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Reopening Optimism Helps Wall Street

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Trading on Wall Street reflected optimism about a return to normal as states and national governments lift stay-at-home restrictions. Credit...Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Wall Street climbed for a second day on Wednesday as investors kept their focus on the prospect of economic recovery.

The S&P 500 rose 1.5 percent — after swinging between gains and losses earlier in the day as weakness in large technology stocks offset gains in other parts of the market. The S&P 500 had climbed 1.2 percent on Tuesday.

Trading on Wednesday reflected optimism about a return to normal as states and national governments lift stay-at-home restrictions. Companies that will benefit as shoppers are allowed back in stores and people begin to travel again were among the best performers in the S&P 500. Nordstrom, Gap and Kohl’s each rose more than 14 percent.

Though stocks have continued their rebound from late-March lows, the rally has become less steady than it was earlier, with the S&P 500 alternating between gains and losses, as expectations for an eventual recovery from the coronavirus pandemic have squared off against the reality that the damage is still severe and likely to continue for some time.

On Wednesday, investors were cheered by the news of fiscal stimulus proposals from the European Union and Japan. In Japan, the cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe approved more than a trillion dollars in stimulus money. In Brussels, the European Commission seemed on the verge of introducing expansive financial measures to support the bloc. Shares in Europe mostly ended higher.

But uncertainty continued over U.S.-China relations. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Wednesday that the State Department no longer considered Hong Kong to have significant autonomy under Chinese rule, a move that indicated that the Trump administration was likely to end some or all of the United States government’s special trade and economic relations with the territory in southern China.

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“I’m mostly having Zoom calls with strangers,” said Hasti Nazem, who left her job just before the shutdown.Credit...Nicholas Albrecht for The New York Times

The staggering unemployment figures — devastating as they are — do not fully capture the degree to which the coronavirus has disrupted professional life across the country.

Since March, when the crisis began to shut businesses en masse, a generation of professionals has seen careers enter a state of suspended animation. Hiring has dried up, advancement has ceased, job searches have been put on hold and new ventures are in jeopardy. As a result, even well-connected high earners are suddenly in unfamiliar territory.

“There is deep uncertainty,” said Alisa Cohn, an executive coach who works with companies including Google and Pfizer. “We’re not just in a holding pattern. We’re on our way somewhere new, but we don’t know what it looks like.”

In March, Hasti Nazem, 35, left a start-up she helped found. Two months later, the job market has imploded, promising leads have dried up, and she is stuck in limbo. She is mining her network for introductions, but still without a full-time job.

“I’m mostly having Zoom calls with strangers,” she said.

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Many shops were closed at Rockaway Beach in Queens, N.Y., over the weekend.Credit...Hilary Swift for The New York Times

Businesses surveyed by the Federal Reserve were hopeful that economic activity would begin to pick up as states reopened, but most were “pessimistic about the potential pace of recovery.”

The Fed’s Beige Book, a regularly published collection of qualitative business assessments, showed that companies were not expecting a rapid rebound, as they struggled to rehire workers and wait for demand to recover. Many companies were still shedding workers, and businesses who were trying to hire cited several factors complicating their attempt to restart their work force, including child care issues, enhanced unemployment benefits and health fears.

Especially hard-hit companies also appeared to be deferring or skipping rent payments.

“Commercial real estate contacts mentioned that a large number of retail tenants had deferred or missed rent payments,” the Beige Book noted.

In the New York region’s services sector, “business contacts continued to express great uncertainty about whether and when business would get back to reasonably normal levels, but there continued to be fairly widespread pessimism,” the report said.

Companies in that region also reported that “many” unemployed workers were “reluctant to return to work — some attributed this to generous unemployment benefits, as well as safety concerns.”

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A Chevron refinery in Richmond, Calif. The company’s announcement of job cuts comes as it is slashing $1 billion from its 2020 operating costs.Credit...Preston Gannaway for The New York Times

Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company after Exxon Mobil, is planning to cut 10 to 15 percent of its 45,000 employees worldwide in a sweeping overhaul.

Veronica Flores-Paniagua, a company spokesman, said that employees were notified of the layoffs on Tuesday, and that most would occur by the end of the year.

