Live Stock Market Updates – The New York Times

SoftBank secures a deal to sell nearly 200 million shares of Sprint.

Masayoshi Son, the billionaire who controls the investment giant SoftBank, got one step closer to offloading his stake in the long-troubled wireless carrier Sprint.

Months after Sprint closed its merger with T-Mobile in April, Mr. Son’s company announced its intention to sell its stake in the newly combined business. T-Mobile said on Monday that it would help sell nearly 200 million shares of Sprint held by SoftBank, valued at about $20 billion.

Mr. Son has for years tried to sell off his control of Sprint, a debt-laden business. He had long pushed for a merger with T-Mobile, which would allow him to reap some cash that could be used to shore up his other businesses.

An outspoken entrepreneur, Mr. Son has had to defend his struggling empire after weak performance in some of his investments, including WeWork. When the coronavirus pandemic hit, huge swaths of his empire saw drops in revenue.

SoftBank reported an operating loss of $12.7 billion for the fiscal year that ended in March, its first yearly loss in 15 years. T-Mobile, controlled by the German company Deutsche Telekom, has become a hefty challenger to its rivals Verizon and AT&T, with roughly 100 million customers across the country.

Companies see a multibillion-dollar opportunity in virus-proofing offices.

With companies pressing to figure out how to safely reopen workplaces, makers of everything from office furniture to smart ventilation systems are rushing to sell them products and services marketed as solutions.

Some companies, like makers of thermal cameras that sense skin temperature, are rebranding their wares as virus-containment fever-scanning products. Others are creating entirely new services.

And they have a captive market. To protect employees and reduce liability for virus outbreaks at work, companies are racing to comply with public health guidelines on issues like employee screening and social distancing. In the United States, the market for contact-tracing technologies for employers could soon be worth $4 billion annually, according to estimates from International Data Corporation, a market research firm.

But the preventive tools and pandemic workplace rules are so new — as is the emerging science on the virus — that it is too soon to tell how well, or if, they work.

“These are all untested theories and methods right now,” said Laura Becker, a research manager focusing on employee experience at I.D.C. “What is going to be the most effective component of all of these work force return strategies? We don’t know.”

New hope for white-collar job seekers? It depends.

White-collar job seekers in some industries have begun to see signs that the hiring trough caused by the pandemic seems to have passed. Human resource departments are again filling open jobs, and recruitment is picking up for high-level corporate posts, according to headhunters, recruiters and executives at staffing firms.

But the recovery is uneven. More than a million new jobless claims continue to be filed each week, and certain industries are far outpacing others. Positions in technology, health care, financial services and consumer packaged goods lead the way. Hiring by retailers, apparel makers, airlines, hotels and academic institutions remains moribund, the recruiters said.

“There’s been a lot more activity in the last few weeks,” said Tom Gimbel, chief executive of LaSalle Network, a Chicago staffing company. “Companies are adjusting to the new normal.”

White-collar workers have become used to working from home using digital platforms, just as they shop online rather than going to the store. These shifts in professional and consumer habits are powering the demand for executives in tech-oriented roles, said Shawn Banerji, a headhunter who places executives at major companies. He has several searches underway, each of which can cost the companies that hire him a six-figure retainer, for roles like chief digital officer, chief technology officer and head of engineering.

“Companies want to transform and adapt to the digital landscape,” he said. “They’ve gotten religion as a result of the coronavirus pandemic in terms of technology.”

Despite the increase in virus cases, states that reopened earlier have had more of a pickup in employment activity than states that remain under more restrictions, according to ManpowerGroup, a staffing and placement company. The rate of hiring in Georgia and Texas, for example, is running slightly ahead of the pace in California.

How a rotting Green Bay boardwalk may help solve America’s jobs crisis.

Across the country, state and local officials are considering ways to directly hire their out-of-work constituents, hoping that they can pay them to clean up parks, assist in conservation efforts and form the backbone of the public health response to the virus.

