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Stress tests passed, banks are primed to pay shareholders.
Daily Business Briefing
June 25, 2021, 12:07 a.m. ET
June 25, 2021, 12:07 a.m. ET
The nation’s biggest banks can get back to business as usual.
The Federal Reserve said on Thursday that Wall Street lenders were most likely strong enough to fully resume shareholder payouts after the regulator lifted pandemic-related restrictions — the latest sign that the economy is returning to normal.
“The banking system is strongly positioned to support the ongoing recovery,” the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, Randal K. Quarles, said in a statement.
That means the nation’s biggest lenders — including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America — can increase the amount they pay out to shareholders through stock buybacks and dividends.
Industry representatives immediately took a victory lap.
“The strength and resiliency of the nation’s largest banks have been reconfirmed,” Kevin Fromer, the chief executive of the Financial Services Forum, said in a statement. The resumption of “reasonable” dividends and buybacks would support the economy’s recovery, said Mr. Fromer, whose group represents the leaders of the eight largest U.S. banks.
The Federal Reserve imposed temporary limits on dividends and buybacks last year as a way to protect against loan losses that could have threatened the financial system. But government efforts to prop up the economy, including enhanced unemployment benefits and stimulus payments, meant that such losses never emerged. Indeed, Americans used some of that money to pay down debts and are, overall, comparatively flush and eager to spend after a year of lockdowns.
In March, the Fed’s governors unanimously approved plans to end the buyback and dividend limits after the second quarter as long as banks passed their so-called stress tests — the annual evaluations of banks with $100 billion or more in assets. The test were established by the Dodd-Frank reform law established after the 2008 financial crisis.
On Thursday, the Fed said the banks had passed the test, which assessed how they would fare under dire situations such as a severe global recession punctuated by major stress in commercial real estate and corporate debt markets alongside a 55 percent decline in equity prices. That hypothetical case would trigger collective losses of $470 billion among the 23 large banks, with nearly $160 billion of the losses coming from commercial real estate and corporate loans, the Fed said. While the banks’ capital ratios would fall to 10.6 percent under that scenario, that is still more than double the lowest required ratio.
The stringent conditions in the stress tests contrast with a more rosy reality: U.S. lenders have maintained a firm footing during the pandemic, racking up profits and building up reserves in preparation for a torrent of losses that so far hasn’t materialized. Bank stocks have jumped about 28 percent since January as a speedy vaccine rollout bolstered economic activity.
If a bank’s capital dips below certain levels in the tests, the Fed can restrict it from paying out money to shareholders. But a New York Times analysis of results suggested that none of the six largest banks were close to facing such restrictions.
The banks’ passing grades prompted criticism that the test had been too easy.
“I’m losing my faith in the stress tests,” said Sheila Bair, who was head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation during the financial crisis. She pointed out that the tests are predictable because they have been made more transparent, and that the scenarios are reflective of the 2008 meltdown — not emerging risks, like climate change.
“They need to get a little more creative,” she said. “They’re looking in the rearview mirror — that’s the problem.”
Lenders are expected to announce their capital plans on Monday afternoon, according to the Fed. The lag will allow banks to compare their own analyses with the Fed’s and potentially revise their payout proposals.
“The expectations have been high regarding payouts,” said Ian Katz, an analyst at Capital Alpha Partners, a research firm in Washington. “I think they’re going to meet those expectations, and they’ve gotten the green light to do that.”
Mayra Rodríguez Valladares, a financial risk consultant who trains bankers and regulators, said she expected banks to boost their dividend payouts and share buybacks — although she believed doing so would be premature.
“We still do not know how many corporate or individual defaults are coming our way once all stimulus and Fed programs to provide respite during Covid end,” Ms. Rodríguez Valladares said. “Banks should not be excessive in dividend payouts and should make sure that they are well above minimum capital levels to protect them if defaults rise later in the year.”
Gregg Gelzinis, associate director for economic policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, added that bigger dividends and buybacks wouldn’t bolster the economy.
“That’s money that could have been used to expand lending to businesses and households, aiding the recovery,” he said.
But the Bank Policy Institute, an industry group, said large lenders were on solid ground to help the economy bounce back from the past year’s upheaval.
Large banks “remain in an excellent position to continue to support the economic recovery as loan demand strengthens,” said Francisco Covas, the institute’s executive vice president.
Future tests, however, may not be so forgiving.
Mr. Quarles was appointed vice chair for supervision by President Donald J. Trump, and his term will expire in mid-October. The next time the banks go through their annual checkups, they most likely will be facing scenarios approved by different leadership.
Isaac Boltansky, the director of policy research at the research and trading firm Compass Point, said the change will introduce an element of uncertainty for banks, who might encounter more strenuous scenarios related to the kinds of risks Ms. Bair said could lie ahead.
“Where I think it is a little bit hazier is what happens after this,” he said.
Google pushed back plans to phase out a widely used technology to track the web activity of users, in an effort to address growing concerns from regulators and digital advertising industry rivals.
In a blog post on Thursday, Google said it intended to start gradually blocking trackers, or cookies, from its Chrome web browser in mid-2023 and eliminate them altogether later that year. Previously, Google had said it planned to begin stripping cookies from Chrome in January 2022.
Google’s approach to removing cookies from Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser, upset many in the digital advertising industry and captured the attention of regulators. The fear was that Google’s dominance, already evident through its stranglehold on advertising, search and web browsing, would be further entrenched by removing a tool used by many rival online marketers to target ads.
“It’s become clear that more time is needed across the ecosystem to get this right,” wrote Vinay Goel, director of privacy engineering for Chrome. “This will allow sufficient time for public discussion on the right solutions, continued engagement with regulators, and for publishers and the advertising industry to migrate their services.”
The company’s announcement came on the heels of the European Union saying it will investigate Google’s plans to eliminate cookies as part of a broader inquiry of its dominance in digital advertising technology. Earlier this month, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority reached an agreement with Google to allow the regulator to review any changes to Chrome as part of another investigation.
Other web browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox have taken more aggressive measures to curb tracking online, but Google has struggled to move forward — in part because of the concerns that its privacy initiatives are self-serving for a company that already knows so much about the interests and habits of its users.
Under an initiative called the Privacy Sandbox, Google has proposed a new set of tools to approximate the role played by cookies without the same privacy concerns of tracking individuals on the internet.
Britain’s economic recovery is continuing apace and inflation is now expected to climb even higher than previously predicted, but the Bank of England’s policymakers stood firm on Thursday and saw little need to scale back their large monetary stimulus program.
That is, all but one.
In his final meeting, Andy Haldane, the central bank’s chief economist, cast the lone dissenting vote, arguing that the bank should pare back its bond-buying program because of the improved economic outlook and rising price pressures. It continued a theme he has sounded for months. In February, he described inflation as a sleeping tiger that had been “stirred from its slumber.”
Since the central bank’s previous meeting in May, it has raised its expectations for economic growth and predicted that the annual inflation rate would temporarily climb above 3 percent, higher than previously forecast and exceeding its 2 percent target.
“It is possible,” the minutes from this week’s meeting said, that “upward pressure on prices could prove somewhat larger than expected.”
Still, the majority of policymakers were not ready to withdraw any of the support they were giving to the economy, arguing that the central bank should not undermine the economic recovery by tightening monetary policy too quickly, the minutes said.
The policy-setting committee held interest rates at a record low of 0.1 percent and kept the size of its bond-buying program at 895 billion pounds. It offered few clues about when it might reduce stimulus. After the announcement, the pound dropped 0.5 percent against the U.S. dollar.
Mr. Haldane contends the economy is approaching takeoff speed and, for a second consecutive month, urged the central bank to reduce its target for the amount of bonds it intends to buy by £50 billion. That would end the program in August instead of at the end of the year.
It was the 68th and last policy meeting for Mr. Haldane, 53, who joined the bank in his early 20s and has recently been one of the most optimistic proponents of strong economic recovery in Britain — and a leading worrier that central banks risk underreacting to rising inflation.
He is leaving to run the Royal Society of Arts, a British think tank focused on the future of work and sustainable business practices.
With Mr. Haldane’s departure, the monetary policy committee will lose its most hawkish member as it has to decide how to emerge from its pandemic response measures. Even while Britain was enduring a strict lockdown through a cold and dark winter, Mr. Haldane kept up his confidence in the economy.
In February, he said there was “enormous amounts of pent-up financial energy waiting to be released, like a coiled spring.” Since then, that spring has turned into warnings about the “beast of inflation.”
Now central bankers face their “most dangerous moment” since the early 1990s, when policymakers began using targets for inflation to guide decisions, Mr. Haldane recently wrote in New Statesman magazine. “While nothing is assured, acting early as inflation risks grow is the best way of heading off future threat.”
Mr. Haldane’s imaginative language and directness have been a consistent feature of his time at the Bank of England, which he joined in 1989. He became a member of the policy-setting committee and became chief economist in 2014.
After the 2008 financial crisis, he was outspoken about the risks that banks and large asset managers could pose to national economies, sometimes making him a pariah in the financial sector. But he just as eagerly addressed what he believed was a crisis in economics that left his profession blindsided, and has warned against groupthink in central banks. He has also voiced his support for the Occupy movement, and worked with students determined to make economics education more intellectually diverse.
