Small-Business Relief Money Flowed Unevenly: Live Updates – The New York Times

Money from the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, which ran out of funds on Thursday, flowed heavily to California and Texas, with construction companies and manufacturers getting the largest number of loans, rather than harder-hit retailers and restaurants, according to new data.

The nearly $350 billion in the Paycheck Protection Program also disproportionately flowed to states that have suffered fewer infections and deaths under the virus, like Kansas, than to harder-hit states like New York and New Jersey, when adjusting for the size of the small-business economy in each state.

The new data, which include loan approvals through Thursday, show accommodation and food service firms have received less than 9 percent of the money from the program, about $30.5 billion, though they have suffered the largest job losses of any industry during this recession. Construction firms received the largest share, at just over 13 percent, or about $45 billion.

The program was intended for banks to distribute the loans, which the federal government will pay off in most cases. That structure benefited companies with existing relationships with banks.

S.B.A. officials included data on the largest lending institutions in the program, though they were not identified. The top lender distributed more than $14 million in loans with an average size of more than $500,000 per loan — suggesting that the institution was giving loans to relatively large businesses.

Stocks jump as investors rally behind the idea of reopening the economy.

Stocks in the United States rallied on Friday, with efforts to reopen the economy taking center stage and investors undeterred by more data showing the economic damage of the coronavirus pandemic.

The gains came after President Trump told governors on Thursday that they could begin reopening businesses in their states by May 1 or earlier, and Boeing — one of the nation’s largest manufacturers — said it planned to bring about 27,000 employees back to work in Washington State to resume aircraft production.

The announcement is the first attempt at large-scale resumption of business activity by a U.S. corporation since the coronavirus outbreak forced companies and government officials to shut down most nonessential work. Boeing’s shares rose more than 14 percent on Friday

Some European automakers — including Volkswagen, Volvo and Daimler — are planning to restart assembly lines next week, staffed by workers in masks and protective clothing, sometimes separated from one another by plastic screens.

Opel, a unit of the French automaker PSA, said it would reopen its German dealerships on Monday after the German government announced that it would gradually ease lockdown restrictions.

The S&P 500 rose more than 2 percent, while Boeing’s gains led the Dow Jones industrial average to a nearly 3 percent jump.

After global stock markets nose-dived earlier this year, they have been rebounding since late March, as investors have routinely looked past evidence of the damage caused by stay-at-home orders and business shutdowns, and instead focused on hopes for an eventual recovery.

On Friday, the rally came after China reported that its economy — the world’s second-largest after that of the United States — shrank for the first time in decades. And data on car sales in Europe showed they collapsed.

Some also saw hopeful signs in a report by the medical news website STAT that a drug from Gilead Sciences showed early — and, thus far, unproven — promise in fighting the coronavirus. According to STAT, the antiviral drug, remdesivir, has helped patients with severe symptoms recover rapidly in a clinical trial at a Chicago hospital. Gilead’s shares jumped nearly 10 percent.

Still, without data from rigorous trials with control groups, it is impossible to know how effective the drug actually is. The National Institutes of Health is conducting a trial in which patients receive remdesivir or a placebo. The results will be known within weeks.

Two weeks ago, Gilead altered two of its trials midstream. It increased the size of a study of patients with severe disease from 400 patients to 2,400 and increased the size of a trial of patients with moderate disease from 600 to 1600 patients — moves that could allow the company to spot subtle effects if the drug was not making a substantial difference in outcomes.

More news media outlets lay off workers.

The news media industry continues to be shellacked by the dismal advertising market as businesses remain shuttered throughout much of the country. The New York Times now estimates that approximately 33,000 workers in the media industry have been affected by planned layoffs, pay cuts and furloughs, up from 28,000 last week.

The magazine company Condé Nast announced on Monday that it was cutting the pay of nearly half its work force by 10 to 20 percent. The newspaper chain Advance Local — which shares a corporate parent with Condé — said this week that it would furlough employees for one to two weeks.

