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Live Stock Market News During the Coronavirus Pandemic – The New York Times


Wall Street’s focus was on economic recovery Tuesday, and stocks rallied along with crude oil prices.

The S&P 500 rose more than 1 percent, with shares of companies most likely to benefit from the lifting of restrictions on travel and commerce faring well. Shares of Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and other big carriers rose, as did Marriott International.

Oil prices have been climbing all month as the restarting of factories and resumption of travel raised expectations that demand would rise. On Tuesday, West Texas intermediate crude rose another 3 percent, and shares of companies in the energy industry, like Chevron and Halliburton, were also higher.

It’s been a turbulent period for stocks, with the S&P 500 alternating between gains to losses on a daily basis last week, as expectations for an eventual recovery from the coronavirus pandemic have squared off against the reality that the damage is still severe and likely to continue for some time.

News of progress on vaccine development — even if small scale and early stage — has been one factor fueling the gains.

Tuesday was no exception, after the biotech company Novavax said on Monday that it was starting trials of its vaccine on humans, with preliminary results expected in July. On Tuesday, the pharmaceutical giant Merck said it bought the rights to develop a potential drug that had “potent antiviral properties against multiple coronavirus strains,” and was also beginning work on vaccine candidates.

The reopening of businesses has been another. One largely symbolic opening on Tuesday was that of the New York Stock Exchange’s trading floor. A small number of traders returned to the floor, wearing masks and following social-distancing rules, the exchange said.

Shares in Europe and Asia were also higher as investors shrugged off negative news like rising tensions between the United States and China and the combustible political situation in Hong Kong. Instead, they focused on Japanese leaders gradually lifting emergency measures there, while European leaders have also moved to ease travel restrictions.

But any gains are susceptible to a sudden change in sentiment if the reopening plans result in new outbreaks or fresh concerns about the longevity of economic slowdown emerge.

Americans are feeling worse about the present but slightly better about the future than they did a month ago, according to a survey by the Conference Board.

After two months of decline as the coronavirus pandemic forced widespread lockdowns, the board’s index of consumer confidence rose slightly this month in a preliminary reading as “the gradual reopening of the economy helped improve consumers’ spirits,” the research group said Tuesday.

“While the decline in confidence appears to have stopped for the moment, the uneven path to recovery and potential second wave are likely to keep a cloud of uncertainty hanging over consumers’ heads,” said Lynn Franco, the board’s senior director of economic indicators.

The share of those surveyed saying business conditions are good decreased to 16.3 percent from 19.9 percent, while those saying conditions are bad increased to 52.1 percent from 45.3 percent. But 43.3 percent said they expected business conditions to improve over the next six months, up from 39.8 percent, while those expecting a decline decreased to 21.4 percent from 25.1 percent.

Even as American employers let tens of millions of workers go, some companies are choosing a different path. By instituting across-the-board salary reductions, especially at senior levels, they have avoided layoffs.

The ranks of those forgoing job cuts and furloughs include major employers like HCA Healthcare, the hospital chain, and Aon, a London-based global professional services firm with a regional headquarters in Chicago.

Others that managed to avoid layoffs include smaller companies like KVH, a maker of mobile connectivity and navigation systems that employs 600 globally and is based in Middletown, R.I.

“We’d never done a pay cut before,” said Martin Kits van Heyningen, who started KVH in his parents’ basement more than three decades ago.

The trend is a reversal of traditional management theory, which held that salaries were sacred and it was better to cut positions and dismiss a limited number of workers than to lower pay for everyone during downturns.

There is often a genuine desire to protect employees, but long-term financial interests are a major consideration as well, said Donald Delves, a compensation expert with Willis Towers Watson. “Companies learned the hard way that once you lay off a bunch of people, it’s expensive and time-consuming to hire them back,” he said.

There’s recently been a surge of people who are picking up their online orders in-person at Walmart, Target, Home Depot and other stores big and small. With the best shopping ideas coming from big box retailers, Amazon is missing out, writes the On Tech columnist Shira Ovide.

I’ve been impressed by how old-school companies, from Best Buy to my local cheese shop, have quickly adapted to offering low-contact pickups like this. Some of this activity is a temporary coronavirus-related spike, but I bet some of these habits will stick.

Three years ago, Amazon agreed to pay $14 billion to buy the Whole Foods supermarket chain. This was the moment when Amazon acknowledged the importance of physical stores, and I couldn’t wait to see how the company reimagined in-person shopping experiences that had not changed much in my lifetime. And then, not much happened.

Yes, Whole Foods stores are offering home deliveries now. But it’s other retailers that are rethinking how their physical stores can work hand-in-hand with online shopping.

The lawsuit says drivers must wait months to receive unemployment benefits, if they receive them at all, compared with the two to three weeks that the state has said is typical for other workers. The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction requiring the state to immediately pay their benefits and the benefits of other drivers to whom they are owed.

Some drivers are being directed to a federal pandemic relief program intended for contractors, even though the state considers them employees and conventional unemployment benefits would pay them far more. According to the lawsuit, a key problem is that the state has not forced Uber and Lyft to provide the data on workers’ earnings that employers must typically supply.

An Uber spokesman said the company had provided the state with the earnings data it had requested, though he declined to elaborate on whether the data would be sufficient to calculate unemployment benefits promptly. Lyft said the company was working with the state to provide access to earnings data.

“During this pandemic emergency, we have been moving heaven and earth to get every single unemployed New Yorker their benefits as quickly as possible — including Uber and Lyft drivers,” said Jack Sterne, a spokesman for the Cuomo administration.