The governor of Pennsylvania wants to hire unemployed workers to help the state track the spread of the coronavirus in the fall. City Council members in Austin, Texas, voted to pay people to help with projects like preparing land for fire season. And Green Bay, Wis., hopes to pay the out-of-work to fix a decades-old rotted boardwalk in a major recreation area.

The programs so far are likely to allow for only a small number of jobs, in some cases just a handful. But local officials say they are hopeful the idea can persuade other areas to try similar efforts and, more important, elicit additional funding from Congress to support local job creation.

The federal government allocated $660 billion for forgivable loans to businesses that agreed to keep workers on the payroll. But in some states and cities, one emerging answer to the growing jobless problem is simple: Hire those workers directly, sometimes using federal funds.

Delta will restart flights to Shanghai as tensions between the U.S. and China ease.

Delta Air Lines said on Monday that it planned to restart passenger flights to China this week, the first U.S. airline to do so after a monthslong hiatus that started as the coronavirus pandemic took hold but has been extended by a diplomatic dispute.

The airline will fly from Seattle to Seoul to Shanghai on Thursdays and back along the same route on Saturdays. Next month, it will add another weekly flight from Detroit to Seoul to Shanghai on Fridays and back on Sundays. United Airlines is also expected to restart flights to China in the coming weeks.

The three major American airlines that fly between the United States and China — Delta, United and American Airlines — announced the suspension of flights between the two countries on Jan. 31 as the Trump administration imposed travel restrictions. Delta and United had planned to restart the flights earlier this month, but were unable to secure approval from China’s aviation regulator.

The U.S. Transportation Department on June 3 threatened to ban Chinese airlines from flying to the United States unless the country allowed U.S. companies to resume flights. The following day, the Civil Aviation Authority of China said it would allow one weekly passenger flight each for Delta and United, which it later increased to two. The United States reacted in kind, granting a total of four round-trip passenger flights to Chinese airlines.

More than 8.5 million passengers traveled on direct flights between the United States and China in 2018, the last year for which the Transportation Department has complete data.

The Department of Transportation also said on Monday that it would start to review charter flights operated by Indian airlines on a case-by-case basis, suggesting that Air India may be using so-called repatriation flights to circumvent India’s ban on regularly scheduled international travel.

The 2021 Golden Globes get pushed back to February.

The 2021 Golden Globes will take place on Feb. 28, a date that the Oscars abandoned last week in an effort to salvage its 93rd installment in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the small group of journalists that hands out the Globes, had not previously announced a date for the 78th ceremony. The Globes have taken place in January since 1973, in part because the press association likes to set the pace for the Academy Awards race — or at least try. The February slot will allow the Globes to maintain that position. The Oscars were rescheduled for April 25, with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences emphasizing that it selected that date by consulting with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.

As previously announced, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will host the 2021 Globes, which the press association said on Monday would continue to be “Hollywood’s party of the year.” It will take place as usual at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, Calif. Ms. Fey and Ms. Poehler last hosted the freewheeling show in 2015.

Wall Street climbs as big tech stocks rally.

Stock markets rallied on Monday as investors’ hopes for the reopening of economies vied with persistent worries about the ability of global leaders to stop the coronavirus from spreading further.

The S&P 500 closed up more than half a percent. Technology stocks led the gains, with Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all climbing to new highs. The Nasdaq composite rose more than 1 percent.

Investors were watching the spread of cases in the United States, where a top adviser to President Trump said on Sunday that officials were preparing for a possible second wave of infections. They were also watching potential trade tensions between the United States and China, after Beijing said it was temporarily suspending poultry imports from a Tyson Foods slaughterhouse that has had coronavirus cases among its workers.

It was not clear whether the spate of bad news would be enough to dissuade investors entirely. There were signs on Monday that governments were taking steps to further ease restrictions. In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was said to be preparing to announce a relaxation of lockdown rules sought by restaurants and other businesses seeking to open, and on Sunday, Spain reopened its borders to European travelers.

