The precise language was still being written on Wednesday morning, but a few key points were emerging. Companies that get aid will be required to stop buying back their stock, an oversight panel will keep tabs on $500 billion in aid for troubled companies, and the medical system will get a major chunk of aid that Sen. Minority Leader Charles Schumer described as a Marshall Plan for facilities battling the coronavirus.

The company, which has vast holdings in the Permian Basin in the U.S. and other areas, also said it had made a deal with activist investor Carl Icahn to add his nominees to the company’s board of directors. Icahn had criticized Occidental for buying oil-and-gas producer Anadarko last year, saying the deal was too expensive. Buying Anadarko left Occidental with more than $30 billion in net debt at the end of the year.

It is rare for short-term Treasury yields to fall into negative territory, though not unprecedented. And it probably is a sign that the coronavirus cash grab hasn’t fully abated, despite U.S. authorities’ efforts to ease the impact of the virus on the country.

The company said Wednesday that it is pulling its full-year profit, sales, and earnings-per-share guidance because of an “unusually wide range of potential outcomes” during the first quarter of the year.

The move shows just how hard it is for any business—and retailers in particular—to fully understand the financial impact that the coronavirus outbreak will have. Target, for instance, has seen a boom in sales, but it has also spent $300 million over and above usual costs to keep its stores stocked, as supply chain disruptions and massive customer demand for specific items hit the company simultaneously.

While China is reportedly the world’s largest producer of the active pharmaceutical ingredients used to make drugs, India is a major manufacturer of generic drugs. But analysts suggest that the Indian order, meant to diminish the spread of Covid-19, may not be an issue for Mylan.

That’s the conclusion of the J.P. Morgan Global Quantitative and Derivatives Strategy team headed by Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou. It sees net purchases of $3.25 trillion in equities in major investment sectors over the rest of the year, a dramatic reversal of the net selling of $1.88 trillion the team estimates took place during the first quarter.

Late Tuesday, Facebook disclosed in a blog post that it has “seen a weakening in our ads business in countries taking aggressive actions to reduce the spread of Covid-19.” On Monday, Twitter sharply reduced its own March quarter revenue outlook, citing the impact of a slowing global ad market. While both Facebook and Twitter are seeing an increase in usage, there has not been an accompanying boost in revenue.

According to the association’s latest Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey, the volume of home-purchase applications for the week ended Friday was 15% lower than it was a week earlier. It was down 11% from the same week one year ago.

Many of these workers are in customer-facing roles in retail, travel, and food service. But their customers have disappeared. Lacking personal resources, these millions of Americans could be reduced to desperate straits without quick government help. “This is a real issue, from a survival standpoint,” Alpert says, “and from ensuring law and order.”

Most insurers have already said they would cover the costs of Covid-19 tests. Aetna appears to be the first major insurer to take this further step.

The company is “aggressively pursuing austerity measures” to preserve cash, CEO Mary Barra said in written comments. GM also said it would suspend its 2020 guidance. GM said that the combination of tapping its credit lines and its cash on hand would leave it with between $31 billion and $32 billion in cash at the end of the month.

Chevron had expected to spend $5 billion on share repurchases this year, and will end the first quarter having spent $1.75 billion, the company said. But the buybacks will end there.

The dramatic step is the first time the Olympics has been postponed in peacetime and comes as a devastating blow to the city of Tokyo and the Olympic movement.

That means shareholders don’t have to worry about dilution, and shares were up about 20% shortly before the close on Tuesday. During the financial crisis, car companies, banks and insurance firms gave the government equity in exchange for bailout funds.

In a statement on Tuesday morning, the auto maker announced plans to manufacture a number of devices and tools used by health-care workers treating Covid-19 patients, including plastic face shields, powered air-purifying respirators, and a simplified respirator.

In a filing with the SEC, the chip maker said that, to date, “Intel has kept its factories operational while safeguarding the health and safety of employees and continues to have a strong balance sheet.” But the company said the suspension of the buyback plan “is prudent given uncertainty regarding the length and severity of the pandemic.” Intel said it isn’t changing its dividend rate—the stock yields about 2.9%—and still has capacity to reinstate purchasers “as circumstances warrant.”

Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices, says an overall decline in dividend payments in 2020 “is very feasible” due to the coronavirus pandemic. That warning marks a drastic turnabout from the start of the year, when Silverblatt was expecting dividend increases of about 9% for S&P 500 companies.

Under a program it introduced on Monday, called the Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facility, the Fed can buy up to 20% of the assets of any exchange-traded fund that provides broad exposure to the investment-grade bond market.

This time around, moreover, there is no debate about the need for government intervention. In 2008—and well beyond—dissenters questioned the wisdom and fairness of bailing out the corporate sector, and especially the nation’s banks.

Fadia wrote that 10.2 million hydroxychloroquine pills were sold in the week ending March 13, according to data-science company Iqvia, well above the average weekly volume of 8.5 million pills.

“The coronavirus pandemic is causing tremendous hardship across the United States and around the world. Our nation’s first priority is to care for those afflicted and to limit the further spread of the virus. While great uncertainty remains, it has become clear that our economy will face severe disruptions,” the Fed said in a statement. “Aggressive efforts must be taken across the public and private sectors to limit the losses to jobs and incomes and to promote a swift recovery once the disruptions abate.”

