Bloomberg The federal government ordered airlines accepting financial aid to maintain minimal service levels to cities they served before the Covid-19 pandemic ravaged the transportation system, but made adjustments for low-cost carriers and those that fly to some destinations only part of the year. The US Department of Transportation eased some requirements it made in a proposal after airlines and ...

Just what kind of economic slump will this be? It’s too early to know, but it’s not too early to speculate. I’ve done a totally unscientific survey of economic forecasts. Some were solicited by me; others I received from regular emails. What follows is a quick summary of what I found. It doesn’t attempt to forecast peak unemployment or the ...

We are seeing glimmers of light at the end of the tunnel that is the Covid-19 crisis. China, where the pandemic first struck, had its first day with no new deaths to report. Europe’s worst hit countries, Italy and Spain, are recording a slowing of their respective death tolls. And governments are now talking openly about lifting draconian lockdowns that ...

In the face of a global health emergency, automakers are stepping in — or being summoned — to make ventilators. Can they manufacture at the scale required, with the world needing a 10-fold increase in production to cope with the surge in coronavirus infections? It will be a severe challenge. Car companies such as Ford Motor Co, General Motors (GM) ...

In an ordinary April, Corporate America would now be gearing up for proxy season, preparing for annual meetings and arguing with activist investors over strategy. Instead, companies find themselves on the front lines of the coronavirus crisis, facing difficult choices about how best to protect workers, investors, and their businesses from the virus and its fallout. Among the issues normally ...

As a Manhattan resident, I’ll be the first to admit that New York City in general and Manhattan in particular are not optimally designed for social distancing. People here tend to get around not in their own automobiles but on foot or by bus, subway, taxi or ride-share. We buy our groceries mostly not in giant wide-aisled supermarkets but in ...

Italy was the first country in Europe to implement draconian measures to contain the Covid-19 epidemic. As the outbreak slows, the government is weighing when and how to reopen its economy. There’s not much cause for optimism, sadly. The coalition government of the populist Five Star Movement and the center-left Democratic Party has been much better at enforcing lockdowns than ...

For a man who swept to office almost eight years ago vowing to restore Japan’s economic vitality after two decades of malaise, going back to the starting line must be particularly painful for Shinzo Abe. Japan’s longest serving prime minister, Abe has huge parliamentary majorities and no internal challengers to his command of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Yet despite ...

Bloomberg The world’s largest oil producers are hammering out the terms of an unprecedented deal to mitigate the devastating impact of the coronavirus crisis as they prepare for an extraordinary meeting this week. Saudi Arabia and Russia are closing in on an agreement to curb output, which could drain some of the oil surplus threatening to overwhelm storage tanks and ...

Bloomberg It’s crunch time for the European Union (EU) as it strives to overcome internal differences and agree to a plan that would stem a virus-led downturn, which may eclipse the severity of the Great Recession more than a decade ago. The EU’s finance ministers on Tuesday will seek to endorse a list of measures worth more than half a ...