Tag: Updates

British Financial system’s Collapse in 2020 Was Worst Since 1709: Stay Updates

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Post date February 12, 2021

Newcastle in Northern England in December. The UK service sector, which was largely closed due to lockdowns last year, fell 8.9 percent.

Recognition…Mary Turner for the New York Times

To understand how severe the economic burden of the pandemic was in Britain, you need to go back three centuries. The economy contracted 9.9 percent in 2020, as the first estimates by the Office for National Statistics showed on Friday. A Bank of England study of historical data shows the recession is the worst since 1709, the year of the so-called Great Freeze, an extraordinarily cold winter in Europe.

Even with nearly £ 300 billion, or about $ 415 billion, as incentives for businesses, jobs and public services, including the National Health Service, restrictions to contain the pandemic shrank the economy back to size in 2013.

The UK’s service sector, which accounts for four-fifths of the country’s economy, fell 8.9 percent. But the pain was uneven: restaurants, hotels, theaters, and other recreational services were particularly beaten, while professional, financial, and health services were not injured as badly. A recent survey found that around half of hotel companies have less than three months of cash on hand.

The economic cost, in some ways, reflects the greater devastation of the pandemic. There have been more than 115,000 Covid-related deaths in the UK, which has the appalling distinction of having the highest number of deaths in Europe.

However, the outlook is improving for both public health and the economy. The country should avoid a double-dip recession that would have resulted from two consecutive quarters of negative growth following the spring 2020 downturn. In the last three months of the year, the statistics office reported, the gross domestic product rose 1 percent compared to the previous quarter, more than most forecasters had expected.

Despite the discovery of a more contagious variant of the coronavirus in the UK, the economy grew late in the year as more businesses adapted to restrictions, schools remained open, and contact tracing and widespread testing added to economic activity. Warehousing and transportation also added to growth as consumers spent more online during the holiday season and businesses had their inventory in stock before the end of the Brexit transition period.

The economy is expected to contract again in the first few months of 2021 as most of the UK is under strict lockdown and trade was disrupted by Brexit. However, the rapid roll-out of vaccines has supported expectations for a positive rebound over the year. The Bank of England expects the economy to return to pre-pandemic size by early 2022 as consumers spend the accumulated savings while services such as restaurants, hairdressers and hotels close.

The IRS will begin accepting tax returns on Friday. Millions of people received stimulus payments and unemployment benefits over the past year – but they are treated differently for tax purposes. In this week’s “Your Money Advisor” column, Ann Carrns explains the implications for both.

Stimulus checks

The good news is, you don’t have to pay income tax on the stimulus checks, also known as economic impact payments. If you’ve received the expected amount and your family circumstances haven’t changed, the Internal Revenue Service says you don’t need to include information about the payments on your 2020 tax return.
If you were eligible for the payments but for some reason didn’t receive them or didn’t receive the full amount, you can still get the money by applying for rebate reclaim credit on your 2020 tax return. You must submit a return, even if you are not otherwise required to do so, in order to receive credit.
If you had a life change in 2020 – like having a child – or if you are self-supporting and no longer being claimed as dependent on a parent’s tax return, you may be eligible for more cash by drawing the loan on your 2020 return.

Unemployment benefits

In contrast to business stimulus payments, unemployment benefits are taxed by the federal government as ordinary income. (However, you don’t pay Medicare and Social Security taxes on unemployment benefits like you do on paycheck income.)
You should be provided with a Form 1099-G listing your unemployment income and any withheld taxes that you will put on your tax return.
You will also likely owe state income taxes on unemployment benefits, unless you live in one of the nine states that don’t have state income tax or some other states that are tax exempt from unemployment benefits, including California, Montana , New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Wisconsin exempts unemployment benefits for citizens but tax breaks for nonresidents, according to the Tax Foundation.

Recognition…Disney Plus via Associated Press

Disney reported a 98 percent drop in quarterly earnings on Thursday, driven by heavy losses at the coronavirus-ravaged theme park division. The company’s fledgling Disney + streaming service now has 100 million subscribers worldwide, convincing investors that Mickey Mouse is well positioned for the future despite the pandemic.

Overall, Disney posted earnings of $ 29 million, or 2 cents per share, compared to $ 2.13 billion for the same period last year. The company’s large theme parks business was the most troubled with operating losses of more than $ 2 billion in the company’s first fiscal quarter that ended Jan. 2. This was the result of key properties that continue to be closed, such as Disneyland, California, and a significant drop in visitor numbers at the flagship Walt Disney World in Florida, which limits daily visits to 35 percent of capacity as a coronavirus safety measure. Other Disney divisions – filmmaking, the ESPN cable network – have mostly had results where the negatives (the cancellation of films) were offset by positives (greatly reduced film marketing costs).

Revenue was $ 16.2 billion, down 22 percent.

Wall Street had expected losses per share of 41 cents and sales of $ 15.93 billion.

From a stock market standpoint, Disney had a year of extremes. In March, when the company closed theme parks for the first time, postponed movies, and temporarily operated its sports cable network without major live sports, shares fell 38 percent. But investors have forgiven remarkably since then, despite the fact that Disney reported quarterly doomsday financial results. Disney stock closed Thursday at $ 190.91 on the New York Stock Exchange, a far nominal high. Even some Disney executives were slackened by the wave – the best time, the worst time.

According to analysts, investors are overlooking short-term losses and focusing on the potential of Disney +, which now has 95 million subscribers worldwide. It only had about 30 million subscribers a year ago (and didn’t exist a year and three months ago). Increasingly, streaming looks like a two-company game, at least at the top between Disney and Netflix, which had a long lead. Disney + has benefited from the pandemic by selling a monthly subscription to local families. But the upstart also found a megawatt hit, “The Mandalorian”, straight out of the gate. A multitude of original television series and films are going to Disney + this year.

Even so, there is a not-so-small asterisk on the heady subscriber numbers: The average monthly revenue per paid Disney + subscriber fell by 28 percent to 4.03 US dollars. That’s because Disney + has signed millions of subscribers in India by offering them a near-giveaway price.

Tags British, Collapse, Economys, Live, Updates, Worst

World News

Covid-19 Information: Stay Updates – The New York Instances

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Post date February 11, 2021

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Los Angeles Temporarily Closes 5 Coronavirus Vaccination Sites

Mayor Eric Garcetti said on Wednesday the city would close five of its Covid-19 vaccination sites, including Dodger Stadium, because of a supply shortage.

We’re vaccinating people faster then new vials are arriving, here in Los Angeles, and I’m very concerned right now. I’m concerned as your mayor that our vaccine supply is uneven, it’s unpredictable and too often, inequitable. By tomorrow, the city will have exhausted its current supply of the Moderna vaccine for first-dose appointments. This is an enormous hurdle in our race to vaccinate Angelenos, and unfortunately, it means that we will have to temporarily close Dodger Stadium and the other four non-mobile vaccination sites for two days on Friday and Saturday. As soon as we receive more supply, and I hope that we get — I’d love a call tonight or tomorrow from some source at the state or national level, saying we found some more, but most likely, hopefully Tuesday or Wednesday, we will reopen and start the business up again.

Mayor Eric Garcetti said on Wednesday the city would close five of its Covid-19 vaccination sites, including Dodger Stadium, because of a supply shortage.CreditCredit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Facing a shortage of coronavirus vaccine doses, Los Angeles will temporarily close five of its inoculation sites, including one of the country’s largest, at Dodger Stadium, raising new questions about the federal government’s handling of supplies and distribution.

By Thursday, the city will have exhausted its supply of the Moderna vaccine for first-dose appointments, Mayor Eric Garcetti said at a news conference. The centers will be closed on Friday and Saturday with plans to reopen by Tuesday or Wednesday of next week, he said.

“We’re vaccinating people faster than new vials are arriving here in Los Angeles,” Mr. Garcetti said. “I’m concerned as your mayor that our vaccine supply is uneven, it’s unpredictable and too often inequitable.”

The United States has struggled to mount a mass vaccination campaign in the face of limited supply and logistical hurdles. President Biden has promised to administer 100 million vaccines by his 100th day in office, which falls on April 30.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Wednesday that about 33.8 million people have received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine, including about 10.5 million people who have been fully vaccinated.

The federal government has delivered about 66 million doses to states, territories and federal agencies, with many kept in reserve for second doses. State and federal officials have come under fire for their handling of vaccines, as demand far outpaces supply and health care providers struggle to predict how many doses they might receive.

About 10 percent of Californians have received a vaccine, according to C.D.C. data.

The city-run Dodger Stadium site opened on Jan. 15 and vaccinated more than 85,000 people in its first two weeks, despite waits that could sometimes last hours. Administrators have reduced wait times, and the site was averaging more than 6,000 shots a day last week, far more than the city’s other sites.

Mr. Garcetti said Los Angeles had received only 16,000 new doses of the vaccine this week.Starting in December, California faced a dramatic spike in virus cases concentrated in the southern part of the state and in its main agricultural region, the Central Valley, as well as the spread of a new local strain that may be more transmissible.

California now leads the nation in cases and deaths. Infections peaked around the holidays and have declined since mid-January, but deaths remain at record highs.

Mr. Garcetti said that hospitalizations in Los Angeles were down to about 3,700 on Wednesday, the lowest number in months.

Despite shortage concerns, the city will continue its mobile vaccination program, Mr. Garcetti said. “We can’t afford to see the outbreaks and, quite frankly, the unequal deaths that we’re seeing in communities of color,” he said.

United States ›	United StatesOn Feb. 10	14-day change
New cases	94,893	–36%
New deaths	3,255	–22%

World ›	WorldOn Feb. 10	14-day change
New cases	442,450	–26%
New deaths	13,572	–14%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters

It’s one of the world’s most in-demand commodities and has become a new currency for international diplomacy: Countries with the means or the know-how are using coronavirus vaccines to curry favor or thaw frosty relations.

India, the unmatched vaccine manufacturing power, is giving away millions of doses to neighbors friendly and estranged. It is trying to counter China, which has made doling out shots a central plank of its foreign relations. And the United Arab Emirates, drawing on its oil riches, is buying shots on behalf of its allies.

But the strategy carries risks.

India and China have vast populations of their own that they need to inoculate. Although there are few signs of grumbling in either country, that could change as the public watches doses be sold or donated abroad.

“Indians are dying. Indians are still getting the disease,” said Manoj Joshi, a distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi think tank. “I could understand if our needs had been fulfilled and then you had given away the stuff. But I think there is a false moral superiority that you are trying to put across where you say we are giving away our stuff even before we use it ourselves.”

For India, its soft-power vaccine drive has given it a rejoinder to China after years of watching the Chinese make political gains in its own backyard — in Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Nepal and elsewhere. Beijing offered deep pockets and swift answers when it came to big investments that India, with a layered bureaucracy and slowing economy, has struggled to match.

So India has sent vaccine doses to Nepal, a country that has fallen increasingly under China’s influence. And Sri Lanka, in the midst of a diplomatic tug of war between New Delhi and Beijing, is getting doses from both.

The donating countries are making their offerings at a time when the United States and other rich nations are scooping up the world’s supplies. Poorer countries are frantically trying to get their own, a disparity that the World Health Organization recently warned has put the world “on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure.”

With their health systems tested as never before, many countries are eager to take what they are offered — and the donors could reap some political good will in reward.

“Instead of securing a country by sending troops, you can secure the country by saving lives, by saving their economy, by helping with their vaccination,” said Dania Thafer, the executive director of the Gulf International Forum, a Washington-based think tank.

Still, efforts to use vaccines to win hearts and minds aren’t always successful.

The United Arab Emirates, which is rolling out vaccines faster than any country except Israel, has begun donating Chinese-made Sinopharm vaccine doses that it purchased to countries where it has strategic or commercial interests.

But in Egypt some doctors balked at using them, because they said they did not trust the data the U.A.E. and the vaccine’s Chinese maker had released about trials.

And the government of Malaysia, one of the Emirates’ biggest trading partners, declined an offer of 500,000 doses, saying that regulators would have to independently approve the Sinopharm vaccine. After regulatory approval, Malaysia bought vaccines instead from Pfizer of the United States, the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine and one made by another Chinese company, Sinovac.

Credit…U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, via Associated Press

Many were clever fakes.

They were stamped with the 3M logo and shipped in boxes that read, “Made in the U.S.A.”

But these supposed N95 masks were not produced by 3M and weren’t made in the United States, federal investigators said on Wednesday.

They were counterfeits, and millions were bought by hospitals, medical institutions and government agencies in at least five states, the federal authorities said as they announced an investigation.

Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, said the masks were dangerous because they might not offer the same level of protection against the coronavirus as genuine N95s.

“We don’t know if they meet the standards,” said Brian Weinhaus, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations.

Cassie Sauer, the president and chief executive of the Washington State Hospital Association, said that about two million counterfeit masks might have made it into the state. They were “really good fakes,” she said.

“They look, they feel, they fit and they breathe like a 3M mask,” Ms. Sauer said.

News of the investigation came the same day the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence branch warned law enforcement agencies that criminals have been selling counterfeit coronavirus vaccines online for “hundreds of dollars per dose.”

Credit…Charles Krupa/Associated Press

In a bid to get more residents age 75 and older vaccinated, Massachusetts officials say they will also inoculate the people accompanying them, regardless of age, to mass vaccination sites, which can be confusing to navigate.

“The idea for a mass vaccination site can seem a bit daunting,” Marylou Sudders, the secretary for health and human services in Massachusetts, said at a news conference on Wednesday.

The knowledge that the person accompanying them to the vaccination site will also be inoculated, Ms. Sudders said, may “bring an extra level of comfort to those who may be hesitant or don’t want to bother their caregiver or loved one or a good friend to book an appointment.”

Massachusetts has administered almost a million vaccine doses at nearly 130 sites statewide, said Gov. Charlie Baker. About 10 percent of residents have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 2.8 percent have received two doses, according to a New York Times tracker.

Starting on Thursday, companions can schedule their vaccine along with that of the older resident.

Joan Hatem-Roy, the chief executive of Elder Services of Merrimack Valley, a nonprofit group in northeastern Massachusetts, called the idea “a game changer.”

“I get nervous going to a Patriots game at Gillette, so I can imagine a senior trying to think about going to Gillette Stadium,” one of the vaccination sites, Ms. Hatem-Roy said.

Some expressed concern that younger people who are less susceptible to serious illness from the virus might be vaccinated before people who are 65 or older or who have chronic health conditions. But Mr. Baker said the immediate goal was to make sure people 75 and older are vaccinated.

“Those communities are far more likely to lose their life and get hospitalized as a result of Covid,” he said. “We want to make sure that we make it as easy as we possibly can for folks who fall into that over-75 category to get vaccinated and to get vaccinated early in this process.”

The state’s decision to vaccinate companions came as a surprise to Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, who said Massachusetts had not moved as quickly as he had expected on vaccinations. He said he would rather see more vulnerable groups be deemed eligible for the vaccination first and for any transportation issues to be resolved without companions getting shots.

“I do know that the governor is feeling a lot of pressure to improve the performance in the state,” Dr. Jha said. “That may be part of the motivation for doing this, because it will certainly bump up those numbers.”

He did not expect other states to follow suit — at least not right away. But Dr. Jha said it might be different in April or May, when the vaccine supply may outweigh the demand.

In some places, a similar model has been tried on a smaller scale.

In Albemarle County, Va., 70 caregivers and family care providers for people with intellectual disabilities were vaccinated, according to local affiliate NBC29. In Texas, older and disabled residents said they wanted their home health workers to be vaccinated, but many workers were declining the inoculation, according to The Texas Tribune.

With fraud already popping up in vaccines, tests and stimulus checks, Dr. Jha worried that scammers might try to use the new Massachusetts program to take advantage of older residents.

“I don’t know how you carefully police that,” he said. “There are bad actors who may try to manipulate this.”

Ms. Sudders offered her own warning on Wednesday, urging older residents’ not to accept offers from strangers to be their vaccine companions.

Credit…Sergey Ponomarev for The New York Times

The coronavirus has been used as an excuse to restrict free speech in dozens of countries, according to a report released Thursday by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy organization.

Pointing to cases of censorship, arbitrary arrest and physical assault, the report found that at least 83 governments around the world have used the pandemic to justify silencing critics or preventing peaceful assembly.

It found that in at least 18 countries, military or police forces assaulted journalists, bloggers or critics of the government’s response to the pandemic, and that in at least 10 countries, officials used social distancing concerns to prevent or disband protests, even while allowing other large gatherings.

The findings expose a tension at the heart of coronavirus restrictions: Some of the same tools officials have used to save lives and slow the spread of Covid-19 — such as restricting large gatherings, countering misinformation or instituting lockdowns — can also be used by authoritarian governments as a pretext to monitor citizens or quash dissent.

China, Cuba, India, Egypt and Russia are among the countries where the restrictions on free speech have been felt most broadly, according to Human Rights Watch.

“The obligation of governments to protect the public from this deadly pandemic is not a carte blanche for placing a chokehold on information and suppressing dissent,” Gerry Simpson, associate crisis and conflict director at the organization, said in a news release.

The report relied on research from Human Rights Watch as well as data and reports from other nongovernmental organizations including the United Nations.

Credit…Sean Gallup/Getty Images

Instagram took down the account of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the political scion and prominent anti-vaccine activist, on Wednesday over false information related to the coronavirus.

“We removed this account for repeatedly sharing debunked claims about the coronavirus or vaccines,” Facebook, which owns Instagram, said in a statement.

Mr. Kennedy, the son of the former senator and U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, worked for decades as an environmental lawyer but is now better known as an anti-vaccine crusader. A 2019 study found that two groups including his nonprofit, now called Children’s Health Defense, had funded more than half of Facebook advertisements spreading misinformation about vaccines.

He has found an even broader audience during the pandemic on platforms like Instagram, where he had 800,000 followers. Though Mr. Kennedy has said he is not opposed to vaccines as long as they are safe, he regularly endorses discredited links between vaccines and autism and has argued that it is safer to contract the coronavirus than to be inoculated against it.

Facebook is becoming more aggressive in its efforts to stamp out vaccine misinformation, saying this week that it would remove posts with erroneous claims about the coronavirus, coronavirus vaccines and vaccines in general, whether they are paid advertisements or user-generated posts. In addition to Mr. Kennedy’s Instagram account, the company said it had removed multiple other Instagram accounts and Facebook pages on Wednesday under its updated policies.

They did not include Mr. Kennedy’s Facebook page, which was still active as of early Thursday and makes many of the same baseless claims to more than 300,000 followers. The company said it did not automatically disable accounts across its platforms and that there were no plans to take down Mr. Kennedy’s Facebook account “at this time.”

Children’s Health Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Members of Mr. Kennedy’s family have spoken out against his anti-vaccine efforts, including a brother, sister and niece who accused him of spreading “dangerous misinformation” in a column they wrote for Politico in 2019. Another niece, Kerry Kennedy Meltzer, a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center, wrote an opinion essay in The New York Times in December challenging his claims.

“I love my uncle Bobby,” she wrote. “I admire him for many reasons, chief among them his decades-long fight for a cleaner environment. But when it comes to vaccines, he is wrong.”

Credit…Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

A Texas doctor with only six hours to administer expiring doses of a Covid-19 vaccine inoculated 10 people, but the move got him fired and charged with stealing the doses.

The doctor, Hasan Gokal, had scrambled in December by making house calls and directing people to his home outside Houston. Some were acquaintances; others, strangers. A bed-bound nonagenarian. A woman in her 80s with dementia. A mother with a child who uses a ventilator.

After midnight, and with just minutes before the vaccine became unusable, Dr. Gokal gave the last dose to his wife, who has a pulmonary disease that leaves her short of breath.

For his actions, Dr. Gokal was fired from his government job and then charged with stealing 10 vaccine doses worth a total of $135 — a misdemeanor that sent his name and mug shot rocketing around the globe.

“It was my world coming down,” he said in a telephone interview on Friday. “To have everything collapse on you. God, it was the lowest moment in my life.”

The matter is playing out as pandemic-weary Americans scour websites and cross state lines chasing rumors in pursuit of a medicine in short supply.

Late last month, a judge dismissed the charge as groundless, but the local district attorney vowed to present the matter to a grand jury. And while prosecutors portray the doctor as a cold opportunist, his lawyer says he acted responsibly — even heroically.

“Everybody was looking at this guy and saying, ‘I got my mother waiting for a vaccine, my grandfather waiting for a vaccine,’” the lawyer, Paul Doyle, said. “They were thinking, ‘This guy is a villain.’”

Global Roundup

Credit…Nicolas Tucat/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Sister André has lived through the 1918 flu pandemic, two World Wars and “many sad events,” she once said. As Europe’s oldest known person, she turns 117 on Thursday and has now accomplished another feat: defeating the coronavirus, with barely any complication.