“It is a difficult business decision driven by a very challenging economic time,” she said, referring to the plummeting oil prices in recent months as the coronavirus pandemic reduced demand for transportation and power fuels. “The impacts are still being worked out, but they are going to vary across location, across business segment, across function.”

The cuts come as the California-based Chevron is slashing $1 billion from its 2020 operating costs, a move announced in March.

Tens of thousands of oil workers have lost their jobs this year, most of them employed by service companies doing oil field work for the producers. Exxon Mobil, Chevron’s main rival, has said it has no immediate layoff plans but is cutting spending. BP told employees in late March that there would be no layoffs for three months.

With varied international operations and a large presence in the Permian Basin shale field in West Texas, Chevron has been a favorite of investors because of its relatively strong balance sheet and a 5.5 percent dividend that is considered secure.

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Emma Witbolsfeugen stood on the shoulder of I-70 in Independence, Mo., to rally for rent forgiveness.Credit...Christopher Smith for The New York Times

The United States, already wrestling with an economic collapse not seen in a generation, is on the precipice of a compounding crisis of evictions, as protections and payments extended to millions of people out of work begin to run out.

The fallout is predicted to be devastating for the nation’s renters, who entered the pandemic with lower incomes, significantly less in savings and housing costs that ate up more of their paychecks. They also were more likely to work in industries where job losses have been particularly severe.

Many have been scraping by because of temporary government assistance and emergency orders that postponed many evictions. But evictions will soon be allowed in about half of the states, according to Emily A. Benfer, a housing expert and associate professor at Columbia Law School who is tracking eviction policies.

“I think we will enter into a severe renter crisis, and very quickly,” Professor Benfer said.

That means more and more families may soon face displacement at a time when people are still being urged to stay at home.

In many places, that has already begun. The Texas Supreme Court recently ruled that evictions could begin again. In the Oklahoma City area, sheriffs apologetically announced that they planned to start enforcing eviction notices this week. And a handful of states had few statewide protections in place to begin with, leaving residents particularly vulnerable as eviction cases stacked up.

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Boeing employees leave the property during a shift change at the plant in Renton, Washington, in April.Credit...Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Boeing said Wednesday that it was taking a significant step toward its goal of slashing 10 percent of its global work force by laying off more than 6,700 employees in the United States, all of whom will be notified this week. Another 5,500 workers have been approved for voluntary buyouts and will leave within weeks.

Boeing’s commercial business, which was most exposed to the devastating decline in air travel, will suffer the deepest cuts, the company said. Its defense and space operations have been more insulated.

“The Covid-19 pandemic’s devastating impact on the airline industry means a deep cut in the number of commercial jets and services our customers will need over the next few years, which in turn means fewer jobs on our lines and in our offices,” the chief executive, David L. Calhoun, said in a note to employees. “I wish there were some other way.”

Boeing will have to cut nearly 4,000 more workers to meet its overall goal of shedding 16,000 jobs. The remaining layoffs will be announced in batches over the next few months, the company said.

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The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.Credit...Joel Kowsky/Agence France-Presse/NASA, via Getty Images

NASA on Wednesday postponed a SpaceX mission scheduled to send two American astronauts into orbit. It would have been the first crewed space launch from U.S. soil in nearly a decade, and the first ever in a privately made spacecraft.

The launch was delayed because of poor weather conditions. The next opportunities are Saturday at 3:22 p.m. Eastern time and Sunday at 3 p.m.

A lot is riding on the launch. NASA thinks the future of space — at least for low Earth orbit, for now — is chartered flights on private spacecraft. If successful, the launch could open up a range of economic activity and experimentation, with commercial operators stepping in while governments step back.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is the cheapest human-carrying spacecraft yet made for NASA, by some distance. The agency’s contracts with private companies have fixed prices, an incentive to keep costs down. But Elon Musk, who runs SpaceX in addition to Tesla, will get some extra promotional value out of the launch: The astronauts, Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken, will be ferried to the spacecraft in a NASA-branded Tesla Model X.

