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The story of Easter

President Trump has a new aspiration: to “have the country opened up” by Easter, on April 12. It’s a publicly announced goal that horrifies health experts. Andrew has pieced together how the president came to side with the business-minded “we can’t have the cure be worse than the problem” crowd.

It began late last week when Wall Street executives warned the Trump administration of another Great Depression if Americans didn’t get back to work soon. Financiers like Lloyd Blankfein and Gary Cohn suggested that, based on reports coming out of China and Italy, younger people might be able to return to work sooner. None of those executives are doctors or scientists.

The White House also seized on opinion pieces like this NYT Op-Ed by David Katz, the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, that questioned the guidelines about flattening the infection curve through extreme social distancing. (Mr. Katz’s piece has been rebutted by other experts.)

A pivotal moment came yesterday when Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence held a conference call with finance magnates like Paul Tudor Jones, Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone, Dan Loeb of Third Point and Ken Griffin of Citadel. Several participants urged Mr. Trump to revive the economy and suggested that the markets would be receptive to a plan to do so. Later in the day, Mr. Trump held a virtual town hall on Fox News, where he spoke about his Easter deadline.

What’s at stake in an economic restart

At the heart of the debate about when to lift the lockdown is a grim calculation: Can we put a price tag on human life? It’s a crass calculation, but the trade-off between economic well-being and health is embedded — implicitly and explicitly — in many aspects of business and society.

The consensus among economists, the NYT’s Eduardo Porter and Jim Tankersley report, is that reopening soon would result in huge costs in lives lost but little in lasting economic benefits.

How much is a life worth? Regulators already make assumptions. The Environmental Protection Agency, for example, has established a cost of $9.5 million per life saved as a benchmark for cleaning up toxic waste sites. Initial research on the coronavirus in the U.S. suggests that a relatively strict government-imposed lockdown would reduce deaths by half a million people, at a cost of $2 million in lost economic activity per life saved.

• This has reopened the debate about whether the focus should be on saving years of life rather than lives — which alters the calculus, given that Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, appears to be much more deadly for older people than for the young.

• Factoring in non-virus deaths due to overwhelmed hospitals is another variable that economists are assessing, and could tilt the recommendations toward even stricter lockdowns.

‘At last, we have a deal’

At 1:30 a.m. Eastern, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, announced a bipartisan agreement on a $2 trillion stimulus package, calling it a “wartime level of investment into our nation.” It is expected to be signed into law within days.

Among the measures: an expansion of unemployment benefits, direct payments to workers, funding for hospitals and local governments, and lending programs that could backstop trillions more in funding.

• A $500 billion fund to bail out distressed industries now comes with oversight by an inspector general and a ban on recipients buying back their own shares. (It also blocks Trump family businesses, and others tied to senior government officials, from receiving the loans.)

• A $350 billion fund for small businesses will extend loans that will be forgiven if companies continue to pay their workers throughout the crisis.

The package will blow up the budget, according to analysts at the Eurasia Group: “The U.S. is likely on pace for an annual deficit of at least $4 trillion and likely higher, in the range of 15-20 percent of G.D.P.”

The markets rallied on news that an agreement was in sight, recording their biggest one-day percentage gain since the 1930s yesterday. The rise pushed the S&P 500 back to levels seen … last Friday.

• Chaotic markets haven’t been kind to quant funds, investment firms that rely on number-crunching algorithms to generate big returns in both good times and bad. The FT and Bloomberg show how the wild market swings of recent weeks proved too much for the machines to handle.

Inside American Airlines’ fight for survival

As carriers await aid from Washington, David Gelles of the NYT talked with executives of American Airlines. The mood inside the company: fearful and frantic.

The airline is canceling 40 percent of its flights each day, and the flights that it is running — which carry just a few people — cost thousands of dollars each trip. Middle seats are blocked off to promote social distancing, planes are being sprayed regularly with antivirus chemicals, and first-class service no longer includes hot towels or nuts.

The company said last week that it had secured $1 billion in financing and $8.4 billion in total available liquidity. To save money, it has shut off coffee and water service in break rooms and is cannibalizing parked planes for repair parts.

“This is scary,” José Freig, who’s overseeing American’s coronavirus response team, told David. A bailout from Washington will help, executives said, but a fear of traveling could haunt American — and the whole airline industry — for a long time.

How essential is WeWork, anyway?

The co-working company’s operating model — crowding strangers into shared workplaces — runs counter to public health guidelines during the pandemic. The business is trying to figure out how to survive, as its investors squabble.

WeWork has resorted to offering employees $100-a-day bonuses to come in. The company argues that because it offers services like mail, security and storage, it qualifies as an “essential” business under New York State guidelines. But employees and customers don’t seem to agree — Peter Eavis of the NYT notes that Midtown Manhattan locations have seen little customer traffic.

Meanwhile, its biggest investors are fighting. Peter sends in this dispatch:

SoftBank, which rescued WeWork last fall, is threatening to walk away from its offer to buy $3 billion worth of company stock. It may be a tactic to pay less to other big shareholders, like Benchmark and the former C.E.O. Adam Neumann. But what happens if it follows through on its threat?

• SoftBank wouldn’t have to lend WeWork $1.1 billion in additional debt financing, a move that would unnerve the company’s landlords.

• It probably wouldn’t change who controls WeWork: Mr. Neumann has already ceded his shares to WeWork’s board, which now controls the majority of the company’s voting shares. SoftBank holds three of eight board seats, and the company’s new C.E.O., Sandeep Mathrani, holds a seat but would most likely vote with SoftBank.

• Mr. Neumann theoretically could try to regain his board seat, but we understand that’s not likely to happen.

The speed read

Deals

• Facebook is said to have held talks to buy a stake in Reliance Jio, a low-cost internet service provider in India. (FT)

• The Fed asked BlackRock to direct billions in bond purchases as part of an emergency program. (WSJ)

• Executives at Apollo Global Management reportedly told investors that they were tracking 250 potential distressed-investing opportunities. (Bloomberg)

Tech

• Oracle’s Larry Ellison reportedly helped convince President Trump of the potential for two antimalarial drugs and is now working on a website to track the results of Covid-19 drugs administered outside clinical trials. (WaPo)

• Facebook is experiencing a surge in use during the pandemic. That’s not necessarily a good thing. (NYT)

• Drivers for Uber and Lyft accuse the companies of defying state laws meant to give them unemployment benefits and sick pay. (NYT)

Best of the rest

• The F.D.I.C., for whatever reason, is urging people not to keep their cash under the mattress. (@FDICgov)

• And the S.E.C. warned against a potential increase in illegal insider trading during the pandemic. (WaPo)

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