“She’s recovered, along with all the residents here,” said David Tavella, the spokesman at the Ste. Catherine Labouré nursing home in Toulon, a city in southeastern France, where Sister André lives. “She is calm, very radiant and she is quite looking forward to celebrating her 117th birthday,” he said, adding that the home’s most famous resident was resting on Wednesday and needed a break from interviews.

The coronavirus swept through the nursing home last month, just as nurses began consulting residents about vaccinations; 81 of its 88 residents became infected, including Sister André, and 11 eventually died.

Mr. Tavella said that until last month no case had been detected in the nursing home since the beginning of the pandemic. Still, the outbreak was a stark reminder that the virus has been devastating in places where the most vulnerable reside, even with stringent restrictions that have turned many care homes into fortresses.

Sister André remained isolated for weeks and felt a bit “patraque,” or off color, Mr. Tavella said, but she blamed the virus and not her age. She slept more than usual, but she prayed and remained asymptomatic. This week, she became the oldest known person to have survived Covid-19.

“She kept telling me, ‘I’m not afraid of Covid because I’m not afraid of dying, so give my vaccine doses to those who need them,’” Mr. Tavella said.

Sister André’s story has made headlines in France, providing some uplifting news in a country where thousands of nursing home residents have died.

France began vaccinating health care workers this week, but the authorities have faced criticism for a sluggish rollout as France continues to struggle with a rising number of infections, and no end to restrictions in sight. As of Wednesday, 2.2 million people had been vaccinated, less than 3 percent of the population.

In other developments around the world:

The coronavirus variant first detected in Britain is going “to sweep the world, in all probability,” the director of the country’s genetic surveillance program, Sharon Peacock, told the BBC on Thursday. The variant, known as B.1.1.7., has been detected in 75 countries, including the United States.

Mexico authorized China’s Sinovac vaccine for emergency use, said Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the deputy health minister, Reuters reported. This month the country also authorized the Russian coronavirus vaccine, Sputnik V, for use.

Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Even as layoffs in the United States remain extraordinarily high by historical standards, unemployment claims continue to decline as coronavirus cases and restrictions on activity recede.

New claims for unemployment benefits declined last week for the fourth week in a row, the Labor Department reported Thursday morning.

Last week brought 813,000 new claims for state benefits, compared with 850,000 the previous week. Adjusted for seasonal variations, last week’s figure was 793,000, a decrease of 19,000.

There were 335,000 new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federally funded program for part-time workers, the self-employed and others ordinarily ineligible for jobless benefits. That total, which was not seasonally adjusted, was down from 369,000 the week before.

New coronavirus cases have fallen by a third from the level two weeks ago, prompting states like California and New York to relax restrictions on indoor dining and other activities.

“We’re stuck at this very high level of claims, but activity is picking up,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist with ZipRecruiter, an online employment marketplace. Indeed, job postings at ZipRecruiter stand at 11.3 million, close to the 11.4 million level before the pandemic hit.

The improving pandemic situation has eased the strain on dining establishments, Ms. Pollak added. More generally, however, the leisure and hospitality industry is still under pressure.

Plenty of other signs of weakness remain. On Friday, the Labor Department reported that employers added just 49,000 jobs in January, underscoring the challenges for the nearly 10 million unemployed.

President Biden cited the weak showing to press for approval of his $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package. It would send $1,400 to many Americans, provide aid to states and cities, and extend unemployment benefits that are due to expire for millions in mid-March.

Ms. Pollak said postings by employers at ZipRecruiter in recent days offered hope. “We’ve seen employers smash all of our expectations and show a great deal of exuberance,” she said.

Credit…Yale University, via Associated Press

President Biden wants racial equity to be at the essence of a fair national coronavirus response. And Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a Yale epidemiologist who grew up in the U.S. Virgin Islands, is in charge of the effort.

Dr. Nunez-Smith, the chairwoman of Mr. Biden’s Covid-19 equity task force, spoke to The New York Times about the challenges ahead in her role.

She is charged with advising the president on how to allocate resources and reach out to underserved populations to fight a pandemic that has taken a devastating toll on people of color. Black and Latino people have been nearly twice as likely as white people to die from Covid-19.

“Make no mistake about it — beating this pandemic is hard work,” Dr. Nunez-Smith told reporters on Wednesday, after the White House named the members of the task force. “And beating this pandemic while making sure that everyone in every community has a fair chance to stay safe or to regain their health, well, that’s the hard work and the right work.”

Q. You’ve been in office just a few weeks. What have you learned?

A. What’s great about this is being public facing. I hear from everyday Americans every day. People write all the time with their own experiences.

Obviously you cannot cure racial disparities in health care overnight, so what are you aiming for, at least in the near term? And then in the long term?

We’re charged with rapid response recommendations and then paving the way for equity in the recovery. We talk a lot about vaccines, but we can’t forget about everything else. We think about frontline essential workers and others who still have challenges in terms of having inadequate protection in the workplace. Access to testing is also uneven.

It’s exciting to see new technologies emerge, but we also have to make sure that everybody can benefit from all of the scientific discoveries.

Credit…Martin Mejia/Associated Press

A cougar has tested positive for the coronavirus, the first such instance in the United States. And a tiger at the same Texas facility that exhibits wild animals also tested positive, the Department of Agriculture said on Wednesday.

After several cats at the facility, which the department did not name, began coughing and wheezing, the facility took samples for testing.

The National Veterinary Services Laboratory confirmed the infection in the two cats. While several tigers in the United States have caught the virus, along with lions, snow leopards and many domestic cats, this was the first report of a cougar.

The animals have mild symptoms and are expected to recover, according to the announcement, as have other zoo cats that have been infected with the virus.

Dogs, mink and gorillas have also caught the coronavirus in the United States. The Agriculture department keeps a list, updated weekly, of all confirmed tests.

Farmed mink infected with the virus have passed it to humans in some cases, which caused Denmark to cull its entire farmed mink population, about 17 million. There is no evidence of domestic or zoo animals passing the virus to humans, and advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention largely concerns how people who have Covid-19 should avoid infecting their pets.

Credit…John Moore/Getty Images

Officials in Michigan have confirmed the presence of a highly contagious coronavirus variant in one of its state prisons, the first such case documented in an American correctional facility — and a potential harbinger of even wider dispersion of the virus in prisons, public health officials said.

Michigan prison and health officials said Wednesday that an employee at the Bellamy Creek Correctional Facility, in Ionia, Mich., was found to have been infected with the B.1.1.7 variant. That strain was first detected in December in the United Kingdom. It has been found to spread more easily than other coronavirus variants.

The variant’s potential to disseminate rapidly in prisons and jails, which are typically overcrowded, unsanitary and have poor ventilation, has alarmed public health experts.

“When we see increased levels of contagiousness in spaces that are overcrowded that really do not lend themselves to social distancing, what we know is going to happen is that there will just be really an explosion of cases,” said Lauren Brinkley-Rubenstein, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. “And so it just means more cases, more rapid transmission, and more devastation for incarcerated people and staff that work in jails and prisons.”

Correctional facilities and detention centers have already been devastated by Covid-19, with more than 600,000 infections and 2,700 dead among inmates and correctional officers, according to a New York Times database tracking infections in prisons, jails and detention centers.

Michigan prison officials said that once they had confirmed the presence of the variant, they ordered daily testing of all inmates and staff members in the prison, which has more than 1,600 inmates. As of Thursday, about 500 inmates and 100 correctional officers at the facility had been infected with the coronavirus, and one inmate had died.

As of Thursday morning, it was not clear whether anyone at the prison — aside from the staff member — had been infected by the new variant.

But prison authorities have expressed concern about the possible diffusion of the variant because inmates had been transferred from the Bellamy Creek Correctional Facility to two other prisons, the Duane Waters Health Center and the Macomb Correctional Facility, before officials were aware that the staff member had been sickened.

The Duane Waters facility, in Jackson, is reserved for some of the state prison system’s most severely ill inmates.

The prison system “will be taking extra steps to identify where this variant is present amongst staff and the prisoner population and we will continue to do everything we can to keep the prisoners, our staff and the community safe,” Heidi Washington, director of the Michigan prison system, said in a news release.

— Maura Turcotte and Ann Hinga Klein

Tags Covid19, Live, News, Times, Updates, York

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Stay World Covid-19 Pandemic and Vaccine Updates

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Post date February 11, 2021

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transcript

C.D.C. Says Layering and Improving Mask Fit Increases Protection

Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said wearing more tightly fitting masks or layering masks increases effectiveness in preventing Covid-19.

Research has demonstrated that Covid-19 infections and deaths have decreased when policies that require everyone to wear a mask have been implemented. So with cases, hospitalizations and deaths still very high, now is not the time to roll back mask requirements. I have also seen very many well-meaning people wearing masks that do not fit well or fit incorrectly. In fact, recent survey data from Porter Novelli found that among adults who reported wearing masks in the past week, half said they wore their masks incorrectly in public. New data released from C.D.C. today underscore the importance of wearing a mask correctly and making sure it fits closely and snugly over your nose and mouth. The C.D.C. is updating the mask information for the public on the C.D.C. website to provide new options on how to improve mask fit. This includes wearing a mask with a moldable nose wire, knotting the ear loops on your mask or wearing a cloth mask over a procedure or disposable mask. There are also new options available to consumers called mask fitters, small reusable devices that cinch a cloth or medical mask, and that can create a tighter fit against the face, and thus improve mask performance. The bottom line is this: Masks work and they work best when they have a good fit, and are worn correctly.

Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said wearing more tightly fitting masks or layering masks increases effectiveness in preventing Covid-19.CreditCredit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Wearing a mask — any mask — reduces the risk of infection with the coronavirus, but wearing a more tightly fitted surgical mask, or layering a cloth mask atop a surgical mask, can vastly increase protections to the wearer and others, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported on Wednesday.

New research by the agency shows that transmission of the virus can be reduced by up to 96.5 percent if both an infected individual and an uninfected individual wear tightly fitted surgical masks or a cloth-and-surgical-mask combination.

Dr. Rochelle P. Walensky, director of the C.D.C., announced the findings during Wednesday’s White House coronavirus briefing, and coupled them with a plea for Americans to wear “a well-fitting mask” that has two or more layers. President Biden has challenged Americans to wear masks for the first 100 days of his presidency, and Dr. Walensky said that masks were especially crucial given the concern about new variants circulating.

“With cases hospitalizations and deaths still very high, now is not the time to roll back mask requirements,” she said, adding, “The bottom line is this: Masks work, and they work when they have a good fit and are worn correctly.”

Virus-related deaths, which resurged sharply in the United States in November and still remain high, appear to be in a steady decline; new virus cases and hospitalizations began to drop last month. But researchers warn that a more contagious virus variant first found in Britain is doubling roughly every 10 days in the United States. The C.D.C. cautioned last month that it could become the dominant variant in the nation by March.

As of Feb. 1, 14 states and the District of Columbia had implemented universal masking mandates; masking is now mandatory on federal property and on domestic and international transportation. But while masks are known to both reduce respiratory droplets and aerosols exhaled by infected wearers and to protect the uninfected wearer, their effectiveness varies widely because of air leaking around the edges of the mask.

“Any mask is better than none,” said Dr. John Brooks, lead author of the new C.D.C. study. “There are substantial and compelling data that wearing a mask reduces spread, and in communities that adopt mask wearing, new infections go down.”

But, he added, the new research shows how to enhance the protection. The agency’s new laboratory experiments are based on the ideas put forth by Linsey Marr, an expert in aerosol transmission at Virginia Tech, and Dr. Monica Gandhi, who studies infectious diseases at the University of California, San Francisco.

One option for reducing transmission is to wear a cloth mask over a surgical mask, the agency said. The alternative is to fit the surgical mask more tightly on the face by “knotting and tucking” — that is, knotting the two strands of the ear loops together where they attach to the edge of the mask, then folding and flattening the extra fabric at the mask’s edge and tucking it in for a tighter seal.

Dr. Brooks cautioned that the new study was based on laboratory experiments, and it’s unclear how these masking recommendations will perform in the real world (the experiments used three-ply surgical and cloth masks). “But it’s very clear evidence that the more of us who wear masks and the better the mask fits, the more each of us benefit individually.”

Other effective options that improve the fit include using a mask-fitter — a frame contoured to the face — over a mask, or wearing a sleeve of sheer nylon hosiery material around the neck and pulled up over a cloth or surgical mask, the C.D.C. said.

Even as vaccines are being slowly rolled out across the country, the emergence of the new variants, which may respond differently to treatments or dodge the immune system to some degree, has prompted public health officials to emphasize that Americans should continue to take protective measures like masking.

United States ›	United StatesOn Feb. 9	14-day change
New cases	96,488	–35%
New deaths	3,170	–20%

World ›	WorldOn Feb. 9	14-day change
New cases	398,538	–26%
New deaths	14,751	–13%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Charles Krupa/Associated Press

“The idea for a mass vaccination site can seem a bit daunting,” Marylou Sudders, the secretary for health and human services in Massachusetts, said at a news conference on Wednesday.

Massachusetts has administered almost a million doses of the vaccine at nearly 130 sites statewide, said Gov. Charlie Baker. About 10 percent of residents have received at least one dose of the vaccine, and 2.8 percent have received both doses, according to a New York Times tracker.

Companions should be able to schedule their vaccine along with that of the older resident, the governor said, and effective Thursday, they now can.

Joan Hatem-Roy, the chief executive of Elder Services of Merrimack Valley, a nonprofit group in Northeast Massachusetts, called the idea “a game changer.”

“I get nervous going to a Patriots game at Gillette, so I can imagine a senior trying to think about going to Gillette Stadium,” one of the vaccination sites, Ms. Hatem-Roy said.

Some expressed concern that younger people who are less susceptible to serious illness from the virus might get a vaccine before people who are 65 or older or who have chronic health conditions.

But Governor Baker said the immediate goal was to make sure people 75 and older are vaccinated.

He does not expect other states to follow suit — at least, not right away.

But Dr. Jha said it might be different in April or May, when the supply of vaccine may outweigh the demand.

In some places, a similar model has been attempted on a smaller scale.

In Albemarle County, Va., 70 caregivers and family care providers for people with intellectual disabilities were vaccinated, according to local affiliate NBC29. In Texas, older and disabled residents said they wanted their home health workers to be vaccinated, but many workers were refusing the inoculation, according to The Texas Tribune.

With fraud already popping up in everything from vaccines to tests to stimulus checks, Dr. Jha worried that scammers might try to use the new Massachusetts program to take advantage of older residents.

“I don’t know how you carefully police that,” he said. “There are bad actors who may try to manipulate this.”

Ms. Sudders offered her own warning on Wednesday, urging older residents’ not to accept offers from strangers to be their vaccine companions.

Credit…Kena Betancur/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said that large arenas and stadiums across the state would be able to open for events with spectators, at very limited capacity, as soon as Feb. 23. Attendees will be required to provide a negative coronavirus test result.

Venues that hold 10,000 people or more would be allowed to host 10 percent of their normal capacity, if they are approved by the state’s Department of Health.

Attendees will have to provide a negative P.C.R. test, taken within 72 hours of the event, before they can enter. Socially distanced assigned seating will be mandatory, as will face coverings and temperature checks.

While controlling the spread of the coronavirus, the state has to simultaneously “get this economy open intelligently,” Mr. Cuomo said, adding that “this hits the balance of safe reopening, and again a P.C.R. test is as safe as you can get.”

The governor cited the success of a recent Buffalo Bills’ playoff game, attended by about 6,700 people who had to provide a negative coronavirus test before they could enter, as the inspiration for his decision. A negative test result is a snapshot in time of whether the virus can be detected if a person is infected, and may miss individuals who are infected but do not yet carry enough of the virus for the test to come back positive.

“The testing is the key,” Mr. Cuomo said at a news conference on Wednesday.

Mr. Cuomo said that the Barclays Center in Brooklyn would reopen on Feb. 23, for a Brooklyn Nets game against the Sacramento Kings.

But the Bills’ stadium is open air, unlike the Barclays Center. Public health experts say the quality of ventilation is crucial when considering indoor gatherings because the virus is known to spread more easily indoors.

At his news conference, Mr. Cuomo did not offer details on ventilation, but a release from his office later said that in order to reopen venues to professional sports, sites had to “meet enhanced air filtration, ventilation and purification standards.”

Attending an indoor event is risky even with ample ventilation and other precautions, said Saskia Popescu, an epidemiologist at George Mason University.

“Bringing thousands of people indoors for an event that elicits screaming and socializing is not ideal right now,” Dr. Popescu said in an email.

As for playing games at venues like Citi Field or Yankee Stadium, which are being used as vaccination sites, the governor joked that “between innings, people will do vaccines.”

Gareth Rhodes, a member of the governor’s Covid-19 task force, said the state planned to work with teams so the vaccinations could continue.

The Citi Field vaccination site, which serves eligible Queens residents and taxi drivers and food service workers from all five boroughs, opened Wednesday. It will have 200 appointments a day available during its first week of operation and will offer 24-hour service starting next Wednesday, officials said. The site will be able to administer 4,000 doses of the vaccine a week by next week, Mayor Bill de Blasio said at an appearance outside the stadium. It could provide 5,000 doses a day if the city had more supply, he added.

“This site is the beginning of something very big,” Mr. de Blasio said. “The Mets are doing something crucial today for the people of Queens.”

The site was supposed to open the week of Jan. 25, but it was postponed because of vaccine shortages.

The mayor also said that mass vaccination sites were still planned at Empire Outlets in Staten Island and at the Barclays Center, though he did not specify dates when they will open.

Credit…Bruno Kelly/Reuters

A World Health Organization panel of experts on Wednesday recommended that the vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford be used in countries where concerning new variants of the coronavirus are circulating.

The recommendation came days after a decision by South Africa to halt at least temporarily plans to roll out AstraZeneca’s vaccine.

The decision was announced after a small clinical trial indicated that the vaccine might not protect against mild and moderate cases caused by avariant of the virus first seen in that country. Researchers were unable to draw a conclusion about the impact of the variant, known as B.1.351, on the vaccine’s ability to prevent severe disease.

Despite recommending the AstraZeneca vaccine for use everywhere, W.H.O. scientists conceded that each country should take into account the state of the virus and the type of variants spreading there.

The W.H.O. has not yet granted an emergency-use listing for the AstraZeneca vaccine, a step that would set into motion the rollout of the vaccine in many lower- and middle-income countries.

The W.H.O. will separately consider the vaccine’s two manufacturers: AstraZeneca and the Serum Institute, the Indian producer that will supply many doses for the Covax initiative to bring vaccines to poorer parts of the world. The W.H.O. will weigh those decisions in the next week, with decisions expected around the middle of this month.

The W.H.O. at the end of last year approved Pfizer’s vaccine. Its decision on AstraZeneca’s vaccine is highly anticipated, because countries around the world are counting on the cheap and easy-to-store product.

Countries are expected to begin receiving their first tranches of the AstraZeneca vaccine from Covax later in February.

The W.H.O.’s decisions come as concern is rising about whether certain variants may reduce the effectiveness of Covid-19 vaccines and treatments. The B.1.351 variant has so far generated the most worry. The AstraZeneca vaccine and other leading vaccines still appear to provide strong protection against another, more contagious coronavirus variant first identified in Britain, known as B.1.1.7.

But scientists have cautioned against drawing firm conclusions from preliminary data.

“We are so in the early stages of understanding what any specific change in the virus means for the performance of one or another of the vaccines or the vaccines as a whole,” said Katherine O’Brien, the W.H.O.’s director of immunization, vaccines and biologicals, at Wednesday’s news conference.

For now, South Africa is planning to inoculate health workers starting next week with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which prevented hospitalizations and deaths in clinical trials in the country. The vaccine is not yet authorized there, but officials said they would use it as part of an ongoing clinical trial.

As for the AstraZeneca vaccine, South African health officials indicated on Wednesday that they were considering selling or swapping their million doses of the vaccine for different shots. W.H.O. scientists said that they were open to discussing such plans as part of the Covax initiative.

The W.H.O. panel that issued recommendations on Wednesday, known as the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunization, also advised that the AstraZeneca vaccine be given to adults regardless of their ages, breaking with a number of European countries that have opted to restrict the use of the vaccine to younger people.

The W.H.O. panel also recommended that the two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine be given between four and 12 weeks apart. The guidance follows the release of a paper last week that found that the vaccine appears to work better when second doses are delayed. Britain and other countries have opted to delay second doses of the vaccine in an effort to get more first doses into their populations.

Credit…Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

At the Berkeley campus of the University of California, this was to be the month that academic life began inching back toward normal. Some students who had been sent home last year returned to their dorms in January. The first handful of in-person classes since the pandemic began had been set to resume on Feb. 1.

Instead, a wave of coronavirus infections has sent the campus into an unprecedented lockdown.

Since the beginning of the month, some 2,000 students have been confined to their rooms around the clock, unable even to visit floor-mates. The students are allowed out to go to the bathroom, get food and take twice-weekly coronavirus tests. (There are also exceptions for rare medical needs or emergencies.)

