €500bn (£430bn;$540bn) rescue package for European countries hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. At their Brussels talks, EU ministers failed to accept a demand from France and Italy to share out the cost of the crisis by issuing so-called coronabonds. The package finally agreed is smaller than the European Central Bank (ECB) had urged. (BBC News)
Mexico throws OPEC’s historic oil production cut into doubt ahead of G-20 meeting. The deal was agreed on by all OPEC and non-OPEC producers participating in the conference, with the exception of Mexico. It means the cuts, which amount to roughly 10% of global supply, will not take place unless the broader alliance also receives their consent. Energy ministers from the Group of 20 major economies will convene for their own extraordinary video meeting on Friday. Meanwhile, an unprecedented plunge in oil demand will turn the industry upside down. (CNBC, Economist)
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Friday he was planning to hold new talks on oil prices after phone calls with U.S. President Donald Trump and the leadership of Saudi Arabia, TASS news agency reported. (Reuters)
Flooded by requests for help like never before, a federal disaster loan program that was supposed to deliver emergency relief to small businesses in just three days has run low on funding and nearly frozen up entirely. Now, business owners who applied are desperate for cash and answers about what aid, if any, they are going to receive. The initiative, known as the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, is an expansion of an emergency system run by the Small Business Administration. Many applicants have waited weeks for approval, with little to no information about where they stand, and others are being told they’ll get a fraction of what they expected. (New York Times)
Trump administration officials on Thursday sought to revoke federal licenses used by China Telecom Corp. to do business in the U.S. as part of a broader campaign to curb global Chinese technology interests on national security grounds. A collection of federal agencies led by the U.S. Department of Justice and including the departments of Defense and Homeland Security asked the Federal Communications Commission to permanently revoke licenses the Chinese internet service provider’s U.S. subsidiary has used since 2007 to act as a “common carrier” connecting domestic and overseas networks. Meanwhile, Canada and France this week denied that donations of masks from Huawei would influence their decisions on whether the Chinese firm plays a role in their 5G rollouts. (Wall Street Journal, CNBC)
China’s consumer loans are shrinking at an unprecedented pace after a decade of breakneck expansion, a blow to the government’s strategy of relying on spending as a growth engine amid the worst public health crisis in a generation. The net balance of consumer loans – made up of short-term and credit card loans from banks and online lenders – plunged by a quarter in the first two months of this year to 7.4 trillion yuan (US$1 trillion), according to data published by the People’s Bank of China. Some microlenders are staring at 20 cents on a dollar in bad loans. The nation’s much-vaunted army of consumers are flinching as the coronavirus outbreak closes shops and causes job losses, hurting demand for new credit and ability to service older ones. (South China Morning Post)
After five years of war, Saudi Arabia and its allies are laying down their arms in Yemen—for two weeks. The unilateral ceasefire, said the Saudis, was prompted by fears of covid-19 spreading into Yemen, the region’s poorest country, which does not have the capacity to deal with a big outbreak. But it is also indicative of a shift in Saudi thinking over the past year. (Economist)
Boeing Co. is considering a plan to reduce its workforce by about 10%, people familiar with the matter said, as the aerospace giant grapples with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. The plan could involve buyouts, early retirements and involuntary layoffs. The potential labor cuts at the aerospace giant, which globally employs about 160,000 people, were expected to largely target Boeing’s commercial arm, these people said. No decision on cuts was imminent, one of the people briefed on the matter said, and the potential 10% reduction was among scenarios under consideration. (Wall Street Journal)
Airbus has shelved plans to create a new assembly line in Toulouse, France, for its A321 airliner as the company wrestles with the coronavirus crisis. (Reuters)
Container ship operators have idled a record 13% of their capacity over the past month as carriers at the foundation of global supply chains buckle down while restrictions under the coronavirus pandemic batter trade demand. Shipping goods, especially food, around the world has become harder and harder amid lockdowns and curfews. Now heavy disruptions in multiple locations are beginning to cause shortages all over the world. (Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg)
Former vice president Joe Biden sought to appeal to liberal supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday with a pair of new proposals to expand access to health care and curtail student loan debt. Biden proposed lowering the eligibility age for Medicare coverage from 65 to 60. He also came out in favor of forgiving student loan debt for people who attended public colleges and universities and some private schools and make up to $125,000 a year. (Washington Post)
Prices of surgical gowns, gloves and N95 masks have jumped up. The masks, which used to sell for between 50 cents and a dollar apiece, are now on offer for $5 or $6, state and local officials said. That not only increases the price for taxpayers but also leads to states outbidding each other in desperation, with poorer ones left behind. (Los Angeles Times)
Chinese President Xi Jinping has called for tighter supervision of workplace safety to effectively safeguard the safety of people's lives and property. As the country is resuming work and production, it is necessary to strengthen monitoring and law enforcement of production safety in a differentiated manner and better implement the responsibilities of enterprise entities, said Xi, also general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission, in an instruction. (Xinhua)
Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan — once heralded for early successes in battling the pandemic — are now confronting a new wave of coronavirus cases, largely fueled by infections coming from elsewhere. Singapore is also seeing a rise in local transmissions, with more than 400 new cases in the past week that have been linked to migrant worker dormitories. Further, South Korean officials on Friday reported 91 patients thought cleared of the new coronavirus had tested positive again. (New York Times, Reuters)