In 2009, Mr. Haldane founded the charity Pro Bono Economics, which sends economists into charities to help them use data to measure their impact, while also advocating higher levels of math skills across the country. Although he has said economics needs to be more easily accessible, Mr. Haldane has also insisted that economists need to better understand the public. He has crisscrossed Britain meeting community groups and students to discuss topics including homelessness and mental health.
“Technocratic institutions require the continuous consent not just of Parliament but of the wider public,” Mr. Haldane wrote in the foreword to “The Econocracy,” a book by ex-students on reforming economics.
His successor has not been named.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Thursday approved a one-month extension of the national moratorium on evictions, scheduled to expire on June 30, as officials emphasized this will be the final time they will push back the deadline.
The moratorium, instituted by the agency last September to prevent a wave of evictions spurred by the economic downturn associated with the coronavirus pandemic and extended earlier this year, has significantly limited the economic damage to renters and sharply reduced eviction filings.
On Thursday, the C.D.C. director, Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, signed the extension, which goes through July 31, after a week of internal debate at the White House over the issue.
Local officials and tenants rights groups have warned that phasing out the freeze could touch off a new, if somewhat less severe, eviction crisis than the country faced last year during the height of the pandemic.
White House officials agreed and pressed reluctant C.D.C. officials to extend the moratorium, which they see as needed to buy them more time to distribute $21.5 billion in emergency federal housing aid funded by a pandemic relief bill passed this spring.
Administration officials, speaking on a conference call with reporters on Thursday, unveiled a range of other actions intended to blunt the impact of lifting the moratorium and the lapsing of similar state and local measures.
Among the most significant is a new push by the Justice Department, led by Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, to coax local housing court judges to slow the pace of evictions by forcing landlords to accept federal money intended to pay back rent.
In a letter to state court officials, Ms. Gupta urged judges to adopt a general order requiring all landlords to prove they have applied for federal aid before signing off on evictions, while offering federal funding for eviction diversion programs intended to resolve landlord-tenant disputes.
Other initiatives include a summit on housing affordability and evictions, to be held at the White House later this month; stepped-up coordination with local officials and legal aid organizations to minimize evictions after July 31; and new guidance from the Treasury Department meant to streamline the sluggish disbursement of the $21.5 billion in emergency aid included in the pandemic relief bill in the spring.
White House officials, requesting anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue publicly, said recently that the one-month extension, while influenced by concerns over a new wave of evictions, was prompted by the lag in vaccination rates in low-income communities.
Ms. Walensky was initially reluctant to sign the extension, according to a senior administration official involved in the negotiations. She eventually concluded, the official said, a flood of new evictions could lead to greater spread of the virus by displaced tenants.
Forty-four House Democrats wrote to Ms. Walensky, on Tuesday, urging them to put off allowing evictions to resume. “By extending the moratorium and incorporating these critical improvements to protect vulnerable renters, we can work to curtail the eviction crisis disproportionately impacting our communities of color,” the lawmakers wrote.
Groups representing private landlords maintain that the health crisis that justified the freeze has ended and that continuing the freeze even for an extra four weeks would be an unwarranted government intrusion in the housing market.
“The mounting housing affordability crisis is quickly becoming a housing affordability disaster fueled by flawed eviction moratoriums, which leave renters with insurmountable debt and housing providers holding the bag,” said Bob Pinnegar, president of the National Apartment Association, a trade group representing owners of large residential buildings.
Stocks on Wall Street climbed into record territory on Thursday, extending a rebound lifted by more good news about the economy and progress on a deal in Washington that could boost infrastructure spending.
After a slide last week, the S&P 500 has climbed nearly 2.5 percent this week, gaining three of four days. Last week’s drop reflected uncertainty about the path forward for interest rates and inflation after the Federal Reserve indicated it was open to raising rates sooner than expected and would begin discussing when to pull back on its emergency stimulus to support the economy.
Thursday’s gains came after the Labor Department reported that weekly claims for state jobless benefits declined,; the Commerce Department said orders at factories for big-ticket items like aircraft and machinery rose in May; and lawmakers in Washington said they had reached an agreement on a $579 billion spending plan for roads, broadband internet and other projects.
Though a final bill is still far from assured, optimism around its prospects meant stocks tied to construction and engineering jumped. Terex Corporation, a supplier of cranes and lifts used in large construction projects, jumped 4 percent, while Dycom, which specializes in telecommunication systems, rose 5.8 percent.
Fluor, another engineering and construction company that has a large government contracting business, climbed 4.5 percent. Vulcan Materials, which makes asphalt for roads, rose 3.3 percent, and construction-equipment giant Caterpillar was the one of the best-performing stocks in the Dow Jones industrial average, rising more than 2.6 percent.
Banks also rallied on Thursday ahead of the release of the Federal Reserve’s annual “stress tests” on the largest financial firms. The Fed could drop or relax restrictions put on the banks’ ability to distribute cash to shareholders — limits that were put in place earlier in the pandemic to strengthen the financial system. Goldman Sachs gained 2.1 percent, while JPMorgan Chase rose more than 0.9 percent.
Microsoft climbed about half a percent to end the day with a market value of over $2 trillion for the first time. It’s not the first company to cross that threshold, Apple did so in August 2020, and oil giant Saudi Aramco did so in late 2019.
The S&P 500 gained 0.6 percent, notching a record high. The Dow rose 1 percent.
The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced a $2.2 billion cryptocurrency fund on Thursday, during a stormy week for Bitcoin in a season of extremes for digital assets. A crackdown in China has driven down crypto prices in recent days, the latest bout of volatility that makes regulators wary of the industry as it moves into the mainstream.
Katie Haun, a co-chair of the fund, is a former federal prosecutor who created the first U.S. government cryptocurrency task force. Anyone who has been around crypto for years realizes it will be “a bumpy ride,” she told the DealBook newsletter before the announcement. Nonetheless, the fund is oversubscribed. “We could have quite easily raised a lot larger funds without any issue at all,” she said.
The crypto fund is “all weather,” investing at all stages, in both the equity of companies and directly in crypto coins and tokens, according to a statement from the fund. “We are radically optimistic about crypto’s potential,” Ms. Haun and her fellow co-chair, Chris Dixon, said in the statement. “The size of this fund speaks to the size of the opportunity before us: crypto is not only the future of finance but, as with the internet in the early days, is poised to transform all aspects of our lives.”
This is Andreessen’s third crypto fund. Each is progressively bigger, as the firm expands into new areas and doubles down on what worked before. Ms. Haun said the latest fund — focused on infrastructure, non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, and decentralized finance, or DeFi — is made up entirely of repeat investors. Through the ups and downs, interest in crypto is only getting stronger, she said. That’s why the industry needs more clarity about “the rules of the road,” she added.
To that end, Andreessen isn’t just betting on crypto businesses, but hiring former government insiders to help steer its strategy as crypto regulation evolves. Bill Hinman, the former director of the SEC’s corporate finance division, where he worked on digital asset issues, is joining as an advisory partner, as is Brent McIntosh, the former under secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, who coordinated the G7’s work on crypto. Tomicah Tillemann, the technologist and former adviser to Joe Biden in the Senate, is joining to run global policy.
“As with any new computing movement, crypto has endured a variety of challenges and misconceptions,” the statement said. “That’s why we are also bringing together heavy-hitters across several functions to help translate crypto to the mainstream.”
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Initial claims for state jobless benefits fell last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.
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The weekly figure was about 393,000, down 15,000 from the previous week. New claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federally funded program for jobless freelancers, gig workers and others who do not ordinarily qualify for state benefits, totaled 105,000, up 7,000 from the week before. The figures are not seasonally adjusted. (On a seasonally adjusted basis, state claims totaled 411,000, a decrease of 7,000.)
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A total of 26 states have announced plans to discontinue some or all federal pandemic unemployment benefits this month or next — including a $300 supplement to other benefits — even though they are funded through September.
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New state claims remain high by historical standards but are one-half the level recorded in early February. The benefit filings, something of a proxy for layoffs, have receded as businesses return to fuller operations, particularly in hard-hit industries like leisure and hospitality.
An influential watchdog group said on Thursday that the British government was doing far too little to carry out the ambitious pledges it had made on tackling climate change.
Although the government has promised to cut its greenhouse emissions to net zero by 2050, it has failed to take interim steps — such as tax incentives for reducing emissions — essential to meet that goal, according to a report by the group, the Committee on Climate Change.
“The trouble is the action, the delivery has just not been there,” said John Gummer, chairman of the committee, which is funded by the British government to advise lawmakers on environmental policies.
The criticism may prove uncomfortable for Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has made leadership on climate diplomacy a key pillar for the post-Brexit Britain that he is trying to shape.
Britain’s ambitions to wield influence in this area will be on display in November in Glasgow, where Mr. Johnson is expected to lead a significant international gathering known as COP26, which leaders like President Biden hope will be a forum for advancing the global climate agenda.
