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A group of Senate Republicans outlined their roughly $618 billion coronavirus-relief offer Monday, including a round of $1,000 direct checks for many adults, as Democrats began a process that would allow them to pass President Biden’s $1.9 trillion plan along party lines, the Wall Street Journal reported. The 10 Republican senators met with Biden yesterday to discuss their proposal, which would provide $300 a week in enhanced federal unemployment benefits through June, versus the $400 a week through September in the Biden plan. The GOP proposal also outlines $20 billion each for child care and schools — both lower than the Biden proposal — as well as $50 billion for small-business relief and $160 billion for vaccines, testing and protective equipment, according to a summary released yesterday. The proposal omits measures favored by many Democrats, such as aid for state and local governments and a plan to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. The meeting lasted roughly two hours, and Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said that the two sides explained their proposals further and agreed to keep talking. Nine senators joined in person, with Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) attending remotely.

A little over a year after a reconstituted Toys ‘R’ Us opened two brick-and-mortar stores to much fanfare, the toy seller is now permanently closing the stores, according to multiple media reports, Retail Dive reported. The stores, opened in the fall of 2019, were a joint venture between Tru Kids, owner of the Toys ‘R’ Us intellectual property, and b8ta. Tru Kids did not immediately respond to a request for comment. When Toys ‘R’ Us was liquidating its stores and putting its remaining assets up for sale, some speculated that its intellectual property might be among the most valuable ever sold in a chapter 11 auction. The speculation stemmed from the millions of adults who shopped in its stores when they were younger and associated the brand with all the greedy joys of toy acquisition to a child. The auction never happened. The toy retailer's lenders — who pulled the plug on the toy store chain and sent it into wind down-mode after it fell short of performance projections in the 2017 holiday season — opted to take ownership of the property instead through what became Tru Kids, which also runs international Toys ‘R’ Us operations. Headed by Richard Barry, the old Toys ‘R’ Us' chief merchant, Tru Kids partnered with b8ta to open its first two stores under the Toys ‘R’ Us banner. The stores weren't exactly stores in the traditional sense of buying inventory from suppliers and selling it for a profit. They were more a kind of marketing platform and showroom for toymakers, which paid Toys ‘R’ Us fees to put their products in the location. The store closures come at a time when the toy category broadly has gotten a big bump in the COVID-19 era, with parents seeking ways to entertain children stuck at home. From their closures, it seems traffic declines at the store were severe enough to lower their value as showrooms in the eyes of suppliers.

Academic economists who have studied the Paycheck Protection Program have concluded that it has saved relatively few jobs and that, at a cost of more than half a trillion dollars, it has been far less efficient than other government efforts to help the economy, the New York Times reported. “A very large chunk of the benefit went to a very small share of the firms, and those were probably the firms least in need,” said David Autor, an M.I.T. economist who led one study. The divergence in views over the program’s economic payoff stems in part from ambiguity about its goals: saving jobs or saving businesses. Using different methodology than the Treasury economists, Mr. Autor says the Paycheck Protection Program saved 1.4 million to 3.2 million jobs. Other researchers have offered broadly similar estimates. Given the program’s cost, saving jobs on that scale doesn’t necessarily qualify as a success. Unemployment benefits also provide income, at far less expense, and programs like food assistance and aid to state and local governments pack a larger economic punch, according to many assessments. And because the paycheck program was designed to reach as many businesses as possible, much of the money went to companies that were at little risk of laying off workers, or that would have brought them back quickly even without the help. Many policy experts on Wall Street and in Washington — as well as businesses and banks on Main Streets across the country — say the program’s merits should be assessed instead on what it did to save businesses. On that basis, they say, it helped prevent a greater calamity and fostered economic healing. Read more. 