The investment-grade corporate-bond market gained, even though strategists such as Daniel Sorid, high-grade bond strategist at Citigroup, characterized the size of the new corporate debt programs as modest.

“This necessary step protects our employees and the communities where they work and live,” said CEO Dave Calhoun in the company’s news release. “We will keep our employees, customers and supply chain top of mind as we continue to assess the evolving situation.”

Boeing added in an email to Barron’s that employees who cannot work remotely will receive paid leave for 10 working days, double the company policy.

The company said Monday that plummeting air travel has reduced demand from airlines and that its aviation subsidiary, GE Aviation, would lay off about 10% of its workers and furlough approximately 50% of its maintenance, repair, and overhaul employees for three months.

The indictment in Butte County, where 85 people died during the 2018 Camp Fire, charges the company with 84 counts of manslaughter and one count of unlawfully causing a fire.

The San Francisco-based company expects a slight decline in first-quarter revenue from the same quarter a year ago, and anticipates an operating loss. Twitter shares are down 24% in the last year.

The poster-child for the trend is Zoom Video Communications, an application spreading like wildfire. A case study is taking place in my own house. My college-freshman daughter is taking her spring semester classes over Zoom. My wife is preparing to teach a law school class by Zoom. A few days ago, I “attended” a class via Zoom. The tool is popping up everywhere, and the stock is taking off in response.

Shares of Teladoc Health, a telemedicine company, and Slack Technologies, the collaborative-communications software company, also soared on Monday.

The buyback plan is in addition to the $4.8 billion repurchase program announced on March 13. Combined, the repurchase programs would retire 45% of the company’s stock, SoftBank said. The company previously announced a $5.5 billion repurchase program in February 2019. SoftBank said it has about $245 billion of assets and $15 billion of cash on its balance sheet.

Already, the nation’s eight major banks have said they will suspend their stock-repurchase programs through the second quarter in an effort to support “customers, clients, and the nation’’ amid the pandemic. The move could be followed by other industries, especially those with deeply disrupted businesses such as energy and travel companies.

Royal Caribbean, which is the second largest U.S. cruise operator, said it now has more than $3.6 billion of liquidity. That includes cash deposits and existing undrawn revolving credit lines. Royal Caribbean added that it has financing committed for the ships that are on order.

Prices for U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate crude just a day earlier had posted their largest one-day percentage rise on record, partly due to comments from the Trump administration, which indicated that it was considering intervention in the oil-price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia.

The Fed’s original money-market lending program, introduced late Wednesday, was created to finance banks’ purchases of short-term corporate securities known as commercial paper (specifically from money-market funds). After this latest expansion, the Fed will also finance similar bank purchases of municipal debt maturing in less than one year.

Jim Paulsen, the Leuthold Group’s chief investment officer, sees the upturn in longer-term Treasury yields as a glass-half-full story. The history of market crashes since 1987 shows that the 10-year note’s yield turns upward as a bear market is close to running its course, he writes in a client note.

The number of cases in the U.S. more than doubled to 7,087 on Thursday, jumping by 3,551. It’s a huge jump, but the roughly 7,000 cases recorded by the WHO are only about half the number tallied by the Johns Hopkins Center for Science and Engineering database.

First, the good news: The number of new confirmed cases of the coronavirus in China has slowed considerably, and that suggests the risk from the virus isn’t indefinite. “It’s the uncertainty for what the virus is engendering that’s creating market chaos, but the important thing is that it’s a fading virus,” Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve Chairman and advisory board member at RockCreek, a $14 billion investment firm, said in a video to the company’s clients. “The book will close on this, but not right away.”

Manufacturers Honeywell International and 3M are stepping up production of N95 industrial face masks—which Vice President Mike Pence says can now be sold directly to hospitals in need. General Electric said its GE Healthcare subsidiary is committing more production lines to ventilators and adding shifts so lines can be active 24 hours a day.

“Today’s update represents a critical milestone on our journey to transform GE,” said General Electric CEO Larry Culp in a news release. “The value from this transaction will fortify our considerable sources to de-risk our balance sheet and continue to solidify our financial position.”

Even before the current coronavirus pandemic added new stresses to the financial markets, AT&T faced a pair of competing financial challenges: reducing its $163 billion debt position, while also maintaining its dividend, which currently provides investors with a 6.7% yield.

In a securities filing after the market closed Thursday, Carnival preannounced adjusted earnings of 22 cents a share, compared with 49 cents a share a year earlier. It added that the cornonavirus outbreak cost 23 cents a share, including canceled voyages, but the results exclude ship impairment and goodwill charges.

“The first thing you should know is that we continue to pay benefits,” said Andrew Saul, commissioner of the Social Security Administration, in a statement on Thursday.

This is true whether Americans are receiving their Social Security benefits or Supplemental Security Income payments via direct deposit or mail, though they should check in with the U.S. Postal Service for any updates as well. Right now, the USPS is “closely monitoring” the coronavirus, also known as Covid-19. The Surgeon General, World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have all said there’s currently no evidence the disease can spread through mail.