Classes are being held remotely for the foreseeable future.

Confined students are barred even from going outside to sunbathe or exercise, although the university is talking with city health officials about relaxing that prohibition.

“It’s been a little bit of a struggle,” Veronica Roseborough, a freshman quarantined in one eight-story residence hall, said on Wednesday, “but the university is doing what it can to keep cases low.”

The lockdown was ordered after the university reported 44 new infections among its staff and 43,000-plus students on Jan. 30. Since then, 183 more cases have been found, bringing the total since Sept. 9 to 724.

The number of new infections has declined since the quarantine began, officials said, but the lockdown will not end until Feb. 15.

The quarantine is not the only one on a college campus. (Last year, the University of Wisconsin-Madison shuttered 2,000 students in two dorms, and schools nationwide are struggling to control outbreaks.) But it might be the most rigid.

Security has been increased in residence halls to spot rule breakers and unwanted visitors. A cellphone-based “badge” (green for already tested, yellow for a missed test, orange and red for quarantined and Covid-19-positive) is subject to checking by so-called health ambassadors.

Flouting the rules can be costly. Violators can be suspended from classes, and student organizations can be deregistered.

But some students remain undeterred by the penalties.

“Some may disagree with me,” said one student who claimed to slip out regularly to socialize with friends (“I make sure they have a test”).

“My mental health is very important,” the student said.

Credit…Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

Coronavirus-related deaths, which rose sharply in the United States beginning in November and remain high, appear to be in a steady decline, following in the tracks of new virus cases and hospitalizations, which began to drop last month.

The country has reported about 2,800 deaths a day recently, an average that excludes one anomalous day last week when Indiana announced a large number of backlogged death reports. That national average remains far above the level of early November, before the country’s recent surge, when roughly 825 deaths were being reported daily. But it is down significantly from the peak just a few weeks ago, when the average was more than 3,300 a day.

New coronavirus cases are a leading indicator for deaths, and that statistic has been improving markedly for a month. On Tuesday, the country reported 96,400 new cases, the third day in a row of having fewer than 100,000 new recorded cases, a level not seen since early November.

The seven-day average of new cases, a more reliable indicator of the pandemic’s direction, has fallen more than 50 percent since it peaked on Jan. 8.

Whether that will continue remains in doubt. Researchers warn that a more contagious virus variant first found in Britain is doubling roughly every 10 days in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautioned last month that it could become the dominant variant in the nation by March.

Deaths tend to lag behind new cases by several weeks, and the day-to-day statistics can be prone to reporting vagaries. For a while, it was hard to discern clear signs that deaths had begun to decline. But the national trend now is unmistakable: The daily average has dropped about 18 percent since Jan. 12.

Although deaths are still rising in some states, including Alabama and South Carolina, far more are reporting sustained declines. Over the past two weeks, reports of virus deaths have dropped more than 40 percent in New Mexico and more than 30 percent in Arkansas, Colorado and Connecticut.

The declines are heartening but are not a reason for people to let down their guard, said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist and associate professor at Harvard.

Dr. Hanage said the surges in new cases and deaths in December and early January had probably stemmed from the increase in gatherings over the holidays and from the onset of winter. Influenza and most kinds of coronavirus infections peak during winter, and there is little reason to think that Covid-19 is any different. (Influenza is not a coronavirus infection, as an earlier post suggested.)

The more infectious nature of the Covid-19 virus, and the appearance of variants that may spread even more easily, remain a significant cause for caution, he said.

“If in response to these dropping numbers people relax, then it is entirely possible and expected that we will see that decline start to bottom out and even start to increase again,” he said.

A New York Times analysis found that about half of the country’s roughly 465,000 Covid-19 deaths have occurred since the brutal surge began in November.

Credit…Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times

After a two-week pause of in-person instruction, the Chicago Teachers Union said early Wednesday that its members had approved an agreement to reopen classrooms in the country’s third-largest public school system.

More than 20,000 ballots were cast, with 13,681 members voting in favor and 6,585 voting against, the union said.

Under the agreement, prekindergarten and some special education students will return to classrooms on Thursday. Staff in kindergarten through fifth-grade classrooms will return on Feb. 22, and students in those grades will return on March 1. Staff members in sixth- through eighth-grade classrooms will return March 1, and students on March 8.

Listen to ‘The Daily’: What Will It Take to Reopen Schools?

The Biden administration is determined to restart in-person learning quickly. But there are some major hurdles.

As part of the agreement, the city committed to offering 2,000 coronavirus vaccine doses this week to staff members in classrooms that were set to reopen on Thursday and any other employees who live with people who were at high risk from the virus. It would then provide 1,500 doses a week to school staff in the weeks after that.

Teachers who have no students attending in-person classes could continue to teach remotely, and unvaccinated teachers could take unpaid leaves of absence for the next quarter instead of teaching in person. The agreement also set thresholds for what would lead the district, as well as individual schools or classrooms, to temporarily revert to distance learning.

“This plan is not what any of us deserve,” Jesse Sharkey, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said in a statement. “This agreement represents where we should have started months ago, not where this has landed.”

“We will protect ourselves by using the school safety committees created under this agreement to organize and see that C.P.S. meets safety standards and mitigation protocols,” Mr. Sharkey said. “Safety Committees will enforce this agreement, have access to information and the ability to change unsafe practices in their school.”

Ms. Sharkey criticized Mayor Lori Lightfoot over her handling of the situation and said that union delegates had passed a vote of no confidence in the mayor and school leadership on Monday night.

Ms. Lightfoot and the chief executive of the district, Janice K. Jackson, said in a statement, “This vote reaffirms the strength and fairness of our plan, which provides families and employees certainty about returning to schools and guarantees the best possible health and safety protocols.”

Ms. Lightfoot, a Democrat, and the union have been locked in one of the most intense disagreements over reopening anywhere in the country. The mayor has argued that the city’s most vulnerable students need the opportunity to return to school in person, while the union condemned the city’s reopening plan as unsafe.

Credit…Chandler West/White House Photo Office

Jill Biden, the first lady, and Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman, held a series of phone calls on Wednesday with nurses’ unions, including one representing several rural areas around the country that have struggled to keep up with the coronavirus surge, according to an administration official.

In one call, nurses in Huntington, W.Va., shared concerns about dozens of colleagues they said had contracted the virus at a local hospital. In Columbus, Ohio, nurses told stories of health workers’ having to share and reuse N95 masks and fearful that their ranks will be strained by infection.

Nurses are at particularly high risk to contract the virus, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nurses, along with doctors and other workers on the front lines, have also reported high rates of depression, trauma and burnout during the pandemic.

And shortages of protective gear remain a chronic issue.

On the calls, Dr. Biden and Mr. Emhoff “told them that this administration is fighting for them,” according to a spokesman for the first lady. But mostly they listened to the nurses and promised to share what they had learned with President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris.

In the calls, each of which lasted 10 to 20 minutes, the nurses said they were thankful for the administration’s work, but they reiterated the need for more protective gear and more vaccine doses. The conversations turned emotional at times, the spokesman said.

The calls came as Dr. Biden’s broader platform began to emerge during her husband’s first weeks in office.

The first lady has made a point of publicly praising emergency workers. After the Bidens moved into the White House, one of her first official acts was to film a video to thank them, along with members of the military, for ensuring that the inauguration went safely. (When she made the video, she was still wearing her inauguration dress.)

Every four years, we celebrate the beginning of a new administration. It’s the start of a bright new chapter. A time for us all to come together. I’m so grateful to all who worked to create an incredible day – especially in this uniquely difficult year. pic.twitter.com/P3L7OYoANR

— Jill Biden (@FLOTUS) January 21, 2021

Dr. Biden’s other efforts have included a videotaped message with her husband that aired at the Super Bowl last weekend.

“We wanted to thank all the frontline health care heroes, both at the game and watching across the country,” the first lady said. “You and your families carried us through this year with courage, compassion and kindness.”

Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

A year into the pandemic, the disposable, virus-filtering N95 mask remains a coveted piece of protective gear. Continuing shortages have forced doctors and nurses to reuse their N95s, and ordinary Americans have scoured the internet — mostly in vain — to get them.

But Luis Arguello Jr. has plenty of N95s for sale — 30 million of them, in fact, which his family-run business, DemeTech, manufactured in its factories in Miami. He simply can’t seem to find buyers.

After the pandemic exposed a huge need for protective equipment, and China closed its inventory to the world, DemeTech, a medical suture maker, dived into the mask business. The company invested tens of millions of dollars in new machinery and then navigated a nine-month federal approval process that allows them to market the masks.

But demand is so slack that Mr. Arguello is preparing to lay off some of the 1,300 workers he had hired to ramp up production.

“It’s insane that we can’t get these masks to the people who desperately need them,” he said.

In one of the more confounding disconnects between the laws of supply and demand, many of the nearly two dozen small American companies that recently jumped into the business of making N95s are facing the abyss — unable to crack the market, despite vows from both former President Donald Trump and President Biden to “buy American” and buoy domestic production of essential medical gear.

These businesses must overcome the ingrained purchasing habits of hospital systems, medical supply distributors and state governments. Many buyers are loath to try the new crop of American-made masks, which are often more expensive than those produced in China. Another obstacle comes from companies like Amazon, Facebook and Google, which banned the sale and advertising of N95 masks in an effort to thwart profiteers from diverting vital medical gear needed by frontline medical workers.

What’s required, public health experts and industry executives say, is an ambitious strategy that includes federal loans, subsidies and government purchasing directives to ensure the long-term viability of a domestic industry vital to the national interest.

“The government needs to call the outsourcing of America’s mask supply what it is: a national security problem,” said Mike Bowen, the owner of Prestige Ameritech, a Texas mask producer who has testified before Congress about the need to support domestic manufacturers.

Credit…Eli Hartman/Odessa American, via Associated Press

The White House, attempting to ramp up its mass coronavirus vaccination effort, is standing up five new inoculation centers, including three in Texas and two in New York that are specifically aimed at vaccinating people of color, officials said Wednesday.

President Biden has said repeatedly that racial equity will be at the core of his coronavirus response, but there are stark racial disparities in the vaccination campaign. In some cities, wealthy white people have been flocking to clinics that primarily serve Black people and Latinos, using up scarce supplies of vaccine.

And the administration’s effort to gather race and ethnicity data on vaccine recipients is faltering.

“This is a perfect example of our equity work coming to life, and this is a model for the potential we have to do this well around the country,” Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, the chair of Mr. Biden’s Covid-19 Equity Task Force, said Wednesday during a news conference with Governor Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, referring to the new centers.

“It’s a bold step that we should take as a sign of hope,” Mr. Cuomo said.

On his first day in office, the president directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to begin establishing federally supported community vaccination centers, with the goal of having 100 centers in operation within a month. On Tuesday, the administration announced that it intends to start shipping one million doses of vaccine per week to federally supported community health centers in underserved neighborhoods.

On Sunday, Mr. Biden told Norah O’Donnell of CBS News that Roger Goodell, the commissioner of the National Football League, had extended an offer for the administration to use all 30 league stadiums to distribute Covid-19 vaccines.

People in underserved neighborhoods face a variety of obstacles in getting vaccinated, experts say, including registration phone lines and websites that can take hours to navigate, and a lack of transportation or time off from jobs to get to appointments. And people of color, particularly Black people, are more likely to be hesitant about getting vaccinated, in light of the history of unethical medical research in the United States.

But Mr. Cuomo said he rejected the term “vaccine hesitancy,” adding, “Let’s call it what it is. It’s a lack of trust — for understandable reasons.”

The New York centers will be located at York College in Queens and Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, Mr. Cuomo said, and will be capable of vaccinating 3,000 people a day. The federal government will provide a special dosage allocation for the sites, and they will be staffed jointly by the federal government, military personnel and members of the National Guard.

Last week, the administration announced that it was building two mass vaccination clinics in California, one in Los Angeles and the other in Oakland. The Texas clinics will be located in Arlington, Dallas and Houston, White House officials said.

Credit…Tojo Andrianarivo for The New York Times

Primary care doctors have grown increasingly frustrated with their exclusion from the nation’s vaccine rollout, unable to find reliable supplies for even their eldest patients and lacking basic information about distribution planning for the shots.

“The centerpiece should be primary care,” said Dr. Wayne Altman, the chairman of family medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, who also sees patients in Arlington, Mass. State officials there are using Fenway Park and Gillette Stadium as mass vaccination sites, rather than ensuring practices like his can inoculate patients who are at high risk from the coronavirus.

“If you distribute the vaccine to all these practices and let them go at their pace, it would accelerate this rollout dramatically,” Dr. Altman said.

There are roughly 500,000 primary care doctors in the United States, who have traditionally administered nearly half of all adult vaccinations, inoculating their patients against pneumonia, flu and other infectious diseases. While most physician offices can’t handle storage for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine because of its need for special freezers, doctors say they could easily administer the Moderna vaccine with adequate storage measures as well as some of the others likely to become available soon.

“We’re ready,” said Dr. Elizabeth Kozak, an internist in Grand Rapids, Mich. She was approved in early January to deliver the Moderna vaccine. “We haven’t seen a thing, but we’re ready.”

While some physicians say they have received small amounts of the vaccine, many say they are still waiting for any indication about when they might get doses and how they fit into the long-range timetable for broader distribution.

Doctors say they are critical to reaching people who would not otherwise get a vaccine because they are unable or unwilling to go to mass vaccination sites or even their local pharmacy.

“We can’t have one or two strategies for vaccine distribution,” said Dr. Evan Saulino, a family physician in Portland, Ore., who has talked to patients, including those who are Black or Spanish-speaking, who are not sure they want the vaccine. Some of his patients are distrustful of the government and may not want to get a shot from someone in uniform. One person he spoke with would not go to the drugstore but might consider being inoculated at his clinic.

Dr. Kozak, the internist from Michigan, agreed, saying doctors like her could focus their attention on people who can’t easily navigate the current set up. “We might not be able to do the numbers but we are able to do the more fragile and vulnerable populations,” she said.

Global Roundup

Credit…Hollie Adams/Getty Images

Vacationing abroad may not be possible for residents of Britain until all adults in the country have been vaccinated, a government official said on Wednesday, raising questions about how the tourism industry might cope with such restrictions and dashing hopes of many who hoped that a relatively successful vaccine rollout in Britain could let them enjoy trips abroad this summer.

The transportation secretary, Grant Shapps, said on British television that international travel would depend on “everybody having their vaccinations” in Britain, and that restrictions could remain as long as other countries have not made significant progress in vaccinations.

“We’ll need to wait for other countries to catch up as well, in order to do that wider international unlock,” Mr. Shapps said.

As of Wednesday, Britain had administered more than 12.5 million vaccine doses, equivalent to about 18 percent of its population, one of the highest rates in the world. At the current pace, the country is on track to give the first shot of a two-dose coronavirus vaccine to its entire population by the end of June.

The authorities have reported a sharp drop in the number of infections in recent days, and Prime Minister Boris Johnson is expected to announce a potential loosening of restrictions this month.

But on Wednesday, Mr. Shapps urged caution about travel plans for this year and advised people not to book vacations either within Britain or abroad. “I’m afraid I can’t give you a definitive ‘will there or will there not be’ the opportunity to take holidays,” he told Sky News.

Mr. Shapps’s warning came a day after the authorities announced new travel restrictions, including prison sentences of up to 10 years for anyone traveling to Britain who lies about where they’ve been.

Mr. Shapps called the measures, including the jail sentence, “appropriate.” Under other restrictions that are set to come into force on Monday, British residents arriving in England from more than 30 countries where coronavirus variants are believed to be widespread, will have to pay up to 1,750 pounds ($2,410) for a 10-day quarantine in government-managed hotel rooms.

Britain has reported 114,000 deaths from the coronavirus, the world’s fifth-highest known death toll.

In other developments around the world.

Mexico authorized China’s Sinovac Covid-19 vaccine for emergency use, said Hugo Lopez-Gatell, the deputy health minister, Reuters reported. Earlier this month, the country also authorized the Russian coronavirus vaccine, Sputnik V, for use.

Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of Japan said on Wednesday that the country would begin its vaccination program next week, starting with medical workers.
The leaders of the World Health Organization and the United Nations agency for children, Unicef, warned in a joint statement that the vast chasm of inequality in the global vaccine rollout will “cost lives and livelihoods, give the virus further opportunity to mutate and evade vaccines and will undermine a global economic recovery.” Of the 128 million vaccine doses administered globally, more than three quarters were in just 10 countries, while nearly 130 other countries are yet to administer a single dose, the statement said.

Credit…U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, via Associated Press

Many were clever fakes.

They were stamped with the 3M logo, and shipped in boxes that read, “Made in the U.S.A.”

But these supposed N95 masks were not produced by 3M, and not made in the United States, federal investigators said Wednesday.

They were counterfeits, and millions of them were bought by hospitals, medical institutions and government agencies in at least five states, federal authorities said as they announced an investigation.

Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, said the masks were dangerous because they may not offer the same level of protection against the coronavirus as genuine N95s.

“We don’t know if they meet the standards,” said Brian Weinhaus, a special agent with Homeland Security Investigations.

Cassie Sauer, the president and chief executive of the Washington State Hospital Association, said about two million counterfeit masks might have made it into the state. They were “really good fakes,” she said.

“They look, they feel, they fit and they breathe like a 3M mask,” Ms. Sauer said.

News of the investigation came the same day the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence branch warned law enforcement agencies that criminals on the dark web have been selling counterfeit coronavirus vaccines for “hundreds of dollars per dose.”

Credit…Lena Mucha for The New York Times

Germany will remain in lockdown for at least another month because of the danger of more infectious variants of the virus, Chancellor Angela Merkel and governors decided on Wednesday.

“We know that this mutation is a reality now and we know it will increase,” said Ms. Merkel after meeting with governors from the 16 German states. “The question is how quickly will it increase.”

Although a sharp drop in new daily infections shows that a nearly two-month lockdown is having an effect, the authorities worry about the spread of more infectious variants. Nearly 6 percent of the positive coronavirus cases in Germany were found to be caused by more contagious variants, with the variant that has been found in Britain dominating.

The lockdown extension is designed to prevent the contagious variants from gaining steam.

Most shops, museums and services will remain closed until the number of new infections reaches an average of 35 cases per 100,000 people over a week, a rate that should be reached by March if the current trend holds. Over the past week, there has been an average of 68 cases per 100,000 people. The reopening of schools and day care centers, which the government has prioritized, will be overseen by the states and will most likely happen sooner. Hair salons are allowed to open on March 1 under strict safety rules. The opening of other businesses, such as gyms, bars and restaurants, will be discussed at a future meeting, Ms. Merkel said.

Over the past week, there has been an average of 8,887 new cases per day in Germany, far fewer than the nearly 25,000 a day around Christmas, according to a New York Times database.

The lockdown rules are in effect until March 7. Ms. Merkel and state governors will meet again on March 3, to decide on future measures.

Credit…Johanna Geron/Reuters

A top European Union official said on Wednesday that the bloc was “not where we want to be” in handling the pandemic, after missteps in lining up vaccine supplies left it lagging behind other countries.

“We were late to authorize,” the official, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, told lawmakers in Brussels.

“We were too optimistic when it came to massive production, and perhaps too confident that what we ordered would actually be delivered on time,” she said. “We need to ask ourselves why that is the case.”

She stood by the view that buying vaccine doses as a bloc had been the right decision, however.

“I cannot even imagine what would have happened if just a handful of big players — big member states — had rushed to it and everybody else would have been left empty-handed,” she said, adding that it would have been “the end of our community.”

Her comments came as criticism has mounted over Ms. Von der Leyen’s handling of negotiations with pharmaceutical companies to secure vaccines for the 450 million people living in the bloc’s 27 member states.

Whereas Britain and United States have surged ahead in rolling out vaccines, the European Union has been more cautious and price-conscious, leading to a crisis after vaccine producers said there were delays in filing orders.

Its tensions with Britain, which left the bloc’s authority at the end of last year, were magnified after the Commission reversed an attempt last month to restrict vaccine exports into the country via Northern Ireland.

“The bottom line is that mistakes were made in the process leading up to the decision,” Ms. von der Leyen said on Wednesday. “And I deeply regret that. But in the end, we got it right.”

Over 17 million people, or about 4 percent of people living in the bloc, have received at least one vaccine dose, she said.

Tags Covid19, global, Live, Pandemic, Updates, Vaccine

Business

Reside Inventory Market Updates – The New York Instances

Post author By
Post date February 10, 2021

“GM.’s 2020 performance was remarkable by any measure,” said Mary Barra, the General Motors chief executive.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Rebecca Cook/Reuters

General Motors said on Wednesday that it earned $6.4 billion in 2020, a modest decline from the year before, as brisk sales of pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles in the second half of the year offset the damage on its business caused by the pandemic in the spring.