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Steven Van Zandt, left, and James Gandolfini in “The Sopranos,” the series that helped put HBO on the map as a creator of original programming.Credit...Craig Blankenhorn/HBO

HBO has been an innovator for much of its nearly 50-year run. Now, with the unveiling on Wednesday of the ambitious HBO Max streaming platform, it’s a playing catch up in the streaming wars.

AT&T, the parent company of HBO since 2018, plans to spend more than $4.5 billion on the project over the next few years. The company hopes to have 50 million HBO Max subscribers by 2025 and envisions that the service will eventually generate billions in annual profits as it takes on Netflix, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Apple TV Plus and Peacock, among others.

A potential stumbling block for it is the cost. Netflix’s no-frills plan costs $9 a month. Disney Plus charges $7 a month. But HBO Max is asking people to spend $15 a month, at a time when household budgets are constrained by the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

Even before the outbreak, industry analysts called the pricing “unreasonable.” Now many customers are looking to cancel their HBO accounts, largely because of the cost, according to a study prepared for The New York Times by the global research consultancy Kantar.

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The Magic Kingdom in Florida, the world’s No. 1 theme park by attendance, will reopen on a limited basis on July 11.Credit...Eve Edelheit for The New York Times

Walt Disney World, one of the largest tourist sites on the planet, has a plan to reopen in mid-July. But the necessary safety protocols — limiting the number of visitors, making face masks mandatory, deploying roaming squads to enforce social distancing, no longer allowing people to get up close and personal with Mickey Mouse — shows how difficult it will be to operate once-booming attractions as the country prepares for a broader reopening.

“We’re going slow because we want to make constant progress and not have to backtrack,” Bob Chapek, Disney’s chief executive, said by phone from Florida on Wednesday. “The risk is going too far, too fast.”

Disney’s theme parks, some with Main Street U.S.A. entrances, loom large in the popular imagination as symbols of Americana. Disney World has been closed since March 15 because of the pandemic, and its reopening carries a certain symbolism in itself, an attempt by fans to reclaim a semblance of normal life and an effort by a coronavirus-battered Disney to demonstrate that a visit will remain a cultural rite of passage for many children.

Walt Disney World consists of six separately ticketed parks with combined annual attendance of 93 million. The two most popular ones, the Magic Kingdom and the Animal Kingdom, will reopen on July 11. Disney World’s other major parks, Epcot and Hollywood Studios, will reopen on July 15.

  • The American division of the bakery chain Le Pain Quotidien filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, a sign of the damage the pandemic has inflicted on the fast-casual restaurant industry. To keep some of its stores open, the company has proposed a sale to the restaurant company Aurify Brands.

  • Social distancing measures, put in place to help stop the spread of the coronavirus, have hurt sales of gum and mints, the Hershey Company said Wednesday in a regulatory filing to announce a bond offering. Demand for some products increased when the pandemic began, but have since leveled off. The company said it expected the pandemic would have a significant impact on earnings in the second quarter, when lockdown orders were put in place.

  • The nation’s biggest nursing home operator, Genesis HealthCare, reported Wednesday that it had received $180 million under the federal CARES Act and additional money from other federal and state programs as part of the nation’s response to the pandemic. The company, based in Pennsylvania, disclosed the federal grant money as it announced first-quarter earnings of $33.5 million after reporting a loss in the same period a year earlier.

  • The eurozone economy is likely to shrink by as much as 12 percent this year, in line with the European Central Bank’s most pessimistic projections a month ago, the bank’s president, Christine Lagarde, said.

  • New data released on Wednesday showed that the Chinese economy — or at least the part involving its vast industrial sector — continues to bounce back from the outbreak. Industrial sales in April rose 5.1 percent compared with a year earlier, statistics officials said.

Reporting was contributed by David Yaffe-Bellany, Gregory Schmidt, Clifford Krauss, Jeanna Smialek, Brooks Barnes, Jason Karaian, Niraj Chokshi, Matthew Goldstein, Jack Ewing, Carlos Tejada, Matt Phillips, Ben Dooley, Makiko Inoue, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Mohammed Hadi, Joe Gose, Mary Williams Walsh, Katie Robertson and Kevin Granville.

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