Metropolitan Tokyo asked some businesses to close and the ancient capital of Kyoto warned tourists to stay away as Japan battles a fast-spreading outbreak of the new coronavirus, amid fears the government’s measures are too little and too late. (Reuters)
Images have emerged of coffins being buried in a mass grave in New York City. Workers in hazmat outfits were seen using a ladder to descend into a huge pit where the coffins were stacked. The location is Hart Island, used for New Yorkers with no next of kin or who could not afford a funeral. (BBC News)
Finance
Pressure is building on federal regulators to help mortgage companies that say they face a wave of missed payments by struggling homeowners. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Thursday signaled concern about the health of the mortgage market, and a group of senators this week urged regulators to “take urgent and immediate action” to avoid a housing-finance crisis. “We’re watching carefully the situation with the mortgage servicers,” Mr. Powell said. (Wall Street Journal)
As the first set of entrepreneurs learned they would receive emergency loans administered through the federal Small Business Administration, many of those who had applied through Silicon Valley Bank were stuck trying to deal with glitches in the application process. The tech-focused bank had processed close to 5,000 applications to the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program by Tuesday evening, according to people familiar with the matter. But as many as 30% of those ran into issues requiring applicants to restart the process, the people said. SVB, which handles banking for about half of all venture-backed companies, said through a spokesperson that it had “received significant interest in the program.” (The Information)
Venture capital investors are flush with cash, but they may want to slow down their spending. U.S. venture firms have roughly $150 billion of funds available to invest in cash-starved startups, a little more than half of the $279 billion they have raised since 2014. That estimate of the VC industry’s “dry powder”—business slang for cash reserves—comes from an analysis of data from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association performed by Jon Sakoda, founder of the early-stage venture firm Decibel Partners. He estimates that about half of the dry powder is reserved for new investments, while the other half is for follow-on investments in startups VCs previously put money into, as the chart above shows. (The Information)
US junk bonds rally most since 2009 after Fed intervention. (Financial Times)
Foreign funds dump Japan stocks faster than after Lehman collapse: Foreign investors unloaded Japanese equities for eight straight weeks through April 3 at a pace roughly 50% greater than during the 2008 financial crisis. (Nikkei Asian Review)
A California retail developer claims the state’s coronavirus lockdown was an act of God that prevented it from completing a $4.2 million property acquisition, asking a court to prevent owner Exxon Mobil Corp from selling to any other buyers. Pacific Collective LLC invoked force majeure in its bid to delay an Exxon property acquisition, according to a suit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court. (Reuters)
Technology
Before the pandemic, automation had been gradually replacing human work in a range of jobs, from call centers to warehouses and grocery stores, as companies looked to cut labor costs and improve profit. Labor and robotics experts say social-distancing directives, which are likely to continue in some form after the crisis subsides, could prompt more industries to accelerate their use of automation. And long-simmering worries about job losses or a broad unease about having machines control vital aspects of daily life could dissipate as society sees the benefits of restructuring workplaces in ways that minimize close human contact. (New York Times)
One of the safe havens for jobs in recent weeks has been food delivery services, where demand has jumped. Uber Eats, for instance, saw sales rise 8% last week from the week earlier—a big jump for a multibillion-dollar-per-quarter business. But the drivers who ferry meals to people’s homes are actually earning less, according to exclusive data we got access to. The data is from Steady. Steady has access to bank account details on about 51,000 of its roughly 500,000 active job-seeking app users, allowing it to track average earnings. (The Information)
Amazon said Thursday that it is developing a lab to screen its workers for the novel coronavirus, showing that more visibility into who is infected is essential to returning its business to normalcy. The e-commerce giant has begun assembling the equipment needed to build a facility and said in a blog post Thursday that it hopes to “start testing small numbers of our front line employees soon.” Amazon says it has started to develop “incremental testing capacity,” relative to what governments might set up. (Washington Post)
The Virus Changed the Way We Internet: A New York Times analysis of internet usage in the United States from SimilarWeb and Apptopia, two online data providers, reveals that our behaviors shifted, sometimes starkly, as the virus spread and pushed us to our devices for work, play and connecting. (New York Times)
Technology startups are headed for a fall. (Economist)
A striking feature of the vaccine development landscape for COVID-19 is the range of technology platforms being evaluated, including nucleic acid (DNA and RNA), virus-like particle, peptide, viral vector (replicating and non-replicating), recombinant protein, live attenuated virus and inactivated virus approaches (Fig. 1). Many of these platforms are not currently the basis for licensed vaccines, but experience in fields such as oncology is encouraging developers to exploit the opportunities that next-generation approaches offer for increased speed of development and manufacture. It is conceivable that some vaccine platforms may be better suited to specific population subtypes (such as the elderly, children, pregnant women or immunocompromised patients). (Nature)
How AI is being used in this pandemic: AI is already used for data collection to track and monitor the spread of the virus. Another key area is in hospitals to help in the daily routines to decide which patient is at risk to develop severe symptoms. AI is also used to find a vaccine against Covid-19. (Eurointelligence)
Smart Links
“Saturday Night Live” returns this weekend with a brand-new, socially distant episode. (Los Angeles Times)
College students demand coronavirus refunds. (Wall Street Journal)
Spring home-selling season: U.S. new listings drop 27%, while UK house sales expected to drop to lowest level in 20 years. (Mansion Global, Financial Times)
Online wellness industry is booming. (Economist)
Who is MI Gov. Gretchen Whitmer? (Politico)
30 virtual tours of national parks. (The Outbound)