Business

The mass of jobless workers struggling to get through to state unemployment offices remained concentrated among lower-wage occupations, but it’s also starting to include middle and professional classes as quarantines and lockdowns spread economic misery upward. The International Monetary Fund forecast earlier this week that the U.S. economy will shrink by 5.9 percent in 2020. “Records are being broken left and right with respect to the depth and breadth of the current downturn,” said Mark Hamrick, senior economic analyst for Bankrate. “With no immediate end in sight to efforts aimed at mitigating the virus’ spread and impact, it is impossible to see a near-term upturn in employment prospects.” The unadjusted raw number of claims over the past four weeks totals 20.1 ...

The Get My Payment portal will also allow people to track the status of their payments. More than 80 million Americans have received payments since they started flowing last weekend, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in announcing the launch of the portal. To set up direct deposit, taxpayers will have to provide their adjusted gross income from their 2018 or 2019 returns, whichever they filed most recently; the refund or amount they owed from that return; and their bank account type, account number and routing number. The IRS launched a different web tool last week that allows people who didn’t file returns in 2018 or 2019 to provide basic personal information to the agency to receive their payments. The program is part of the massive coronavirus-response legislation enacted last mont...

Moynihan indicated that Bank of America is in no rush to call its employees back to the company’s offices. Since early March, the bank has moved more than 150,000 people to work-from-home status and deployed 90,000 laptops, he said. Moynihan said the bank is stable, under control and “serving customers at volumes that are pretty remarkable.” For example, the bank helped launch the so-called Paycheck Protection Program small-business rescue with people working virtually. “We’ll bring people back — first, when we’re allowed to — but we’ll also bring people back on a view that we don’t want to change course of action until we know it’s going to be stable,” he said. “Once we got the people here, we actually have the luxury to ho...

Feroli added that he thought activity could begin to ramp up slowly starting in June, “but not quite to where it was before. We do see growth down for the year by 7 percent.” This suggests Trump is not likely to get his wish, issued on Twitter on April 8, that once he enters the relaunch codes, all damage from the coronavirus will suddenly evaporate and the economy will rock once more. “Once we OPEN UP OUR GREAT COUNTRY, and it will be sooner rather than later, the horror of the Invisible Enemy, except for those that sadly lost a family member or friend, must be quickly forgotten,” he wrote. “Our Economy will BOOM, perhaps like never before!!!” That is certainly not the message coming from most economists or corporate executives. Some of America’s biggest companies are starting to talk abo...

Stay-at-home orders have reconfigured daily life so thoroughly that many businesses have had to adapt in creative and surprising ways, even in sectors not staring down imminent disaster. Workers and employers in a variety of under-the-radar industries around the country told POLITICO about how they’re struggling or managing to change. Private investigators Stay-at-home orders have made many aspects of a private investigator’s work more difficult. With most everyone home during the day, surveillance is more easily detected. Many court records aren’t digitized. You can’t serve a subpoena in person. And then there are the phone or Zoom interviews. “I’m looking at a two-dimensional screenshot of a person. … I can’t see what they’re doing with their hands. I can’t see if they’re going to scratc...

“Countries urgently need to work together to slow the spread of the virus and to develop a vaccine and therapies to counter the disease,” the report said. “Until such medical interventions become available, no country is safe from the pandemic (including a recurrence after the initial wave subsides) as long as transmission occurs elsewhere.” Also Tuesday, finance ministers and central bank governors representing G-7 nations met virtually and “reiterated their pledge to do whatever is necessary to restore economic growth and protect jobs, businesses and the resilience of the financial system,” according to a summary of the meeting released by the Treasury Department. The officials discussed the need to assist emerging and developing countries during the c...

Davis countered that Roy’s approach to the pandemic would endanger public health and further damage the economy. Roy, she said in an interview, should spend less time on radio shows comparing mayors and judges to “dictators,” and “more time working to make sure Texans are getting the critical medical and economic support they need.” Other early flaps have involved statewide leaders who aren’t even on the ballot this fall. Abbott in particular has taken heat from Democrats and in the press for moving too slowly to stamp out the spread of the virus — positions his critics contend were meant to accommodate businesses in rural counties that form his voting base, but also where the virus hasn’t increased as rapidly. “We were leaning blue after O’Rourke ran. But people felt like that was t...

The yield curve inverted again last summer, and Harvey called it a “code red” to financial markets that a downturn was coming in 2020. But the viral outbreak got here first, bringing commerce to a historic halt and throwing the outlook for the next year or more into radically uncertain territory. What can we expect next? And how can we mitigate the damage? In an interview with POLITICO Magazine, the 61-year-old Canadian-born Harvey made a new prognostication: This recession will be short, painful and very different from any that have come before. The subsequent recovery might be just as quick and historic—with tens of millions of jobless workers suddenly reporting back to their employers—but that will depend on yet another wild card, whether Washington’s policymakers can really get the bil...

The massive infusions of cash from central banks and governments around the world will help. But new approaches will ultimately be required, Rogoff argued, including possible global debt moratoriums for emerging-market economies such as India likely to be slammed by the virus. He also said central banks such as the Fed may be forced into unprecedented steps to revive growth — such as lowering interest rates below zero, a move the central bank has long resisted in part because of mixed evidence of its effectiveness. The big institutional players in this global economic drama are battle-tested veterans at spraying foam on the runway in the form of giant spending programs and an alphabet soup of lending facilities and central bank interventions. The U.S. Fed and Treasury just last week announ...

Trump has said the White House will move ahead with reopening the economy even without the capacity to test every American for the virus. Roughly 328 million people live in the U.S., with only 2 million coronavirus tests completed as of Friday. Dr. Tony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, said last week that the benchmarks might not be consistent across the country, since each area faces different challenges. “I would not want to pull back at all in New York until I was clear that that curve really was doing what we’ve seen in other countries — a very steep decline down — and we had the capability, if there was a resurgence, of having everything in place to be able to do the containment, as opp...

“People want to get back to work. … We are setting up a council of some of the most distinguished leaders in virtually every field, including politics, business and medical. And we’ll be making that decision fairly soon,” Trump said in a Saturday interview on Fox News. Fauci on Sunday called for a “rolling reentry” and a solution “that is not one size fits all” to prevent a potential rebound in Covid-19 cases from a premature reopening. “It is not going to be a light switch that we say, ‘OK, it is now June, July, or whatever, click, the light switch goes back on,’” Fauci told CNN host Jake Tapper. “It’s going to be depending where you are in the country, the nature of the outbreak that you already experienced, and the threat of an outbreak that you may not have experience...

“There’s something good going to happen. I really believe that. There’s something very good going to happen. We have to get back,” Trump said at a Friday news conference. Nearly 17 million Americans have filed claims for unemployment benefits over the past three weeks, already exceeding the total number of jobs lost over 18 months from the Great Recession of 2007-09. “People aren’t going to just venture outside, they’re not going to go to large gatherings, they’re not going to feel confident right off the bat,” Cuban, an investor and owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, said Sunday. “There’s going to be a lot of trepidation, and that concern is going to lead to people holding back and not spending money.” The often provocative investor also opined on the $2 trillion stimu...