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

Even as they have substantially reduced service, the largest U.S. airlines are averaging just 17 passengers on domestic flights and 29 on international flights, according to a copy of congressional testimony from the head of Airlines for America, an industry group.

At the same time, airlines are collectively burning through about $10 billion a month as they cut costs and await the return of passengers, Nicholas Calio, the industry group’s chief executive, said in the testimony, prepared for a Senate hearing about aviation on Wednesday.

“While the industry will do everything it can to mitigate and address the multitude of challenges, no factual doubt exists that the U.S. airline industry will emerge from this crisis a mere shadow of what it was just three short months ago,” Mr. Calio said in the prepared remarks.

The pandemic has virtually wiped out air travel with traffic volumes down 95 percent and more than 3,000 aircraft grounded. More than 100,000 airline employees are working reduced hours or have accepted pay cuts or early retirement, Mr. Calio said.

Mr. Calio addressed complaints from some consumers that airlines were strongly encouraging them to take vouchers instead of refunds for canceled flights, saying that if the carriers refunded all canceled tickets at once they might have to seek bankruptcy protection.

He also thanked Congress for injecting nearly $50 billion in grants and loans into the industry in March and said that the funds would help provide stability “throughout a challenging summer, going into a very uncertain fall season.”

Airbnb, the home-sharing start-up, laid off around a quarter of its staff, or 1,900 people, on Tuesday as it reels from the global pandemic that has battered the travel industry.

Airbnb lowered its revenue forecast for this year to be less than half of what it made in 2019 because of the pandemic, Brian Chesky, the company’s chief executive, told employees. Before the layoffs, Airbnb, which is based in San Francisco, had 7,500 employees.

It was the latest effort to trim costs by the once highflying start-up, which investors have valued at $31 billion. As global travel ground to a halt beginning in February and people canceled their Airbnb stays, the company cut its $800 million marketing budget, arranged new debt facilities and raised $1 billion in new funding.

Airbnb has said it planned to go public this year.

Mr. Chesky said that Airbnb’s business would have to change as a result of the pandemic, with more focus on travel options that are “closer to home, safer, and more affordable.”

“While we know Airbnb’s business will fully recover, the changes it will undergo are not temporary or short-lived,” he said.

Stocks on Wall Street rallied along with oil prices, as investors were encouraged by efforts to reopen economies, as well as by signs from Europe and China that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic may be over in some of the hardest-hit places.

The S&P 500 climbed nearly 1 percent in a second day of gains.

Underscoring the optimism across financial markets, oil prices surged on Tuesday. The price of benchmark crude in the United States rose about 20 percent to $24.49 a barrel. Brent crude, the international benchmark, was up about 14 percent at $31.

The stock market gains — the S&P 500 is up about 30 percent over the past six weeks — have come even as companies report discouraging financial results and warn of the economic damage being caused by the pandemic. For example, on Tuesday, a measure of demand and employment in the services industry showed a sharp slowdown in April to the lowest level since March 2009, as stores and restaurants were shuttered and consumers stayed home.

Investors have managed to shake off such grim data and other signals that the United States economy is in an unprecedented decline, because it shows what has already happened rather than what might come as stay-at-home orders are lifted and governors gradually move to reopen their economies.

On Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York laid out a tentative plan for how the state, which has been the hardest hit by the coronavirus outbreak, might begin to restart its economy.

Still, even as the overall mood was lifted on Tuesday, investors showed they were concerned about lasting damage. Shares of cruise operators plunged after Norwegian Cruise Line, one of the world’s largest, said that there was “substantial doubt” about its ability to survive the pandemic. And Hertz stock also cratered after the company, which is teetering on bankruptcy, said it had negotiated an extension on a missed payment on the lease for its rental fleet.

Last year at this time, the Walt Disney Company was celebrating the record-breaking arrival of “Avengers: Endgame” in theaters. On Tuesday — with theaters closed worldwide, along with theme parks — Disney offered a bleak financial assessment of its businesses.

Profit in the most recent quarter, the second in Disney’s fiscal year, totaled $475 million, down 91 percent from $5.43 billion in the same period a year earlier. Excluding one-time items, per-share profit fell to 60 cents from $1.61.

Analysts had been expecting per-share earnings of 88 cents and revenue of $17.8 billion. Since late January, when Shanghai Disneyland closed amid coronavirus fears in China, Disney shares have fallen almost 30 percent. They closed on Tuesday at $101.06.

Because of its size and lack of diversification, Disney has been badly hobbled by the coronavirus pandemic. But the quarter that ended on March 30 was largely spared. Walt Disney World, for instance, was closed for 17 days of the period; the vast resort will be closed for at least 60 days of the current quarter.

In recent days, prominent analysts downgraded Disney. Citing “significant and unrivaled earnings risk for the foreseeable future,” Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson moved the company to neutral from buy.

White House economists project nearly zero virus deaths by mid-May.

White House economists have built a model of coronavirus infections that forecasts deaths from the virus will essentially stop in the United States by the middle of May, a far more optimistic projection than other public health models, and one that drew quick rebukes from economists outside the Trump administration.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers posted the modeling, which was first reported by The Washington Post, on its Twitter feed on Tuesday morning. The model does not appear to follow the conventions that epidemiologists use to forecast infection spread.

In a follow-up Twitter post, the council included a picture of the model’s projections, along with three projections from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington — one from the end of March, one from the beginning of April and one from May 4. The model was developed by Kevin Hassett, Mr. Trump’s first chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers who has returned to the White House as an economic adviser during the crisis.

The projections resemble the earlier two sets of projections from the institute’s model, but not its modest recent projection, which forecasts nearly 1,000 Americans will still be dying every day of the virus at the end of May.