Digital sites, whose subscription businesses are often immature or nonexistent, continue to impose cost-savings as a way to stanch the bleeding in the ad market. Slate, which converted its membership program, Slate Plus, into a paywall last month, is cutting all employees’ pay on a sliding scale. Vox Media, which purchased the legacy brand, New York Media, last year, is furloughing roughly 10 percent of its work force and cutting the pay of high-earning employees.

The Los Angeles Times, one of the country’s largest newspapers by circulation, announced internally this week that it was furloughing 40 non-newsroom workers and cutting senior managers’ pay. It also shuttered three community weeklies, laying off 14 people, including guild members.

The paper was previously thought to be relatively insulated from the current environment, because — like other outlets, such as The Washington Post and Bloomberg Media, which have yet to make cuts — it is owned by a benevolent benefactor, Patrick Soon-Shiong, a local entrepreneur who purchased the paper along with The San Diego Union-Tribune and other properties two years ago for $500 million.

The ride-sharing business has collapsed.

In February, Uber said it had expected to bring in $16 billion to $17 billion in revenue this year. On Thursday, the company said it could no longer forecast what will happen.

Lyft has not yet made a similar announcement, but there’s no reason to think it faces a different fate.

Drawing from aggregated debit and credit card purchases of millions of U.S. consumers, for example, the analytics firm Second Measure found that spending on Uber’s rides dropped about 83 percent in March. And earnings tracker service Gridwise, using data collected from more than 30,000 drivers nationwide, found that the average hourly earnings of drivers dropped 36 percent from the beginning of March to the middle of the month. By the end of March, wages began to recover slightly, but were still down 24 percent.

So how are the companies dealing with the slump? For now, the strategy appears to be: Wait it out, and deliver food — as much of it as possible.

Uber’s money-losing food delivery service, Uber Eats, most likely surpassed Uber’s ride-hailing business in sales by mid-March and jumped about 27 percent for the month, according to Second Measure.

Although Lyft had no food delivery business before the pandemic, it created a temporary one to deliver meals and groceries for students and seniors. And on Wednesday, Lyft expanded the program to 11 major cities, including Atlanta, Houston, San Francisco and Seattle.

Since the coronavirus outbreak reached the United States, Amazon — a company built on the promise that people will always want more items, more quickly — has struggled to respond to a surge in orders. Sometimes products are in stock. Sometimes they aren’t. Its popular page featuring Deals of the Day, once a prominent feature, has been buried. The company is even trying to tamp down demand.

For consumers, the changes have generated confusion just as people have turned more than ever to online shopping to help protect themselves from the virus. The company tells customers that some products will arrive in weeks, rather than hours or days. And the sense of endless bounty on the site has eroded.

“It is almost like a run on the bank, when there is a rumor you can’t get your money out and everyone runs to the A.T.M.,” said Guru Hariharan, whose company, CommerceIQ, advises large consumer brands with their Amazon business.

Over the past decade, far more workers who are eligible for Social Security have been waiting to file, often substantially increasing their lifetime annual benefits.

But the stunning job losses in the pandemic-induced economic crisis could bring this trend to a crashing halt, as suddenly unemployed older workers without substantial savings scramble to meet living expenses.

Even in good times, there is no simple, one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to timing a claim — your longevity, savings and any other pension income are important factors. Now the decision is complicated by the highly uncertain outlook for the economy, jobs and financial markets.

But even if you need Social Security income immediately, you may have options worth considering that can boost lifetime benefits. Our Retiring columnist, Mark Miller, walks you through the key questions to consider.

Frauds around the coronavirus include businesses selling intravenous vitamin C drips to “boost immunity” to the virus, websites offering masks that never arrive and even reports of fake drive-up testing sites, where impostors swabbed people’s cheeks in exchange for cash.

Here are some questions and answers about coronavirus-related fraud:

How can I protect myself from coronavirus fraud?

First, understand that there are currently no F.D.A.-approved vaccines or treatments for the coronavirus, said Noah Joshua Phillips, an F.T.C. commissioner. That will, hopefully, change — but you are unlikely to hear about it first via a shady robocall. The best thing to do if you get a suspicious call is to hang up, he said.

