Record Cuts in Oil Output In 2020
Saudi Arabia, Russia and the U.S. agreed to lead a multinational coalition in major oil-production cuts.
As part of the agreement, 23 countries committed to withhold collectively 9.7 million barrels a day of oil from global markets.
The deal, designed to address a mounting oil glut resulting from the coronavirus pandemic’s erosion of demand, seeks to withhold a record amount of crude from markets—over 13% of world production.
The U.S. has never been so active in forging a pact like this, Benoit Faucon.
One consequence of cheap oil: North America’s oil industry is resorting to the desperate measure of shutting in productive wells.
Producers are doing so without knowing what will happen when they try to resume production.
But U.S. and Canadian oil companies have limited options. Pipelines, refiners and storage facilities are filling up.
Even when there is somewhere to send oil, low prices mean that many barrels lose money.
Procter & Gamble’s plant in Albany, Ga., is racing to churn out one of the most in-demand products in America: toilet paper.
The factory has ramped up production by 20% of both toilet paper and paper towels. The challenge:
Albany has one of the nation’s highest rates of coronavirus and the plant has had to revamp its operations to keep its roughly 600 workers healthy.
Among other measures, it has instituted pre-shift temperature checks and staggered start times.
Assembly-line workers at America’s largest auto makers, ordered to turn their skills from vehicles to ventilators, must first master tweezers and tiny screwdrivers.
That is one of the many steps ahead in the race to convert car plants to medical-supply factories.
General Motors and Ford Motor hope to head off a shortage of the lifesaving machines but have only weeks to deliver them.
The intricate machines typically are assembled at the rate of dozens a week. GM and Ford plan to produce 80,000 by late summer, more than the estimated total number now in U.S. hospitals.
Smithfield Foods CEO warned of risks to the nation’s food supply.
The company is keeping its Sioux Falls, S.D., pork plant closed indefinitely at the urging of the state’s governor—after it was linked to 238 coronavirus cases.
Smithfield’s plant and other meatpacking facilities around the country have emerged as hot spots for Covid-19.
Smithfield CEO Ken Sullivan warned that the 550 farmers who supply the plant will no longer have a place to send their hogs, and not operating the plant’s processing lines will make it harder to keep grocery stores stocked with pork.
Tech Rivals
Looking for a job? Big tech is still hiring.
As some of Silicon Valley’s most-promising startups lay off workers and others freeze hiring,
established companies including Apple, Google and Amazon.com are pursuing software engineers, data scientists, product designers and others.
The current moment may give well-capitalized tech companies a chance to poach skilled workers who until recently were gravitating to smaller upstarts, Chip Cutter and Patrick Thomas report.
The coronavirus pandemic hasn’t done much to cool the U.S.-China tech rivalry.
The Trump administration is weighing new curbs designed to hamper China’s ability to make leading-edge semiconductors, according to people familiar with the matter.
The chairman of Chinese telecom giant Huawei Technologies warned last month that Beijing would impose its own restrictions if the U.S. moves forward with that plan.
While the most visible technological battle has been over 5G, it has also extended to other technologies that could transform how we live, work and fight wars in the not-so-distant future, such as artificial intelligence..
Big Government, Poor Examples
The coronavirus pandemic could lead to a bigger state and higher taxes.
Like the great wars of the 20th century, some analysts and historians think the current crisis could fuel a new era of big government in which public officials control more of the levers of the economy, for better or for worse.
During World Wars I and II, government spending rose sharply in the U.S., U.K. and other countries to finance wartime production and research, and it remained higher after the fighting ended.
To be sure, this isn’t war. But Western governments have made economic interventions long considered unthinkable outside wartime—and they are proving popular.
Poorer nations in Europe’s east could teach the west a lesson on coronavirus.
By Sunday, Spain had lost 350 people per million of its population to Covid-19, Italy 322, Belgium 314, France 202 and Britain 145, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
Romania, in contrast, had lost 15 per million, the Czech Republic 12, Poland 5 and Slovakia 0.4. A big reason for the discrepancy: The poorer countries of Central and Eastern Europe, fearing their relatively weak health-care systems would be overwhelmed by the virus, moved more quickly to enact strict social-distancing rules and restrict movement to contain outbreaks.
Pleased to Meet Me
The International Monetary Fund and World Bank will hold their annual spring meetings virtually this week, attempting to combat the most severe global downturn since the Great Depression via teleconferences and video chats.
The institutions are seeking to corral world leaders around a four-point plan: to contain the health crisis, to protect people and firms from the economic fallout, to safeguard the financial system from disintegrating into crisis and to begin planning for a global economic recovery,
Economists are working to tally the potential cost of the coronavirus pandemic.
Even a conservative calibration of a 3-month, 60 standard deviation shock is forecast to lead to a cumulative loss in industrial production of 12.75% and in service sector employment of nearly 17% or 24 million jobs over a period of ten months, with increases in macro uncertainty that last five months.
Original Source: Newsletter: Oil, Ventilators, Toilet Paper and Pork
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