The automaker reported that revenue declined 11 percent to $122 billion from $137 billion in 2019, when it reported net income of $6.7 billion.

“G.M.’s 2020 performance was remarkable by any measure, and even more so in a year when a global pandemic caused companies around the world — including G.M. — to temporarily suspend manufacturing,” Mary Barra, the company’s chief executive, said in a letter to shareholders.

The pandemic forced G.M. and other automakers to close all of their North American plants for about 60 days last spring, and caused a deep drop in sales of new vehicles.

Automakers also struggled in the pandemic with a shortage of semiconductors needed for features like touch screens, computerized engine controls and transmissions. New cars can have more than a hundred semiconductors.

The shortage of chips is expected to last well into 2021. This led G.M. to cut its forecast for operating profit this year by $1.5 billion to $2 billion.

In a conference call with reporters, Ms. Barra said G.M. was working with suppliers to ensure it had the chips it needed, and it expected to be able to make up for any lost production over the course of the year.

“The semiconductor shortage won’t slow our growth plans, and without mitigation strategies we still expect to see a very good year for General Motors,” she said. “Right now, we won’t lose any production as it relates to full-size trucks and S.U.V.s throughout the year.”

Among the full-size vehicles the company is counting on is an electric Hummer pickup truck that it will begin delivering late this year. It is one of 30 electric cars G.M. plans to introduce by 2025 as part of a broader goal it set late last month to sell only zero-emission vehicles by 2035.

The company currently makes only a few electric vehicles, including the Chevrolet Bolt, but it is spending heavily to increase its offerings and compete with Tesla, the leading electric carmaker. This year, G.M. will spend more than $7 billion on developing electric and autonomous vehicles. By 2025, it plans to spend more than $27 billion on those two technologies.

Ms. Barra said on Wednesday that she and other G.M. officials had spoken with President Biden and his aides about the company’s plans for electric and autonomous vehicles. Mr. Biden has said he intends to step up the fight against climate change and wants the government to help create millions of jobs in renewable energy and auto manufacturing.

“The Biden administration is increasingly aligned around the importance of domestic manufacturing and the need for widespread adoption of E.V.s,” she said. “We look forward to working with the administration on policies that support safe transportation and zero emissions.”

Credit…Chris Helgren/Reuters

United Airlines plans to invest in and buy as many as 200 aircraft from Archer Aviation, an electric air taxi start-up that announced plans on Wednesday to go public, in a deal that Archer said valued it at about $3.8 billion.

“Part of how United will combat global warming is embracing emerging technologies that decarbonize air travel,” United’s chief executive, Scott Kirby, said in a statement on Wednesday. “By working with Archer, United is showing the aviation industry that now is the time to embrace cleaner, more efficient modes of transportation.”

United is investing about $20 million in Archer, and an additional $5 million will come from Mesa Airlines, which operates regional flights for United and others. The airline’s tentative aircraft order is valued at up to $1 billion, Archer said in a statement. United said it would only purchase the aircraft once they were available and had met its operating and business requirements.

The aircraft, which can travel at speeds of up to 150 miles an hour for up to 60 miles, would be used within the next five years to let United’s customers commute in dense urban areas or quickly reach the airline’s airport hubs, United said. The aircraft are set to debut this year, according to Archer, which is based in California.

The news follows United’s announcement late last year that it plans to become carbon-neutral by 2050, in part by investing in a “direct air capture” plant in Texas that will remove carbon dioxide from the sky and inject it underground.

Archer said it planned to go public via a sale to a blank-check company, also known as a special purpose acquisition company. The combined company is expected to raise about $600 million from investors, including United, the newly formed carmaker Stellantis and others. The company expects to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ACHR.

Credit…Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

U.S. markets

The S&P 500 rose less than half a percent on Wednesday, rebounding from a small decline the day before.
General Motors on Wednesday reported $6.4 billion profit for 2020, as brisk sales of pickup trucks and sport-utility vehicles in the fall offset the pandemic disruptions in the spring. Its shares fell about 5 percent, however.
Twitter’s shares rose 14 percent in early trading after the company said on Tuesday that its revenue rose 28 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the previous year.
Lyft jumped about 9 percent after the company’s fourth-quarter revenue — although down sharply from a year ago — was higher than the previous period.

Commodities

Commodities prices rose to multiyear highs as traders anticipated stronger demand for raw materials to aid the economic recovery. West Texas Intermediate futures, the U.S. crude benchmark, gained 0.5 percent to $58.67 a barrel, the highest level since April 2019. Brent prices climbed to $61.50 a barrel, the highest since July 2019.
Copper prices, which have been climbing for 10 straight months, approached an eight-year high in London trading. The metal is seen as good predictor for the direction of the global economy given its broad usage, especially for the wiring for power transmission.

Europe

The Stoxx Europe 600 index gained 0.3 percent, helped by advances among banking companies. Gains were led by Adyen, a Dutch payments company that handles transactions for companies including eBay, after it raised its growth expectations. Adyen’s shares were at a record high, having more than doubled over the past year.

Asia

Credit…Jason Henry for The New York Times

Salesforce, the business software giant and San Francisco’s largest employer, said on Tuesday that it would allow most of its employees to permanently work remotely on a full- or part-time basis.

The company, which has 54,000 employees, said most workers would visit the office one to three days a week for meetings and collaborative work. A small population will work from the office four or five days a week, and other Salesforce workers who don’t live nearby or need an office will be fully remote.

Tech companies have been at the forefront of permanent work-from-home policies. In May, Facebook was one of the first to announce that it would allow many employees to work remotely even after the pandemic. Twitter, Coinbase, Shopify and Microsoft have followed suit.

Salesforce said in December it would buy the workplace chat app Slack. Over the summer, as Salesforce and other companies toyed with the idea of returning to the office, Marc Benioff, Salesforce’s chief executive, seemed to acknowledge that office work would be permanently changed.

“I just feel very strongly that we have the ability to do something very powerfully here and to motivate this new workplace, just like we did in the prior workplace,” Mr. Benioff said at the time. “Technology is actually going to become a critical part of managing our workplace, where before it was not part of our culture.”

Salesforce said it planned to redesign offices to create more spaces that foster collaboration, including “café-style seating, open-air conference areas and private nooks, with an emphasis on clean desks and social distancing,” the company said in a statement.

Credit…Yicun Liu/Riot Games

Riot Games, the video game publisher that produced the popular title League of Legends, said Tuesday it was investigating claims of sexual harassment and gender discrimination against its chief executive, Nicolo Laurent.

Mr. Laurent and Riot were sued in Los Angeles County Superior Court in January by Sharon O’Donnell, a former executive assistant to Mr. Laurent. In court documents, Ms. O’Donnell said Mr. Laurent repeatedly made sexually suggestive remarks to her, asked her to work at his house when his wife was not home, and told women who worked for Riot that the way to handle stress related to the coronavirus pandemic was to “have kids.”

“Riot Games is a male-dominated culture,” the lawsuit said. Female employees like Ms. O’Donnell were “discriminated against, harassed and treated as second-class citizens,” it said.

When she refused Mr. Laurent’s advances, Ms. O’Donnell said in the lawsuit, he yelled at her, grew hostile, took away some of her responsibilities and eventually fired her in July.

Ms. O’Donnell “believes that this was because she refused to have sex or an affair with the defendant,” according to the lawsuit, which was first reported on Tuesday by Daily Esports.

Riot disputed Ms. O’Donnell’s claim in a statement, saying she “was dismissed from the company over seven months ago based on multiple well-documented complaints from a variety of people.”

Riot said an outside law firm was conducting the investigation into Mr. Laurent and was being overseen by a committee of the company’s board of directors. Riot said Mr. Laurent was cooperating with the investigation.

Riot, which is owned by the Chinese internet giant Tencent, has grown into one of the world’s most prominent video game companies.

Its flagship League of Legends game, released in 2009, brought in more than $1.8 billion in revenue last year, according to an estimate from the research firm SuperData. And the series of professional competitions Riot has built around the game has attracted tens of millions of fans and turned star gamers into e-sports celebrities who can make millions of dollars.

But Riot has also been under fire for what employees have said is a sexist, toxic workplace. In 2019, it agreed to pay $10 million to the 1,000 women who had worked at the company since 2014 to settle a class-action lawsuit claiming gender discrimination and unequal pay.

California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing, which has been investigating Riot since 2018, said last year that the women could be entitled to as much as $400 million, which Riot disputed. It said earlier this month that it was moving forward in court with an effort to seek “class-wide relief” for the women who worked at Riot.

Aunt Jemima formally rebranded itself on Tuesday as the Pearl Milling Company, moving one step closer to permanently abandoning the breakfast product line’s likeness that critics had long said perpetuated a racist stereotype for more than a century. The new name comes from the milling company in St. Joseph, Mo., that pioneered the self-rising pancake mix that became known as Aunt Jemima.
Heineken, the big brewer based in Amsterdam, said on Wednesday it would lay off 8,000 workers, or almost 10 percent of its work force, as it confronts a steep fall in beer sales to restaurants and bars closed because of the pandemic. The company reported an 18 percent drop in net revenue for 2020, and a 79 percent fall in operating profit. Dolf van den Brink, the chief executive, called it a “year of unprecedented disruption and transition.”
Lyft said on Tuesday that revenue for the fourth quarter of 2020 was $570 million, a 44 percent decline from the year before but in line with Wall Street expectations. Losses increased 22 percent, to $458.2 million. Revenue for 2020 was down 35 percent, to $2.4 billion.
Twitter said on Tuesday that its revenue in the fourth quarter last year was $1.29 billion, a 28 percent increase from the previous year and slightly above Wall Street expectations. Profit for the quarter was $222 million, bolstered by a turnaround in income after a significant drop in ad spending earlier in 2020. The company lost $1.14 billion for the year.

Tags Live, market, Stock, Times, Updates, York

Business

Inventory Market, Bitcoin, Tesla: Reside Enterprise Information Updates

Post author By
Post date February 9, 2021

A Bitcoin A.T.M. in New York. Bitcoin continued to rise, fueled by Tesla’s announcement that it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of the digital currency.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

Bitcoin continued its rally, the latest leg of which was set off by Tesla’s announcement on Monday that it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of the digital currency and would start accepting Bitcoin payments. Bitcoin rose above $48,000 per coin early on Tuesday, a record, before coming off that high later, according to CoinDesk, a trading platform for digital currencies.

It is up more than 45 percent in 2021, and other cryptocurrencies are rising, too — including Dogecoin, which rose about 1,000 percent over the past week.

The momentum has been building as more trading apps allow users to buy, hold and sell cryptocurrencies, reported Nathaniel Popper for The New York Times: “The rally is a moment of euphoria for the thousands of different versions of digital money, which years ago were dismissed as little more than online Beanie Babies caught in a speculative bubble,” he wrote.

Stock markets

On Wall Street, the S&P 500 was slightly lower in early trading Tuesday, after the index had climbed to another record on Monday. Through Monday, the S&P 500 had climbed for six consecutive trading days.
European market were modestly changed, with the FTSE in Britain up slightly while the Stoxx Europe 600 was slightly lower.
The Nikkei in Japan gained 0.4 percent, while the Kospi in South Korea fell 0.2 percent.

Stimulus checks

Democrats in the House on Monday proposed legislation to send stimulus checks of $1,400 to Americans earning up to $75,000 and households with incomes up to $150,000. The direct payments are a critical part of President Biden’s stimulus plan, although the proposal may run into opposition from Republicans and some Democrats who want to focus the payments on lower-income Americans.
House committees on Tuesday are expected to begin considering the overall $1.9 trillion package, aimed at supporting the economy through the pandemic.

Benefits of lockdown

Ocado, the online supermarket based in Britain, reported a 35 percent rise in sales over the past year. As the company invests in new warehouses, “The landscape for food retailing is changing, for good,” said the chief executive, Tim Steiner.
Still, the company reported a net loss of 44 million pounds (about $60 million), down from 215 million pounds the previous year, and its shares fell.

Credit…Leah Millis/Reuters

Neera Tanden, President Biden’s nominee to head the Office of Management and Budget, will tell a Senate committee this morning that she would “work in good faith with all members of Congress” if confirmed, in a bid to head off Republican complaints about her past criticisms of conservatives.

Ms. Tanden is the president of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank, a veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations and a former top aide to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. She is set to testify on Tuesday morning before the Senate Homeland Security committee, with a second hearing scheduled for Wednesday before the budget committee.

Republicans in the Senate have criticized Ms. Tanden for past statements, including Twitter posts, in which she criticized Republicans in Congress and elsewhere. Ms. Tanden will nod to those criticisms in the opening statement she has prepared for delivery.

“The role of O.M.B. director is different from some of my past positions,” she plans to say. “Over the last few years, it’s been part of my role to be an impassioned advocate. I understand, though, that the role of O.M.B. director calls for bipartisan action, as well as a nonpartisan adherence to facts and evidence.”

Ms. Tanden will also stress her qualifications for the job, including her experience being raised by an immigrant single mother who was forced to draw on the government safety net at times.

“We relied on food stamps to eat, and Section 8 vouchers to pay the rent,” Ms. Tanden will say. “At school, I remember being the only kid in the cafeteria line who used 10-cent vouchers from the Free Lunch Program. I remember using food stamps at the grocery store.”

“If I am privileged to serve as director,” she will say, “I would ensure that O.M.B. uses every tool at its disposal to efficiently and effectively deliver for working Americans, small businesses, and struggling communities.”

Credit…Fox

The chief executive of Fox News, Suzanne Scott, will remain in her role for several years to come after signing a new contract with Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Corporation, the network said on Tuesday.

The new multiyear deal will keep Ms. Scott as the leader of Fox News Media, which also includes the cable channel Fox Business and the streaming service Fox Nation.

“Suzanne’s track record of success, innovative sprit and dedication to excellence make her the ideal person to continue to lead and grow Fox News,” Lachlan Murdoch, the executive chairman of the Fox Corporation and Rupert Murdoch’s eldest son, said in a statement on Tuesday.

The network did not disclose the exact length or financial terms of the deal.

Fox News is facing a major defamation lawsuit and working to regain the ratings crown it recently lost to CNN for the first time in decades. Some viewers left the network for alternative channels like Newsmax after Fox’s news division called the presidential election for Joseph R. Biden Jr., over the protestations of then-President Trump.

Until Election Day, though, Fox News had been enjoying another record year under Ms. Scott’s tenure. Its weeknight lineup ended the year as the third-most-watched in all of prime-time television, ahead of the ABC broadcast network.

“I am grateful to Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch for the opportunity to continue leading Fox News Media and positioning all of our platforms for future success,” Ms. Scott said in a statement.

Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

House Democrats on Monday rolled out a key plank of President Biden’s stimulus plan, proposing legislation to send direct payments of $1,400 to Americans earning up to $75,000 and households with incomes up to $150,000.

The plan, drafted the day before key committees are scheduled to being meeting to consider it, is at odds with proposals from some Republicans and moderate Democrats who want to curtail eligibility for direct payments, targeting it to lower income people. Mr. Biden has said he is open to such modifications.

For now, the measure would allow individuals earning up to $100,000 and households earning up to $200,000 to be eligible for some payment, though the size of the checks would phase out gradually for those with incomes above $75,000, or $150,000 for a family.

The bill, unveiled by Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, was one of a series that Democrats presented on Monday ahead of a week of legislative work to solidify the details of Mr. Biden’s stimulus proposal.

The decision to keep the income cap at the same level as the last round of stimulus payments comes after days of debate among the House Democratic caucus over the size of the checks, as some moderates pushed to restrict the full amount to those who make $50,000 or less and households earning up to $100,000.

The legislation also includes a series of significant changes to the tax code and an increase in an extension of weekly federal unemployment benefits. It would raise the $300-a-week payment to $400 a week and continue the program — currently slated to begin lapsing in March — through the end of August.

The $1.9 trillion plan would also provide for billions of dollars for schools and colleges, small businesses and a provision that would increase the federal minimum wage to $15 by 2025, a progressive priority.

Credit…Mike Blake/Reuters

Cryptocurrency prices are soaring after Tesla said that it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin with company funds. The electric carmaker wasn’t the first company to shift corporate cash into cryptocurrencies, but it was one of the biggest. It could make finance chiefs elsewhere consider whether they should follow suit, the DealBook newsletter reports.

Tesla’s move is an “exclamation point” for institutional acceptance of Bitcoin, said Matthew Graham, the chief executive of the Beijing-based blockchain investment firm Sino Global Capital. “It’s clear that Bitcoin is ready for Main Street.”

Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, is known for bucking convention, so his company’s purchase is not as surprising as it would be at, say, Ford or General Motors.

Tesla had more than $19 billion in cash at the end of 2020, a big enough cushion to make the Bitcoin purchase a relatively small share of its resources. But much of that cash was raised in recent stock sales, and the company only recently reported its second year of positive free cash flow. Because of Bitcoin’s unique characteristics, Tesla will have to record declines in the value of its Bitcoin against its earnings, but cannot book gains.

The software company MicroStrategy now holds Bitcoin worth about a third of its market capitalization, according to a site that tracks corporate holdings. MicroStrategy’s chief, Michael Saylor, held a conference last week that promoted Bitcoin for corporations.

Naresh Aggarwal of the Association of Corporate Treasurers in London is skeptical that many companies will follow Tesla and MicroStrategy and buy Bitcoin at scale. “Gold is probably a more traditional form of alternative investment,” he said, yet few firms outside the financial sector hold it. “If they’re not tempted by gold, then I can’t see them being tempted by Bitcoin,” he added, likening it to “putting money on a horse race.”

Keeping money in liquid, safe investments is particularly important during the pandemic, and many corporate finance chiefs remember being burned in 2008 by higher-yielding alternatives.

Credit…Maggie Shannon for The New York Times

The race to distribute vaccines and the emergence of more contagious variants of the coronavirus have put a renewed spotlight on the plight of grocery workers in the United States.

The industry has boomed in the past year as Americans have stayed home and avoided restaurants. But in most cases, that has not translated into extra pay for its workers, Sapna Maheshwari and Michael Corkery report for The New York Times. After Long Beach, Calif., mandated hazard pay for grocery workers, the grocery giant Kroger responded last week by saying it would close two locations.

And now, even as experts warn people to minimize time spent in grocery stores because of new coronavirus variants, The Times found only 13 states that had started specifically vaccinating those workers.

“Kroger is sending a message, more than anything else,” said Andrea Zinder, president of Local 324 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, which represents about 160 employees at the two stores. “They are trying to intimidate workers and communities: If you pass these types of ordinances, there will be consequences.”

Kroger, which operates about 2,750 stores, has attracted particular attention because it pursued stock buybacks last year and because its chief executive, Rodney McMullen, earned more than $20 million in 2019. The median compensation of a Kroger employee that year was $26,790, or a ratio of 789 to 1, according to company filings.

Credit…General Motors, via Agence-France Press — Getty Images

“I’ve been writing about the auto industry for 19 years, and I’ve really never seen anything like this,” Neal E. Boudette, who covers the auto industry for The New York Times, told Shira Ovide in this week’s On Tech newsletter.

“When I saw the G.M. news, I sat back in my chair and reflected on how revolutionary this was,” Mr. Boudette said. “G.M., for more than a century, has been producing internal combustion engine vehicles, and soon it won’t be.

“We’re on the cusp of one of those big industrial transformations in which we shift from an old way of doing things to a completely new one, and everything will be turned upside down.”

They discussed the future of cars and whether traditional automakers or tech-focused companies, like Tesla and Apple, would rule the next generation of the roads.

“It’s not either-or,” Mr. Boudette said. “The companies that succeed will need to think like the other side. Auto companies need to adapt the mind-set and expertise of tech firms, and vice versa.”

Credit…Mandel Ngan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

For weeks, policy veterans have been fretting among themselves over the scale of President Biden’s proposal for more pandemic aid, in private emails and text chains, Neil Irwin reports for The New York Times.

Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, made those concerns public with an op-ed article in The Washington Post last week. The article received some support on Twitter from another economist from the Obama administration and from a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund.

The core question is whether the administration’s $1.9 trillion plan is too big. Is action on that scale needed to contain the economic damage from the pandemic? Or is it far too big relative to the hole the economy’s in, thus setting the stage for a burst of inflation followed by a potential recession?

Mr. Summers argues that the plan’s total size reaches a scale that risks major future problems. That implies that much of that spending will just slosh around the economy, causing prices to rise.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other top officials argue that their proposal is prudent and appropriately scaled and that the United States is in a do-whatever-it-takes moment. They do not dismiss the possibility that there will be higher inflation down the road — but say it is a manageable risk.
The economy is in uncharted territory. There is a lot of money poised to be spent, and some things may reduce the supply of goods and services. Lots of money chasing finite supply is an Economics 101 recipe for surging prices.
But for the medium term, the more important question is whether any inflation surge would be a temporary not-so-harmful phenomenon or the start of something more lasting.

