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The department’s changes, unveiled Wednesday, are designed to spur online platforms to be more aggressive in addressing illicit and harmful conduct on their sites, and to be fairer and more consistent in their decisions to take down content they find objectionable, a Trump administration official said.

PepsiCo said it would end entirely the Aunt Jemima line of pancake syrup and batter adorned with the face of a black woman, while Mars plans to “evolve” the Uncle Ben’s brand of rice dishes that uses a black man as its logo.

The Commerce Department said housing starts rose 4.3% in May to an annual rate of 974,000, below the 1.10 million economists expected, while permits jumped 14.4% to a rate of 1.22 million, slightly lower than the estimate of 1.25 million. Housing-starts data are volatile from month to month and can be subject to large revisions. “We aren’t much bothered about the undershoot,” says Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. “The outlook is very positive, given the astonishing surge in mortgage demand.”

The Energy Information Administration also reported that the U.S. added 1.2 million barrels of crude oil to storage in the week ended June 12, even as analysts had expected a decline in inventories.

New Tesla vehicle registrations in California fell about 37% year over year in April and May combined. But the stock isn’t reacting to the news. In fact, Tesla shares rose about 2.1% to more than $1,000 in midday trading Wednesday.

The move isn’t doing much to lift Lyft, Uber Technologies, or EV-maker stocks today. But the news is another sign to investors that battery-powered cars are here to stay.

Hertz filed to offer up to $500 million in shares Monday, aiming to cash in on a surge in the stock’s popularity even though the company had filed for bankruptcy protection on May 22. In a filing Wednesday, Hertz said it had been “advised orally” by employees with the Securities and Exchange Commission’s division of corporation finance on Monday afternoon that they planned to review the offering’s prospectus supplement.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that employers cannot fire workers for being gay or transgender, a massive victory for LGBTQ workers and the gay rights movement. While the decision isn’t overtly an economic issue, it “gives the U.S. an international [economic] comparative advantage,” Paul Donovan, chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management, wrote in a blog post. The economic impact “is potentially quite big,” extending secure employment to 5% of U.S. workers, he added.

U.S. Steel said it would lose about $315 million in Ebitda, short for earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. That amount excludes restructuring spending of about $100 million. Wall Street was looking for a loss of just $135 million.

In conjunction with the offering, the online sports gambling company gave stronger-than-expected revenue guidance for the second quarter of $70 million to $75 million, compared with a Morgan Stanley estimate of $52 million and a consensus projection of $42 million.

Alphabet reported first-quarter earnings of $6.84 billion, or $9.87 a share, compared with $6.66 billion, or $9.50 a share, in the year-ago period, though the 2019 results took a hit from a large fine levied by the European Commission. Revenue after removing traffic-acquisition costs grew to $33.7 billion from $29.48 billion in the year-ago period.

This marks the 25th straight year that the computer giant has raised its payout—up a penny to $1.63 a share. IBM has been paying quarterly dividends continuously since 1916. Its shares now yield 5.17%.

Pfizer reported first-quarter earnings of 80 cents per share, beating the S&P Capital IQ Consensus estimate of 71 cents. The company reported revenue of $12 billion for the quarter. Merck reported earnings of $1.50 per share, 16 cents more than the S&P Capital IQ Consensus estimate, and quarterly revenue of $12.1 billion. But while Merck lowered its guidance for the full 2020 fiscal year in light of the Covid-19 pandemic, Pfizer reaffirmed the guidance it issued before the pandemic was in full force.

The company earned $2.16 a share from $8.1 billion in sales, while Wall Street was looking for $2.03 in per-share earnings and $7.9 billion in sales. Health-care sales jumped 21% year over year. Last year, health-care sales grew 0.3% in the first quarter. Overall, health care represents about 22% of total sales at 3M.

Covid-19 shelter-in-place mandates went into place at the end of March, so conditions for Caterpillar for most of the first quarter qualified as normal. What is most important to investors right now is the shape of the coming economic recovery. There isn’t, however, much in the earnings press release about a recovery. The company, like many other firms, has suspended its full-year financial guidance, cut costs, and gathered cash resources.

It was a wild quarter. Results reflect that. No one knew exactly what to expect. Many industrial businesses that UPS delivers to are closed to help slow the spread of Covid-19. Wall Street earnings estimates, as a result, fell over the past few weeks. But UPS, along with its peer FedEx, are still working hard, delivering packages to homes and essential businesses despite the health risks.

The beverage maker, which also owns Lay’s and Doritos, said organic sales grew 7.9% in the first three months of the year as consumers stocked up due to lockdown measures and shelter-in-place orders. Chief financial officer Hugh Johnston told analysts he expected second-quarter sales to decline at a low single-digit rate as restaurants, movie theaters, and other venues remain closed around the world.

