Bloomberg One of the most painful busts in the history of crude oil happened just six years ago when a sharp price drop cost 200,000 roughnecks, almost half the entire workforce, their jobs. And now, the spread of the coronavirus coupled with an oil-price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia threatens to devastate the oil services industry and its workers …

Bloomberg As if the market crash threating their jobs wasn’t stressful enough, workers in Canada’s oil-sands are bracing for the coronavirus to upend life in the remote camps where they’re lodged. One suspected case among them is already haunting roughnecks who fly in from across Canada and live for weeks on end in barracks-like facilities built in the boreal forests …

Bloomberg Zimbabwe has slashed its debt to South African power provider Eskom Holdings to $4 million from $33 million, the state-owned Sunday Mail newspaper reported, citing Energy Minister Fortune Chasi. “We are making payments religiously,” Chasi was quoted as saying. “We have reduced the debt to $4 million or thereabouts. We are also working on further reducing our indebtedness to …

Bloomberg First they lost money. Now hedge funds want clients to risk even more cash on the bets that caused the pain. LMR Partners, Citadel, Baupost Group and Capital Four Management are trying to persuade clients to inject money into their funds after taking a hit in the coronavirus-fuelled market turmoil. Capula Investment Management has had talks with some investors …

Bloomberg Taiwan’s timing on rolling out a new stock trading system could have been better. Traders in Taipei starting on Monday will be able to trade stocks continuously, rather than through a five-second matched call auction that has been in place since 2014. It’s the only major capital market which runs such auctions throughout regular trading, said the Taiwan Stock …

Bloomberg Bank of America Corp. (BofA) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. plan to make special payments to branch, call-center and operations employees who can’t work from home during the coronavirus pandemic. JPMorgan, the biggest US bank, will make payments of $1,000 — $500 next month, and the rest in May — to branch workers as well as operations and call-center …

Bloomberg UBS Group AG is making “several billion” Swiss francs available to small and mid-sized companies as it backs Switzerland’s measures to help businesses hit by the coronavirus pandemic. The bank will provide liquidity to smaller Swiss corporate clients “who find themselves in need through no fault of their own,” the lender said in a statement. Amortisation payments or leasing …

Bloomberg Flagstar Bancorp, one of the United State’s biggest lenders to mortgage providers, has stopped funding most new home loans without government backing. The move, announced to its customers, deprives the housing market of one of the country’s 10 largest so-called warehouse lenders. Other lenders that make non-traditional mortgages to households will no longer be able to borrow from Troy, …

Bloomberg Nigeria’s central bank will migrate to a single exchange rate for the naira by collapsing the multiple exchange rate policy that determined the value for the local currency, people with direct knowledge of the matter said. The West African nation will merge the official rate, the rate for importers and exporters and rate for foreign-exchange bureaus, among others, according …

Bloomberg Central banks in the Asia Pacific pledged to spend billions of dollars and implemented new policy steps to stem a bond market rout. The Bank of Japan (BOJ) and Bank of Korea (BOK) offered to buy bonds worth a total of $13.1 billion, while Japan’s authority said it would supply another $36.7 billion of funds. Australia’s central bank (RBA), …