Retailers Under Pressure to Protect Workers – The New York Times

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Office Depot employees have been told that they cannot wear masks in the store. Some Walgreens workers say they were also discouraged from wearing them. Protective gear has become a point of contention in the increasingly tense environment at grocery and big-box stores.

Federal health officials appear ready to recommend that Americans of all ages start wearing masks for protection against the coronavirus, but millions of retail workers have been interacting with the public for weeks without them.

In resisting calls from workers to provide them with masks, retailers have cited guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which continues to recommend masks only for health care workers and people showing symptoms of the virus. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration said high-volume retailers should “consider” supplying masks to ill employees and customers, but does not mention healthy workers.

Now experts are increasingly saying there is probably some benefit for people to cover their faces, even with homemade masks, while venturing out to visit the grocery store or pharmacy.

Wall Street is back in selling mode.

Faced with grim new projections of the potential scale and economic ramifications of the coronavirus pandemic, investors dumped stocks on Wednesday. The S&P 500 fell more than 4 percent, bringing its decline over two days to 6 percent.

The drop, which followed a sell-off in Europe and Asia, came after President Trump said at a news conference on Tuesday that the United States would face a “very, very painful two weeks.” U.S. government scientists projected that the outbreak could kill up to 240,000 people in the country. On Wednesday, the United Nations warned of “enhanced instability, enhanced unrest and enhanced conflict.”

The economic readings continue to worsen as well. On Wednesday, surveys of manufacturing and factory activity in the United States, Europe and Japan showed activity slowing to levels not seen in a decade or more. In the United States, factory orders and employment measures fell to their lowest since 2009, the Institute for Supply Management said.

Fears are growing that the global downturn could be far more punishing and long lasting than initially feared — potentially enduring into next year, and even beyond — as governments intensify restrictions on business to halt the spread of the pandemic, and fear of the virus impedes consumer-led economic growth.

“The market is sort of steeling itself for the onslaught of bad news over the next couple weeks,” said Julian Emanuel, chief equity and derivatives strategist at the brokerage firm BTIG.

On Thursday, the U.S. government will report how many people filed for unemployment last week, and the data could show that as many as 5 million workers lost their jobs as people stay home and factories shut down.

“There was an expectation that April 30 was perhaps a doable date in terms of reopening the economy,” said Mr. Emanuel. “I think the market is trading today as if that date is more like the end of May.”

On Wednesday, the decline was led by companies that have become familiar targets of investor unease during the crisis. Airlines were the worst performing sector in the S&P 500 as government data showed a staggering drop in passenger traffic through airports. United Airlines fell 19 percent, and American Airlines dropped 12 percent.

Cruise operator Carnival was the worst performing stock in the S&P 500, with a decline of 33 percent, while rival Royal Caribbean fell 20 percent.

Big banks will get a temporary break on a rule that limits how much they can borrow as the Federal Reserve tries to keep markets functioning.

The Fed said on Wednesday that it will exclude U.S. Treasury securities and deposits at the central bank from bank holding companies’ supplementary leverage ratio. That ratio requires that banks maintain a certain level of capital on their balance sheets based on their total size and can constrain their risk taking.

By excluding Treasurys and deposits, the Fed is essentially giving banks more room to expand their balance sheets.

“Liquidity conditions in Treasury markets have deteriorated rapidly, and financial institutions are receiving significant inflows of customer deposits along with increased reserve levels,” the Fed said. “The regulatory restrictions that accompany this balance sheet growth may constrain the firms’ ability to continue to serve as financial intermediaries.”

The change, which will be in effect for a year, is one that market strategists have flagged as potentially useful, but it is also something big banks have long had on their wish list. It will reduce a key capital requirement for the largest and most systemically important banks, a prospect that faced some criticism.

“Now is not the time to be permitting firms to deplete their capital buffers in this way,” said Gregg Gelzinis, a senior policy analyst at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. “Banks will certainly be pressing to make sure that the change is permanent.”

Although there are far fewer people to see them, the digital billboards in Times Square will stay on.

Despite complaints that the displays were wasting electricity to show ads to nearly empty streets, the Times Square Advertising Coalition said in an email that there was “no plan on darkening the signs,” adding that “the bright lights of Broadway reflect the vibrancy of N.Y.C. that continues on even during our darkest days.”

The billboard space is often sold as annual contracts, said Cristyne Nicholas, a spokeswoman for the group, adding that many of the displays had energy-efficient LED technology. Many of the signs feature public service announcements related to the coronavirus pandemic, and those billboards are seen by the tens of thousands of pedestrians that she said were still passing through the area.

Before the outbreak, billboards and other outdoor ads were one of the most promising sectors of advertising, described as “unblockable promotions” by Alexis Ohanian, a Reddit co-founder and a billboard investor. But as people hunker indoors, less attention is being paid to taxi-top ads, advertising murals and other so-called out-of-home displays, causing companies like Clear Channel Outdoor and Outfront Media to cut costs and tap credit.

Top oil company executives will meet with President Trump on Friday to discuss possible government steps to take pressure off the industry at a time of slumping energy demand, according to a person close to company leaders.

