Live Market Updates: Stocks Rebound Despite Tighter Covid Restrictions

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In many regions, solar panels now provide electricity at a lower cost than new coal- or gas-fired power plants. linked to credit Tom Sibley for the New York Times.

The spring pandemic has put many solar energy projects on hold. But the industry more than made up for the losses at the end of the year and now accounts for more than 40% of the new power generation capacity added this year.

Additions to solar energy capacity will be 43 percent higher by the end of 2020 than in 2019, according to a report released Tuesday by a trade association and research firm.

Overall, about 43 percent of new power generation capacity added this year will come from solar cells, according to a report by the Solar Energy Association and the research and consultancy firm Wood Mackenzie. The growth came from large solar farms, but there was also a jump in housing construction between the second and third quarter of the year.

Renewable energy groups feared the pandemic would kill companies, but the reality is different. As the cost of solar panels continues to fall and concerns about climate change increase, more and more utilities and homeowners are opting for solar energy, often because they can save a lot of money over the lifetime of the systems compared to energy from fossil fuels. In many areas, solar panels now provide electricity at lower costs than new coal or natural gas-fired power plants, and in some areas they can even provide less electricity than existing fossil-fuel-fired power plants.

The pandemic may have helped the industry: Because maintenance and travel costs have decreased, people have more money to invest in solar systems on the roof, which in combination with batteries can also serve as an emergency power supply in case of fire or storm. As electricity demand has decreased, utilities have also become more dependent on solar and wind power, forcing operators to reduce costs and focus more on cheaper renewable energy.

The industry’s performance in 2020 is a testament to our ability to support economic growth even in the darkest of times, said Abigail Ross Hopper, President and CEO of the Solar Association.

Texas leads the way in solar installations measured in megawatts, followed by Florida, California, South Carolina and Virginia. With the exception of California, these states reported more installations in the first nine months of the year than in 2019 as a whole.

After a slow start due to the pandemic, the California Solar Energy and Storage Association said it expects to close the year with more installations than in 2019.

In the UK, 370,000 people were made redundant between August and October, the highest number ever in three months, as employers cut their jobs before the government’s wage subsidy programme, which never really ended.

The national unemployment rate rose from 4.8 percent to 4.9 percent in the three months to October, the highest level in more than four years, according to the National Statistical Office.

The measures taken by the government to support workers and businesses have kept unemployment relatively low. However, the frequent changes in the level of support and the challenges faced by enterprises as a result of pandemic-related restrictions have led to a record number of redundancies. And the longer the pandemic lasted, the more jobs were at stake.

The outlook is expected to darken over the course of the winter as restrictions become more intense. Since October, England has been closed for four weeks, followed by various restrictions depending on the local spread of the virus. From Wednesday, London will join other regions subject to the country’s strictest measures.

Another employment figure shows that 819,200 jobs disappeared from companies’ payrolls between February and November.

These figures do not include the self-employed, who are particularly affected by the pandemic. There have been half a million fewer self-employed since February, a drop of 11%.

The number of people who reported losing their jobs peaked in September, when the government announced to replace the redundancy programme, which pays 80% of workers’ wages, with a less generous plan. But then the country was hit by the second wave of the pandemic, and the government turned around and extended the holiday program until March.

Expanding employment aid programmes would protect millions of jobs and counteract the rise in winter unemployment, wrote Nye Cominetti, an economist with the Resolution Foundation’s think tank, in a memo. But fewer employers are being hired and there are likely to be pandemic restrictions in 2021, so unemployment will continue to rise in the new year, Cominetti added.

According to the Office of Fiscal Responsibility, the country’s independent financial watchdog, unemployment is expected to reach 7.5 percent next year, with 2.6 million unemployed at the end of the redundancy programme.

On Tuesday, the Federal Reserve announced that it is joining a network of central banks and other financial regulators focused on research and policy development to prepare the financial system for the impact of climate change.