In 2019, Mr. Johnson sketched a vision for a “green industrial revolution” in Britain, pledging to ban the sale of most new gasoline- and diesel-powered cars by 2030 and holding out the prospect of creating some 250,000 jobs in areas like offshore wind, hydrogen and battery production. The ideas followed legislation passed in 2019, before Mr. Johnson took office, that established the net-zero pledge for 2050.
On Thursday, though, the committee said that while such pledges were “historic,” the government was badly lagging in making good on them.
“What we have seen since then is almost nothing at all,” Chris Stark, the chief executive of the committee, said in an interview.
The committee and environmentalists have warned that continued lack of follow-through could make it difficult for Mr. Johnson to persuade other governments to take potentially painful steps on reducing emissions at the climate summit.
“Everyone is looking for action and delivery, not for promises,” said Mr. Gummer, a former cabinet minister who, like Mr. Johnson, is a member of the Conservative Party.
Unless the government comes up with credible plans, he said, “the whole concept of global Britain being a leader will, in fact, be undermined.”
In the report published on Thursday, the committee wrote that reaching net zero as well as interim milestones would require what it called a significant change in government action. In addition to tax incentives to spur reduced emissions, the committee called for dedicated government spending to reduce emissions from industry, buildings and agriculture, and a bigger effort to point out the opportunities offered to people and businesses by tackling climate change.
So far, the report’s authors wrote, “it is hard to discern any comprehensive strategy in the climate plans we have seen in the last 12 months.”
Analysts say the criticism may well nudge the government to do more, especially with the climate summit coming.
Doug Parr, the chief scientist of the environmental group Greenpeace UK, said the committee’s critique would be “awkward” for the government. “In this year of all years, yes, it will matter,” he added.
Responding to the report, George Eustice, the government’s environment secretary, told the BBC that Mr. Johnson was closely following climate issues. “This is an agenda that matters to the prime minister, and it is not true to say that he just made a promise and isn’t following through,” he said.
The committee has clout because it is part of the legal framework credited with Britain’s achievements to date on climate. In recent decades, Britain has by some metrics been among the world leaders on tackling climate change, reducing emissions by 40 percent from 1990 to 2019.
Many observers give credit for Britain’s performance to legislation in 2008 that set legally binding emissions targets and established the committee to monitor progress and advise the government.
At the same time, many say, government foot-dragging at this juncture is not surprising, because Britain has previously picked the low-hanging fruit on climate change and now faces more difficult hurdles to make further progress.
A large portion of the earlier gains have come in the power sector. Britain has replaced most of its highly polluting coal-fired generators — first with natural gas plants and, more recently, with renewable generation sources, carpeting the shallows of the North Sea with wind turbines.
Analysts say reducing carbon in electric power is relatively easy because consumers do not see any real change when they flip a light switch. Future progress may require more intrusive and expensive measures, such as replacing natural gas heating systems with devices known as heat pumps and widespread retrofitting of homes with insulation.
“All politicians are deeply afraid of having to engage with consumers and people’s houses because of the political sensitivities,” said Nick Mabey, the chief executive of E3G, an environmental group.
Mr. Stark listed other areas that the government must address, beginning with around 30 million privately owned buildings that will need to have their emissions slashed over 30 years — a daunting task.
There is also much work to be done in transportation, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases. The government has pledged to phase out fossil-fuel vehicles but now must follow through on needed infrastructure like electric charging points. The government must also figure out how to clean up heavy industries like steel and chemicals without forcing these businesses to close.
It all adds up to a huge effort for Britain or any other industrialized country to meet climate targets. Last year, because of the pandemic, Britain reached a level where emissions were around half the level of 1990.
“The next half will be the most difficult half,” Mr. Stark said. “We have done most of the easy bits.”
Laurence D. Fink, the chief executive of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, was in frequent touch with the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in the days before and after many of the Fed’s emergency rescue programs were announced in late March, Jeanna Smialek reports for The New York Times.
Emails obtained by The New York Times through a records request, along with public releases, underscore the extent to which Mr. Fink planned alongside the government for parts of a financial rescue that his firm referred to in one message as “the project” that he and the Fed were “working on together.”
Mr. Mnuchin held 60 recorded calls over the frantic Saturday and Sunday leading up to the Fed’s unveiling on Monday, March 23, of a policy package that included its first-ever program to buy corporate bonds, which were becoming nearly impossible to sell as investors sprinted to convert their holdings to cash. Mr. Mnuchin spoke to Mr. Fink five times that weekend, more than anyone other than the Fed chair.
The Fed and Treasury consulted with many financial firms as they drew up their response — and practically all of Wall Street and much of Main Street benefited — but no other company was as front and center.
The Fed has explained the decision to hire the advisory side of the house in terms of practicality.
“We hired BlackRock for their expertise in these markets,” Mr. Powell has since said in defense of the rapid move. “It was done very quickly due to the urgency and need for their expertise.”
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Delegates to the International Brotherhood of Teamsters convention on Thursday approved a resolution making it a priority to organize Amazon workers and help them secure a union contract. The union represents more than one million workers in industries including parcel delivery and freight and had more than $200 million in revenue last year. The resolution states that Amazon “presents an existential threat to the standards we have set in these industries” and that the union will eventually create a division to organize workers at the company.
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President Biden removed the chief of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, hours after the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that the president had the authority to dismiss the agency’s director. The director, Mark Calabria, had overseen a number of rules aimed to end the federal government’s conservatorship of Fannie and Freddie, imposed in 2008 at the start of the financial crisis. Mr. Calabria favored the eventual privatization of the mortgage giants, and his dismissal hit the companies’ share prices, hurting hedge funds that had bet on an exit from government control.
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BuzzFeed, the digital publisher known for quizzes, listicles and a news division that won its first Pulitzer Prize this month, is close to reaching a merger deal that would take the company public, a person with knowledge of the company said Wednesday. An announcement could come as soon as this week, the person added. BuzzFeed declined to comment. Led by its founder and chief executive, Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed has been in talks to merge with an already public shell company, 890 Fifth Avenue Partners, in what is known as a SPAC deal.
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After nearly two decades leading Southwest Airlines, Gary C. Kelly, will step down from the chief executive position next year, the airline said on Wednesday. He will be replaced by Robert E. Jordan, a top executive who has held a number of jobs at the company. Both men have worked for Southwest since the 1980s. Mr. Kelly, 66, has been in the top job since 2004, expanding Southwest into the nation’s largest airline by passengers carried. Mr. Jordan, 60, an executive vice president who oversees communication and outreach and human resources, will become chief executive on Feb. 1.
Video
Today in the On Tech newsletter, Shira Ovide talks to Cecilia Kang about a package of bills written by House lawmakers that poses existential threats to the tech giants.
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A Discovery reality TV competition, a Russian medical thriller and more productions could be heading to the orbital outpost in the next year.
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Are Telegram and Signal the Next Misinformation Hot Spots?
So what’s your take? Are you concerned?
KEVIN Honestly, not actually?
It is definitely not good for general public protection that neo-Nazis, far-proper militias and other dangerous teams are discovering approaches to communicate and manage, and that those ways progressively include finish-to-conclude encryption. We’ve found this take place for a long time, going all the way back again to ISIS, and it absolutely helps make items more challenging for law enforcement companies and counterterrorism officers.
At the similar time, there is a authentic reward to receiving these extremists off mainstream platforms, exactly where they can locate new sympathizers and acquire gain of the broadcast mechanics of those platforms to spread their messages to millions of possible extremists.
The way I have been considering about this is in a type of epidemiological product. If another person is sick and at risk of infecting others, you preferably want to get them out of the typical populace and into quarantine, even if it implies placing them somewhere like a hospital, wherever there are a large amount of other sick people.
It’s a really terrible metaphor, but you see what I indicate. We know that when they are on significant, mainstream platforms like Fb, Twitter and YouTube, extremists never just communicate between themselves. They recruit. They join absolutely unrelated teams and attempt to seed conspiracy theories there. In some techniques, I’d rather have 1,000 hardened neo-Nazis undertaking lousy stuff together on an encrypted chat application than have them infiltrating 1,000 diverse area Dogspotting teams or what ever.
BRIAN I see where you’re heading with this!
When you open Fb or Twitter, the very first issue you see is your timeline, a general feed that features posts by your mates. But you could also see posts from strangers if your close friends reshared them or Liked them.
When you open Signal or Telegram, you see a list of the discussions you are obtaining with individuals or teams of folks. To get a concept from someone you really do not know, that person would require to know your cellphone number to access out to you.
So to total our analogy, Facebook and Twitter are primarily billions of men and women packed into an great auditorium. Encrypted messaging apps like Sign and Telegram are like major buildings with tens of millions of people today, but each individual is living inside of a non-public room. People have to knock on one particular another’s doorways to send out messages, so spreading misinformation would choose far more effort and hard work. In contrast, on Facebook and Twitter, a piece of misinformation can go viral in seconds simply because the people today in this auditorium can all listen to what anyone else is shouting.
Few Minority-Owned Businesses Got Relief Loans They Asked For
Black and Latino small business owners are having difficulties to get pandemic help below the Paycheck Protection Plan and other federal help efforts, a new study has located, and many say they are on the brink of closing permanently.
