Stock market news live updates: Stock futures open lower after weak economic, earnings data – Yahoo Money

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Posted on April 15, 2020

Stock futures opened slightly lower Wednesday evening, after a batch of historically weak economic data released earlier in the day revealed the extent of the coronavirus pandemic on the domestic economy.

Quarterly results from some of the country’s biggest financial institutions including Goldman Sachs (GS), Bank of America (BA) and Citigroup (C) also reflected steep drops in first-quarter earnings over last year, providing some the first comprehensive glimpses at the coronavirus’s impact on corporate profitability.

Large banks are mostly setting aside billions to cover what they expect to be heavy loan losses, as the outbreak ravages Main Street and key economic sectors.

March retail sales were shown on Wednesday to have plunged at a record rate as consumers – the key engine of U.S. economic activity – stayed in their homes, and put off the bulk of discretionary purchases. Combined with other data, including one showing manufacturing output dropped by the most since 1946 in March, the data stunned Wall Street with the U.S. economy now appears to be “in free fall.”

The Federal Reserve’s April Beige Book, or collection of anecdotes about conditions across the regional Fed districts, affirmed the economic deterioration, noting that “economic activity contracted sharply and abruptly across all regions in the United States as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

While pivotal to containing the spread of the coronavirus, social distancing measures have been catastrophic for domestic economic activity, leaving the question of when businesses across the country will reopen hanging in balance. Though federal and state officials from New York to California are weighing reopening plans as new coronavirus cases level off, definite timelines for easing distancing standards have yet to be established.

“As the U.S. looks to begin the slow process of opening up the economy in May, a couple of conditions need to be met,” Neil Dutta, head of economics at Renaissance Macro Research, wrote in a note Wednesday.

“First, it needs to be clear that the health systems across the country have the capacity to deal with a rise in new coronavirus infections. Second, we need to be on the right side of the infection and death curves,” he added.

“Third, testing capacity needs to be good,” he added. “It looks like the U.S. is on its way to achieving the first and second of these conditions but remains well short of the third. At the moment, the U.S. is conducting just over 1 million tests per week; the health experts say we need at least twice this amount before reopening safely.”

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Here were the main moves at the start of the overnight session for U.S. equity futures, as of 6:01 p.m. ET Wednesday