In related news, small businesses in Nebraska, Oklahoma and other rural states have been the most successful at getting federal pandemic relief in the $284 billion round of aid that opened this month, buoyed by a new rule that authorizes loans to many farms that didn’t qualify before, Bloomberg News reported. Measured by their share of the nation’s small-business payroll, four states, also including North Dakota and Wyoming, got more than twice their share of Paycheck Protection Program loans, based on an analysis of data from Jan. 11 to Jan. 24 released by the Small Business Administration this week. Lenders and applicants say that the process is simpler but slower than last year. Overall, $35 billion of forgivable loans were approved in the first two weeks of the January rollout, a fraction of the $349 billion disbursed in the first 13 days of the program last April. The latest PPP funding included rules aimed at fixing the program’s flaws: Restaurants can draw more debt and applications are more deeply scrutinized for fraud. One change benefited many small farmers and ranchers shut out last year. The Nebraska Farm Bureau, the largest member of the American Farm Bureau, and other agricultural groups successfully lobbied Congress to allow farm owners without paid employees to get aid even if they didn’t earn a net profit. The special rule for farmers was the result of a bipartisan effort led by Representative Ron Kind, a Wisconsin Democrat. “We are helping folks that could’ve used the help before but didn’t qualify,” said John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, which represents over 4,000 family farms and ranches. “The SBA is glad that newly eligible audiences are speaking with their lenders to participate in the Paycheck Protection Program to secure funding that keeps their workforce employed and on payroll during the pandemic,” the agency said in a statement. Read more. 

President Biden and his top economic aides brushed aside criticism from Republicans on Friday about the administration’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package and vowed to forge ahead with the proposal, saying the bill was critical for a flagging economic recovery and overwhelmingly popular with voters, the New York Times reported. The comments came as Biden was briefed by aides on the need for more fiscal help and the state of the economy, and as new analysis from the Brookings Institution suggested the Biden proposal, if enacted, would vault the economy above its prepandemic path by the second half of this year. A team of top economic officials, including Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen, met with Mr. Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the Oval Office on Friday to underscore the challenges facing an economy that recorded decelerating growth at the end of last year. They were joined by Brian Deese, the director of the National Economic Council, and Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey of the Council of Economic Advisers. “The price of doing nothing is much higher than the price of doing something and doing something big,” Yellen said before the briefing. “We need to act now. The benefits of acting now and acting big will far outweigh the costs in the long run.”

United Airlines said on Friday that it warned some 14,000 employees that they might be furloughed, and aviation unions made a new request to Congress and President Joe Biden for another $15 billion in government assistance to keep workers on the payroll through at least Sept. 30, Reuters reported. Chicago-based United warned that once a second round of payroll support expires on April 1, airlines could be forced to make drastic new cuts as the coronavirus pandemic has slashed demand for air travel. United had recalled 13,000 employees from furlough when a $15 billion airline industry payroll package was passed in December to protect jobs through March. “Despite ongoing efforts to distribute vaccines, customer demand has not changed much,” United told employees, while saying it was monitoring demand and advocating for continued government support. The $15 billion in December helped bring back more than 32,000 airline employees and followed a $50 billion package in March for passenger airlines divided between payroll assistance and low-cost government loans.

A private-equity firm that owns a chunk of AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc.’s bonds is converting them into equity following a remarkable rally in the cinema giant’s stock, as AMC struggles to ward off bankruptcy amid closures of movie theaters during the pandemic, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. AMC’s share price quadrupled this week after the company inked a substantial debt and equity raise and subsequently became the latest stock to be touted by the online community of retail investors who helped pump up GameStop Inc. AMC said yesterday that Silver Lake Group LLC on Thursday has elected to convert the $600 million of convertible notes it owns into equity. The Silver Lake swap illustrates how AMC and other volatile companies caught up in the retail trading mania can benefit from surges of bullish sentiment, in this case enabling AMC to cut approximately a tenth of its roughly $6 billion in debt. After closing at $19.90 a share on Wednesday, having more than quadrupled in value from the start of the week, AMC’s stock retraced much of its gains, closing at $8.63 on yesterday, down about 56.6%. AMC share trading was restricted on Robinhood Markets Inc. and other popular online brokerages yesterday, drawing sharp rebuke from individual investors. Menlo Park, Calif.-based Silver Lake bought its unsecured notes in 2018, gaining a seat on AMC’s board. After the coronavirus pandemic forced AMC to temporarily close nearly all of its roughly 1,000 cinemas around the world, Silver Lake entered into a deal to convert its unsecured notes into a new first-lien convertible bond, meaning it would have first dibs on AMC’s assets in the event of a default.