Stock market news live updates: Stock futures slip as investors eye reopening plans – Yahoo Finance

Stock News

Posted on April 26, 2020

Stock futures turned slightly lower Sunday evening as investors mulled a patchwork of state plans to slowly roll back social distancing measures.

In the past week, a handful of states primarily in the South announced some businesses and public spaces would begin to reopen with restrictions, kicking off a multi-phase process of easing the social distancing measures that had been in place over the past several weeks. The decisions were met with criticism from some business owners, epidemiologists and politicians who felt the – coming as the domestic death toll in the U.S. topped 50,000 – were premature.

Still, recent data has suggested the outbreak was leveling off, even in the states hardest hit by the pandemic. On Sunday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said in a press briefing that the latest daily death toll in the state dropped to 367, or the lowest in nearly a month, and assured listeners that, “As long as we act prudently going forward, the worst should be over.” He suggested a phased reopening could begin with construction and manufacturing industries as soon as after May 15, in areas of the state with less concentrated numbers of cases.

The remarks were a testament to the distance the state, the epicenter of the domestic outbreak, had come in flattening the curve for new cases, hospitalizations and deaths with weeks of stay-in-place measures in effect. New York’s known daily death toll had hit a peak of 799 on April 9, just under three weeks ago.

Still, many experts remain deeply concerned about the specter of a resurgence in cases as social distancing measures ease. Dr. Deborah Birx, White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator, told NBC News on Sunday that while the latest drops in new coronavirus case counts gave her “great hope” for reopening, she believed the U.S. would ultimately need a “breakthrough” in coronavirus testing to get a better sense of the extent of the outbreak and allow for more informed decisions about how and when to reopen.

This week, market participants will be anxiously looking ahead for signs of the path forward for the U.S. economy amid preliminary steps to reopen businesses, while simultaneously digesting key economic reports to assess the damage at the outset of the domestic pandemic.

Investors will receive the first print of first-quarter U.S. gross domestic product, and hear from the Federal Reserve for its latest monetary policy decision on the heels of the central bank’s onslaught of relief measures unleashed over the past month to help businesses and households cope with fallout from pandemic.

Alphabet (GOOGL), Boeing (BA), Facebook (FB), Microsoft (MSFT), Tesla (TSLA), Amazon (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL) are among the many companies slated to report corporate earnings results this week.

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