The House Small Business Committee will hold a hearing today at 1 p.m. ET titled "Long-Lasting Solutions for a Small Business Recovery." According to the committee, the hearing will explore efforts to stimulate small business growth following the Great Recession, applying those programs to the COVID-19 crisis, and new ideas to help industries that have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. Click here for a list of witnesses, prepared testimony and a link to access the live webstream today of the hearing.
Three of the nation’s biggest banks revealed yesterday that they had set aside billions of dollars to cover potential losses on loans, signaling that they don’t expect consumers and corporations to be able to pay their debts in the coming months as the pandemic continues to gut employment and commerce, the New York Times reported. Collectively, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo have put aside $25 billion during the second quarter, they said. As a result, their quarterly profits plunged. It was Wells Fargo’s first quarterly loss since 2008. Bank executives said that government aid had so far cushioned the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, which sent millions of workers home beginning in March as cities and states began to shut down. These federal programs, meant to help tide Americans over the worst of the crisis, include a $600 weekly supplement to unemployment benefits. But as the programs begin to expire in the coming months, banks expect their loan losses to mount because defaults will probably rise. JPMorgan is preparing for the unemployment rate to remain in double digits for the rest of the year. Wells Fargo, too, set its unemployment forecast for 10 percent until the end of 2020. Its chief executive, Charles W. Scharf, said the bank’s views “on the length and severity of the downturn deteriorated substantially” over the past three months.
The U.S. Transportation Department said yesterday that U.S. airlines carried 89 percent fewer passengers in May compared with last year, a massive decline that is still better than a historic low in April amid the coronavirus pandemic, Reuters reported. The 20 largest U.S. airlines carried 7.9 million passengers in May down from 74.8 million passengers in May 2019. Still, the airlines carried more than twice as many passengers in May than in April, when passenger traffic fell 96 percent, up from 3 million passengers on all U.S. airlines in April. International U.S. traffic fell 98 percent in May to 182,000 passengers, down from 9.9 million.
General Motors Co. and Ford Motor Co. are continuing to struggle with keeping workers on the job as coronavirus cases surge nationwide, forcing the auto-making giants to cut shifts, hire new workers and transfer others to fill vacant roles, the Wall Street Journal reported. The absences are hampering efforts to recover from the economic havoc wreaked by the pandemic and return to normal production levels after a nearly two-month shutdown this spring. A GM assembly plant in Wentzville, Mo., that has been running three shifts to restock the company’s depleted supply of midsize pickups is cutting one of the shifts to better cope with worker absences, the company said. The plant, normally staffed with around 3,800 hourly workers split across the three shifts, will temporarily eliminate the third one next week. Instead, the company will try to use workers from that shift to fill absences along the assembly line in the first two, the company said. Ford also has been contending with an increase in absences among the 12,500 or so hourly workers split across its two assembly plants in Louisville, Ky., according to the company.