The survey, performed by the Worldwide Approach Team for two equal-rights businesses, Colour of Modify and UnidosUS, incorporated interviews with 500 company owners and 1,200 staff from April 30 to previous Monday. Just 12 percent of the entrepreneurs who utilized for aid from the Compact Enterprise Administration — most of them searching for financial loans in the $650 billion paycheck software — noted acquiring what they had questioned for, although 26 per cent explained they had acquired only a portion of what they experienced asked for. Nearly 50 percent of all proprietors explained they expected obtaining to permanently close in the upcoming six months.
By comparison, in a survey of smaller corporations by the Census Bureau from April 26 to Could 2, 3-quarters mentioned they had requested for a financial loan and 38 % of them said they experienced acquired a person.
Rashad Robinson, the president of Shade of Modify, reported the new survey confirmed that “if we really do not get insurance policies to safeguard these communities, we will shed a era of black and brown companies, which will have deep impacts on our overall country’s financial system.”
Two-thirds of the respondents sought loans of beneath $50,000 through the government’s aid software. Approximately fifty percent claimed they experienced to lay off at least some personnel.
The success propose that the historically weak associations that minority enterprise proprietors have with banks are building it harder for them to tap into the help plan, which would make financial loans that develop into grants if borrowers devote the cash spending staff and lease and utility costs. Numerous banks deemed applications only from present buyers some, like Financial institution of The usa, even turned absent persons who experienced opened credit score cards via other creditors.
The program was the initially time some black and Latino organization proprietors had ever sought a lender mortgage.
Equivalent-legal rights advocates and some lawmakers are pushing to get a lot more aid for minority enterprise entrepreneurs crafted into the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, and the 2nd round of funding for the bank loan application established apart $60 billion for modest and rural banks and nonprofit loan providers, which often do much more work in minority communities than substantial banking institutions do.
Mr. Robinson mentioned his group was pushing lawmakers to occur up with other means to transmit aid to enterprise owners, these kinds of as immediate payments to businesses’ workers through payroll processors or other means.
Coronavirus News and Live Updates
The president says he is taking hydroxychloroquine, an unproven drug against the virus.
President Trump said on Monday that he has been taking hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug whose effectiveness against the coronavirus is unproven, for about a week and a half as a preventive measure, saying he had no symptoms of Covid-19.
The drugs can cause dangerous abnormalities in heart rhythm in virus patients, the F.D.A. warned, saying they should be used only in clinical trials or hospitals where patients can be closely monitored for heart problems.
Several doctors said they were alarmed that Mr. Trump was using the bully pulpit of the presidency to tell the public he takes a drug that has not been proven to be effective against the coronavirus, but which does have known risks.
Dr. Steven E. Nissen, the chief academic officer of the Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at the Cleveland Clinic, said he had treated patients who developed a life-threatening arrhythmia, which the drug can cause.
“This disorder can be lethal,” Dr. Nissen said. “My concern would be that the public not hear comments about the use of hydroxychloroquine and believe that taking this drug to prevent Covid-19 infection is without hazards.
“In fact, there are serious hazards.”
Dr. Nissen noted that hydroxychloroquine had stayed on the market because it treated serious conditions such as lupus and rheumatoid arthritis. But other drugs with the same dangerous side effect have been withdrawn because they treated less serious ailments.
Mr. Trump has in recent weeks stopped talking about the drug that he had been touting as a possible miracle cure. But on Monday, he appeared to relish telling reporters that he was taking it, with approval from the White House physician, Dr. Sean P. Conley.
“After numerous discussions he and I had regarding the evidence for and against the use of hydroxychloroquine, we concluded the potential benefit from treatment outweighed the relative risks,” Dr. Conley said in a statement on Monday night. He also said the president “is in very good health and has remained symptom free.”
The coronavirus outbreak spread to the White House this month, and two members of the staff tested positive. After that, the White House ordered all West Wing employees to wear masks at work unless they are sitting at their desks; the order did not apply to the president.
Early studies of hydroxychloroquine in the laboratory showing that the drug could block the virus from attacking cells prompted enthusiasm. But the studies of the drug in humans have largely proved disappointing, and some have pointed to serious side effects in people with heart problems.
“I’m not going to get hurt by it,” said Mr. Trump, 73, claiming he was making the disclosure in order to be transparent with Americans. “It has been around for 40 years for malaria, for lupus, for other things. I take it. Front-line workers take it. A lot of doctors take it. I take it.”
Trump says that if the W.H.O. doesn’t change, he will permanently cease funding.
President Trump told the director-general of the World Health Organization he would permanently end all funding to the organization if it did not “commit to substantive improvements within the next 30 days,” according to a copy of a letter he posted to Twitter late Monday night.
“It is clear the repeated missteps by you and your organization in responding to the pandemic have been extremely costly for the world,” the president wrote in a four-page letter outlining his grievances against the organization and its leader, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
The letter was his latest broadside against an organization he has sought to blame for the spread of the coronavirus while rewriting the history of his administration’s belated response. He wrote that the United States would reconsider its membership in the organization because it was “so clearly not serving America’s interests.”
Earlier on Monday, Alex M. Azar II, the secretary of Health and Human Services, sharply criticized the W.H.O., saying its handling of the outbreak in China led to unnecessary deaths.
“We must be frank about one of the primary reasons that this outbreak spun out of control,” Mr. Azar said. “There was a failure by this organization to obtain the information that the world needed, and that failure cost many lives.”
Before Mr. Trump posted his letter, President Xi Jinping of China offered to provide $2 billion in the fight against the pandemic and called on other nations to increase their contributions to the W.H.O. China’s contribution last year was $43 million.
Government reaches $354 million deal with new company to make drug ingredients in the U.S.
The Trump administration will announce on Tuesday that it has signed a $354 million four-year contract with a new company in Richmond, Va., to manufacture generic medicines and pharmaceutical ingredients that are needed to treat Covid-19 but are now made overseas, mostly in India and China.
The contract, awarded to Phlow Corp. by the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, meshes President Trump’s “America First” economic promises with concerns that coronavirus treatments be manufactured in the United States. It may be extended for a total of $812 million over 10 years, making it one of the largest awards in the authority’s history.
“This is an historic turning point in America’s efforts to onshore its pharmaceutical production and supply chains,” Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s trade adviser, whose White House portfolio includes the global supply chain, said in a brief interview on Monday evening. The project, he said, “will not only help bring our essential medicines home but actually do so in a way that is cost competitive with the sweatshops and pollution havens of the world.”
It was unclear why the Trump administration decided to award such a large grant to a company incorporated in January when an entire industry exists — contract manufacturing — that makes drugs for other companies. However, those manufacturers that operate in the United States generally make finished products using raw ingredients imported from elsewhere. They do not make the raw ingredients.
Eric Edwards, an entrepreneur and physician who founded Phlow, said the company initially planned to focus on drugs needed by children but switched gears when the coronavirus pandemic emerged. He said Phlow intended to create a stockpile for pharmaceutical ingredients to be used in the event of drug shortages or an emergency.
“There are not a lot of people wanting to bring back generic medicine manufacturing to the United States that has been lost to India and China over decades,” he said. “You need someone like the federal government saying this is too important for us not to focus on.”
The drug maker Moderna said on Monday that the first coronavirus vaccine to be tested in people appeared to be safe and able to stimulate an immune response against the virus.
The findings, which helped give Wall Street its best day in about six weeks, are based on results from the first eight people who each received two doses of the experimental vaccine starting in March.
Those people, healthy volunteers ages 18 to 55, made antibodies that were then tested in human cells in the lab and were able to stop the virus from replicating — the key requirement for an effective vaccine. The levels of those so-called neutralizing antibodies matched the levels found in patients who had recovered after contracting the virus in the community. Two more age groups — 55 to 70, and 71 and over — are now being enrolled to test the vaccine.
Though encouraging, the findings do not prove that the vaccine works. Only larger, longer studies can determine whether it can prevent people in the real world from getting sick. Moderna’s technology, involving genetic material from the virus called mRNA, is relatively new and has yet to produce any approved vaccine.
If those trials go well, a vaccine could become available for widespread use by the end of this year or early 2021, Dr. Tal Zaks, Moderna’s chief medical officer, said in an interview.
Despite the uncertainties, the company’s announcement rapidly encouraged investors, who also welcomed a pledge from the Federal Reserve chairman that there was “really no limit” to what the central bank could do with its emergency lending facilities.
The S&P 500 rose more than 3 percent Monday — Moderna’s shares rose 20 percent — while stock benchmarks in Europe were 4 percent to 6 percent higher.
The rally had all the characteristics of one focused on the prospects for a return to normal, with travel stocks among the best performers in the S&P 500. Oil prices also moved higher.
Texas, the second-most populous state, took more steps to reopen on Monday when Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, announced that office workers could return to work in limited capacities and child care services could reopen immediately. Little League games, sleepaway camps and vacation Bible camps could open beginning May 31, he said.
Mr. Abbott’s latest round of easing restrictions came after the state reported its deadliest day yet last week — 58 deaths between Wednesday and Thursday — and recorded 1,801 new infections on Saturday, the highest single-day increase the state has seen.