The Federal Reserve Board in Washington voted unanimously to join the network of central banks and supervisors of the financial system as a member, according to a press release. The Federal Reserve started joining the group more than a year ago, but is only now officially doing so, which is viewed with caution by Democrats and Republicans.

The group supports the exchange of ideas, research and best practices in the field of environmental development and climate risk management for the financial sector, according to the Fed in a press release.

The announcement came shortly after Republican members of the House of Representatives sent a letter on the 9th to Fed President Jerome H. Powell and Vice President Randall C. Powell, who is responsible for the oversight. Quarles. December not to join the network without a public commitment to take only those measures that do not disadvantage or harm U.S. bank customers.

Republicans are particularly concerned that increased attention to climate risks by federal regulators could jeopardise access to credit for fossil fuels and other energy companies.

Mr Powell has repeatedly stressed that the Fed is likely to join the network one day, along with his colleagues, including the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan.

The annexation is the final step in a trend in which the Fed – which previously seldom spoke publicly on the subject – is paying more attention to climate change. The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, headed by Mary Daley, hosted the first conference on the system’s climate last year. Lael Brainard, Fed Governor and the only Democrat on the central bank’s board of directors in Washington, D.C., spoke at the event and also raised the issue. This year, for the first time, the Fed’s Financial Stability Report contained a detailed chapter on financial risks related to climate change.

A doctor receives the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at St. John’s Mercy Hospital, Newfoundland. St. Louis on Monday, the first day of a major injection program in the United States. The honor… Whitney Curtis for The New York Times…

• Stocks rose Tuesday as Wall Street attempts to break its recent series of losses despite growing trade and social restrictions in many parts of the world to curb coronavirus infections.
• The S&P 500 increased by approximately 0.7% at the beginning of the trading period. The gain at the end of the day would have been the first for the index in a week – although a series of losses was relatively small, as fears of a spread of a pandemic were mitigated by the introduction of massive vaccination campaigns in the United States and Canada.
• In Europe, the UK FTSE 100 index fell by 0.4%, while the European Stoxx 600 index rose by 0.2%.
• From Wednesday onwards, non-essential shops, schools and hairdressers in Germany must be closed for the 10th time. New Year celebrations are largely forbidden in January. Stricter restrictions will come into force in London, leading to the closure of a large part of the hotel industry; in total, around 60% of the English population will be affected by the heaviest measures.
• Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo warned Monday that the state will face a complete closure if hospitalization rates continue to skyrocket, and other states have also tightened restrictions in recent days.
• But financial analysts follow the development of the coronavirus vaccines and see reason to bet on a recovery of activity.
• We expect effective Covid 19 vaccines to be widely available in the second quarter of 2021, supporting a return to more normal economic and social activity, wrote Mark Hefele, Chief Investment Officer at UBS Global Wealth Management, in a note. So even after a 14% rally in global equities since early November, we see even more upside potential.
• A group of U.S. lawmakers unveiled a new spending plan Monday in an effort to break the stalemate in the recovery talks before the end of the week. The proposal includes $748 billion to fund federal unemployment benefits, loans to small businesses and money for vaccines, food aid, schools and other institutions that need to stay afloat.

Volunteers distributed food donations at the Newton Center in Massachusetts last week. The poverty rate fell in the first months of the pandemic, thanks to the support measures provided for in the CARES law, but has risen sharply since then… The honor… Cody O’Loughlin for the New York Times…

Approximately 12 million workers dependent on two federal emergency unemployment programmes will receive them on the 26th. December, according to an analysis by the Century Foundation. This would be in addition to the 4.4 million Americans who have already exhausted their federal unemployment benefits.

It is provided that less than three million of these workers are entitled to so-called extended benefits, which are granted when the unemployment rate of a State is exceptionally high and can last between six and twenty weeks, depending on the State.

If Congress and the board can’t agree on extra help, the rest of us are left with nothing, Eduardo Porter reports for the New York Times.