Stocks have risen in recent weeks on hopes of economic recovery as governments around the world stepped up lending and spending to fight the damage from the pandemic. Though markets took heavy losses in some weeks, the S&P 500 index is down only about 4 percent year to date.

Nursing homes are evicting vulnerable residents.

RC Kendrick, an 88-year-old man with dementia, was living at Lakeview Terrace, a nursing home in Los Angeles with a history of regulatory problems. But on April 6, the nursing home deposited Mr. Kendrick at an unregulated boardinghouse — without bothering to inform his family. Less than 24 hours later, Mr. Kendrick was wandering the city alone.

According to three Lakeview employees, Mr. Kendrick’s ouster came as the nursing home was telling staff members to try to clear out less-profitable residents to make room for a new class of customers who would generate more revenue: patients with Covid-19.

More than any other institution in the United States, nursing homes have come to symbolize the deadly destruction of the coronavirus crisis. More than 51,000 residents and employees of nursing homes and long-term care facilities have been killed, representing more than 40 percent of the total death toll in the United States.

But even as they have been ravaged, nursing homes have also been enlisted in the response to the outbreak. They are taking on coronavirus-stricken patients to ease the burden on overwhelmed hospitals — and, at times, to bolster their bottom lines.

But nursing homes nationwide are kicking out old and disabled residents — among the people most susceptible to the coronavirus — and shunting them into homeless shelters, rundown motels and other unregulated facilities, according to 22 watchdogs in 16 states, as well as dozens of elder-care lawyers, social workers and former nursing home executives.

The once-stable U.S. cheese market takes a volatile turn.

The wholesale market for Cheddar is typically a mild one. But the vagaries of supply and demand during the pandemic have caused sharp swings in cheese prices, which rose to record highs this month — just weeks after plummeting to nearly 20-year lows.

Consumers are buying way more cheese, even as the usually huge demand from restaurants and schools has fallen off. Dairy farmers and prepared-food companies, which supply ingredients to cheese makers or buy their products, have seen disruptions in their businesses. Together, these countervailing forces have fueled the up-and-down trading in the market.

“It’s the most volatility that we’ve seen in the cheese market ever,” said Phil Plourd, president of Blimling and Associates, a dairy commodity consulting firm in Madison, Wis.

This month, as restaurants around the country slowly reopened, companies that supply cheese began to stock up to ensure an adequate supply. So much so, some cheese factories have struggled to meet demand, as dairy farmers who cut production during the worst of the downturn were unable to supply them with enough milk.

Shoppers continue to buy 20 to 30 percent more cheese at stores than they did last year, according to data from IRI, a market research firm in Chicago. The return of demand has again pushed cheese prices higher, where they hover roughly 3 percent below record levels.

“The orders fell off literally in days, and they came back literally in days,” Mr. Umhoefer said. “It was all at once, very much a roller coaster.”

Catch up: Here’s what else is happening.

• The future of a proposed $10 billion government bailout of Lufthansa remained uncertain on Monday, after a meeting with the company’s chief executive and top ministers apparently failed to persuade the airline’s biggest shareholder to back the deal. Heinz Hermann Thiele, who has a 15.5 percent stake in Germany’s flagship carrier, has criticized the plan for giving the German government a 20 percent stake in the airline in return for financial support. The bailout must be approved by shareholders, who will hold a special meeting on Thursday.

Reporting was contributed by David McCabe, Matt Phillips, Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Brooks Barnes, Niraj Chokshi, Jason Karaian, Amy Julia Harris, Michelle Leder, Nelson D. Schwartz, Christopher F. Schuetze, Tariq Panja, Michael Ives, Keith Bradsher, Mohammed Hadi, Gillian Friedman, Carlos Tejada and Paul Sullivan.