Mayor Eric Johnson of Dallas said he believed that the increase was connected to Mr. Abbott’s earlier lifting of constraints, telling CNN that he thought it was “more than likely connected in some way to the opening of restaurants and movie theaters and retail and our malls up to 25 percent occupancy a couple weeks ago.” Mr. Abbott attributed the higher number to increased testing in hot spots, including in the Amarillo area, which he said would not reopen as fast as the rest of the state.
In Michigan, where thousands of autoworkers began returning to work on Monday for the first time in weeks, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat, announced that retail businesses, bars and restaurants with limited seating could reopen with restrictions in the Traverse City area and in the Upper Peninsula, two regions hit less hard than other parts of the state.
“Keep your wits about you,” she urged. “Let’s not all go rushing out and force a closure eventually. What we want to do is keep moving forward.”
The order is especially important for the tourist hub of northwest Michigan, which has already canceled the popular National Cherry Festival and Traverse City Film Festival in July.
“We want to be measured about how we invite people back and how we reopen our businesses,” Mayor Jim Carruthers of Traverse City said. “It’s been horrible to see all the shops and restaurants closed.”
In Massachusetts, another hard-hit state, Gov. Charlie Baker, a Republican, on Monday presented a four-phased strategy to gingerly resume public life, replacing his stay-at-home advisory with a new one, “safer at home.”
The four stages, which begin on Monday and last for three weeks each, are known as “start,” “cautious,” “vigilant” and “new normal,” with each new phase replacing the previous guidelines with slightly looser ones. Progress from one stage to the next is contingent on a continuing decline in the spread of the virus, Mr. Baker said.
“If we don’t keep up the fight, and don’t do the things that we all know we have to do and know we can do, we run the risk of creating a second spike in the fall,” he said.
Across the country, governors are weighing the risks of reopening their states with the need to minimize economic harm. The pendulum will move further toward the economy this week, when several more states, including Connecticut, Kentucky and Minnesota, move to reopen. If current trends hold, New York City is expected to meet the state’s criteria to begin reopening in the first half of June, the mayor said.
But even governors who have allowed certain returns to business have expressed hesitance, and public health officials have been warning for weeks that reopening too soon could lead to a devastating second outbreak.
“This is really the most crucial time,” Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, said Sunday on CNN. “And the most dangerous time.”
Stores and malls could reopen in Minnesota beginning Monday. The enormous Mall of America, in Bloomington, has said that it does not plan to reopen its shops until June 1. On Wednesday, hard-hit Connecticut is expected to reopen salons, museums and office buildings. By Friday, stores and restaurants are expected to open back up in Kentucky.
Oregon judge says the state’s stay-at-home order has lasted too long.
A judge in Oregon has rejected the state’s coronavirus restrictions, saying on Monday that Gov. Kate Brown did not have the authority to keep orders in place for more than 28 days.
Ms. Brown’s office immediately escalated the decision to the Oregon Supreme Court, days after the Wisconsin Supreme Court rejected that state’s extended stay-at-home order. Late Monday night, the Oregon Supreme Court halted the effect of the ruling, by Judge Matthew Shirtcliff of the Baker County Circuit Court, until the full court had a chance to settle the matter.
The Oregon case was brought by a group of churches that contended that Oregon law prohibited the governor from issuing long-term mandates. The governor’s office has argued that Ms. Brown’s orders were issued under a different part of the law with no such limitations.
“Reopening the state too quickly, and without ongoing physical distancing, will jeopardize public health and cost lives,” she said.
On the eve of a hearing to assess federal relief measures, a group of Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee wrote a letter to Jerome H. Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, urging them to take greater risks in a lending program meant to keep credit flowing to midsize businesses.
The so-called Main Street lending program, first unveiled March 23, has yet to get up and running. When it does, it will be backed by $75 billion of the $454 billion that Congress gave the Treasury Department as part of the CARES relief law to support the Fed’s emergency loan efforts.
Mr. Powell and Mr. Mnuchin will testify before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, a Democrat, has expressed concern that the program is taking too long to get started, and that its terms are too cautious, limiting the chances that it will lose taxpayer money but also potentially curbing its effectiveness.
“The vast majority of these firms are not seeking public assistance due to risky behavior,” the senators wrote, adding that “should firms fail to receive affordable financing terms under these facilities, many will be left with a choice between declaring bankruptcy, posing long-term risks to the economy or opening up too quickly.”
They wrote the letter as a new Congressional Oversight Commission raised questions about how the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department were administering emergency bailout funds in its inaugural assessment of the $500 billion program.
The report is the first in what will be a monthly review of how the funds are being used. The money, which was allocated as part of the $2 trillion CARES Act, is being used to provide grants and loans to airlines and companies that are vital to national security and to backstop lending programs designed by the Fed.
The report said that Treasury had yet to disburse the $46 billion in grant and loan money to airlines or businesses critical to national security. Thus far, it has used only $37.5 billion for the Fed’s Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility, which purchases outstanding corporate bonds through a special purpose vehicle.
The bipartisan commission is made up of two Republicans, Senator Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania and Representative French Hill of Arkansas, and two Democrats, Bharat Ramamurti, a former economic adviser to Senator Elizabeth Warren, and Representative Donna Shalala of Florida.
Hotlines in California were deluged on Monday as the state began taking applications for $75 million in cash assistance to help undocumented immigrants weather the economic downturn.
The one-time grants of $500 per person or $1,000 per household will be awarded to about 150,000 people who phone in on a first-come, first served basis, state officials said. Philanthropic organizations and private donors pledged an additional $50 million, for another 100,000 immigrants, Miriam Jordan reports.
There are an estimated 10.6 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., of whom 2 million live in California, more than any other state.
Undocumented immigrants are among the most vulnerable during the pandemic; many work in jobs in homes, hotels and restaurants that have been shut down during the lockdowns.
In anticipation of the payments, people looking for information on how to apply over the weekend directed a flurry of calls to the 12 nonprofit organizations contracted to vet the applications. By Monday, when the phone lines opened, many people reported they could not get through.
The sign-ups were being conducted almost entirely by telephone to avoid hazardous in-person contacts.
To qualify for the money, applicants must prove they are undocumented, out of work because of the health crisis and not eligible for federal stimulus checks or unemployment benefits.
Groups opposed to the program sued to block the state from using taxpayer dollars, arguing that it was illegal. The cases were dismissed by the court.
Amid continued questions about the small business loan program, Trump says he supports relaxing terms.
Mr. Trump said on Monday that he was open to relaxing the terms of a federal program to help distressed small businesses weather the crisis, even as new questions arose about who is able to benefit from the program.
During a round table at the White House, restaurant executives pressed Mr. Trump to extend the forgiveness period for loans under the Paycheck Protections Program from eight weeks to 24 weeks, a change that the president said “should be easy.”
For the loans to be forgiven, businesses must show that they kept their workers on payroll and used three quarters of the money on employment costs.
“The eight-week period is simply not enough time,” said Will Guidara, the owner of Eleven Madison Park, who attended as part of the newly created Independent Restaurant Coalition.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who oversees the program with the Small Business Administration, said he believes there is bipartisan support for such a change.
Monday was the deadline for businesses that got money from the program — which was designed to help mom-and-pop shops struggling during the pandemic — to return it under tightened eligibility rules that the administration imposed after several big companies benefited.
So far, at least 61 public and private companies have returned their small-business loans, according to data compiled by The Times. Among the companies that have returned loans are Ruth’s Chris Steak House, Shake Shack and the shoe start-up Allbirds.
But the majority of money extended to public companies has so far not been returned, and a new survey found that many minority-owned businesses are on the brink of closing permanently because they have been unable to obtain the federal loans.
The survey, conducted by the Global Strategy Group for two equal-rights organizations, Color of Change and UnidosUS, included interviews with 500 Black and Latino business owners and 1,200 workers from April 30 to last Monday. Just 12 percent of the owners who applied for loans from the program reported receiving what they had asked for, and nearly half said they anticipated having to permanently close in the next six months.
By comparison, in a survey of small businesses by the Census Bureau from April 26 to May 2, three-quarters said they had asked for a loan and 38 percent of them said they had received one.
“If we don’t get policies to protect these communities,” said Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, “we will lose a generation of black and brown businesses, which will have deep impacts on our entire country’s economy.”
The state’s standards that New York City has yet to meet are:
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A rate of new hospitalizations below 2 per 100,000 residents a day. In New York City, that works out to around 170 per day. According to the state, the number in the city is around 200 per day.
In the regions that can restart, construction, manufacturing, and wholesale trade can resume. Some retail businesses may open for curbside service only. Five regions became eligible on Friday and a sixth, around Buffalo, can reopen on Tuesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Monday.
Other activities that are allowed include drive-in movies, landscaping and gardening businesses and “low-risk recreational activities” like tennis.
Beaches in New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and elsewhere in New York State will open for swimming then, albeit with crowd limits and social distancing rules in place on the sand.
The city is prepared to fence off the beaches if they start to get crowded, the mayor warned.