What if I am expecting a government stimulus payment?

Most people don’t have to do anything to get their economic stimulus payments, which the government is issuing to help people facing money troubles because of the virus. Those payments will be deposited into your bank account automatically, the I.R.S. said.

“The I.R.S. isn’t going to call you asking to verify or provide your financial information” so you can get your payment faster, the head of the agency, Chuck Rettig, said in a statement this month.

I saw a social media report about virus-related fraud occurring door to door. Is this true?

Agencies including the F.B.I. have issued public warnings about people selling fake virus test kits and “unapproved treatments” on “door-to-door visits.” The inspector general for the Department of Health and Human Services also warned of “scammers” going door to door offering Covid-19 tests in exchange for personal details, like Medicare information.

New data on Friday gave the first concrete indication of how severely European carmakers were hit by coronavirus lockdowns, and it was every bit as bad as feared.

New car registrations in the European Union fell 55 percent last month compared with a year earlier, the European Automobile Manufacturers Association said, as dealers closed their doors and buyers were stuck in their homes. Owners registered 570,000 new cars during the month, down from 1.3 million in March 2019.

Sales all but evaporated in Italy, the European country that went into lockdown the earliest, falling 85 percent. Spain and France also suffered declines of around 70 percent.

Carmakers that depend on southern Europe for sales also suffered the most. Fiat Chrysler sales plummeted 77 percent. PSA, whose brands include Peugeot, Citroën and Opel, suffered a 68 percent plunge in sales.

German carmakers BMW, Daimler and Volkswagen fared marginally better, with declines of less than 50 percent.

Catch up: Here’s what else is happening.

• Walmart said that it had hired 150,000 workers since March 19, and it pledged to hire 50,000 more. The retailer said it had received more than a million applications since its initial hiring announcement. The new workers will be hired on a temporary basis, it said, adding that many had been furloughed from other companies and were looking to bridge the gap until they returned to their original jobs.

• The organizers behind San Diego Comic Con, the annual pop culture celebration, announced on Friday that the event was canceled, the first time in its 50-year history. Fans who purchased badges can request a refund or transfer their badges to next year’s event.

• Ford Motor said it expected to report a $2 billion loss for the first quarter, on revenue of $34 billion. The announcement came in a regulatory filing ahead of a full quarterly report on April 28. The automaker said earlier this week that its first-quarter wholesale volume was down 21 percent from a year earlier, mainly because of the outbreak’s impact on production and demand. It said last month that it was suspending its dividend and any share buybacks.

• General Electric’s aviation leasing division said it was canceling 69 orders for Boeing’s troubled 737 Max jet, which has been grounded for over a year after two fatal crashes. Boeing received 150 Max order cancellations last month. In the first quarter, it took in four times as many order cancellations as new orders.

• Procter & Gamble, the consumer products giant, reported a big jump in sales for the quarter as consumers stocked up on paper towels, toilet paper and diapers. P&G reported that organic net sales rose five percent to $17.2 billion. The company said increased shipments in North America and some parts of Europe offset declines in some Asian markets.

• The coronavirus outbreak has brought China’s extraordinary, nearly half-century-long run of growth to an end. The country’s National Bureau of Statistics said on Friday that the economic output shrank 6.8 percent from January through March compared to the same period last year. It’s the first economic shrinkage acknowledged in official statistics since 1976, when the country was in the final days of the Cultural Revolution.

Reporting was contributed by Daisuke Wakabayashi, Davey Alba, Gina Kolata, Jack Ewing, Abdi Latif Dahir, Simon Marks, Karen Weise, Julie Creswell, Marc Tracy, Elaine Yu, Kevin McKenna, Nelson D. Schwartz, Kate Conger, Katie Thomas, Erin Griffith, Emily Flitter, Alan Rappeport, Brooks Barnes, Keith Bradsher, Amie Tsang, Geneva Abdul, Niraj Chokshi, Vindu Goel, Carlos Tejada and Mike Ives. Yiwei Wang and Coral Yang contributed research.