Chinese leaders meeting since last week in Beijing have stressed their efforts to create jobs and get the country back to work. But surveys and interviews show many young workers are entering into the work force in the worst market in decades.

“When it was April and I still couldn’t start my job, I started to feel worried,” said Huang Bing, 24, who graduated last year from a prestigious Chinese drama school. Her new job, set to begin this past January, ended before it began.

“I began worrying that I may not be able to work this year at all,” Ms. Huang said. “I can’t just keep waiting.”

Online, young people despair over finding a good job, with many settling for something that pays less. Many others are reluctant to relent. “The graduates do not fully understand the market,” said Martin Ma, a human resources officer for a Chinese software company. “Their expectations are quite high.”

For the world, global growth will be hard to rekindle until China gets fully back to work. But the damage to the Communist Party could be long-lasting. It derives its political power from the promise of delivering a better life for the Chinese people, a promise that has become increasingly difficult to fulfill.

The stock trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange reopened on Tuesday, though at a reduced head count to allow space for social distancing measures to remain in force. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo rang the opening bell at 9:30 a.m. at the start of trading.

Floor brokers and trading floor officials will be allowed back, while designated market makers — the specialist traders who buy and sell in order to “make markets” in certain securities — will continue to operate remotely.

Those who are returning must comply with a number of restrictions to regain access to the floor including avoiding public transportation, submitting to temperature checks on entry and wearing a face mask. They will also be expected to maintain a six-foot social distance and avoid physical contact such as shaking hands.

The ability to trade electronically muted the market impact of the more than two-month shuttering of the trading floor, one of the most significant disruptions to the floor operations of the exchange since 1914, when it was closed for about four months as World War I began (not when the United States entered the war, as an earlier post said.).

Back then, the exchange floor was the only way to trade shares listed on the exchange. But floor volume fell from around 70 percent of all New York Stock Exchange trading activity in the early 1990s to less than 20 percent by 2006, academic studies found.

But even that likely overstates the impact of the floor. Over the past decade, the New York Stock Exchange’s share of American stock trading has fallen to about 24 percent from 80 percent, with trading in U.S. stocks now shared by 12 public exchanges and many more nonpublic venues.

That means that the share of stock that actually is touched by the New York Stock Exchange’s flesh-and-blood traders is quite small — as little as 1 percent, according to one recent study.

Here’s the business news to watch this week.

? Software companies that have benefited from the shift to remote working are expected to report robust earnings: Box and Workday on Wednesday, and Salesforce and Zscaler on Thursday.

? The first manned SpaceX flight is scheduled for a Wednesday launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The Falcon 9 rocket will ferry two astronauts to the International Space Station, the culmination of a 10-year effort to restart America’s space program.

?? Pandemic shopping habits have been good for retailers like Costco, Dollar General and Dollar Tree, which all report earnings on Thursday.

?? Shutdowns have been less kind to clothing and accessory retailers like Ralph Lauren, which reports earnings on Wednesday, and Abercrombie & Fitch, Burlington Stores, Nordstrom and Ulta Beauty, which release results on Thursday.

⚖️ A judge in Vancouver is to announce on Wednesday whether Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, can be extradited to the United States to face fraud charges. She was arrested in Canada in December 2018.

The European Central Bank warned Tuesday that the pandemic could create huge aftershocks in the financial system, destabilizing banks as well as highly indebted corporations and governments.

Banks have so far withstood the crisis, largely because regulators forced them to reduce their reliance on borrowed money following the financial crisis and recession in 2008, the central bank said in its annual survey of the health of the eurozone financial system.

But it’s too early to sound the all-clear, the report said. Eurozone banks are plagued by low profitability and the stock market values them at only one-third the book value of their assets. Lenders such as BBVA in Spain or Société Générale in France reported big losses for the first quarter of 2020 while others like Deutsche Bank were just barely profitable.

The central bank praised governments for quickly deploying tax cuts and other measures to help businesses and consumers survive loss of income. But the central bank also warned that the economic stimulus would leave governments with much higher debt that could be a major burden in the future.

Catch up: Here’s what else is happening.

  • Latam, the largest airline in Latin America, said on Tuesday it had filed for bankruptcy protection, the latest carrier to fall victim to the pandemic. The company, based in Santiago, Chile, said it had secured $900 million in financing from major shareholders, including the Cueto and Amaro families and Qatar Airlines, and that it would work with creditors to reduce its debt while it continues operating. Avianca, Colombia’s flagship airline and one of the world’s oldest carriers, filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this month.

  • Lufthansa will receive a bailout worth 9 billion euros, or $9.8 billion, to help the airline survive an “existential emergency” caused by the pandemic and a virtual shutdown of passenger air traffic, the German government said Monday. The agreement, reached after several weeks of negotiations, will give the government part ownership of the airline for the first time since it was privatized in 1997.

  • Hertz, which started with a fleet of a dozen Ford Model T’s a century ago and became one of the world’s largest car rental companies, filed for bankruptcy protection late Friday after falling victim to its mountain of debt. Hertz said that it would use more than $1 billion in cash on hand to keep its business running while it proceeds with the bankruptcy process. The bankruptcy filing excludes operations in Australia, Europe and New Zealand as well as the company’s franchisee locations.

Reporting was contributed by Nelson Schwartz, Alexandra Stevenson, Keith Bradsher, Elizabeth Paton, Jack Ewing, Jason Karaian, Matt Phillips, Noam Scheiber, Jesse Drucker, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Kevin McKenna, Sarah Kliff, Tim Arango, Shira Ovide, Thomas Fuller, Niraj Chokshi, Mohammed Hadi, Julie Creswell, Neal E. Boudette, David Yaffe-Bellany and Kevin Granville.





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