Stock market news live updates: Stock futures drop, officials discuss reopening economy – Yahoo Finance

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Posted on April 12, 2020

Stock futures fell Sunday evening at the end a holiday weekend in the U.S., declining after last week’s rally sent the S&P 500 to its best weekly gain since 1974. Meanwhile, crude oil prices rose and then turned negative, after OPEC and its allies agreed to a production cut of nearly 10 million barrels per day to help ease a mounting supply glut.

Over the weekend, coronavirus cases in the U.S. showed some broadening signs of stabilization, with the growth-rate in domestic cases falling for a second straight day on Sunday, according to a Bloomberg analysis of Johns Hopkins data. U.S. cases were up 5.4% to top 542,000 Sunday afternoon, slowing from a rise of 5.6% Saturday and 7.9% on Friday.

In New York, the U.S. epicenter of the virus, the coronavirus-related death toll fell for a third straight day to 758 on Sunday. However, this marked the sixth consecutive day that deaths were more than 700 in a 24-hour period, underscoring that the death rate, while apparently plateauing, was doing so at a high level in the state. New York’s overall death toll was 9,385 as of Sunday.

With early signs of a leveling off of new cases, officials have addressed the notion of alleviating the social distancing measures put in place over the past several weeks across the country.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infection Diseases, said on CNN that loosening social distancing measures in some parts of the nation “could probably start at least in some ways maybe next month,” while acknowledging that the easing “is not going to be a light switch” and will instead be a more gradual “rolling reentry.”

But even when social distancing begins to let up, it likely won’t spell the end of coronavirus-containment policies, with months more of these measures likely to occur in fits and starts, according to one Federal Reserve official. Neel Kashkari, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President, said on CBS Sunday that “we should all be focusing on an 18-month strategy for our health care system and our economy.” Looking at other countries coping with the outbreak, he noted that relaxing economic controls tended to lead to another flare-up in the coronavirus, necessitating renewed social distancing measures.

Whether the only or one of many, the current wave of social distancing measures assembled through a patchwork of state, local and federal mandates has already dented the U.S. economy, leading millions of individuals to become unemployed in the past several weeks alone. New economic data set for release later this week is expected to show a sharp drop in retail sales and new-home construction as the coronavirus outbreak grinds business activity across many sectors to a halt.

“We have always said the V-shaped recovery was too optimistic, but waves of subsequent shutdowns mean that our gradual recovery is too optimistic, as well,” Seth Carpenter, chief U.S. economist for UBS, wrote in an email Sunday.

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