Tags bitcoin, business, Live, market, News, Stock, Tesla, Updates

Business

Pandemic Stymies Labor Market Restoration: Dwell Updates

Post author By
Post date February 5, 2021

Volunteers distribute donations at a food bank in Pflugerville, Tex., on Wednesday. Emergency aid programs are set to end in March.

Here’s what you need to know:

Job growth is stalling

Cumulative change in all jobs since before the pandemic

By Ella Koeze·Seasonally adjusted·Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

The American economy produced little relief last month as the winter pandemic surge continued to stymie a rebound in the labor market. The weak showing comes in the midst of a fresh effort in Washington to provide a big infusion of aid to foster a recovery.

U.S. employers added 49,000 jobs in January, the Labor Department said Friday. The number reflected a disappointing month of hiring even as it provided hope of renewed economic momentum.

The unemployment rate fell to 6.3 percent, from 6.7 percent.

Unemployment rate

By Ella Koeze·Seasonally adjusted·Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

The limited January gains followed an outright setback in December, when the economy shed jobs for the first time since April. December’s loss, originally stated at 140,000, was revised on Friday to 227,000. The gain for November was revised from 336,000 to 264,000.

There was a small victory in avoiding a second consecutive month of job losses, a prospect that some economists had feared given the one-two punch of rising coronavirus cases and waning federal aid.

“It is a positive sign that we got over those speed bumps and the wheels haven’t completely come off the car,” said Nick Bunker, head of research for the job site Indeed.

But Mr. Bunker said the gains were nothing to celebrate. The economy still has more than nine million fewer jobs than it did before the pandemic, and progress has slowed significantly since the summer. Unlike in December, when job losses were concentrated in a few pandemic-exposed sectors, the weakness in January was broad-based, with manufacturers, retailers and transportation companies all cutting jobs.

“It’s not clear that this one month assuages those concerns,” he said. “A hundred thousand here, a hundred thousand there is steady progress, but it’s not the sort of gains we need to see.”

Looking to strengthen the recovery, President Biden and congressional Democrats have been pressing for a $1.9 trillion relief measure. The legislation took a step forward early Friday when the Senate narrowly passed a budget resolution that will next go to the House, where Democrats will not need Republican support to approve it.

Some Republicans have said a smaller package would suffice, and others have said it is too soon for another round of aid.

Nearly a year after the pandemic devastated the job market, many forecasters predict that the economy will strengthen from here on. The $900 billion federal relief package enacted in December is expected to bolster the economy, with more aid potentially on the way. The vaccination push, though slower than hoped, is paving the way for wider reopenings even as coronavirus mutations around the world make the rollout more urgent.

“There should be a tailwind at the economy’s back,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at the online job site ZipRecruiter. “We’ll need all the tailwinds we can get.”

But the winter slowdown could leave lasting wounds. Though the economy has regained more than half of the 22 million jobs lost last spring, millions of people have been unemployed for a long period — potentially making it harder to rejoin the work force — or are no longer classified as unemployed because they have stopped looking for a job.

“It is difficult on a monthly basis to really see what the long-term impacts will be,” said Daniel Zhao, an economist with the career site Glassdoor. “But certainly the long-term economic scarring is something that is a huge concern for the recovery.”

Credit…Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

As the pandemic recession drags on, more Americans are falling into long-term unemployment — a growing scourge that could threaten not just individual workers but the economic recovery as a whole.

More than four million people in January had been out of work for more than six months, the standard definition of long-term unemployment. That was up slightly from December and almost four times the number before the pandemic began.

The long-term jobless now account for nearly 40 percent of all unemployed workers, the biggest share since the aftermath of the recession of 2007-9. That doesn’t count people who have given up looking for jobs or who can’t work because of child care or other responsibilities.

The long-term jobless got a lifeline in December when Congress extended emergency programs that offer help to people whose regular benefits have expired. But another cliff is coming: Those programs are set to end in March, when there will almost certainly still be millions of people relying on them to pay rent and buy food.

Long-term unemployment continues to rise

Share of unemployed who have been out of work 27 weeks or longer

By Ella Koeze·Seasonally adjusted·Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

“People still haven’t recovered from the December cliff, so they are just being kept in this constant cycle of panic,” said Stephanie Freed, a laid-off lighting designer who last year started an advocacy group for the unemployed.

Even with aid, however, the long-term jobless could face challenges that endure after the pandemic ends. Economic research has shown that when people are unemployed for extended periods, they have a harder time finding jobs. That — combined with businesses that have likewise faced a prolonged hibernation — could leave lasting economic damage.

“The longer a recession lasts, the more there can be permanent scarring,” said Beth Ann Bovino, the chief U.S. economist for S&P Global Ratings Services. “For those people who are long-term unemployed, those businesses that need to reopen, it takes time. It’s not like switching on and off the light bulb.”

Joblessness remained especially elevated for people of color in January as the pandemic continued to affect sectors where they are more likely to work.

The unemployment rate for Hispanic workers stood at 8.6 percent, exactly double where it was a year earlier. For Asian workers, joblessness was at 6.6 percent, more than twice its 3.1 percent level last January.

Black workers had the highest unemployment rate of any major racial or ethnic group, at 9.2 percent last month, up from 6.1 percent a year earlier. Unemployment for white workers is the lowest, at 5.7 percent, though that is still up significantly compared with 3 percent last January.

The figures underline that although the pandemic’s labor market effects have inflicted widespread damage, workers of color continue to shoulder a heavy burden as labor market weakness drags on.

Asian and Hispanic women’s unemployment rates grew the most

Unemployment rates for Black, Hispanic, Asian and white men

Unemployment rates for Black, Hispanic, Asian and white women

By Ella Koeze·Rates are seasonally adjusted except those for Asian men and women.·Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

Women have also borne a major share of the pandemic’s economic fallout. The labor force participation rate — which tracks the share of the population either working or looking for jobs — is down 2.1 percentage points from last year for women 16 and older, compared with a 1.8-percentage-point drop for men.

Women may be lingering on the labor market’s sidelines for several reasons. They are more likely to work in service jobs affected by lockdowns and social distancing, and child care duties have fallen more heavily on mothers as the pandemic shutters schools and day care centers, studies have shown.

The Federal Reserve is attuned to those differences as it assesses the job market.

“When we say that the maximum employment is a broad and inclusive goal, what we’re seeing there is we’re not just going to look at the headline,” Jerome H. Powell, the Fed’s chair, said at a news conference late last month. “We’re going to look at different demographic groups, including women, minorities and others.”

The share of people working or looking for work remained depressed in January relative to its pre-pandemic level, underlining the labor market’s continued weakness.

The so-called labor force participation rate hovered at 61.4 percent last month, the Labor Department said on Friday, little changed from December and down from 63.3 percent in February 2020, just before the crisis took hold. The measure of work force attachment had slumped as low as 60.2 percent last April, and now it seems to have leveled off after rebounding only partway.

People who have left the labor force altogether have still not been replaced

Share of the working-age population who are in the labor force (employed, unemployed but looking for work or on temporary layoff)

By Ella Koeze·Seasonally adjusted·Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

That so many people remain outside of the work force suggests there is more weakness in the labor market than implied by the slowly declining headline unemployment rate, which tracks only people who are actively applying for work. Continued shutdowns and health concerns could be keeping would-be job seekers on the sidelines.

“The third wave of the virus may have dissuaded some individuals from applying for jobs,” Spencer Hill at Goldman Sachs wrote in a note previewing the report.

For people in their prime working years, classified as 25 to 54 years old, labor force participation came in at 81.1 percent in January. That figure stood at 82.9 percent last February and fell to 79.8 percent during the worst part of the pandemic.

Economists and policymakers are closely watching measures of labor force attachment to gauge how far the job market is from full recovery. After the 2007-9 recession, participation for workers in their prime unexpectedly rebounded as some who were believed to have permanently dropped out of the job market began to look for jobs or take open positions.

“Clearly, we have a ways to go before we get back to the vibrant economy we had on the eve of the pandemic, when the unemployment rate stood at 3.5 percent and there were nearly 10 million more people on payrolls,” Charles Evans, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, said in a speech this week.

Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York Times

The Labor Department’s report on Friday that the economy added 49,000 jobs in January, while unemployment fell to 6.3 percent, is fueling a push by President Biden and congressional Democrats to pass a $1.9 trillion aid package as soon as this month.

The report showed the economy remains 10 million jobs below its pre-pandemic levels, with sluggish job growth outside of government: The private sector added only 6,000 jobs on net for the month. Revisions to November and December’s jobs data also showed the job market was struggling even more than previously known in the late fall and early winter.

Even the government gains, which were entirely concentrated in state and local education hiring, could be illusory. The department warned in its report that education layoffs caused by the pandemic last year “distorted the normal seasonal buildup and layoff patterns” in education, and possibly made January’s hiring numbers look better than they actually were.

Mr. Biden lamented the jobs numbers before a meeting with House Democrats in the White House to discuss the aid package, saying the 6,000 new private-sector jobs was far too small a figure. “At that rate it’s going to take 10 years before we get to full unemployment.”

“We can’t do too much here, but we can do too little,” he said. “We’ve got a chance to do something big here.”

Mr. Biden, who is set to speak about the economy later on Friday morning, has repeatedly urged Congress to spend aggressively on vaccine deployment, direct aid to individuals and families, expansions of the social safety net and other provisions meant to bring the pandemic to a swifter end and to bridge vulnerable people and businesses to the resumption of normal levels of economic activity.

He and his aides dismissed any sign in the latest report of an economy healing faster than expected and any reason to scale back on plans to provide more help.

The White House Council of Economic Advisers posted a series of messages to Twitter on Friday morning, calling the report “yet another reminder that our economy remains in a hole worse than the depths of the Great Recession and needs additional relief.”

Strong relief is urgently and quickly needed to control the virus, get vaccine shots in arms, and finally launch a robust, equitable, and racially inclusive recovery

— Council of Economic Advisers (@WhiteHouseCEA) February 5, 2021

“Strong relief is urgently and quickly needed,” the council wrote, “to control the virus, get vaccine shots in arms, and finally launch a robust, equitable, and racially inclusive recovery.”

Analysts had been expecting more significant job gains, and they largely called the report a disappointment. “This is not a good start to 2021,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director at the online jobs site Indeed. “Today’s report is essentially the opposite of what we need almost a year into the pandemic.”

Still, some Republicans have argued that the economy is just now starting to reap the benefits of a $900 billion aid package Congress approved in December and that the economy does not need an additional $1.9 trillion jolt. They are likely to point to the drop in the unemployment rate reported on Friday as further evidence that the aid bill should be smaller and more targeted.

Representative Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas, called the jobs report “weak” but said the economy did not need the type of stimulus package that Mr. Biden is proposing.

“Unfortunately, there is little stimulus in the president’s nearly two-trillion dollar ‘stimulus,’” he said. “And unless he begins to work with Republicans in earnest, Americans will suffer tepid job growth as the new normal.”

Credit…Gabriella N. Baez for The New York Times

The top law enforcement officer in the U.S. Virgin Islands accused the executors of Jeffrey Epstein’s estate of mismanagement after a compensation fund established for Mr. Epstein’s sexual abuse victims had to suspend payments.

Lawyers for Denise N. George, the attorney general for the U.S. Virgin Islands, asked the probate judge overseeing Mr. Epstein’s vast estate to temporarily stop the executors from writing checks and selling assets. The motion, filed late Thursday, says that the executors, two former business associates of Mr. Epstein’s, had mishandled the estate’s finances, including by paying certain legal expenses and landscaping costs for Mr. Epstein’s properties.

Earlier Thursday, the independent administrator of the victims’ fund said she had to suspend approving any further settlement payments after the executors told her they did not have sufficient cash to fund the program.

The program has approved about $55 million in payments to victims. About 150 woman have filed claims saying that Mr. Epstein abused them when the were teenagers or young women. The deadline to file claims is March 25.

Lawyers for the executors contend that they have been unable to sell many of the estate’s assets, including real estate, because of the pandemic. At the end of last year, the estate reported having $240 million in assets, including $49 million in cash on hand.

As of

Data delayed at least 15 minutes

Source: Factset

U.S. markets

Stocks on Wall Street climbed for a fifth consecutive day on Friday, extending a rally that has brought the S&P 500 back up to record highs.
The gains continued even after government data showed that U.S. employers added just 49,000 jobs in January, a weak recovery from an outright setback in December. But the rally also reflected expectations for a new stimulus plan, which continues to advance in Congress.
The S&P 500 rose about half a percent, adding to a rally of more than 4 percent already this week. It has more than recovered from last week when a frenzy by retail traders in “meme stocks” like GameStop and AMC Entertainment unnerved markets. This weeks showing is the market’s best since early November.
Oil prices have risen nearly 9 percent this week, the biggest jump since October. Futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, were at $56.72 a barrel, while Brent crude, the European benchmark, approached $60 a barrel.

Robinhood, AMC and other “meme stocks”

GameStop was volatile, falling in early trading before snapping sharply higher just minutes later. By midmorning Friday, the shares were up about 37 percent as they rebounded from a plunge earlier in the week.
The rally came after Robinhood, the online trading app that enraged users when it restricted buying some of the most popular stocks, announced “there are currently no temporary limits” on buying shares.
AMC Entertainment, another stock that has been the focus of small investors who have egged each other on with social media posts about their trades, also rallied from an early drop and was up more than 10 percent.
Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, met with market regulators on Thursday to discuss the volatility caused by the frenzy of trading in GameStop, AMC and other stocks. Afterward, the Treasury Department issued a statement that said the markets’ “core infrastructure was resilient” and that the Securities and Exchange Commission should publish a study of what happened.

Europe

Most European stock indexes were higher on Friday, with Italy’s still leading the way, as investors expressed confidence in Mario Draghi, the former head of the European Central Bank, forming a new Italian government. The FTSE MIB in Italy has gained close to 7 percent this week, compared with a 3.3 percent gain in the Stoxx Europe 600 index.
Yields on 10-year British government bonds rose to 0.49 percent, the highest since March. Bond prices fell and the yields rose after the Bank of England said on Thursday that it wanted banks to be prepared for negative rates but it had no intention of introducing them imminently. The central bank said it expected the vaccine rollout to prompt a swift economic recovery later this year. The optimism has helped lift bond yields across Europe and the United States.

Asia

Among the winners in the meme-stock frenzy is the Koss family of Milwaukee. The Nasdaq-listed headphone maker that bears their name was swept up in the recent market frenzy, pushing the company’s share price up by nearly 2,000 percent in a matter of days. Koss, like other so-called meme stocks, was singled out by traders because it had attracted a lot of interest from short-sellers, which the buyers hoped to squeeze by bidding up the company’s shares.

Koss insiders sold some $44 million in stock this week, an amount worth more than the company’s entire market cap before crowds of retail traders sent its shares soaring. Michael J. Koss, the chief executive and son of the firm’s founder, sold shares worth more than $13 million, according to a regulatory disclosure. He was joined by other family members, executives and directors in paring their holdings.

The company, founded in 1958, was a pioneer in personal headsets, inventing the first stereo headphone. The company reported around $18 million in revenue in its latest fiscal year, with about a fifth of its sales going to Walmart. It employs just over 30 people directly, in addition to contracting with manufacturers in Asia.

Although executives at other companies at the center of the frenzy, namely GameStop and AMC, haven’t sold shares during the rally, there is nothing untoward legally about the move, provided that the insiders did not have access to private information about the rally. The Reddit-fueled surge in demand was largely conducted in the open, by investors cheering each other on via a public message board.

“As the stock goes up in price, whether it makes sense or not, the people on the end of the short sale suffer,” Craig Marcus, a partner at the law firm Ropes & Gray, told the DealBook newsletter. “People who hold the stock and have the opportunity to sell it and benefit from it, benefit from it.”

Kirin, one of Japan’s biggest breweries, announced on Friday that it would halt a joint venture in Myanmar after the coup earlier this week.

Beginning in 2015, the company set up two brewing companies in Myanmar, hoping to “contribute positively to the people and the economy of the country as it entered an important period of democratization,” Kirin said in a statement on Friday.

But in light of the coup, Kirin decided to exit its joint venture with Myanma Economic Holdings Public Company Limited, it said in the statement, citing the company’s connections to Myanmar’s military. It did not specify a time frame but said it was taking steps “as a matter of urgency.”

Kirin had been under pressure to cut ties with its partner in Myanmar after the release late last year of an Amnesty International report that said the Japanese brewer’s Burmese partner had directed payments to military units implicated in systematic violence against the Rohingya ethnic minority. The report’s allegations could not be independently verified.

In a statement, Amnesty International said Kirin’s decision showed it was “taking its human rights responsibilities in Myanmar seriously.”

Over 400 Japanese companies currently operate in Myanmar, according to data collected by Japan’s external trade agency.

Credit…Wu Hong/EPA, via Shutterstock

Kuaishou, a short-video app, has captured the eyeballs of people across China. It has also caught the attention of stock pickers in Hong Kong, who nearly tripled the value of its shares in its public debut on Friday.

The app, which offers similar features to Periscope, Snapchat and Instagram, raised $5.4 billion and became the largest initial public offering by a Chinese internet company in Hong Kong. (Alibaba and other Chinese giants that are listed in Hong Kong brought in bigger hauls, but they debuted in New York before issuing secondary listings in Hong Kong.)

The company is now worth $160 billion, a valuation that surpasses that of Wells Fargo. More than 1.4 million individual retail investors in Hong Kong put in orders for Kuaishou shares ahead of its listing, according to a person with knowledge of the offering’s details, demonstrating the appetite for Chinese internet companies.

The video app has a large following outside of China’s high-rise metropolises. It is known for videos that focus on slice-of-life vignettes, often in rural areas. In a country that spends much of its waking hours online, Kuaishou has turned ordinary people like train conductors and welders into celebrities. It has also, at times, caught the attention of China’s censors.

Kuaishou’s fund-raising success is a vote of confidence for Hong Kong’s reputation as a top finance capital. Hong Kong is a part of China that operates under separate laws, but the city faces political uncertainty after a crackdown on a pro-democracy movement and the imposition of a national security law by Beijing.

The city has long served as a bridge between the world and mainland China, and for years has served as a home for multinational companies that relied on its legal protections and free flow of information, features that are not available on the mainland.

Beijing’s increasingly heavy hand in the city’s affairs has undermined some of these assumptions. The decision by Chinese regulators to pull the plug on the initial public offering of Ant Group just days ahead of its planned debut in November added to concerns about the risks of interference by Beijing.

Credit…Dolly Faibyshev for The New York Times

Peloton, the home fitness company, reported a jump in quarterly sales and profits on Thursday. But its stock price fell more than 8 percent in after-hours trading, as supply-chain issues continue to weigh on the company and as investors consider whether demand for its bikes and treadmills may fall as gyms reopen.

Peloton’s value has soared nearly sixfold to $46 billion over the past year as pandemic lockdowns made its internet-connected fitness equipment a hot commodity. But the company has struggled to get the bikes to customers because of supply-chain challenges and delivery delays.

Peloton reported $1.1 billion in revenue for the three months that ended in December, a 128 percent increase from a year earlier. It reported a net income of $64 million, compared with a net loss of $55 million a year earlier. Peloton now counts 4.4 million members, it said, including 1.67 million who own its fitness devices and subscribe to its streaming classes.

In a letter to shareholders, Peloton said port closures on the West Coast and other “Covid-related factors” continued to delay deliveries. In December, the company acquired Precor, a fitness company with factories in the United States. It has also begun production in a new factory in Taiwan.

Peloton also said it would invest $100 million to expedite deliveries and would ship equipment by air rather than sea, incurring costs that are 10 times higher than normal.

“These unprecedented measures are for these unprecedented times,” John Foley, Peloton’s chief executive, wrote in a letter to customers.

Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

And now for something completely unexpected: The New York Post recorded a profit for the first time in decades.

The colorful, pun-happy tabloid made money in the most recent quarter, its parent company, News Corp, said Thursday as part of its earnings report.

The Post, which was remade by Rupert Murdoch into the sensationalist, Fleet Street form he preferred, was famous within media circles for being a money-losing enterprise. But it afforded Mr. Murdoch a significant voice in American media. Its aggressive coverage of boldfaced names and intense focus on Wall Street made it a must-read among the powerful. And its financial losses, which at one point reached more than $40 million annually, were considered well worth the cost.

But the irony in The Post’s new profit milestone is that it comes at a time when the paper has arguably lost much of its sensationalist charm and no longer enjoys its reputation as a potent tabloid teaser.

Losses at Mr. Murdoch’s papers in Australia and Britain have forced News Corp to tighten belts at every division in the last few years. The Post also underwent deep cost cuts, laying off more than 20 staff members last year and announcing a leadership change in January. In October, some of the paper’s reporters revolted when they were asked to put their names to a dubious report tying Joseph R. Biden Jr. to his son Hunter’s lobbying activities abroad.

