Text size
Here’s what you need to know about the impact of Covid-19 to navigate the markets today.
• The biggest U.S. bank by assets has told its trading floor employees that the work-from-home experiment is coming to an end. JPMorgan Chase (ticker: JPM) executives informed their sales and trading operations that staff should prepare to be back at their desks by Sept. 21, The Wall Street Journal reports. The news was delivered on a Wednesday morning conference call, and exceptions will be made for employees with child care needs or medical conditions that put them at high risk if they contract Covid-19. J.P. Morgan sent its traders and bankers home in March, and some returned in June when New York City’s phased reopening reached the stage that allowed for office occupancy. Ahead of employees’ return, the bank is requiring them to take an online training course that emphasizes mask-wearing, hand-washing, and how to interact in places like hallways, the Journal reports. The bank has fared relatively well in the pandemic, beating earnings expectations in the second quarter. Profits, however, fell 50% year over year, and the stock is down 28% year to date.
• A New York court ruled against President Donald Trump’s effort to exclude undocumented immigrants from the census count that determines how many seats each state receives in the House of Representatives. The three-judge panel in the Southern District of New York district court ruled that a July 21 memo from the president in which he wrote, “it is the policy of the United States to exclude from the apportionment base aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status,” was a violation of Congress’s constitutional duty to apportion House members based on the number of people in each state. The ruling is expected to be appealed and go to the Supreme Court.
• The federal government has filed fraud charges against 57 people for allegedly misusing loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, which were meant to help small businesses continue paying employees during the worst of the pandemic. In one such case, two brothers in New York allegedly attempted to obtain around $7 million from the program by filing fraudulent loan applications using falsified federal tax filings claiming they had paid more than $3.3 million in wages for 2019, when, “in reality, the IRS has no record of such a filing.” Total losses from PPP loan fraud amount more than $70 million, Brian Rabbitt, acting assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s criminal division, said at an online press conference Thursday. The government backed $525 billion in forgivable small business loans administered by the Small Business Administration through the PPP program.
• Senate Republicans’ trimmed-down coronavirus relief measure failed to pass Thursday, after all Democrats present and one Republican voted against it. The resulting 52-47 vote wasn’t enough to clear the 60-vote threshold required to overcome the upper chamber’s filibuster. The package was worth about $500 billion, far less than the $1 trillion bill Senate Republicans proposed at the end of July and the $3 trillion measure passed by House Democrats in May. Democrats have repeatedly said that they view a so-called “skinny bill” as inadequate to address the crisis at hand, and Republicans have said that the $2.2 trillion compromise Democrats have proposed is far to large. New funding for cash-strapped cities and states is a key item blocking a deal.
• The economy is recovering faster than economists expected, according to a monthly survey conducted by The Wall Street Journal. In the previous survey, the economists polled expected an annualized growth rate of 18.3% in the third quarter, but that has jumped to 23.9% in the most recent survey. Nevertheless, the expected uptick in growth won’t fully pull the U.S. out of the hole caused by the 5% annualized drop in growth in the first quarter and 31.7% annualized decline in the second quarter. In a sign that the recent recovery in the job market is losing some of its momentum, initial jobless claims held steady at 884,000 last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. Tens of millions of people remain out of work. Continuing claims, which effectively measure the number of people who are still out of work, came in at 13.4 million at the end of August and rose to a seasonally unadjusted 29.6 million when the newly created pandemic unemployment benefits that cover gig economy workers is included.
• AstraZeneca’s possible Covid-19 vaccine could still be ready “by the end of this year, early next year,” the company’s CEO Pascal Soriot told reporters Thursday morning. Trials of the candidate vaccine were halted earlier this week after a participant had a serious, unexplained illness. Before that incident caused the trials to be paused, Soriot had said that there might be enough data on the vaccine by next month for the company to submit it for regulatory approval in October. AstraZeneca (ticker: AZN.LN) is partnering with Oxford University on the candidate vaccine. An independent committee is now reviewing the case of the sick participant.
• The 2020 National Football League season starts Thursday night, with the defending Super Bowl champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, hosting the Houston Texans. The Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium can normally hold more than 70,000 fans, but it will be limited to 25% capacity and masks will be required. Fans will be only be allowed to enter at specific parts of the stadium that correspond to their seat location and once in the stadium, they will not be allowed to leave the so-called “zone” associated with their seats. Each zone will have specific restrooms and concessions and fans will not be allowed to leave their assigned zone.
• A fire erupted in the port of Beirut, just weeks after the devastating explosion that killed hundreds, injured thousands and damaged thousands of buildings. The fire began burning Thursday morning at a port warehouse and military helicopters were sent to help fight the blaze. It’s unclear what started the fire and the county’s civil defense chief, Brigadier General Raymond Khattar said “rubber and oil takes time to burn so we have to deal with it using foam.” About a week ago, the Lebanese army found a stash of explosive ammonium nitrate, the same chemical that caused the blast in August. Lebanon’s government and ruling elite have been excoriated for the lapses and corruption that allowed the massive stockpile of explosive chemicals to be stored dangerously in the port for years, but have so far rejected calls for an international investigation.
***
Write to Ben Walsh at ben.walsh@barrons.com