Economists outside the administration criticized the model. Jason Furman, a former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, wrote on Twitter that it “might be the lowest point in the 74 year history of the Council of Economic Advisers.”

“Faux expertise is even worse than ignorance,” he wrote in a follow-up tweet. “To the degree this crowded out input from genuine experts in the conversation and confused other participants into thinking that CEA or other economists had any sort of real or valid model of the epidemic it is really & truly terrible.”

Facebook said on Tuesday that it had removed eight global networks of accounts from the social network, including many that pushed false information about the coronavirus. The company said the disinformation it took down had been posted across more than 30 countries in April. In the United States, notably, the social network’s purge for the first time included pages from QAnon, the fringe conspiracy group.

All of the networks were created before the pandemic began, but “we’ve seen people behind these campaigns opportunistically use coronavirus-related posts among many other topics to build an audience,” Facebook said in its report.

Facebook said it focused on the coordinated behavior of the operations it took down, not harmful virus-related disinformation pushed by the accounts. But coronavirus disinformation was still a significant part of many of the operations in the takedown. In the United States, Facebook said it took down a QAnon operation spanning five Facebook pages, six groups and 20 Facebook accounts that, apart from frequently posting about the upcoming presidential election and the Trump administration, pushed anti-Asian conspiracies and disinformation about the virus.

Some of the accounts created fictitious personas and sold merchandise, Facebook said. More than 133,000 accounts on Facebook followed pages in the QAnon operation and 30,000 accounts joined one or more of the groups.

Hundreds of Wendy’s restaurants have run out of hamburgers. Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in the United States, is limiting the amount of ground beef and pork that customers can buy at some stores. And Costco, where shoppers typically buy in bulk, has placed a three-product cap on purchases of beef, poultry and pork.

Over the last month, dozens of meatpacking plants across the country have shut down because of coronavirus outbreaks, raising concerns about the country’s meat supply. Now, the impact of those disruptions is reaching customers at grocery stores and fast food drive-throughs, where certain types of meat, like hamburgers, are harder to find.

On Monday, nearly one in five Wendy’s restaurants — a total of 1,043 locations — were sold out of beef products, including burgers, according to analysis by the financial firm Stephens, which examined the online menu at every Wendy’s in the United States.

More meatpacking plants have announced infections and shut downs this week. A Tyson Foods pork plant and a Cargill beef plant in Nebraska announced temporary closures after a surge in coronavirus infections. More than 100 workers tested positive for the coronavirus at a Seaboard Foods pork processing plant in Oklahoma, though the facility remains open. In a call with investors on Monday, Tyson executives said that more meatpacking plants were likely to shut down for cleaning as the virus continues to spread.

Brian D. Miller, Mr. Trump’s nominee for the role of a special inspector general, told lawmakers that he would remain independent and vowed to resign or be fired if he faced political pressure from Mr. Trump.

Mr. Miller, testifying before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, tried to defuse fears that he was not independent enough for the prominent watchdog role amid concerns that his current position as a White House lawyer meant he would be putting Mr. Trump’s interests ahead of those of American taxpayers.

Lawmakers created the inspector general role to oversee funds that are part of the $2 trillion economic relief package that Congress passed in March, including money that is being used to support the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending facilities, along with money for loans and grants to airlines and other companies that are deemed critical for national security.

The nomination, which requires Senate confirmation, has not been received well by Democrats, who insisted on strict oversight as a condition of passage.

For more than two hours, Mr. Miller was grilled by senators about the president’s statement and his willingness to defy the White House if necessary.

“I will be independent,” Mr. Miller said. “If the president removes me, he removes me. If I am unable to do my job, I will resign.”

Mr. Trump has not been shy about his resistance to independent oversight and has removed several inspectors general in recent weeks, including a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services who angered him with a report last month highlighting supply shortages and testing delays at hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic.

Catch up: Here’s what else is happening.

• Hertz, the century-old car rental company, narrowly averted an impending crisis Monday after successfully negotiating with its lenders over a missed payment on the lease for its rental fleet, according to a securities filing. The company now has less than three weeks — until May 22 — to come up with a plan to pay them back and continue to meet its financial obligations.

• Norwegian Cruise Line, one of the world’s largest cruise companies, said on Tuesday that there was “substantial doubt” about its ability to survive the coronavirus pandemic. Norwegian acknowledged the dire situation in a securities filing announcing that it was seeking $650 million in new financing.

• NBCUniversal will cut salaries for higher-paid employees, its chief executive, Jeff Shell, announced in a companywide email Tuesday. The media giant will roll back merit increases, typically 3 percent, for those who make more than $100,000, starting in June. The management team, about 17 people, including Mr. Shell and Cesar Conde, the newly appointed head of news, will take a 20 percent pay cut. Employees at its theme parks division have already seen pay cuts. Company leaders haven’t decided how long the cuts will remain in place.

• The British airline Virgin Atlantic on Tuesday became the latest carrier to announce cost cuts, saying it would lay off more than 3,000 workers, retire older jumbo jets and no longer fly from London’s Gatwick Airport. Virgin said in a statement that it could take three years for the airline industry to get back to where it was before the pandemic began.

Reporting was contributed by Jim Tankersley, Davy Alba, Edmund Lee, David Yaffe-Bellany, Niraj Chokshi, Michael Corkery, Alan Rappeport, Jack Ewing, Erin Griffith, Jeanna Smialek, Ben Dooley, Knvul Sheikh, Mohammed Hadi, Sapna Maheshwari, Ivan Penn, Matt Richtel, Carlos Tejada, Daniel Victor, Katie Robertson and Kevin Granville.