Mr. Cuomo reported on Monday that 106 more people in the state had died of the virus, the lowest one-day toll since March 26. And he revealed the results of the virus test he took on live television on Sunday: negative.
Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia announced on Monday that the city of Virginia Beach would be allowed to reopen its beaches with some restrictions on Friday, just before Memorial Day weekend.
Several states on the East Coast, including Delaware, New Jersey and New York, have recently announced plans to reopen their beaches before the unofficial start of summer.
And the Florida Keys will reopen to visitors on June 1, officials announced, after two months under lockdown, with the only access roads closed off by checkpoints.
The archipelago has been blocked off to anyone who does not work or live there since late March. Hotels were ordered closed, and visitors who flew in through the airport were screened and instructed to self-isolate for two weeks.
The stringent measures worked: Monroe County had just 100 confirmed cases and three deaths, according to state data. The three heavily populated counties to the north — Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach — had a total of more than 25,000 cases and 1,000 deaths.
Under Virginia Beach’s new plan, residents and visitors will be permitted to sunbathe, swim, fish and surf, with beach parking being limited to 50 percent capacity. Group sports, alcohol consumption, speakers, tents and umbrella groupings will still be banned.
“These rules must be followed — you must be responsible,” said Mr. Northam, who added that he would close beach access if social distancing measures were not followed.
Virginia began to relax restrictions on businesses and places of worship last week as part of the three-phase plan to reopen the state, which has a stay-at-home order until June 10.
The order has not stopped residents from going to the beaches even when they were still considered closed. Over the weekend, the Oceanfront in Virginia Beach felt like any other hot summer’s day, with children playing in the water and beachgoers catching some rays.
“Virginia’s beaches offer important mental health benefits, rest, relaxation and exercise,” Mayor Bobby Dyer of Virginia Beach said. “I believe we have a great plan, and I am prepared to stand by this great plan to ensure that when we open, we will be the safe beach that is required.”
One type of job is on the rise: contact tracing.
More than 11,000 people across the United States are employed as contact tracers working to track and stop the spread of the virus, and local health departments plan to hire thousands more. The work is mostly phone-based and can be done from home. The jobs can be full- or part-time, often with an hourly wage of $17 to $25; some include benefits.
Keep up with Times correspondents around the globe.
Japan’s economy becomes the largest to officially enter a recession. A Canadian military jet crashes during a flyover for virus workers.
Reporting was contributed by Mike Baker, Ellen Barry, Alan Blinder, Neal E. Boudette, Max Brimelow, Jane E. Brody, Julie Chang, Matthew Conlen, Michael Cooper, Pedro Cota, Melina Delkic, Emily Flitter, Jacey Fortin, Dana Goldstein, Abby Goodnough, Denise Grady, Kathy Gray, Kristen Hwang, Andrew Jacobs, Miriam Jordan, Annie Karni, Adam Liptak, Michael Mason, Alex Matthews, David McCabe, Sarah Mervosh, David Montgomery, Andy Newman, Sharon Otterman, Nadja Popovich, Alan Rappeport, Frances Robles, Rick Rojas, Marc Santora, Michael Schwirtz, Anjali Singhvi, Jeanna Smialek, Kaly Soto, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Eileen Sullivan, Katie Thomas, Neil Vigdor, David Waldstein and Michael Wilson.
Live Coronavirus News and Updates
President Trump is expected to announce as soon as Thursday evening that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will hire hundreds of people to perform contact tracing in communities around the country as part of the president’s push to allow the country to go back to work and school, a top government official said.
Mr. Trump is also expected to say that the federal government will help states pay for even more medical personnel to help track the spread of the virus by getting in touch with people who test positive for coronavirus, which causes Covid-19, to see who they have had contact with three or four days before they started showing symptoms.
“The president will announce a plan in the works to drastically increase the capacity for state and local health departments to do core public health work like testing people, doing contact tracing,” said the official who declined to be identified because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the announcement. “We want to beef up state capacity to be able to perform core functions, so that if and when we start to open the country back up, we don’t have a resurgence of cases to require the country to shut back down.”
In a tweet on Thursday, Mr. Trump revealed that an announcement would come soon, saying: “Major News Conference tonight, the White House at 6:00 P.M. (Eastern), to explain Guidelines for OPENING UP AMERICA AGAIN!” It was not clear what else the new guidelines would include.
The president has repeatedly said he wants to get the country back to work by lifting the draconian restrictions that have kept people in their homes, shuttered businesses and schools and severely damaged the nation’s economy. But public health officials and many governors have said Mr. Trump’s desire for normalcy is running into the reality that doing so quickly could lead to more infections and once again overwhelm the nation’s health system.
Hiring medical personnel to perform contact tracing is needed, public health experts said. But many have cautioned that hiring several hundred for the entire country will be nowhere near enough to keep track of the virus as it spreads. Thomas R. Frieden, a former C.D.C. director, said there are estimates that the country will need to hire as many as 300,000 such workers.
Democrats on Capitol Hill have called for a $30 billion investment in testing capacity across the country, including hiring people to perform contact tracing once someone tests positive. And states have already begun hiring their own teams of workers for the job.
In Massachusetts, the governor said his state will hire 1,000 people to trace the contacts of infected patients. It is not clear how much money Mr. Trump will propose to spend helping the states hire their own people.
“There will be this effort in the coming weeks and months to dramatically scale up the public health work force to do the core functions that are needed to try to prevent re-emergency of the virus when we open up the country,” the official said.
As Mr. Trump prepared to release new guidelines on reopening the country, another group of governors — this time, a bipartisan group from the Midwest — announced Thursday that they were forming a regional coalition to weigh their next steps, which they said would be “fact-based” and “data-driven.” They included Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Gov. Eric Holcomb of Indiana and Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky.
Regional approaches are already being taken by groups of governors on the East and West Coasts. They began to band together after Mr. Trump insisted that the power to reopen the country rested with him — a claim debunked by legal scholars and officials in both parties.
House Democrats consider remote voting as Congress remains in an extended recess.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said on Thursday that the House could soon approve a change to its rules to allow for an alternative to in-person voting, conceding for the first time that the pandemic that has forced Congress into an extended recess could prompt history-making modifications to the way the institution operates.
Her comments marked a distinct shift from Ms. Pelosi’s earlier resistance to even considering any change that would allow lawmakers to vote remotely, although she cautioned that the matter was far from settled.
“It’s not as easy as you may think,” Ms. Pelosi told reporters during a telephone news conference. “I’ve been negative on the status quo of it because so far we haven’t had a good option.”
Congressional leaders have been under mounting pressure to consider an alternative to returning to the Capitol, as it has become increasingly clear that their approach to doing business from afar is bumping up against its logistical and political limits.
“Everybody’s working so hard on all of these initiatives, including on how we can come together, whether it’s by proxy voting or remote voting or whatever it is,” Ms. Pelosi said. “When we are ready, we will do it.”
In a conference call with Democrats on Thursday, Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Rules Committee who has been studying the issue at the speaker’s request, recommended changing House rules to allow remote voting by proxy, according to one person on the private call who described it on condition of anonymity.
Other Democrats have different ideas. Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the majority leader, told reporters on Wednesday that he favors voting by FaceTime.
Earlier, Ms. Pelosi noted that the House would have to reconvene to approve the creation of a special committee that she has proposed to oversee the federal government’s response to the coronavirus, and it could move then to change the voting rules.”
When people ask about remote voting or proxy voting and the rest, that requires a change in the rules of the Congress,” Ms. Pelosi said. “ At that time, I would hope that we could approve the committee.”
The $349 billion lending program for small businesses has run out of funds.
A federal loan program intended to help small businesses keep workers on their payrolls has proved woefully insufficient, with a staggering 22 million Americans filing for unemployment in the last four weeks.
The program, called the Paycheck Protection Program, was in limbo as the Small Business Administration said Thursday that it had run out of money. Millions of businesses unable to apply for the loans while Congress struggled to reach a deal to replenish the funds.
Congress initially allocated $349 billion for the program, which was intended to provide loans to businesses with 500 or fewer employees. The money has gone quickly, with more than 1.4 million loans approved as of Wednesday evening.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Jovita Carranza, the administrator of the Small Business Administration, warned on Wednesday night that “by law, the S.B.A. will not be able to issue new loan approvals once the programs experience a lapse in appropriations.”
The loans have been sought after as small businesses struggle with quarantines and closures, which have quickly depleted cash flows as businesses remain shuttered and customers stay home.
The program underwrites bank loans for small businesses that will never need to be repaid if owners use most of the money to keep paying employees for two and a half months. Economists and business lobbyists warned when the bill was being debated that the money was nowhere close to the $1 trillion or more that companies would need.
Mr. Mnuchin is expected to resume negotiations with lawmakers about adding another $250 billion to the fund on Thursday, while Treasury staff members were expected to meet with aides to Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader.
While both parties agree on the need to replenish the program, talks have broken down over whether to simply fill the pot, as Republicans and the White House want, or make significant changes to how money is allocated to businesses, as Democrats have called for.