News Corp didn’t say exactly how much profit the paper made, but Robert Thomson, the chief executive, touted the moment and added, “Our task now is to ensure its long-term profitability.”

Mr. Murdoch’s other U.S. paper, The Wall Street Journal, continued to see strong financial results. The broadsheet had 3.22 million print and digital subscribers as of the end of December, a 19 percent jump over the previous year. Of that number, about 2.46 million were for digital-only customers, a 28 percent increase over the previous year, amounting to a gain of about 106,000 new digital customers for the period.

Dow Jones, which includes The Journal, the sister publication Barron’s, and Risk and Compliance, an expensive subscription product targeted primarily to banks and other big businesses, saw a 4 percent increase in revenue, to $446 million. Profit before taxes rose 43 percent to $109 million, a portion of which was driven by Risk and Compliance.

As at other papers, advertising revenue at Dow Jones, which includes The Journal, continued to fall, with a 29 percent decrease in print ads, but digital advertising rebounded, growing 29 percent over the previous year. Advertising decreased overall by 4 percent, the company said.

News Corp reported a 3 percent decline in its overall revenue, to $2.41 billion, and a pretax profit of $497 million for the three months ending in December, the company’s second fiscal quarter.

But the company’s biggest bright spot was at the book publisher HarperCollins, where revenue jumped 23 percent, to $544 million, as the division saw higher sales in every book category. News Corp recently lost its bid to Penguin Random House to buy the rival publisher Simon & Schuster.

Tags Labor, Live, market, Pandemic, recovery, Stymies, Updates

Business

Inventory Market Dwell Updates: Jobless Claims, Merck CEO, 23andMe and Extra

Post author By
Post date February 4, 2021

Waiting for food donations in Pflugerville, Texas. Despite the rollout of coronavirus vaccines and a second federal relief package, applications for unemployment insurance remain high.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Ilana Panich-Linsman for The New York Times

The American job market continues to struggle, held back by the coronavirus, the slow rollout of vaccines and the loss of overall economic momentum.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that new claims for unemployment benefits fell last week for the third straight week but remained at extraordinarily high levels by historical standards.

Last week brought 816,000 new claims for state benefits, compared with 840,000 the previous week. Adjusted for seasonal variations, last week’s figure was 779,000, an decrease of 33,000.

There were 349,000 new claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federally funded program for part-time workers, the self-employed and others ordinarily ineligible for jobless benefits. That total, which was not seasonally adjusted, was down 55,000 from the week before.

The easing of new diagnoses and the partial relaxation of restrictions in some places seems to have taken off a bit of the pressure on employers that was evident a few weeks ago.

“These numbers were slightly encouraging,” said Gregory Daco, chief U.S. economist at Oxford Economics. “While still alarmingly high, it’s better than the spike that occurred at the beginning of January.”

Mr. Daco noted that the wait in passing a new stimulus package in December amid partisan battles in Washington may have delayed some claims that ended up being filed in January after it was signed into law. Now that surge seems to be clearing.

Nevertheless, for workers in the hardest-hit industries, conditions remain difficult.

“It’s been a rough winter, especially for folks in the leisure and hospitality sector and the food sector,” said David Deull, an economist at the research and analysis firm IHS Markit. “They were also the ones to suffer during the initial wave of shutdowns in the spring.”

The latest data strengthens the argument for more stimulus, economists say, a key policy position of the Biden White House. The $900 billion aid package passed in December helps many unemployed workers only through mid-March.

“I do think there is a need for more stimulus,” said Rubeela Farooqi, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics. “It’s a crucial part of this rebound.”

Credit…Mike Cohen for The New York Times

Kenneth C. Frazier, the chief executive of Merck who has led the pharmaceutical company for a decade, will step down from that post later this year, the company said Thursday.

Mr. Frazier will stay on after June as executive chairman during a transition period as Robert M. Davis, Merck’s chief financial officer since 2014, takes over as chief executive.

Shares of Merck, which also reported earnings that fell slightly short of analysts expectations on Thursday, were up a little less than 1 percent in premarket trading. The company’s share price has more than doubled since Mr. Frazier took the reins in January 2011, but this has lagged the S&P 500 index, which tripled over the same period.

Mr. Frazier is an outspoken advocate of racial justice. As Merck’s chief executive, he drew headlines for standing up to President Donald Trump over the violent Charlottesville demonstrations in 2017. As a Harvard-educated lawyer before that, he spent a decade successfully pushing for the exoneration of a wrongfully accused man on death row.

“The most important role of a leader is to safeguard the heritage and values of the company,” he told The New York Times in 2018.

He is one of just four Black chief executives of Fortune 500 companies, including Marvin R. Ellison at Lowe’s, René F. Jones at M&T Bank and Rosalind Brewer, who will take over at Walgreens next month.

The company said in a release announcing the transition that Mr. Frazier’s “belief in the importance of a strong, values-based culture, and his ability to attract and retain the best talent, will stand as an enduring testament to his concern and care for the people whose skill and commitment will be critical to Merck’s continued success.”

Credit…Kriston Jae Bethel for The New York Times

Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary, will meet on Thursday with officials from financial market regulators including the Securities and Exchange Commission to discuss the market volatility created by retail traders, the Treasury Department said, after the remarkable rise in prices of “meme stocks” such as GameStop.

The meeting, which will also include the heads of the Federal Reserve, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, is a sign of heightened scrutiny in Washington toward the frenzy in trading.

Shares in GameStop, a video game retailer, surged last week but have since fallen from their dizzying heights, testing the will of investors who joined in the fervor as a challenge to Wall Street investors. It shares soared 1,600 percent in January alone. Since Friday, the price of GameStop stock has plummeted to about $90 from $325.

The scrutiny in Washington comes as Gary Gensler, President Biden’s nominee to head the S.E.C., the principal overseer of capital markets, awaits Senate confirmation. Mr. Gensler served as head of the C.F.T.C. during the Obama administration and gained a reputation as a tough regulator.

Credit…Simon Dawson/Reuters

23andMe, one of the most popular consumer-DNA testing providers, said on Thursday that it planned to become a publicly traded company by merging with an investment fund backed by the British entrepreneur Richard Branson.

The company, which helped popularize at-home DNA testing after it was founded in 2006, will join the ranks of businesses that have found new homes in the public markets by merging with so-called special purpose acquisition companies. The company will be valued at $3.5 billion, including debt.

Commonly known as SPACs or blank-check funds, these vehicles have become one of Wall Street’s biggest crazes. They raise money from public-market investors for the sole purpose of buying a privately held company and giving them their stock tickers, bypassing the traditional cumbersome process of an initial public offering.

Last year, 248 blank-check funds raised $80 billion, shattering records, according to SpacInsider. They have grown so popular that their backers now include an array of unconventional figures, like the former Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane and the former House speaker Paul Ryan.

Mr. Branson was an early participant in the trend: In 2019, he took his Virgin Galactic space tourism company public by merging it with a SPAC. The company is now valued at more than $13 billion.

Now he is turning his attention to one of the biggest names in consumer DNA testing. 23andMe pitched itself as a way for people to screen their genetic data for potential health issues, but was temporarily ordered to stop by the Food and Drug Administration. The agency has since allowed it to offer those services.

Under the terms of the deal announced Thursday, 23andMe will combine with VG Acquisition Corporation, which is backed by Mr. Branson and his Virgin Group. Also investing in the transaction are the mutual fund giant Fidelity and 23andMe’s chief executive, Anne Wojcicki.

Credit…Andrew Testa for The New York Times

The Bank of England has told British banks that they should take whatever steps are necessary to prepare their systems for negative interest rates, opening up a pathway for the central bank to use this additional policy tool to encourage more lending.

But policymakers cautioned on Thursday that they weren’t trying to send the signal that rates would be cut below zero imminently. The markets responded accordingly: The British pound and short-dated bond yield rose as traders pared back expectations for a rate cut.

The central bank held interest rates at 0.1 percent and continued its asset-buying program at the same pace.

For months, there has been a debate about whether the Bank of England could introduce negative interest rates as another mechanism to bolster the economy. Other central banks in Europe and Japan have had negative interest rates for several years, but there were questions about how effective this move would be in the British economy.

After consulting with banks about whether it would be feasible to cut rates further, it found that most firms would need to make some changes to their systems and processes. On Thursday, it asked the banks to begin making these changes.

“While the Committee was clear that it did not wish to send any signal that it intended to set a negative Bank Rate at some point in the future, on balance, it concluded overall that it would be appropriate to start the preparations to provide the capability to do so if necessary in the future,” the minutes from February’s monetary policy meeting said. Banks should prepare “to be ready to implement a negative Bank Rate at any point after six months.”

The central bank also updated its forecasts for the British economy, which is in the midst of the pandemic and also dealing with the initial impact of Brexit, its divorce from the European Union’s single market and customs union. It said the economy didn’t suffer as badly at the end of 2020 as previously expected, but there would be a downturn in the first quarter of 2021 because of the long lockdown while vaccinations are rolled out.

Gross domestic product was forecast to fall 4.2 percent in the first three months of the year. That’s a downgrade from November’s forecast, when the central bank had predicted more than 2 percent growth.

Credit…David Zalubowski/Associated Press

Royal Dutch Shell, Europe’s largest oil company, joined other energy giants this week in reporting sharply lower earnings on Thursday as the pandemic weighed on oil and gas prices and consumption.

Shell said that its adjusted earnings, a metric followed by analysts, fell 87 percent in the 4th quarter compared with the same period a year earlier, to $393 million. By the same metric, Shell’s profit for all of 2020 fell by 71 percent to $4.8 billion.

When including enormous write-downs on oil and gas fields and other assets during the year, Shell reported a loss of $21.7 billion for 2020.

Despite the disappointing results, Shell said it would increase its dividend payout by 4 percent in the first quarter of 2021. It had already increased its dividend by a similar amount in the third quarter of 2020 after a two-thirds cut earlier in the year, the company’s first since World War II.

Shell says it is able to afford the dividend increases because it pulled in about $21 billion in cash over the year after expenditures.

Shell is one of the largest oil producers in the Gulf of Mexico, but Ben van Beurden, the chief executive, said he did not “see any economic impact” on the company from the Biden administration’s decision to pause the granting of new leases on federal property. Mr. van Beurden, on a call with reporters, said that Shell had some 300 lease positions in the Gulf, giving the company “enough running room for the rest of the decade.”.

He did suggest that the administration’s approach might be shortsighted because it could lead to the United States importing oil and gas produced with greater carbon emissions from elsewhere.

Credit…Emile Ducke for The New York Times

U.S. markets

The S&P 500 index rose 0.3 percent at the start of trading after a small gain on Wednesday.
On Friday, the first major report on unemployment and hiring for 2021 will be released by the Labor Department. Despite the vaccine rollout, there are still signs that the labor market is struggling. This week, congressional Democrats and the Biden administration moved forward with their $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package.
Trading in “meme stocks” like GameStop and AMC Entertainment has calmed in the past few days. GameStop shares fell about 7 percent in early trading. Later on Thursday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen will meet with financial market regulators to discuss the recent volatility caused by retail trading.

Europe

Most European stock indexes were little changed. The Stoxx Europe 600 was slightly higher with gains in health care stocks offset by losses in consumer and utilities companies.
Deutsche Bank posted its first annual profit in six years thanks to an increase in fixed-income trading revenue. But investors showed little interest in the beleaguered German bank’s stock, and its shares fell on Thursday.
Royal Dutch Shell reported a nearly 90 percent drop in its profit in the fourth quarter, the latest in a string of big oil and gas companies that have been beaten down by the pandemic, which has sapped demand. It adds pressure to the industry’s transition to greener energy.
Oil prices rose. Brent crude, the European benchmark, gained 0.7 percent, reaching $58.84 a barrel, the highest in nearly a year.

Asia

Credit…via YouTube

A regulator in Massachusetts wants to know if Keith Gill, an early endorser of GameStop also known as Roaring Kitty, broke any rules pertaining to his former day job when he promoted the video-game retailer on social media platforms.

Mr. Gill is a registered securities broker who worked for the insurer MassMutual as a financial wellness education director, and the company has told the state’s securities regulators that it was unaware that he had spent more than a year posting about GameStop on social media, online message boards and YouTube. The insurer also told regulators that had it known about Mr. Gill’s outside activities, it would have asked him to stop or possibly fired him, The New York Times’s Matt Goldstein reports.

Inspired in part by Mr. Gill’s cheerleading, thousands of small investors pushed stock in GameStop to as high as $483 a share and made Mr. Gill fabulously rich on paper. A picture he posted last week on the Reddit WallStreetBets forum showed his GameStop investment was worth $48 million, though his actual returns could not be independently verified.

Mr. Gill may also be summoned to testify before the House Financial Services Committee later this month, Representative Maxine Waters, the chairwoman of the committee, said on the Cheddar financial news channel on Wednesday.

Credit…David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Andy Jassy, the Amazon executive who will take over the company as chief executive when its founder, Jeff Bezos, steps aside later this year, spent more than two decades learning from Mr. Bezos.

In 2002, as a young executive, began following Mr. Bezos everywhere, including board meetings, and sat in on his phone calls, The New York Times’s Karen Weise and Daisuke Wakabayashi report.

The idea, said Ann Hiatt, who was Mr. Bezos’ executive assistant from 2002 to 2005, was for Mr. Jassy to be “a brain double” for Mr. Bezos so that he could challenge his boss’s thinking and anticipate his questions.

As Mr. Jassy followed Mr. Bezos, he also spearheaded Amazon’s move into a new field: cloud computing. That project became Amazon Web Services, now Amazon’s largest source of profit.

Tags 23andMe, CEO, Claims, jobless, Live, market, Merck, Stock, Updates

Business

Reside Updates on Inventory Market At the moment: The Newest

Post author By
Post date February 2, 2021

“The past year presented the most challenging market conditions Exxon Mobil has ever experienced,” said Darren W. Woods, the company’s chairman and chief executive.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

Exxon Mobil on Tuesday reported its fourth consecutive quarterly loss on Tuesday as the pandemic continued to weigh on energy demand and oil and natural gas prices.

In the worst year for the company in four decades, Exxon said it lost $22.4 billion in 2020, compared with a profit of $14.3 billion in 2019. A big chunk of the company’s losses came from $19.3 billion in write-downs in the last three months of the year as the company marked down the value of U.S. natural gas fields acquired when gas prices were far higher before fracking flooded the market a decade ago.

Exxon sharply cut spending on exploration and production by $21.4 billion, or 35 percent, last year because of the pandemic.

“The past year presented the most challenging market conditions Exxon Mobil has ever experienced,” said Darren W. Woods, the company’s chairman and chief executive. He added that the company ended the year as “a stronger company” with a “flexible capital program that is robust to a range of market scenarios and focused on our highest-return opportunities.”

There were some signs of recovery in the fourth quarter. Excluding its write-downs, Exxon made a small profit of $110 million in the quarter as commodity prices began to recover.

Exxon’s large chemical business earned $691 million, its best quarterly result since 2018. Oil production in the Permian basin straddling Texas and New Mexico increased by 42 percent in the quarter compared with the fourth quarter of 2019. After a slow start in 2019, oil production in the deep waters off the coast of Guyana ramped up to 120,000 barrels a day and is expected to increase significantly over the next five years.

Early in 2020, there were persistent concern among investors that the company would cut its dividend, but as oil prices surged above $50 a barrel in recent weeks, those fears have subsided. The company’s stock price has recovered by roughly 40 percent since November. Exxon was up about 2 percent in early trading on Tuesday.

Under pressure to show progress on curbing emissions, the company said on Monday that it was creating a new business called Low Carbon Solutions to develop carbon capture and sequestration projects around the world.

The company is expected to reorganize its board in the coming months and on Tuesday announced the election of a new member, Tan Sri Wan Zulkiflee Wan Ariffin, a former president of the Malaysian oil company Petronas.

Credit…Peter Andrews/Reuters

U.S. markets

Stocks on Wall Street rose on Tuesday, following gains in Asian and European stock markets, as the retail trading frenzy that gripped market watchers for the past week appeared to die down.

The S&P 500 rose 1 percent, adding to a gain of 1.6 percent from the day before, ahead of earnings reports from Amazon and Alphabet.

GameStop and AMC

GameStop shares plunged 40 percent, after dropping 31 percent on Monday. Still, the shares of the video game retailer were up sharply for the year after they rallied 1,600 percent in January. There were signs that efforts to squeeze funds that had bet against the stock were working. Short interest in the stock has fallen by more than half, and some hedge funds have reported losses.
Shares in AMC Entertainment declined 35 percent.
Robinhood loosened its limits on the buying of securities of GameStop, AMC and six other companies. Trading volumes for both companies were lower on Monday than any day in the previous week.

Silver

Futures in silver fell 5 percent on Tuesday to $27.90 an ounce, pulling back from an eight-year high reached on Monday.
Over the weekend, online chatter encouraged retail investors to buy silver in an effort to create a “silver squeeze” as attention seemed to move away from the meme stocks of last week. After websites that sold silver coins and bars reported a surge in demand and the largest exchange-traded product tracking the metal reported record inflows, silver futures rose 9 percent on Monday.

Europe

In equity markets, the Stoxx Europe 600 rose 1 percent, the biggest single-day increase in nearly four weeks.
The eurozone economy contracted 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter, data published Tuesday showed, putting the region on track for a double-dip recession as it struggles to ramp up its vaccination program. That said, the economic decline at the end of last year was slightly smaller than economists forecast.

Asia

Credit…David Zalubowski/Associated Press

Tesla has agreed to recall nearly 135,000 vehicles after a federal regulator raised concerns about problems with the touch-screen displays in some of the company’s most expensive cars.

The company disagreed with a request made in January by the regulator, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, that it recall the cars, but it said that it would proceed “in the interests of efficiently resolving this matter and providing a better experience for the customer,” a Tesla executive said in a letter to the agency that was made public on Tuesday.

The recall affects Model S vehicles from 2012 to 2018 and Model X vehicles from 2016 to 2018. Those are the company’s flagship cars and can cost up to $100,000 or more.

At issue is a memory chip in the center display of the vehicles, which drivers use to control many aspects of their Teslas. The safety agency said when the chip wears out, it can cause the loss of certain functions, including turn signal lighting and the rearview camera display.

“As stated in our letter, the agency tentatively concluded that these vehicles contain a defect related to motor vehicle safety,” the regulator said in a statement. “Safety is NHTSA’s top priority, and timely recalls are crucial to ensuring the safety of drivers, passengers, and other road users.”

Tesla plans to notify owners of the affected vehicles and will replace the component for free, the regulator said. The recall is expected to begin on March 30.

Credit…Ben Stansall/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BP on Tuesday reported its first loss in at least a decade, taking a $5.7 billion loss for the year compared with a $10 billion profit for 2019. The company said it eked out a $115 million profit for the fourth quarter of 2020, representing a year-on-year decline of about 95 percent.

Oswald Clint, an analyst at Bernstein, a market research firm, called the quarterly results “terrible” in a note to clients.

BP blamed a host of factors including low demand for its refined products because of the economic slowdown brought on by the pandemic, as well as low prices for oil and natural gas.

Last year, BP’s chief executive, Bernard Looney, announced a shift away from oil and gas toward clean energy like wind, solar and hydrogen. On a call with analysts, though, Mr. Looney acknowledged that the payoff from some of these investments would not come until the 2030s and that the company would remain reliant on oil and gas for profit for the next few years.

BP, based in London, is a major oil and gas producer in the United States, but Mr. Looney said in an interview that he welcomed the environmentally friendly approach of the Biden administration.

President Biden’s new policies had raised questions about the impact on BP’s drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico, Mr. Looney said, but the administration’s interest in clean energy was likely to aid BP’s recent investment in offshore wind projects off the east coast of the United States.

“That is one of the good things about being a company in transition,” he said.

Credit…Thomas Peter/Reuters

The Chinese e-commerce titan Alibaba said on Tuesday that it was conducting internal reviews of its business in response to an antitrust investigation by the Chinese government, which in recent months has begun scrutinizing the country’s big internet companies like never before.

For many years, the growth of giants like Alibaba was celebrated in China as the fruit of a thriving private sector. Now, regulators in Beijing are more concerned about how the companies’ size and influence are affecting the interests of their customers and competitors, echoing the scrutiny that Western tech giants like Google face in the United States and Europe.

“We approach this antimonopoly investigation with a cooperative, receptive and open mind set,” Alibaba’s chief executive, Daniel Zhang, said on a conference call announcing the company’s latest financial results. “We have a deep appreciation of the significant social and public responsibilities of operating our platform. Beyond complying with regulatory requirements, we will continue to do our best to fulfill our responsibilities to society.”

Mr. Zhang said Alibaba would say more when the investigation was complete. He gave no indication when that might be.

