S&P 500 Edges Down as Investors Sell Bonds, Tech Stocks – Wall Street Journal, 3/30/2021

• U.S. stocks dropped at the open as investors sold government bonds and many of the richly valued technology shares that had powered higher in a low-yield environment.
• The S&P 500 fell 0.5%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.4%, or about 120 points.
• The Nasdaq Composite fell 0.9% as a decline in technology stocks continued.
• In bond markets, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 1.744%, from 1.721% Monday.
• Yields, which rise when prices fall, are hovering at the highest levels since January 2020.
• The sharp rise in yields, which were as low as 0.915% at the start of the year, has curbed appetite for technology shares, many of which won’t generate large profits in the immediate future.
• But that reflation trade has also floundered in recent days on rising concern that elevated Covid-19 infection levels and problems with the vaccine rollout could hamper the global economic recovery. Biden administration officials have warned that the spread of new variants, an increase in travel and loosened restrictions could lead to a surge in cases and deaths.
• Investors are also trying to gauge the impact of President Biden’s planned multitrillion-dollar economic package, as well as the ramifications of higher taxes that may accompany the additional spending.
• Overseas, the pan-continental Stoxx Europe 600 advanced 0.5%.
• In Asia, most major benchmarks closed higher. South Korea’s Kospi rallied 1.1% and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng added 0.8%.
• China’s benchmark Shanghai Composite Index rose 0.6%.

Covid-19 Live Updates: Newly Reported Cases Rise in U.S. – Wall Street Journal, 3/30/2021

• Newly reported U.S. Covid-19 cases rose from a day earlier, as did deaths, while the nation grapples with a fresh surge in infections even as its vaccine drive gains steam.
• The country reported more than 68,000 new infections for Monday, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University and published early Tuesday morning Eastern Time.
• Monday’s figure was up from the 43,694 reported a day earlier and 51,567 a week earlier.
• The seven-day moving average, which smooths out irregularities in the data, was 63,239 as of Sunday, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Johns Hopkins data. The 14-day average was 58,829.
• There were 668 deaths reported for Monday, according to Johns Hopkins data, up from 507 a day earlier and from 586 a week earlier.
• Meanwhile, the U.S. vaccine drive is expanding. President Biden said Monday that the administration is more than doubling the number of pharmacies in the federal program and opening additional mass-vaccination sites.
• He said 90% of adults would be eligible for vaccination by April 19 and that 90% would have a vaccination site within 5 miles of their residence.
• Europe continues to face a rebound in Covid-19 infections just as it struggles to deploy vaccines due to manufacturing hiccups, administrative and logistical bottlenecks, and a protracted approval process for shots.
• By Sunday, European Union member states had injected 15.4 vaccine doses per 100 inhabitants according to data collated by Oxford University, compared with 50.4 in the U.K. and 43.3 in the U.S., where the pace of vaccinations has picked up dramatically in recent weeks.
• In Germany, which has seen a roughly 30% weekly rise in new cases this month despite a relatively tight lockdown, calls were mounting for even tougher measures ahead of the Easter holiday.
• In France, President Emmanuel Macron is expected to meet with top advisors Wednesday to discuss whether the country should tighten lockdown restrictions.
•  Earlier this month, Mr. Macron placed Paris and other hard-hit areas across France under a limited lockdown, allowing people to venture 10 kilometers from their homes.

Traffic in Suez Canal resumes after stranded ship refloated – Reuters, 3/30/2021

• Shipping was on the move again late on Monday in Egypt’s Suez Canal after tugs refloated a giant container ship which had been blocking the channel for almost a week, causing a huge build-up of vessels around the waterway.
• With the 400-metre-long (430-yard) Ever Given dislodged, 113 ships were expected to transit the canal in both directions by early Tuesday morning, Suez Canal Authority (SCA) chairman Osama Rabie told reporters.
• He said a backlog of 422 ships could be cleared in 3 -1/2 days.
• Shipping group Maersk said the knock-on disruptions to global shipping could take weeks or months to unravel.

Global reinsurers stare at massive losses from Suez Canal blockage, Fitch says – Reuters, 3/30/2021

• The blocking of the Suez Canal by one of the world’s largest container ships is likely to result in losses worth hundreds of millions of euros for the reinsurance industry, Fitch Ratings said, even as rescue teams were successful in partially refloating the vessel on Monday.
• This event will reduce global reinsurers’ earnings but should not materially affect their credit profiles, while prices for marine reinsurance will rise further, the credit rating agency said.
• Shipping rates for oil product tankers nearly doubled after the ship got jammed, and the blockage has disrupted global supply chains, threatening costly delays for companies already dealing with COVID-19 restrictions.