The executives are not entirely united, with some favoring tariffs on imported oil and others favoring relief from regulations and royalties on federal lands.

The plan for the meeting was reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal.

The meeting comes after Saudi Arabia sought to limit production as the coronavirus outbreak weighed on global markets, but failed to get Russia to agree. As a result, both countries are pumping more oil to gain market share from U.S. producers, driving prices to two-decade lows. West Texas intermediate crude, the American benchmark, is trading barely above $20 a barrel.

Automakers reported a plunge in new-vehicle sales as fear of the coronavirus and stay-at-home orders kept consumers from dealerships, adding to the troubles of the country’s largest manufacturing sector.

General Motors said sales fell 7 percent in the first quarter, and Fiat Chrysler said first-quarter sales fell 10 percent. Both companies said a significant decline in March offset strong sales in January and February.

Hyundai reported a 42 percent drop in March, and Mercedes-Benz had a 50 percent decline. Other automakers will report monthly and quarterly totals later on Wednesday.

Industry forecasters expect to produce a total for March after all automakers have reported. ALG, a company that tracks trends in auto sales, estimated that industrywide March sales fell 37 percent from a year ago.

The drop in sales is the second big blow to automakers. Most of the industry has shut down factories across North America to prevent the spread of the virus among workers.

“The market right now is really shellshocked,” said Brian Benstock, general manager of Paragon Honda in Queens. He said his service department is “on limp mode” and his sales area is dark.

As the coronavirus pandemic spread around the world in February and March, demand for flights quickly started to collapse. World governments enacted travel bans, borders closed, and travelers opted to stay at home in efforts to contain the outbreak. Those efforts have almost entirely halted air travel in the United States.

The number of people screened by the federal government at airport checkpoints fell dramatically each day in March when compared to the same day of the week a year earlier, ending the month at just 7 percent of last year’s volume, according to Transportation Security Administration data.

On March 1, the agency screened about 99 percent of the 2.3 million passengers, airline crew members and airport workers who filtered past its checkpoints on the same day last year. But by March 31, only about 146,000 people streamed past the checkpoints, or about 7 percent of the 2 million people screened last year.

The Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve are racing to finalize the development of a Main Street lending program aimed at helping mid-market companies along with a new program to buttress states and municipalities suffering financially from the coronavirus pandemic.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on CNBC on Wednesday that the programs were part of the Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to stimulate an economy that is facing a deep recession. Mr. Mnuchin said he was also talking with members of Congress about legislation that would boost investment in the nation’s infrastructure and that he was prepared to ask for more money to support small business loans.

“Jay Powell and I are working round-the-clock at providing liquidity into the economy,” Mr. Mnuchin said.

Mr. Mnuchin would not reveal the timing of the new Fed programs, but said they would be coming shortly.

“We want to get up and running so that they’re available to American business and American workers quickly,” he said.

• SoftBank has decided it will not buy $3 billion in WeWork stock, a board committee of the office space company said Wednesday, dealing a blow to shareholders who had hoped to cash out their shares. SoftBank, a dominant shareholder of WeWork that has poured billions of dollars into the company, could also hold back $1.1 billion of financing from WeWork, reducing the company’s access to cash as the downturn caused by the coronavirus hits the already stressed business.

• The auction house Sotheby’s said that it would furlough some 200 employees, nearly 12 percent of its staff, and lay off another small percentage of its workers. Employees who remain active in the company’s American and British offices will receive 20 percent pay cuts through June 1. Top officials, including the chief executive, Charles F. Stewart, will take an additional 10 percent salary reduction.

• Whiting Petroleum, an oil company focused on shale projects in North Dakota and Colorado, said it was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing “the severe downturn in oil and gas prices driven by uncertainty around the duration of the Saudi/Russia oil price war and the Covid-19 pandemic.” Whiting, which has roughly $1 billion of debt coming due over the next year, said it had reached an agreement in principle with some creditors on a comprehensive restructuring.

• Investors pulled more than $83 billion out of equity and debt investments in emerging markets, new data from the Institute of International Finance shows. “This record-breaking outflow episode is significantly larger than the one seen during the global financial crisis,” economists at IIF wrote in a note on Wednesday.

• Banks in Britain, including Barclays, HSBC and RBS, said they would not pay dividends or carry out share buybacks this year. The supervisory arm of the Bank of England, which had requested the move, also encouraged the banks not to award cash bonuses to senior staff members this year. The European Central Bank has issued a similar request to eurozone banks.

Reporting was contributed by Peter Eavis, Zachary Small, Tiffany Hsu, Clifford Krauss, Erin Griffith, Alan Rappeport, Neal E. Boudette, Kate Conger, Ben Dooley, Peter S. Goodman, Niraj Chokshi, Li Yuan, Keith Bradsher, Noam Scheiber, Amie Tsang, Jason Karaian, Carlos Tejada, Stanley Reed, Quoctrung Bui, Katie Robertson, Mohammed Hadi, Kevin Granville and Daniel Victor.