China’s market watchdog announced the inquiry in late December, amid a series of actions by the authorities to rein in tech giants. The month before, officials had abruptly halted plans by Ant Group, Alibaba’s financial-technology affiliate, to go public in Shanghai and Hong Kong, citing the need for new supervision of internet finance. Regulators later ordered Ant to revamp its business, a process that Mr. Zhang said was still ongoing.

Ant’s business prospects and fund-raising plans remain “subject to substantial uncertainties,” Mr. Zhang said.

Like other tech giants such as Amazon, Alibaba has enjoyed strong growth during the pandemic, as lockdowns lead people to depend more on digital services.

China’s resilient economy helped drive a 37 percent increase in Alibaba’s sales in the latest quarter, the company also said on Tuesday. Profits for the quarter were $12.2 billion and revenue was $33.9 billion, beating analysts’ forecasts. Cloud computing revenue grew 50 percent from a year ago, to $2.5 billion. Alibaba said that part of its business was profitable for the first time in the December quarter.

Credit…Matteo Corner/EPA, via Shutterstock

The eurozone economy shrank in the last three months of 2020 as European countries closed shops and restaurants and restricted travel to try to contain the coronavirus.

Economic output in the 19 countries that belong to the eurozone fell 0.7 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the previous quarter, according to a preliminary estimate by the European Union’s official statistics agency said.

For the full year, overall output fell 5.1 percent.

Economists expect the economy to shrink again in the first quarter of 2021, leading to a double-dip recession. The bloc’s economy also shrank during the first half of 2020.

The decline capped a roller coaster year for the eurozone economy. In the second quarter, gross domestic product fell 11.7 percent as the pandemic took hold, then rebounded 12.4 percent in the third quarter as lockdowns eased and firms adjusted to the crisis.

The latest data reflects the malaise that has taken hold as European leaders struggle to vaccinate their citizens, a project that has moved more slowly on the continent than in Britain or the United States.

“The short-term prospects for the European economy remain clouded by a challenging health situation in several countries and an underwhelming start of the vaccination rollout,” Nicola Nobile, lead eurozone economist at Oxford Economics, said in a note to clients.

European factories have largely adapted to the pandemic and are operating almost normally, but stores, restaurants and hotels continue to suffer. More than half of Germans who work in hotels or restaurants, about 600,000 people, are on government-subsidized furloughs and effectively unemployed, according to the Ifo Institute in Munich, a research organization.

Growth figures for all the eurozone members are not yet available, but among the countries that have reported so far, Austria, Italy and France suffered declines in output in the quarter while Germany, Spain and most other countries managed modest growth.

Including countries like Poland, Hungary and Sweden that are members of the European Union but not the eurozone, output in the bloc fell 0.5 percent in the October-December period.

Credit…John Sommers Ii/Reuters

United Parcel Service reported a 21 percent increase in sales, to nearly $24.9 billion, in the final three months of last year, driven in part by a supercharged online holiday shopping season.

“Our financial performance in the fourth quarter exceeded our expectations, and I thank all UPS-ers for their extraordinary efforts to deliver industry-leading service through the holidays,” Carol Tomé, the company’s chief executive, said in a statement.

Ms. Tomé, who took the helm at the company just after the pandemic began, has been putting in place a “better, not bigger” strategy, aimed at improving profit over package volume. Excluding pension costs and a tax charge related to the sale of UPS Freight, the company’s profit per share rose to $2.66 in the fourth quarter from $1.94 a year earlier, far surpassing analyst estimates. The company’s share price was up more than 3.5 percent in premarket trading, but dipped after the market opened.

Despite causing early disruptions, the pandemic accelerated a shift to online shopping, helping to raise the company’s average daily package volume for the year to 24.6 million, a 13 percent increase from 2019. Excluding one-time costs, profit also rose 9.5 percent for 2020, to nearly $7.2 billion.

The company declined to provide a forecast for this year, citing uncertainty caused by the pandemic.

Credit…Ian C. Bates for The New York Times

Silver briefly replaced GameStop as the breakout focus. Over the weekend, the precious metal experienced a surge of interest along with an uptick in online chatter about the chances for generating the kind of price increases that grabbed the world’s attention last week. On Monday, the price of silver jumped as much as 11.5 percent in early trading — to the highest level in eight years — but gave up some of its early gains, and ended the day at about $29 per ounce, a 7 percent increase. That was still around its highest level since early 2013. It fell on Tuesday.
Shares of GameStop fell about 31 percent on Monday, and was set to fall further on Tuesday. Short interest in GameStop, a measure of the volume of bets against the stock, fell by more than half last week, according to the market-data firm S3 Partners, suggesting that the gambit to inflict financial pain on Wall Street institutions by creating a so-called short squeeze may have worked. Robinhood decreased the number of companies with trading restrictions to eight from 50, according to an update on its website.
Robinhood raised an additional $2.4 billion over the weekend, adding to the $1 billion it had to seek from its investors earlier last week. On Thursday, an arm of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, Wall Street’s main clearinghouse for stock trades, demanded $3 billion in additional collateral from Robinhood, to cover risky trades by its customers, according to Vladimir Tenev, the brokerage firm’s chief executive. That demand was later reduced to about $700 million.
Melvin Capital Management, one of the hedge funds pilloried on social media message boards for its short-selling bets that GameStop shares would fall, lost 53 percent on its portfolio in January, a person familiar with the matter said. A principal reason was the huge losses the firm suffered when small investors bid up the stock of GameStop.

Tags latest, Live, market, Stock, today, Updates

World News

World Covid-19 Reside Updates: Information on Vaccine, Variants, Stimulus and Circumstances

Post author By
Post date February 1, 2021

Emma Fields receiving a Covid-19 vaccination in Mound Bayou, Miss., on Saturday.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Rory Doyle for The New York Times

Vaccinations in the United States are slowly picking up speed as the Biden administration pushes to accelerate inoculations and blunt the spread of more contagious virus variants.

The United States has administered about 30 million doses, and, as of Sunday, is averaging more than 1.3 million doses administered over the past seven days, compared with an average of less than one million per day two weeks earlier, according to a New York Times vaccine tracker.

President Biden, under pressure to speed up coronavirus vaccinations, has recently suggested the nation could soon reach an average of 1.5 million shots a day.

But just as there are signs of progress, another problem has taken root: the spread of the variants, which scientists warn must be contained before they become dominant. Several hundred cases of the more contagious variant discovered in Britain, which experts have said could be the dominant form in the United States by March, have already been confirmed.

The country has also recorded its first two cases of the variant spreading rapidly in South Africa, which has proved to reduce the effectiveness of vaccines.

“If we didn’t have these variants looming,” we would be in a good place, said Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccine scientist and pediatrician at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. If those variants take over by spring, “as many of us are predicting,” he said, “it changes everything. Now, we really have to vaccinate the American population by late spring, early summer.”

Two key challenges in the weeks ahead are “increasing the supply of vaccines” and “speeding up the time it takes to administer them,” Andy Slavitt, a White House adviser, said in a news briefing on Friday. Many experts have pushed for bringing other vaccine options out and releasing the first doses more widely.

The most effective state programs, said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, are “very simple, age-based, not a lot of complex rules. They focus on getting the vaccines out.”

Here is a snapshot of how five of the best-performing states are doing:

West Virginia has given at least one dose to 10.7 percent of its population, second only to Alaska, and leads the nation in the percentage of its population that has received two doses (3.7 percent). Early on, the state got a head start because it opted out of a federal program to vaccinate people in nursing homes and other long-term care facilities. While other states chose the federal plan, which teamed with Walgreens and CVS, officials decided the idea made little sense in West Virginia, where many communities are miles from the nearest chain store, and about half of pharmacies are independently owned. Instead the state created a network of pharmacies, pairing them with about 200 long-term care facilities.
According to health officials in Alaska, there are several reasons behind the state’s relatively high vaccination rate, The Anchorage Daily News has reported. Those factors include: the state’s having received a high number of doses through the Indian Health Service; the decision to receive doses monthly, versus weekly, as most states do; and declining virus caseloads, which has allowed health care workers to focus on inoculations. The state has vaccinated 13 percent of its population, according to a Times database.
North Dakota has used 91 percent of the vaccines distributed to the state, according to the Times vaccine tracker. It is the only state above 90 percent; more populous states like California (58 percent) and New York (64 percent) have used less, proportionally. North Dakota was among the first states to lower the minimum age eligible for vaccination, from 75 to 65.
In a recent interview with the American Medical Association, health officials in New Mexico attributed part of the state’s success to its “data-oriented and science-oriented” governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, and to an app that allowed easy registration and close coordination among hospitals and providers. The state has given 9.8 percent of residents at least one shot, and has used 83 percent of its doses.
Connecticut got mass vaccination sites up and running early, and uses an inventory system that allocates unused doses to places that need them. But older residents have complained about long waits.

United States ›	United StatesOn Jan. 31	14-day change
New cases	111,478	–32%
New deaths	1,875	–5%

World ›	WorldOn Jan. 31	14-day change
New cases	389,735	–21%
New deaths	8,093	+2%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times

PARIS — Public frustration with lockdowns is palpable across Europe, with pensioners protesting this weekend in Vienna, restaurateurs taking to the streets in Budapest and demonstrators clashing with the police in Belgium, prompting dozens of arrests. The Dutch authorities fined more than 10,000 people last week for violating the national curfew.

While none of the protests resulted in the kind of violence seen in the Netherlands in recent weeks, they reflect a growing impatience as political leaders extend restrictions to guard against a resurgence of the virus fueled by new variants.

In France, President Emmanuel Macron has resisted a full lockdown, making a calculated gamble that his government can tighten the rules just enough to avoid a new wave of infections.

Prime Minister Jean Castex appeared in front of television cameras for an unexpected statement on Friday night, announcing a handful of new curbs, including strict border closures.

“Even if the path is very narrow, we must take it,” Mr. Macron was reported to have said at a cabinet meeting last week, according to the Journal du Dimanche, pushing back against the advice of several senior aides. According to the newspaper, he added: “When you are French, you have all you need to get by, as long as you dare to try.”

Polls in France have shown weariness with restrictions, and grumbling about the rules is growing in some quarters.

France is still under a 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. curfew, and places like cafes, museums and theaters are closed. Schools and shops are open.

After a widely publicized breach of the rules at a restaurant in the southern city of Nice last week and a call to “civil disobedience” by some restaurant owners, the French economy minister, Bruno Le Maire, warned on Monday that any establishments that flouted the rules would be cut off from coronavirus aid.

In the French Alps, protesters blocked roads on Monday to demand that ski lifts reopen.

Critics say that Mr. Macron’s approach may simply be delaying the inevitable and that he could be forced to change course if cases started to surge.

“It’s a risk, I’m hoping it was a calculated risk,” Karine Lacombe, an infectious-disease specialist, told the French news channel LCI on Sunday.

Mr. Macron’s plan is rooted partly in the relative stability of the pandemic in France. The number of new daily cases has inched up only slowly and while hospitalizations remain high, there has been no sudden surge. More contagious variants of the virus have been registered in the country, but the authorities say they believe that their spread, so far, is under control.

“Everything suggests that a new wave could occur because of the variant,” Olivier Véran, the French health minister, told the Journal du Dimanche. “But perhaps we can avoid it thanks to the measures that we decided early and that the French people are respecting.”

Aurelien Breeden reported from Paris, and Marc Santora from London.

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N.Y.C. Snowstorm Delays Vaccinations

On Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York postponed coronavirus vaccinations to prevent older residents from traveling to appointments in blizzard-like conditions.

The storm is disrupting our vaccination effort, and we need to keep people safe. We don’t want folks, especially seniors, going out in unsafe conditions to get vaccinated. We know we can reschedule appointments very quickly because, of course, we have supply. We’re going to use the supply we have. Our problem is lack of supply. So we can take the supply we have and distribute it very quickly in the days to come, and make sure everyone gets the appointments. But it’s not safe out there today. So vaccinations are canceled today. They’re also going to be canceled tomorrow. Based on what we are seeing right now, we believe that tomorrow, getting around the city will be difficult, it’ll be icy, it’ll be treacherous. We do not want seniors, especially, out in those conditions. So we’re going to have vaccinations off for today and tomorrow, come back strong on Wednesday. We’ll be able to catch up quickly because, again, we have a vast amount of capacity. We don’t have enough vaccine. So we’ll simply use the days later in the week. Crank up those schedules, get people rescheduled into those days.

On Monday, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York postponed coronavirus vaccinations to prevent older residents from traveling to appointments in blizzard-like conditions.CreditCredit…James Estrin/The New York Times

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York said on Monday that coronavirus vaccinations scheduled for Tuesday would be postponed because of the winter storm, the second day in a row that they have been delayed.

Heavy snow was also complicating vaccination efforts in Washington, Philadelphia, New Jersey and elsewhere.

At a news conference on Monday, Mr. de Blasio of New York City said he did not want older residents traveling to vaccine appointments amid blizzard-like conditions with gusty winds.

“Based on what we are seeing right now, we believe tomorrow, getting around the city will be difficult,” Mr. de Blasio said. “It will be icy, it will be treacherous.”

He said he believed the city could quickly make up the appointments later in the week.

“We have a vast amount of capacity; we don’t have enough vaccine,” he said. “We’ll simply use the days later in the week, crank up those schedules, get people rescheduled into those days.”

The storm will temporarily derail a vaccine rollout that has been plagued by inadequate supply, buggy sign-up systems and confusion over the New York State’s strict eligibility guidelines. The vaccine is available to residents 65 and older as well as a wide range of workers designated “essential.”

About 800,000 doses have been administered so far in the city, Mr. de Blasio said.

Vaccine appointments originally scheduled for Monday at several sites in the region — the Javits Center in Manhattan, the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens, a drive-through site at Jones Beach in Long Island, SUNY Stony Brook and the Westchester County Center — would be rescheduled for this week, according to a statement from Melissa DeRosa, a top aide to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. “We ask all New Yorkers to monitor the weather and stay off the roads tomorrow so our crews and first responders can safely do their jobs,” she said.

Mr. Cuomo said at a news conference on Monday that New York’s seven-day average positive test rate was 4.8 percent, the 24th straight day it had declined.

Mr. Cuomo added that the state had administered about 1.96 million doses of the vaccine.

In the Philadelphia area, city-run testing and vaccine sites were closed on Monday. Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island and parts of the Washington, D.C., area were following suit. Some areas away from the center of the storm were expected to remain open for vaccinations, including parts of Massachusetts and upstate New York.

Credit…Tamir Kalifa for The New York Times

The past few weeks in the United States have been the deadliest of the coronavirus pandemic, and residents in a majority of counties remain at an extremely high risk of contracting the virus. At the same time, transmission seems to be slowing throughout the country, with the number of new average cases 40 percent lower on Jan. 29 than at the U.S. peak three weeks earlier.

Other indicators reinforce the current downward trend in cases. Hospitalizations are down significantly from record highs in early January. The number of tests per day has also decreased, which can obscure the virus’s true toll, but the positivity rate of those tests has also gone down, indicating that the slowed spread is real.

Still, the average reported daily death rate over the past seven days remains above 3,000, compared with less than 1,000 per day in September and October.

Experts say the decrease could mark a turning point in the outbreak after months of ever-higher caseloads. But new, more contagious variants threaten to upend progress and could even send case rates to a new high if they take hold, especially if the national vaccine rollout faces hurdles.

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Biden to Discuss Pandemic Relief Package With Republicans

President Biden will meet with 10 Republican senators on Monday who have proposed a much smaller Covid-19 relief package. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters that the Mr. Biden’s biggest concern is releasing a package that is too small.

The president has been clear since long before he came into office that he’s open to engaging with both Democrats and Republicans in Congress about their ideas. And this is an example of doing exactly that. So as we said in our statement last night, it’s an exchange of ideas, an opportunity to do that. This group obviously sent a letter with some outline, some top lines of their concerns and their priorities, and he’s happy to have a conversation with them. What this meeting is not, is a forum for the president to make or accept an offer. His view — it remains — what was stated in the statement last night, but also what he said on Friday, which is that the risk is not that it is too big, this package, the risk is that it is too small. And that remains his view, and it’s one he’ll certainly express today. But it’s important to him that he hears this group out on their concerns, on their ideas. He’s always open to making this package stronger. And he also, as was noted in our statement last night, remains in close touch with Speaker Pelosi with Leader Schumer, and he will continue that engagement throughout the day, and in the days ahead.

President Biden will meet with 10 Republican senators on Monday who have proposed a much smaller Covid-19 relief package. Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters that the Mr. Biden’s biggest concern is releasing a package that is too small.CreditCredit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

White House officials offered a pointed, if polite, warning to 10 Senate Republicans planning to pitch a scaled-back coronavirus relief package to President Biden at the White House on Monday evening: Think bigger.

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, played down expectations of the meeting, a critical first test of Mr. Biden’s dueling commitments to bipartisanship and speeding pandemic aid, saying no deal would be done without further negotiations — a statement aimed at reassuring Democrats leery of a fast, weak deal.

“What this meeting is not is a forum for the president to make or accept an offer,” Ms. Psaki told reporters on Monday afternoon, repeating the president’s determination to push through a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill.

“The risk is not that it is too big, this package,” Ms. Psaki added. “The risk is that it is too small. That remains his view.”

A coalition of center-right Republican senators, led by Susan Collins of Maine, on Monday outlined a more limited $618 billion stimulus plan, which they are billing as a way for Mr. Biden to pass a pandemic aid bill with bipartisan support and make good on his inauguration pledge to unite the country.

With 10 Republicans on board, joining the Senate’s 50 Democrats, a bipartisan bill could overcome the chamber’s 60-vote filibuster rule. But Democrats have shown little enthusiasm for a measure that amounts to less than one third of what the president says is needed.

Still, after receiving a letter from the senators on Sunday requesting a meeting, Mr. Biden called Ms. Collins and invited her and the other signers to the White House. He also spoke with Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader.

The Republican proposal is likely to be met with resistance from congressional Democrats, who are preparing this week to begin laying the groundwork for passing Mr. Biden’s plan through a process known as budget reconciliation, which would allow it to bypass a filibuster and pass solely with Democratic votes.

The proposal would include $160 billion for vaccine distribution and development, coronavirus testing and the production of personal protective equipment; $20 billion toward helping schools reopen; more relief for small businesses; and additional aid to individuals. The package would also extend enhanced unemployment benefits of $300 a week — currently slated to lapse in March — until June 30.

“We recognize your calls for unity and want to work in good faith with your administration,” wrote the Republican group, which includes Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Mitt Romney of Utah.

The measure omits a federal minimum wage increase that Mr. Biden included in his plan. It would also whittle down his proposal to send $1,400 checks to many Americans, and limit it to lower-income earners.

The proposal calls for checks of up to $1,000 for individuals making $50,000 a year or less and families with a combined income of up to $100,000, with individuals earning less than $40,000 — and families earning less than $80,000 — receiving the full amount.

Previous rounds of direct payments were targeted to Americans earning less than $99,000 annually, with those earning less than $75,000 receiving the full amount.

Congress approved more than $4 trillion through a series of bills last year to address the coronavirus crisis and its economic fallout. Most recently, in December, lawmakers passed a $900 billion stimulus plan that included $600 direct checks to many Americans.

Mr. Biden received an important boost on Monday ahead of his meeting with the senators: Gov. Jim Justice of West Virginia, a close ally of former President Trump, said he supported a bigger relief package than the one that the center-right Republicans are proposing.

“If we actually throw away some money right now, so what?” said Mr. Justice, a former Democrat who switched parties to support Mr. Trump in 2017, told CNN.

Credit…Kendrick Brinson for The New York Times

The American economy will return to its pre-pandemic size by the middle of this year, even if Congress does not approve any more federal aid for the recovery, but it will be years before everyone thrown off the job by the pandemic is able to return to work, the Congressional Budget Office projected on Monday.

The new projections from the office, which is nonpartisan and issues regular budgetary and economic forecasts, are an improvement from the office’s forecasts last summer. Officials told reporters on Monday that the brightening outlook was a result of large sectors of the economy adapting better and more rapidly to the pandemic than originally expected.

They also reflect increased growth from a $900 billion economic aid package that Congress passed in December, which included $600 direct checks to individuals and more generous unemployment benefits.

The budget office now expects the unemployment rate to fall to 5.3 percent at the end of the year, down from an 8.4 percent projection last July. The economy is expected to grow 3.7 percent for the year, after recording a much smaller contraction in 2020 than the budget office initially expected.

The rosier projections are likely to inject even more debate into the discussions over whether to pass President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic rescue package. It could embolden Republicans who have pushed Mr. Biden to scale back the plan significantly, saying the economy does not need so much additional federal support and that another big package could “overheat” the economy.

But the report shows little risk of that happening. The economy is projected to remain below potential levels until 2025 on its current path. And big economic risks remain. The number of employed Americans will not return to its pre-pandemic levels until 2024, officials predicted, reflecting the prolonged difficulties of shaking off the virus and returning to full levels of economic activity.

The Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell, warned last week that the economy was “a long way from a full recovery” with millions still out of work and many small businesses facing pressure.

Budget officials said the rebound in growth and employment could be significantly accelerated if public health authorities were able to more rapidly deploy coronavirus vaccines across the population.

As it stands, the budget office sees little evidence of growth running hot enough in the years to come to spur a rapid increase in inflation. It forecast inflation levels below the Federal Reserve’s target of 2 percent for years to come, even with the Fed holding interest rates near zero.

Other independent forecasts, including one from the Brookings Institution last week, have projected that another dose of economic aid — like the $1.9 trillion package Mr. Biden has proposed — would help the economy grow more rapidly, topping its pre-pandemic path by year’s end.

Credit…Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York Times

During January, the pandemic’s deadliest month, Laredo, Texas, held the bleak distinction of having one of the most severe outbreaks of any city in the United States. The death toll in the overwhelmingly Latino city of 277,000 now stands at more than 630 — including at least 126 in January alone.

When the virus made its way to the borderlands almost a year ago, Dr. Ricardo Cigarroa could have just hunkered down. He could have focused on his profitable cardiology practice, which has 80 employees. He could have kept quiet.

Instead, Dr. Cigarroa has become a top crusader and the de facto authority on the pandemic along this stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border.

On regional television stations, he calmly explains, in both English and Spanish, how the virus is evolving. Known for making Covid-19 house calls around Laredo in his old Toyota Tacoma pickup, he is interviewed so often that Texas Monthly called him “The Dr. Fauci of South Texas,” comparing him to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the country’s top infectious disease expert — though Dr. Cigarroa holds no official government portfolio.

Lately, Dr. Cigarroa has been losing his patience.

Looking exhausted in a video posted on Facebook, he blasted political leaders for allowing the virus to rampage through this part of South Texas. Dr. Cigarroa singled out Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, for refusing to allow Laredo to impose stricter mitigation measures.

“To the governor: It’s OK to swallow your pride,” Dr. Cigarroa said, stunning some viewers with a warning that the virus could kill 1 in 250 Laredoans by midyear. “It’s OK to say that you’re not going to do it, and then do it to save lives.”

Pleading with the people of Laredo to consider civil disobedience in the form of staying home from work if politicians fail to act, he added, “The only thing that will save lives at this point will be staying home and shutting down the city.”

Credit…Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

Even as more districts reopen their buildings and President Biden joins the chorus of those saying schools can safely resume in-person education, hundreds of thousands of Black parents say they are not ready to send their children back. That reflects both the disproportionately harsh consequences the coronavirus has visited on nonwhite Americans and the profound lack of trust that Black families have in school districts, a longstanding phenomenon exacerbated by the pandemic.

It also points to a major dilemma: School closures have hit the mental health and academic achievement of nonwhite children the hardest, but many of the families that education leaders have said need in-person education the most are most wary of returning.

That is shifting the reopening debate in real time. In Chicago, only about a third of Black families have indicated they are willing to return to classrooms, compared with 67 percent of white families, and the city’s teachers’ union, which is hurtling toward a strike, has made the disparity a core part of its argument against in-person classes.

In New York City, about 12,000 more white children have returned to classrooms than Black students, though Black children make up a larger share of the overall district. In Oakland, Calif., just about a third of Black parents said they would consider in-person learning, compared with more than half of white families. And Black families in Washington, Nashville, Dallas and other districts also indicated they would keep their children learning at home at higher rates than white families.

Education experts and Black parents say decades of racism, institutionalized segregation and mistreatment of Black children have left Black communities to doubt that school districts are being upfront about the risks.

“For generations, these public schools have failed us and prepared us for prison, and now it’s like they’re preparing us to pass away,” said Sarah Carpenter, the executive director of Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy group in Tennessee. “We know that our kids have lost a lot, but we’d rather our kids to be out of school than dead.”

In many cities and districts, Latino and Asian-American families are also less likely than white families to send their children back. Asian-Americans have opted out of in-person classes at the highest rates of any ethnic group in New York City. Latino families in Chicago were most likely to say they would keep their children at home when schools reopened.

Still, the pattern is most consistent and pronounced with Black families, which have been particularly affected by decades of underinvestment. By one estimate, a $23 billion gap, or $2,226 per pupil, separates funding for predominantly white districts and nonwhite districts, and Jessica Calarco, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington who has studied reopening, said the pandemic had amplified that inequity.

“If you know your school doesn’t have hot running water, how would you feel about sending your child to that school knowing they can’t fully wash their hands before they eat lunch?” she asked.

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

Credit…Elmond Jiyane for GCIS, via Reuters

A million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine arrived in South Africa on Monday, paving the way for the country to begin vaccinating its population of nearly 60 million. Health care workers will be the first to be offered the shots, officials said.

The country has reported by far the most cases and deaths from the coronavirus on the African continent. It has participated in clinical trials of several vaccines.

The plane delivering the eagerly awaited doses from the Serum Institute of India, which produced them, was met at the airport by President Cyril Ramaphosa. The president has come under criticism over the country’s lagging start to widespread vaccination, with many countries in Asia and the West able to start immunizing their populations weeks before South Africa could secure a supply.

South Africa experienced a surge in new cases around the turn of the year, fueled by the more transmissible variant of the virus that was first detected in the country. But the surge has begun to ease in recent weeks. Information has not yet been released on the AstraZeneca vaccine’s effectiveness against the variant, which is now predominant in the country.

Over the course of the pandemic, South Africa has reported about 1.45 million cases, and has lately been averaging about 5,800 new cases a day, according to a New York Times database.

In other developments around the world:

Seeking a better understanding of the pandemic’s origins, a team of 15 World Health Organization experts is visiting some of the places first hit by the coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan, including a live animal market, a hospital and a disease control center. The inquiry is expected to take months to complete. Scientists initially believed the outbreak began at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, but many experts now doubt that theory.
The European Union will get 75 million additional doses of vaccine in the next few months, the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech announced on Monday. The vaccine jointly developed by the company and Pfizer was the first to be authorized for use in the E.U., but supplies have been limited by production issues in the early going, and several countries, including Germany, are off to slower than expected starts in vaccinating their populations.
The police in China said they had broken up a criminal ring that manufactured and sold more than 3,000 fake coronavirus vaccine doses, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported on Monday. More than 80 people were arrested, the agency said. According to Xinhua, the police said that since September, the main suspect had been selling vials of “vaccine” that was really just saline solution.

Credit…J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

The scattered reports from around the country can play like a cruel irony: Someone tests positive for the coronavirus even though they have already received one or both doses of a Covid-19 vaccine.

Notable examples

It’s happened to at least three members of Congress recently:

But it’s been reported in people in other walks of life too, including Rick Pitino, a Hall of Fame basketball coach, and a nurse in California.

How can that happen?

Experts say cases like these are not surprising and do not indicate that there was something wrong with the vaccines or how they were administered. Here is why.

Vaccines don’t work instantly. It takes a few weeks for the body to build up immunity after receiving a dose. And the vaccines now in use in the U.S., from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, both require a second shot a few weeks after the first to reach full effectiveness.
Nor do they work retroactively. You can already be infected and not know it when you get the vaccine — even if you recently tested negative. That infection can continue to develop after you get the shot but before its protection fully takes hold, and then show up in a positive test result.
The vaccines prevent illness, but maybe not infection. Covid vaccines are being authorized based on how well they keep you from getting sick, needing hospitalization and dying. Scientists don’t know yet how effective the vaccines are at preventing the coronavirus from infecting you to begin with, or at keeping you from passing it on to others. (That’s why vaccinated people should keep wearing masks and maintaining social distance.)
Even the best vaccines aren’t perfect. The efficacy rates for Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are extremely high, but they are not 100 percent. With the virus still spreading out of control in the U.S., some of the millions of recently vaccinated people were bound to get infected in any case.

Credit…Pool photo by Mary Altaffer

The deputy commissioner for public health at the New York State Health Department resigned in late summer. Soon after, the director of its bureau of communicable disease control also stepped down. So did the medical director for epidemiology. Last month, the state epidemiologist said she, too, would be leaving.

The high-level departures came as morale plunged in the Health Department and senior health officials expressed alarm to one another over being sidelined and treated disrespectfully, according to five people with direct experience inside the department.

Their concern had an almost singular focus: Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Even as the pandemic continues to rage and New York struggles to vaccinate a large and anxious population, Mr. Cuomo has all but declared war on his own public health bureaucracy. The departures have underscored the extent to which pandemic policy has been set by the governor, who with his aides designed a vaccination program hampered by early delays.

The troubled rollout came after Mr. Cuomo declined to use the longstanding vaccination plans that the State Department of Health had developed in recent years in coordination with local health departments. Mr. Cuomo instead adopted an approach that relied on large hospital systems to coordinate vaccinations.

In recent weeks, the governor has repeatedly made it clear that he believed he had no choice but to seize more control over pandemic policy from state and local public health officials, who he said had no understanding of how to conduct a real-world, large-scale operation like vaccinations. After early problems, in which relatively few doses were being administered, the pace of vaccinations has picked up and New York is now roughly 20th in the nation in percentage of residents who have received at least one vaccine dose.

“When I say ‘experts’ in air quotes, it sounds like I’m saying I don’t really trust the experts,” Mr. Cuomo said at a news conference on Friday, referring to scientific expertise at all levels of government during the pandemic. “Because I don’t. Because I don’t.”

His comments reflected a rift between the state’s top elected official and its career health experts of the sort that has occurred across different levels of government during the pandemic.

In Albany, tensions worsened in recent months as state health officials said they often found out about major changes in pandemic policy only after Mr. Cuomo announced them at news conferences — and then asked them to match their health guidance to the announcements.

That was what happened with the vaccine plan, when state health officials were blindsided by the news that the rollout would be coordinated locally by hospitals.

At least nine senior state health officials have left the department, resigned or retired in recent months. They include Dr. Elizabeth Dufort, the medical director in the division of epidemiology; and Dr. Jill Taylor, the head of the renowned Wadsworth laboratory — which has been central to the state’s efforts to detect virus variants — and the executive in charge of health data, according to state records.

Tags cases, Covid19, global, Live, News, stimulus, Updates, Vaccine, Variants

Business

Inventory Market Immediately Reside: The Newest Updates on Silver, AMC and Gamestop

Post author By
Post date February 1, 2021

Some companies that sell silver said there would be delays in fulfilling orders because they were facing unusually high demand.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Michael Dalder/Reuters

The frantic price swings last week in stocks like GameStop and AMC Entertainment, led by retail traders aiming to take on Wall Street, have spread to a new target: silver. The price of the precious metal jumped 10 percent on Monday to the highest in eight years after online calls to create a “silver squeeze.”

The attraction to silver came as the S&P 500 index rose in early trading, following gains on European and Asian stock markets.

Retail websites for buying silver coins and bars said they were experiencing high demand and there would be delays in shipping orders. Moneymetals.com, a dealer in precious metals, said it was not taking any new silver orders until midmorning Monday and put some restrictions on gold purchases as well. The iShares Silver Trust, a large BlackRock exchange-traded product tracking the metal, reported record net inflows on Friday of $944 million.

Shares in companies that mine for silver surged higher, too. Fresnillo rose 15 percent and Polymetal International was up 7 percent, and both were among the biggest gainers on the FTSE 100 index in Britain. On the U.S. exchanges, Silvercorp Metals rose 30 percent and Fortuna Silver Mines rose 25 percent.

But the silver market is fundamentally different than that of beleaguered companies like AMC and GameStop.

The company stocks that caught the attention of the army of day traders over the past week, spurred on by memes on Reddit, had been unloved by hedge funds. By driving the price of these stocks higher, the traders “squeezed” the firms holding short positions.

Melvin Capital Management, one of the hedge funds that bet GameStop shares would fall, lost 53 percent on its portfolio in January, a person familiar with the matter said. Short sellers lose money when a company’s shares rise, and the losses are potentially limitless.

Silver prices had already been rising before the recent interest, and some users on Reddit have warned against a “silver squeeze,” saying it would benefit the same hedge funds and investors they toppled last week. Also, silver is a much bigger and deeper market, making it harder to influence.

The price of silver climbed nearly 50 percent last year, and some institutional investors expected it to outperform gold this year. Still, the traders, who appear to be mostly small investors focused only on a handful of stocks and assets, have emerged as a new risk factor for the large firms betting against stocks and regulators concerned about the smooth functioning of markets.

U.S. markets

The S&P 500 index rose 1 percent, rebounding from a loss of more than 3 percent last week — its worst week since late October.
GameStop’s shares fell about 10 percent in early trading, having gained 400 percent last week and more than 1,600 percent in January. Another target of the trading frenzy, AMC, rose 18 percent. It gained about 280 percent last week.

Europe

Most European stock indexes were higher in midday trading. The Stoxx Europe 600 gained more than 1 percent, led by industrial and technology stocks.
Asos, the online fashion retailer, bought Topshop, Miss Selfridge and other brands from Arcadia Group, once the crown jewel of Britain’s high street retailers, for 295 million pounds ($404 million). Asos shares rose more than 6 percent.

Asia

Credit…Carlo Allegri/Reuters

After a week of wild trading, GameStop’s shares fell about 10 percent in early trading on Monday, as some of the attention shifted to the market for silver, where the price of the precious metal jumped to the highest since 2013 and websites selling silver coins reported unusually high demand.

Last week, GameStop’s stock reached as high as $483 and fell as low as $61. It lost 44 percent on Thursday after Robinhood and other trading platforms said they would limit customers’ ability to buy certain securities, including GameStop, AMC Entertainment and BlackBerry. Then the trading app reversed some of the restrictions, and the shares rose about 65 percent on Friday.

On Reddit’s Wall Street Bets forum, posters implored others to keep holding their GameStop shares and options. GameStop’s shares closed at $325 on Friday, up 1,625 percent in January.

On Monday, AMC rose about 18 percent early in the day. Last week, the price jumped nearly 280 percent.

The interest in silver began over the weekend. Moneymetals.com, a dealer in precious metals, said it wasn’t taking any new silver orders until midmorning Monday The iShares Silver Trust, which tracks the metal, reported record net inflows on Friday of $944 million.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Wednesday it was “actively monitoring” the volatile trading. Melvin Capital Management, one of the hedge funds that bet against GameStop’s shares, lost 53 percent on its portfolio in January, a person familiar with the matter said.

Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

“This has been a very surreal weekend and week for me.”

So said Vlad Tenev, the chief executive of the online brokerage firm Robinhood, in a public conversation with — of all people — Elon Musk about the challenges his company has faced amid the run-up in stocks like GameStop’s, the DealBook newsletter reports.

Mr. Tenev opened up on the social network Clubhouse late on Sunday about what led Robinhood to impose curbs on trading shares in GameStop and other companies last week, drawing outrage from customers and politicians alike. Last Thursday, an arm of the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, Wall Street’s main clearinghouse for stock trades, had demanded $3 billion in additional collateral — “an order of magnitude” more than usual, Mr. Tenev said — to cover risky trades by its customers.

That demand was later reduced to about $700 million, but Robinhood was still forced to draw down credit lines from banks and raise $1 billion from existing investors.

“This was nerve-racking,” Mr. Tenev said.

Mr. Tenev said the clearinghouse’s decision was based on “an opaque formula,” but sought to dispel persistent rumors that Wall Street elites were behind the move. Mr. Musk, a noted provocateur on Twitter, asked whether “something really shady” was behind the collateral demand. “You’re getting into conspiracy theories a little bit,” Mr. Tenev answered, and added that other brokers were also asked to post additional cash.

“We had no choice, in this case,” Mr. Tenev said. “We had to conform to regulatory capital requirements.”

The Robinhood chief also disputed speculation that his brokerage firm had imposed the trading curbs to aid Wall Street partners, including the big financial firm Citadel, whose brokerage arm executes most of its trades and whose hedge fund had invested in a fellow investment firm that had been betting against GameStop’s share price.

When Mr. Musk asked whether Robinhood was “beholden” to Citadel, Mr. Tenev shot back, “That’s just false.”

Credit…Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

The recent surge in GameStop’s stock — propelled by individual investors who banded together on Reddit — has put new pressure on the Biden administration’s pick for the top job at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler.

Mr. Gensler would inherit the agency as it faces calls to more tightly regulate online trading programs such as Robinhood that critics say enable unsophisticated investors to make risky financial bets, Deborah B. Solomon reports in The New York Times. But defenders of such platforms say they help flatten out inequities in the financial markets that have long favored deep-pocketed firms over average people. The S.E.C. said it was “closely monitoring” the situation in a statement.

“What’s going on with GameStop has almost nothing to do with GameStop as a company,” said Barbara Roper, director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America. “When you see the markets essentially turned into a video game or turned into a casino, that actually has some pretty serious repercussions for the way we use the markets to fund our economy.”

The question for Mr. Gensler, and the agency, will be what, if anything, they should do about concerns from people like Ms. Roper.

The S.E.C.’s role has traditionally been to ensure that companies disclose enough information for people to make informed investment decisions. But it does so by enforcing laws that were written before the advent of trading platforms such as Robinhood. Mr. Gensler’s first moves, those who know him say, will be investigating the GameStop surge to figure out who benefited, as there is speculation that it may have been fueled by some big funds after all.

Credit…Nick Zieminski/Reuters

Melvin Capital Management, one of the hedge funds pilloried on social media message boards for its short-selling bets that GameStop shares would fall, lost 53 percent on its portfolio in January, a person familiar with the matter said.

A principal reason was the huge losses the firm suffered when small investors bid up the stock of GameStop. The Wall Street Journal first reported the amount of Melvin Capital’s loss.

Founded by Gabe Plotkin, a protégé of the hedge fund billionaire and New York Mets owner Steven A. Cohen, Melvin Capital had $8 billion in assets under management at the end of January. That amount included $2.75 billion that Mr. Cohen’s fund, Point72, and Citadel, another hedge fund, put into Melvin Capital, as well as fresh capital from new investors, the person said.

Hedge fund returns at Citadel fell 3 percent for the month, about a third of which was caused by a $2 billion investment it made in Melvin about a week ago, according two people briefed on Citadel’s results.

Melvin Capital exited its position in GameStop after having to raise additional funds, Mr. Plotkin confirmed to CNBC last week. The firm was a main player in the market drama set off by a group of day traders who have been bidding up a handful of stocks that Wall Street had given up on — forcing losses on big hedge funds.

The traders appear to be mostly small investors focused on a handful of stocks like GameStop and AMC Entertainment. But they have emerged as a new risk factor for large firms that had bet against those companies with what are known as short sales. While the financial damage on Wall Street appears so far limited to a number of firms, the volatility shook the broader market. The S&P 500 fell 1.9 percent on Friday, finishing its worst week in three months.

Credit…Elijah Nouvelage/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The owner of The Charleston Gazette-Mail and other West Virginia news publications filed a lawsuit in federal court on Friday against Google and Facebook, accusing the companies of profiting from “anticompetitive and monopolistic practices” that have damaged the newspaper business.

The publisher, HD Media, said the lawsuit was the first of its kind to be filed by a newspaper company. The suit is focused on the centrality of Google to the online advertising market, as well as an agreement between Google and Facebook that is the center of an antitrust lawsuit brought by 10 state attorneys general. It is estimated the two tech companies together accounted for more than half of all digital advertising spending in 2019.

“Google and Facebook have monopolized the digital advertising market, thereby strangling a primary source of revenue for newspapers across the country,” HD Media said in the suit, filed in U.S. District Court of the Southern District of West Virginia.

“There is no longer a competitive market in which newspapers can fairly compete for online advertising revenue,” the suit continued.

The rise of digital media has led to sharp drops in revenue for many newspaper companies, which once depended on print ads and print subscriptions to stay in business. More than one in four American newspapers shut down between 2004 and 2018, and tens of thousands of newsroom jobs have disappeared.

In addition to The Gazette-Mail, which in 2018 won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, papers owned by HD Media include The Herald-Dispatch and The Logan Banner.

“We invite every other newspaper in America to join this cause,” Doug Reynolds, the managing partner of HD Media, said in a statement on Friday. “We are fighting not only for the future of the press but also the preservation of our democracy.”

Tech companies have come under new scrutiny in recent months. In October, the Justice Department filed suit against Google, accusing the company of illegally protecting its monopoly over internet search and the digital advertising market. In two lawsuits filed in December, dozens of states accused Google of abusing its dominance of the online ad business and thwarting competitors in search.

Last month, the lyric-annotation company Genius Media and two left-wing magazines, The Nation and The Progressive, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google — as well as its parent company, Alphabet, and a sibling company, YouTube — citing what the suit called “anticompetitive conduct” in the digital ad market.

Google referred a request for comment to a statement the company issued this month in response to a separate complaint. In the statement, the company said its ad business “helps websites and apps make money and fund high-quality content.” Facebook did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Tags AMC, GameStop, latest, Live, market, silver, Stock, today, Updates