The vaccine effort, highlighted Monday in a New York Times article, is being run out of the British university’s Jenner Institute, which focuses on vaccine development. The laboratory began Phase 1 trials of the experimental vaccine on April 23, and said on April 24 that it planned to vaccinate 800 volunteers over the course of a month.

Since the beginning of April, meatpacking plants across the country have been forced to shut in response to viral outbreaks that have infected thousands of workers. Meatpackers work in tight spaces and breathe recirculated air during long shifts, which makes it easy for the virus to transmit across the thousands of workers in a single plant. The United Food & Commercial Workers union estimates that 20 workers in meatpacking and food processing have already died from Covid-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus.

“Covid-19 has dramatically changed our business environment and it is critical we respond with agility to this new reality,” said Jochen Zeitz, who stepped in as acting chief executive after the February resignations of longtime leader Matt Levatich. He said the company was formulating a new strategic plan for growth and profits.

In addition to an expansion of its corporate-lending facilities, the Fed’s latest moves include several new programs that extend central-bank support to corners of markets where it hadn’t been active, such as municipal bonds and high-yield exchange-traded funds. It will also provide extra support to banks that make small-business loans or participate in the Treasury’s Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, programs that have so far struggled to get loans to businesses.

As part of an effort to make available $2.3 trillion in new loans amid the coronavirus crisis, the central bank said Thursday that it would buy the bonds of “fallen angel” companies, or companies that get downgraded from investment grade to junk. Companies will qualify if they had an investment-grade rating on March 22 and have since been downgraded to one of the top three tiers of the high-yield bond market (BB+, BB or BB-).

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is holding a virtual meeting with its allies, which include Russia, with a goal to help balance the oil market that has suffered from a drop in demand tied to efforts to stop the spread of Covid-19 and a price war between Moscow and Riyadh that has flooded the world with crude. Under the agreement in principle, Saudi Arabia would remove 4 million barrels a day from its April production levels, while non-OPEC member Russia would cut 2 million barrels a day.

The Labor Department said Thursday that for the week ended April 4, 6.6 million people filed for unemployment insurance. That follows an upwardly revised, and record high, 6.9 million in the previous week.

Analysts expected 10 cents in earnings per share. The number will be “materially below” that level. For the year, General Electric had expected to earn about 55 cents a share and generate about $3 billion in free cash flow from its industrial operations.

Gorman contracted the disease roughly three weeks ago but largely worked throughout his illness, a Morgan Stanley spokesman told Barron’s. The bank’s staff was informed of Gorman’s health status on Thursday after he sent a 10-minute video to employees in which he provided an overview of the bank’s business amid the pandemic as well as his own health status. He received medical clearance from doctors more than a week ago.

Wall Street’s consensus estimate for fiscal second-quarter earnings was recently 39 cents a share, according to FactSet. Analysts had been calling for 59 cents a share as recently as Feb. 28, according to FactSet.

The association, known as NAR, polled its members to learn how coronavirus is affecting business. Of the more than 5,000 respondents, 90% say they have seen interest decline among homebuyers in their markets—up from 48% in mid-March, the last time the survey was conducted.

Mortality in France, Italy, and the U.K. is more than 10%. Those are the countries hit hardest by deaths. South Korea, Germany, and Canada each have mortality rates below 3%. In the U.S., mortality is about 3.4%. The American figure is elevated because of the high rate of deaths in the New York region.

“The Postal Service has lost billions of dollars a year for many years,” Trump said during Tuesday’s coronavirus task force media briefing. “I’ll tell you who’s the demise of the Postal Service…Amazon or these other internet companies.”

JPMorgan Chase has $500 billion in liquid assets and an additional $300 billion in borrowing capacity from the Federal Reserve that it can use to support loans, Dimon said, adding that those figures don’t include additional capacity under some of the Fed’s newly created credit facilities.

Dimon also noted the stability of JPMorgan’s dividend—something that has been called into question at all of the major U.S. banks after their European counterparts were urged to suspend their payouts amid the pandemic.

Investors are awaiting more clarity on a global plan to cut production to reduce the current oversupply of oil. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, and its allies, a group known as OPEC+, plan to talk on Thursday after delaying an expected Monday meeting. For OPEC to make a deal, however, the U.S. will likely have to agree to its own coordinated production cut—a drastic change from the competitive free market ethos that has characterized the U.S. oil industry for decades.

One potential piece of good news for Carnival: Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund recently took an 8.2% stake in the company. Meanwhile, Carnival has enough liquidity to keep the company afloat through November under a “Zero Sail” scenario outlined by analysts at Wells Fargo Securities.

Pacific Gas & Electric and its holding company PG&E have been in bankruptcy court since January 2019, when they filed to manage the potential costs of a series of historically destructive wildfires caused by the utility’s equipment. On Monday, attorneys representing victims of those wildfires in effect withdrew from a $13.5 billion settlement they reached with the utility late last year. They told the court that their mediation process with the company was “at an impasse.”