Democrats have insisted on attaching new restrictions to ensure that the money flows to minority-owned businesses and other companies that are traditionally disadvantaged in the lending market. They also want to add more money for hospitals, food-stamp recipients and state and local governments whose tax receipts have plunged.
The Senate is expected to convene in a procedural session on Thursday, but it is unclear whether Senate Republicans will try to pass the funding. Such a maneuver would require unanimous agreement from all 100 senators.
And, just as the money ran out, the Federal Reserve’s backstop for the program came on line. The facility, which takes the loans banks make to small businesses as collateral, became fully operational as of Thursday. Banks that make loans are now able to essentially get financing from the Fed to extend that credit by using the loans they are making as collateral.
The promise that the program was coming has most likely encouraged lending by assuring banks that they would not have to keep the loans on their balance sheets.
More than 5.2 million workers were added to the unemployment tally on Thursday, another staggering increase that is sure to add fuel to the debate over how long to impose stay-at-home orders and restrictions on business activity.
In the last four weeks, the number of unemployment claims has reached 22 million — roughly the net number of jobs created in a nine-and-a-half-year stretch that began after the last recession and ended with the pandemic’s arrival. The latest figure from the Labor Department, reflecting last week’s initial unemployment claims, underscores how the downdraft has spread to every corner of the economy: hotels and restaurants, mass retailers, manufacturers and white-collar strongholds like law firms.
“There’s nowhere to hide,” said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton in Chicago. “This is the deepest, fastest, most broad-based recession we’ve ever seen.”
Some of the new jobless claims represent freshly laid-off workers; others are from people who had been trying for a week or more to file.
The mounting unemployment numbers seem certain to add to pressure to lift some restrictions on business activity. President Trump has said some measures should be relaxed soon because of the impact on workers. “There has to be a balance,” he said at a press briefing Wednesday evening. “We have to get back to work.”
Many governors and health experts are more cautious. If business conditions return to normal too quickly, they fear, a second wave of infections could spread.
“For all practical purposes, the U.S. economy is closed, so why would you expect layoffs to stop?” said Torsten Slok, chief economist at Deutsche Bank Securities. “The longer the wait to reopen, the more painful it will be in terms of layoffs. Getting a date for reopening and getting more certainty about reopening is critical.”
Mr. Slok expects the unemployment rate to hit 17 percent this month, up from 4.4 percent in March and higher than any mark since the Great Depression.
The coming wave of hardship is likely to widen racial disparities, with poverty projected to rise twice as much among blacks as among whites. Poverty is also likely to rise disproportionately among children, a special concern because brain science shows that early deprivation can leave lifelong scars.
If quarterly unemployment hits 30 percent — as the president of one Federal Reserve Bank predicts — 15.4 percent of Americans will fall into poverty for the year, the Columbia researchers found, even in the unlikely event the economy instantly recovers. That level of poverty would exceed the peak of the Great Recession and add nearly 10 million people to the ranks of the poor.
There are significant caveats. Most important, the model does not yet include the potentially large anti-poverty effect of the Cares Act, the emergency legislation last month that provides about $560 billion in direct relief to individuals and even greater sums to sustain businesses and jobs. However imprecise, the model suggests a coming poverty epoch, rather than an episode.
Fed up with the broad restrictions on American life, and in some cases encouraged by anti-government activists on the right, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across the country to urge governors to reopen businesses and relax strict rules on daily life that health officials have said are necessary to save lives.
More protests against stay-at-home orders have been planned in other states, including Texas, Oregon, and California, as the economic and health effects of the coronavirus mount in the United States.
Some organizers and demonstrators had affiliations with the Tea Party and displayed the “Don’t Tread on Me” logo that was an unofficial slogan for the movement. Others waved flags and banners in support of President Trump, who has pushed to reopen the economy.
But the size of the protests in places like Michigan suggested that anger over the no-end-in-sight nature of the lockdowns is not limited to the far right, and that the public’s patience has a limit. As anxiety, uncertainty and joblessness grow, the next few weeks will pose a test for governors and local leaders who are likely to face increased pressure to loosen some of the restrictions.
In Michigan alone, more than 1 million people — roughly a quarter of the state’s work force — have filed for unemployment benefits.
Greg McNeilly, a Republican consultant in the state who has criticized the governor’s response as too blunt and sweeping, said that while the protests this week included fringe elements of the right, politicians would be mistaken if they dismissed them outright.
“At the heart of this is legitimate concern that, look, we can’t beat this virus without a vaccine or herd immunity,” he said. “And right now it feels like our policymakers, state and federal, are choosing fear instead of saying ‘how can we live safely with this?’”
Early research on underlying health conditions associated with the virus has highlighted that obesity appears to be one of the most important predictors of severe cases of the coronavirus illness, but asthma does not.
New studies point to obesity as the most significant risk factor, after only older age, for patients being hospitalized with Covid-19, the illness caused by the virus. Some 42 percent of American adults — nearly 80 million people — live with obesity. Young adults with obesity appear to be at particular risk, studies show.
The research is preliminary, and not peer reviewed, but it buttresses anecdotal reports from doctors who say they have been struck by how many seriously ill younger patients of theirs with obesity are otherwise healthy.
For people with asthma, the outbreak of a disease that can lead to respiratory failure was particularly worrisome. Many health organizations have cautioned that asthmatics are most likely at higher risk for severe illness if they get the virus.
But data released this month by New York State shows that, only about five percent of Covid-19 deaths in New York were of people who were known to also have asthma, a relatively modest amount. Nearly eight percent of the U.S. population — close to 25 million people — has asthma, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The research into the affects of asthma at this early stage is minimal and not always consistent. A recent commentary published in Lancet by a group of European researchers called it “striking” that asthma appeared to be underrepresented as a secondary health problem associated with Covid-19, and anecdotal evidence supports that observation.
“We’re not seeing a lot of patients with asthma,” said Dr. Bushra Mina, a pulmonary and critical care physician at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, which has treated more than 800 Covid cases. The more common risk factors, he added, are “morbid obesity, diabetes and chronic heart disease.”
The president is set to issue new federal guidelines on social distancing on Thursday in a bid to move the country closer to reopening for business, even as public health officials warned that it was far too early for any widespread return to public life.
Although capacity has improved in recent weeks, supply shortages remain crippling, and many regions are still restricting tests to people who meet specific criteria. Antibody tests, which reveal whether someone has ever been infected with the virus, are just starting to be rolled out, and most have not been vetted by the Food and Drug Administration.
Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, said governors and mayors would make the call on lifting restrictions after receiving guidance from the federal government.
But she warned that it was no time for Americans to become complacent about social distancing.
“I will remind the people again: This is a highly contagious virus,” she said.
The risk of easing restrictions too soon was underscored in recent days by the experience of some nations in Asia, which had seemed to be succeeding against the virus only to see infections rise again.
Singapore, whose early efforts to combat the virus won praise, announced a record jump in coronavirus cases on Wednesday evening. Most of its 447 new confirmed cases came from crowded dormitories of migrant laborers, where up to 20 people are crammed in each room.
And in Japan, which has seen a sharp rise in confirmed infections in the past month, the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said Thursday that he would declare a national emergency. He urged people to limit travel, as experts fear that an upcoming holiday period known as Golden Week, which starts April 29, could encourage people to hit the road and spread the pathogen to previously unaffected areas.
New York’s sweeping shutdown will last until at least May 15, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday as he urged people to prepare for a “new normal” while the state sputtered into reopening over the next few months.
“This is going to be a moment of transformation for society, and we paid a very high price for it,” he said. “But how do we learn the lessons so that this new normal is a better New York?”
The governor’s guidance, including that businesses begin considering how to “reimagine” workplaces by weighing more regular use of telecommuting and sustained social distancing, came as he announced that his state’s official death toll had risen by 606 to 12,192, an increase in fatalities that was the state’s lowest in 10 days. (The tally did not include the more than 3,700 people in New York City who had died during the outbreak without being tested and were now presumed to have died because of the virus.)
Although Mr. Cuomo and other public officials have been encouraged by some statistics suggesting that New York’s efforts to stop the spread of the virus were working, he cautioned that reopening too hastily would cause the infection rate to swell.
“The rate of infection is everything,” said Mr. Cuomo, who is coordinating with other Northeast governors on a strategy for restarting the bulk of the economy.
Mr. Cuomo signaled that “more essential” businesses with a low infection risk would be prioritized for reopening, though he did not articulate a specific timeline. “Less essential” industries with a high infection risk, one of his presentation slides said, would be the “last priority — dependent on infection decline and precautions put in place.”
Other states and cities also extended stay-at-home orders. Wisconsin’s governor said his state would now stay at home until May 26, with schools also being closed for the rest of the academic year. Mayor Quinton Lucas of Kansas City, Mo., and Sam Page, the St. Louis County executive, also announced that they would extend their stay-at-home mandates. On Wednesday, despite pushback, Idaho’s governor extended his statewide order through the end of April, telling residents, “I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do for the people of Idaho.”
Back in New York, the economic consequences of the pandemic came into clearer view when Mayor Bill de Blasio said that New York City would need at least $2 billion in “very tough budget cuts” in its next fiscal year. His proposal forecasts an extraordinary drop in the city government’s tax revenue: some $7.4 billion over the current fiscal year and the next.
