The Business Leaders Trump Asks for Advice on the Coronavirus

And borrowers are worried about the fine print. Paul Caragiulo, a restaurateur in Florida, told Stacy that he was wary of making use of a program that’s being worked out in real time. Info sheets provided by the government “are bullet points, not term sheets,” he said.

Speaking of details being worked out on the fly: Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, told Axios that he expects venture-backed companies to qualify for the small-business aid after all. And Jay Clayton, the S.E.C.’s chairman, suggested that he would support companies owned by private equity firms qualifying as well.

If you work at a small business and plan to apply for loans from the program, we’d like to hear from you: Drop us a line at dealbook@nytimes.com.

The labor market’s ‘grief and suffering’

The latest data revealed that 6.6 million Americans filed an initial unemployment claim last week. That means that around 10 million people have lost their jobs over the past two weeks alone. Economists have struggled to describe the speed and severity of the downturn:

“What usually takes months or quarters to happen in a recession is happening in a matter of weeks.” — Michelle Meyer, the chief U.S. economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch

“Sadly, the claims figures over the last two weeks may be the new normal for at least a few more weeks as we expect job losses arising from the coronavirus pandemic to surpass 20 million.” — Nancy Vanden Houten, the lead economist at Oxford Economics

“The grief and suffering behind these numbers is incomprehensible.” — Heidi Shierholz, the director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute

More grim data will come out today, in the form of monthly payroll numbers for March. It will almost certainly show a decline in jobs, breaking the streak of 113 months of employment growth through February. But since the government surveyed businesses in the week before widespread shutdowns put millions out of work, the decline won’t likely be as dismal as the weekly claims data.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/03/business/dealbook/trump-coronavirus-advisors.html