Market Brief: April 13, 2020

West Texas Intermediate futures, the U.S. benchmark, rose, then fell and then rose again after Trump’s tweet. Around 10:20 a.m., they were up 3.5%, to $23.56 a barrel. Brent futures, the international benchmark, also moved up and down, and were up about 1.6%, to $31.98 a barrel. Oil prices had been rising this month in anticipation of a deal.

Ford said it would report an adjusted pretax loss of roughly $600 million and that deliveries to dealers plunged 21%. Frankly, this shouldn’t be a surprise. Things aren’t great for car makers right now. For starters, production was halted industrywide in March and plants aren’t slated to reopen until early May.

It is an interesting time in the automotive industry to say the least. U.S. production was halted in mid-March and auto firms, including Ford, General Motors, and Tesla, have raced to change over assembly lines to manufacture health-care equipment to help battle the pandemic.

While the company’s announcement didn’t specify how much of the charge stemmed from new investment losses, a fund spokesman tells Barron’s that the latest write-down reflects $9.9 billion of lost value in the quarter that ended in March. With the new write-down, the fund has posted an investment loss of about $400 million since its 2016 inception, wiping out cumulative gains of $9.5 billion through December.

The company said it now expects to invest more than $500 million in payroll increases, up from a previous estimate of $350 million, as hourly employees’ wages are increased by $2 an hour, and as hourly base pay for overtime hours worked was doubled.

General Electric has roughly $35 billion in bonds due between now and 2024. The final amount of the new debt sale will depend on the market, but it could amount to tens of billions.

In March, according to new data from China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, total handset sales were up 241% from February to 21.8 million units, though still down 23% from a year earlier. The total included 6.2 million 5G phones, up 161% from February, and accounting for 27% of all phones shipped, down from 37% a month earlier.

Barclays analyst Tim Long says this reflects a 416% surge in iPhone sales in March from February, to about 2.5 million units, shifting the balance back to 4G phones. Apple is expected to announce its first 5G iPhones later this year.

The data, published Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine, were from hospitalized patients given the drug on a compassionate-use basis, not from a clinical trial. There was no control group randomly selected to receive a placebo. That makes it difficult to determine exactly what the results mean.

On Friday, Eli Lilly said its drug baricitinib, which the Food and Drug Administration has approved as a treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, would be included in a large study run by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to test various potential therapies to treat Covid-19.

Official reports from the Chinese government, a set of closely followed purchasing managers’ indexes, recently showed that Chinese manufacturing and service-sector activity unexpectedly expanded in March after suffering the worst contractions on record in February. Some investors and economists found in the news reason to be optimistic about the ability of economies around the world to rebound quickly once the virus threat dissipates. But that optimism requires an assumption the data are accurate.