U.S. banks, for the most part, are in good shape, and central bankers injected trillions of dollars to stabilize financial markets—and stand willing to do more. But three areas—emerging markets, corporate bonds, and, of course, the banks themselves—require close monitoring to ensure today’s fragile fiscal stability doesn’t turn into a big problem.

The two biggest high-yield bond exchange-traded funds rose Monday as investors seemed incrementally more optimistic about a rebound in U.S. economic growth after signs that the spread of coronavirus could be slowing.

But buyers may want to dial down their optimism about lower-rated bonds. Unlike the investment-grade market, the market for high-yield debt won’t get Federal Reserve support. And Wall Street strategists say that risky companies are far more likely to default than they were before the coronavirus brought the economy to a standstill.

Vir and GlaxoSmithKline said they believe they could begin testing Vir’s Covid-19 drug candidates in Phase 2 clinical trials within three to five months.

The announcement came in a letter from Gilead CEO Daniel O’Day, issued on Saturday. O’Day said the company was working to boost production of remdesivir, cutting the amount of time it takes to produce the drug from a year to six months. He said the company aimed to have 500,000 treatment courses manufactured by October, and 1 million by the end of 2020.

Credit Suisse analyst Brad Zelnick on Monday cut his rating on Zoom shares to Underperform from Neutral, while lifting his price target on the shares to $105, from $95, still below Friday’s closing level of $128.20.

But officials in the Canadian province of Ontario are apparently not among those who consider cannabis essential. Cannabis stores in the province closed down on Saturday, after the government excluded recreational pot from its list of essential businesses.

Shares of Whiting had traded over $150 as recently as 2015, but they fell below $1 in the past few weeks, as the company’s debt troubles drove many investors away. Its stock closed at 67 cents on Tuesday. Oil has lost more than two-thirds of its value this year.

The London-listed company said capital spend for 2020 would now be around $12 billion, 25% lower than its previous guidance, including a $1 billion reduction in spend on its U.S. shale business BPX Energy.

The U.S. urged Saudi Arabia and Russia to back off plans to increase production. While Russia is reportedly not going to pump more, the kingdom ignored the plea. It plans to raise production to 12.3 million barrels a day, up from 9.7 million a day in February. Oil prices, already down more than 50% in March, were moving lower on Wednesday.

The Institute for Supply Management said its index, based on a survey of manufacturing companies across the country, fell to 49.1 in March from 50.1 in February. The below-50 print represents contraction, though the decline in activity wasn’t as bad as economists feared. Economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal expected a reading of 44.5 for March.

Instead of ships, tanks, and bombers—products Franklin Delano Roosevelt called for during World War II—America needs ventilators for critically ill patients. Industry has responded and is preparing a huge increase in production in coming weeks.

General Motors, which produced tanks during World War II, will build a Ventec Life Systems ventilator at a plant in Indiana. Ford Motor, which made bombers during the war, wants to build up to 200,000 ventilators in 2020 by partnering with General Electric to build a basic ventilator licensed from Airon.

Mr. Kilar succeeds John Stankey, 57 years old, who last year gained an additional title as AT&T’s chief operating officer, putting him in line to succeed company Chief Executive Randall Stephenson. Mr. Kilar will report to Mr. Stankey.

With the closing of the deal, old T-Mobile’s COO Mike Sievert will become CEO of New T-Mobile, succeeding John Legere. Sievert will oversee the complex process of combining T-Mobile and Sprint’s networks, retail operations, and customer bases. Magenta-wearing Legere had previously said he planned to remain CEO until his contract expired on April 30. He’ll remain on T-Mobile’s board of directors until June 2020.

Payroll provider ADP provided an early glimpse of how current data may not reflect reality on the ground as its survey period, like the Labor Department’s, ends on the 12th of the month. ADP said Wednesday that small businesses eliminated 90,000 jobs in March, a decline that was was offset by hiring last month across larger companies, resulting in an overall drop in private payrolls of 27,000.

General Electric stakeholders probably feel a little more secure Wednesday morning. The company has about $20 billion in fresh cash after closing on the sale of its biopharma division to Danaher, the industrial-health care hybrid conglomerate, on Tuesday evening.

United Technologies also received regulatory approval to merge with Raytheon this week. That deal is slated to close on Friday. The merger catalyzes two other huge transactions which will create three new stocks: an aerospace giant, called Raytheon Technologies, along with a stand-alone elevator maker, called Otis, and an air-conditioning company, to be called Carrier.

The study, conducted by scientists at the Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University and distributed before peer review on Monday, is among the first randomized, double-blind clinical trials of hydroxychloroquine in Covid-19 patients.