George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist and liberal financier, is directing more than $130 million through his foundation to combat the effects of the virus, with $37 million aimed to help at-risk populations in New York City, including undocumented families and low-wage workers.
More immediately, the state’s latest high-profile tactic to quell the virus — a requirement for people to wear facial coverings in public when they cannot maintain six feet of social distancing — will take effect at 8 p.m. on Friday. It applies to settings like sidewalks and grocery stores as well as buses, subway cars and ride-share services. The move came after officials in Honolulu, Los Angeles and Washington imposed some requirements for people to cover their faces.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people wear cloth face coverings, which is intended to protect those around them, a move that came after research showed that many people were infected but did not show symptoms. (Public health officials have warned against buying or hoarding the N95 masks needed by health care workers.)
Health officials have urged people to combine face coverings with social distancing, suggesting that one tactic did not replace the need for the other.
Death tolls are growing at nursing homes in New Jersey and Virginia as the virus sweeps through.
In a small New Jersey township, police on Monday found 17 dead bodies inside a nursing home morgue designed to hold four people. This brought the death toll at the long-term care facility to 68, including 26 people who tested positive.
Even as nursing homes have taken measures to limit the spread of the virus, testing kits are a more effective way to separate the sick from the healthy, but they are still not widely available.
After the first positive test came back at a Virginia nursing home in mid-March, its administrator said the staff restricted visitors, conducted temperature checks at the end of every worker’s shift and isolated residents who had tested positive into separate areas.
Even so, there suddenly was another case. And within two weeks, dozens of others inside the facility, the Canterbury Rehabilitation and Healthcare Center in Richmond, Va., were falling ill. Now, at least 46 residents are dead — more than a quarter of the facility’s population and one of the highest known death tolls in the United States.
“You can’t fight what you can’t see,” said Dr. Jim Wright, the director of the center.
Nations around the world are going further in limiting movement, and anger is building.
Country after country around the world concluded on Thursday that restrictions on public life needed to be tougher or longer-lasting than they had planned, settling in for a longer, harder fight than they expected against the pandemic.
And along with the frustration and pain, anger and recrimination have flared in many places, as they have in the United States.
In Japan, where the epidemic is surging, the government abandoned its much-criticized, relatively laissez-faire approach and declared a national emergency — though the constraints on people and businesses remain voluntary.
Britain had set this week as the time to review, and possibly lift, its original lockdown order, but instead extended it for three weeks, as conditions there continued to worsen. Just a few days earlier, France had stretched its restrictions into May.
Australia, despite having a small and declining number of cases, extended its lockdown for at least four weeks. Russia canceled one of its marquee events, the annual Red Square parade commemorating victory in World War II. Greece, bowing to concerns about the virus hitting crowded migrant camps, said it would move thousands of people out of them.
China’s pride over the country’s success in getting the contagion under control, and comparisons to nations that are still struggling, have fueled a wave of nationalism and xenophobia. A widely circulated cartoon showed foreigners being sorted into trash bins, shops have barred foreigners, and in one major city, Africans report being mistreated, singled out as possible carriers of the virus.
In Spain, the pandemic’s appalling toll and suggestions that victims are being undercounted have become fodder for critics of an already-shaky government. And around Manila, as in so many of the world’s urban areas, resentment is rising over a lockdown has intensified the poverty and misery of countless people.
As critical medical resources are expedited to regions in the country currently hit hardest by the spread of the virus, other communities bracing for outbreaks are left with few good options to stock hospitals with masks, respirators, gloves, goggles and surgical gowns. Supplies are backlogged or canceled at the last minute and demand is driving up prices. In some cases, it is not clear whether a vendor is legitimate or a scam.
“I don’t take anything away from hot spots,” Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, a Democrat, said in an interview. “But we don’t want to become one of them.”
In Montana, there are 404 cases with seven deaths so far, according to a New York Times analysis.
Mr. Bullock said Montana has received 78,000 N95 masks from the federal government, while the state needs 550,000.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency is working with 11 different manufacturers to purchase protective gear for medical workers, and it is suggesting workers wash and reuse their gear.
Jerry Falwell Jr.’s angry counteroffensive against critics of his decision to invite Liberty University students back to its Lynchburg, Va., campus after spring break has played out in the media, the courts, even with the campus police.
But his campaign has been undermined by the spread of a virus he cannot control.
Since March 29, when a Liberty student living off-campus was the first to be diagnosed, confirmed cases in the Central Virginia health district, which surrounds Lynchburg and Liberty, have grown from seven to 78. One person has died.
It is not known whether any of those cases are linked to returning Liberty students, but the university community is exposed as well. Liberty said on Wednesday night that two employees had tested positive for the virus, two more had results pending, and seven were quarantined at home.
Amid those struggles, a Liberty student on Monday filed a class-action lawsuit, saying that Liberty and Mr. Falwell had “placed students at severe physical risk and refused to refund thousands of dollars in fees owed to them for the Spring 2020 semester,” according to a statement from the law firm filing the suit.
The furor in Lynchburg centers on Mr. Falwell’s decision to open the campus to all students and staff at a time when most American universities were closing for fear of spreading the disease. For weeks before that decision, Mr. Falwell had derided other universities’ responses as overreactions driven by a desire to harm Mr. Trump.
We answer your housing questions on breaking leases, paying rent and more.
Whether you’ve moved back with your parents, or simply to a different space to ride out the pandemic, do you have any options if you want to break your lease? Or are you looking for your next house and considering a life-changing purchase during these strange times? We have the answers you need.
Reporting was contributed by Mike Baker, Karen Barrow, Ellen Barry, Alan Blinder, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Emily Cochrane, Michael Cooper, Jason DeParle, Caitlin Dickerson, Nicholas Fandos, Manny Fernandez, Emily Flitter, David Gelles, Abby Goodnough, Adeel Hassan, Neil Irwin, Danielle Ivory, Miriam Jordan, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Sheila Kaplan, Annie Karni, Kate Kelly, Donald G. McNeil Jr., Richard Pérez-Peña, Jeremy Peters, Roni Caryn Rabin, Alan Rappeport, Simon Romero, Marc Santora, Nelson D. Schwartz, Michael D. Shear, Matt Stevens, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Eileen Sullivan, Jim Tankersley, Katie Thomas and Elizabeth Williamson.
So You Bought Someone a Gadget. Here’s How Not to Become Their Tech Support.
So, when Mr. Isaacian could not set up a new router for his grandmother, he booked a technician as a result of TaskRabbit who did not will need a how-to video clip or any added language assist. It was a relatively uncomplicated procedure, he reported, although he did just take this time to vet the TaskRabbit “Tasker,” these types of as examining how lots of jobs the person had finished and how reputable they have been. He also experienced to make sure his grandmother realized to check out in on the “Tasker” to assure they weren’t getting benefit of her or deliberately throwing away time to earn a lot more revenue. But Mr. Isaacian mentioned he’d use TaskRabbit or a very similar services yet again.
“It’s something that would choose me a lot of time, but he managed it,” Mr. Isaacian mentioned.
Even so, there are some goods Mr. Isaacian simply just refuses to acquire for his relatives, like a notebook or intelligent Tv set — even if it will come with extra tech guidance. It may sound signify or heartless, but it’s a tactic that Mr. Santo Domingo also endorses.
“It’s like any connection you have and it is definitely a two-way road,” Mr. Santo Domingo mentioned. “If you have a relative that just pesters you to no conclude, then like any other individual you are going to conclusion up it’s possible not finding up the phone pretty as promptly. As very long as your relative asks you nicely, it is truly like the golden rule. As an IT human being or as your loved ones IT person, if you’re handled well, you are going to reciprocate.”
If you truly want to get anyone a gadget, Mr. Santo Domingo suggests a product or service like a mesh Wi-Fi router like the Wirecutter’s decide, the Eero Pro + 2 Eero Beacons. Contrary to other routers or even devices, you can reboot the program from anywhere — even if you’re not in the residence the place the solution is, building it an easy product or service to serve as the go-to IT person for your beloved a single, if required. Or, if your recipient insists on some wise house gizmos, get a good swap or clever plug to go with it, Mr. Santo Domingo mentioned. Comparable to a wireless mesh router, you can remotely turn it on and off again, which fixes more widespread complications than you could assume.
“A clever change or plug can preserve you several hours,” Mr. Santo Domingo explained. “Instead of telling a relative to unplug or plug something back in, you can do that remotely with a clever plug. Sometimes, even although you notify a relative about the mobile phone to do that, they may or may perhaps not do it.”
And if you completely have to participate in the function of tech guidance, use what ever gadget your good friends or household personal to your benefit, Mr. Santo Domingo reported. If they are getting difficulties with a router, request them to FaceTime or use Skype, WhatsApp or Fb Messenger to movie chat and see for oneself what the problem might be and assistance tutorial them in the right route.
At the close of the working day on the other hand, Mr. Isaacian wishes tech firms and companies manufactured it a lot easier to carry out a distant demo for his spouse and children or much more critical, designed additional movie tutorials that are not in a single language.