The programmes being phased out are the Pandemic Unemployment Benefit, which was created for those who can work and others who are not covered by regular unemployment insurance, and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Benefit, which extends benefits to 13 weeks beyond the normal duration (12 to 30 weeks, depending on the state).

Pascal Noel, economist at the University of Chicago, and his colleague Peter Ganong analyzed the consequences of the end of unemployment benefits in a study published last year. Mr Noel pointed out that expenditure fell significantly in the month in which the benefits expired alone, and this was true in all areas.

And such a shock has consequences. Mark Aguiar of the University of Princeton and Eric Hurst of the University of Chicago have calculated that the drop in food spending attributed by professors Ganong and Noel at the end of unemployment benefits leads to a decline in food quality: a sharp drop in household consumption of fresh fruit and an increase in the consumption of hot dogs and processed meat for lunch.

Jesse Rothstein of the University of California at Berkeley and Robert Valletta of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco investigated what happened when unemployment insurance ended for workers who lost their jobs during the 2001 or 2007-2009 recessions. According to the results, household incomes have fallen by an average of $522 per month.

• On Monday, Pinterest agreed to pay $22.5 million. The company agreed to pay $22 million to settle a lawsuit for sex discrimination and retaliation brought by Françoise Brougher, its former managing director, in one of the largest publicised individual sex discrimination schemes. Within the framework of the agreement, Pinterest did not acknowledge any liability. Brougher said they will jointly donate $2.5 million to charities that support women and under-represented minorities in the technology industry, with an emphasis on education, funding and advocacy.
• Monday, the Federal Trade Commission unveiled a comprehensive study of how social media and streaming companies collect and use data about their users, a commitment that aims to give the consumer watchdog a better understanding of a crucial part of the online sector. The agency has commissioned nine leading technology platforms – Amazon, ByteDance (working with TikTok), Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube – to provide information on how they collect data, how user data is used to determine what ads are delivered to whom, and how companies measure and encourage user engagement.
• The Ministry of Justice and the United Auto Workers Union announced on Monday that they have reached an agreement in principle to implement changes aimed at eradicating corruption within the union without placing it under full government control. U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, Matthew J. Schneider, and union president Rory Gamble said the AU has agreed to appoint an auditor to oversee the union’s finances. The agreement terminated the union’s criminal investigation, but Mr Schneider’s office is still looking for union officials.

It seems that a new streaming service is appearing every day as companies rush to claim the growing consumer interest during the pandemic. But the latest streaming provider has a special feature: Sensical, announced Tuesday, is aimed at children aged 2 to 12 and is affiliated with the non-profit group Common Sense Media, which many parents rely on to evaluate television programs, films and video games based on their educational value and age.

Common Sense Media recently launched a commercial company under the name Common Sense Growth to market its audience and brand, and Sensical is the first company. The free streaming service, which will be launched in the coming months and will be supported by advertising, will contain thousands of short videos that have been checked and sorted into zones for toddlers (2-4 years old), young children (5-7 years old) and older children (8-12 years old). Content partners are the Jump Patrol, the Mother Goose Club and Sesame Workshop.

In general, parents don’t trust the way short videos are presented to their young children, says Eric Berger, CEO of Common Sense Networks. We take the guesswork out and raise the bar not only for Sensical, but for the industry as a whole.

The giant that Mr Berger has not mentioned is YouTube, which has tried to provide more customizable options for parents with the launch of YouTube Kids in 2015, but is still criticized as a potentially dangerous Wild West.

Mr. Berger’s unit, which is structured as a non-profit organization, will have to be careful not to damage the Common Sense brand – especially since it sells advertising.

Sensory loads are displayed up to seven minutes per hour. Certain categories of advertising will be banned, including foods with a high sugar content, amusement parks and certain video games. (Examples of acceptable categories: Pets, healthy food, educational products).

The restrictions also apply to videos whose content is essentially disguised as advertising. Advertisements in videos suitable for children under the age of 6 are aimed at attentive adults.

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