Exclusive: PayPal launches crypto checkout service – Reuters, 3/30/2021

• PayPal will announce later on Tuesday that it has started allowing U.S. consumers to use their cryptocurrency holdings to pay at millions of its online merchants globally, a move that could significantly boost use of digital assets in everyday commerce.
• The service, which PayPal revealed it was working on late last year, will be available at all of its 29 million merchants in the coming months, the company said.
• Checkout with Crypto builds on the ability for PayPal users to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies, which the San Jose, California-based payments company launched in October.
• The company will charge no transaction fee to checkout with crypto and only one type of coin can be used for each purchase, it said.

T-Mobile to Scale Back TV-Service Plans – Wall Street Journal, 3/30/2021

• T-Mobile US is scrapping its efforts to crack into the home television market on its own after the wireless company failed to build its skinny bundle of channels into a profitable service.
• The cellphone carrier said Monday it will wind down the service, called TVision, on April 29 and steer its wireless customers toward Google’s YouTube TV instead.
• The new product was designed to supplement T-Mobile’s home broadband-internet service, which is scheduled to open up to the general public later this year.
• Rival online video packages from Sony and others have shut operations or raised prices on live-TV service to keep up with programmers that continue to raise their fees.

Apple to host developers event online again as COVID-19 cases surge – Reuters, 3/30/2021

• Apple said on Tuesday it would host its annual developers’ conference in an online-only format for the second year in a row, from June 7 to June 11, as COVID-19 cases rise in the United States.
• The iPhone maker’s Worldwide Developers Conference, usually held in San Jose, California with more than 5,000 people attending, was moved completely online for the first time in June last year due to the coronavirus outbreak.
• The United States surpassed 30 million total cases of COVID-19 on Sunday, and the seven-day average of new cases was slightly less than 60,000 per day, according to officials of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Musk says battery cell constraints impact production of Tesla Semi – Reuters, 3/30/2021

• Tesla chief Elon Musk tweeted on Tuesday that supply constraints related to battery cells are making it difficult to scale up production of its long-delayed Tesla Semi electric commercial truck, sending the company’s shares down nearly 2%.
• “Demand is no problem, but near-term cell supply makes it hard to scale Semi. This limitation will be less onerous next year,” the billionaire entrepreneur said here.
• Musk’s statement was in response to a tweet which referred to a news report about the electric carmaker receiving an order for ten Semi trucks from MHX Leasing LLC.
• Last week, Musk had suggested the bottlenecks would cause the mass production to be delayed until 2022.

Amazon union vote enters final stretch in watershed moment for U.S. labor – Reuters, 3/30/2021

• The votes on whether to form a union at Amazon.com’s sprawling Alabama fulfillment center are set to be reviewed starting on Tuesday, with momentum for future labor organizing at America’s second-largest private employer hanging in the balance.
• An agent from the U.S. National Labor Relations Board will sift through ballots sent to more than 5,800 workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama-based warehouse as part of a prolonged process expected to last days and spark legal challenges.
• Amazon has aggressively discouraged attempts by the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to become the first ever to organize one of the online retail giant’s facilities in the United States.
• A union victory would leave Amazon, second only to Walmart with more than 800,000 employees nationwide, vulnerable to additional organizing efforts and represent a watershed moment for the U.S. labor movement, said Wilma Liebman, a former NLRB chair during the Obama administration.

Spotify Acquires Sports-Talk App Locker Room – Wall Street Journal, 3/30/2021

• Spotify Technology is making its move into live audio by acquiring the sports-talk app Locker Room and its maker Betty Labs.
• The deal values the company, initially backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, and more recently by Google Ventures and Precursor Ventures, around $50 million, according to a person familiar with the transaction.
• For Spotify, which has expanded into podcasting to position itself as the world’s largest audio company—not just a music-streaming giant—the deal is a bet that live audio will last well beyond the pandemic.
• The Locker Room app is less than a year old. It launched in October of last year and has seen about 19,000 installs since then, according to app research firm Sensor Tower.
• So far in March, it has seen about 8,000 installs, already representing 60% month-over-month growth from all of February.

JPMorgan, Salesforce Join Growing List of Firms Dumping Office Space – Wall Street Journal, 3/30/2021

• JPMorgan Chase, Salesforce.com and PricewaterhouseCoopers are among the major firms looking to unload big blocks of office space, the latest sign that remote work is hurting demand for this pillar of commercial real estate.
• At the end of 2020, 137 million square feet of office space was available for sublease across the U.S., according to CBRE Group.
• That is up 40% from a year earlier and the highest figure since 2003.
• That raises the prospect that demand for office space could be permanently lower at some companies, much like the rise of e-commerce has been driving down demand and rents for street-level retail.
• This flurry of subleasing activity is already causing fresh headaches for landlords. Office rents for more expensive space, including concessions, fell around 17% over the past year in New York and San Francisco and 13% nationwide, according to real-estate firm JLL.