Some glimmer of hope for Aston Martin in China.

The carmaker re-opened up the last of its 18 Chinese dealerships in Wuhan this week, having closed its sites during the coronavirus outbreak.

The Treasury Committee is demanding urgent action from the chancellor to help newly self-employed, graduates, those with savings and others who have who have fallen through the gaps in income support measures announced so far.

Mel Stride MP, chair of the Treasury Committee, said:

Telling self-employed people to access Universal Credit is not enough – especially given the issues with the five-week wait. Many people – self-employed or not – are having issues with claiming UC and contacting the DWP.

He added that the UC system also unfairly penalises people for having larger savings.

Currently the biggest bar to many will be the fact that anyone with savings of £16,000 or more cannot claim, except for jobseeker’s allowance of £74.35 a week, and will receive no help with their rent.

The committee listed six groups of people it said have fallen through the gaps in the supports announced so far.

• People who work via Personal Service Companies
• People falling the wrong side of the £50,000 threshold for the self-employed scheme
• People who are newly self-employed
• Graduates
• People who started work, or were due to start work, after 28 February cut-off date
• Workers who have taken time off for maternity/paternity, as they will have lower average self-employed incomes and are therefore assessed for less by HMRC

Standard Chartered and HSBC have followed suit with their own executive pay cut announcements.

Over at HSBC:

Chairman Mark Tucker will be donating all of his 2020 pay of £1.5m to charities helping with Covid-19 responses.

Meanwhile, the CEO and CFO are giving up 25% of their fixed pay for 6 months. Here’s what that looks like.

HSBC chief executive Noel Quinn is giving up £160,000 and will waive his annual cash bonus for 2020 worth up to £1.24m. (But for context, Quinn was set to take home a £3m in fixed pay alone for 2020 before bonuses.)

HSBC CFO Ewen Stevenson will give up around £93,000 and a cash bonus worth up to £706,000.

Standard Chartered says:

Both its CEO and CFO will waive cash bonuses for 2020 (which to be fair is really just in line with Bank of England guidelines announced last week.)

However, they say they will also make “significant personal donations” to a Covid-19 assistance fund set up by the bank (though it has not clarified how much that will be).

Royal Bank of Scotland’s CEO is giving up a quarter of her remaining fixed pay for the year and will waive her bonus for 2020.

It means Alison Rose will be giving up around £419,000 of her £2.2m fixed salary, plus a bonus worth up to £1.9m.

We don’t have a comparable figure for what she earned last year, given that she took over as chief executive in November 2019. However, the last full year pay package claimed by her predecessor Ross McEwan was worth around £3.6m for 2018.

Rose said in a statement:

In the current environment, many of our customers are worried about their jobs and their businesses and, in recognition of this, I have taken these decisions on my own pay.

The 25% salary sacrifice, which is also being matched by RBS chairman Howard Davies, will be donated towards the National Emergencies Trust (NET) Coronavirus Appeal.

Davies will be giving up around £140,000 of his £750,000 fixed pay.

It’s the latest bank to announce salary sacrifices, following similar moves by Barclays and TSB yesterday.

Switzerland is looking to ease its coronavirus restrictions from the end of April in order to avoid facing its worst recession on record.

The Swiss government’s forecasts show the country’s economy could contract by as much as 10.4% this year due to the outbreak. That is a stark downgrade from previous forecasts of a 1.5% contraction.

More via Reuters:

The downgrade, from the government’s previous forecast of a 1.5% contraction, would occur if there was a prolonged shutdown in Switzerland and abroad, triggering bankruptcies and job cuts.

In this L-shaped scenario, there would only be a weak recovery with the economy forecast to grow by 3.4% in 2021.

In a second, v-shaped-scenario, the Swiss government reckoned with a contraction of 7.1% before a stronger bounceback come 2021.

Channel 4 is to make £245m in savings, mostly though a big cut to its programming budget, and furlough almost 100 staff to weather an ad slump due to the coronavirus.

The broadcaster, which is publicly-owned but is funded mostly by TV advertising, is facing a TV ad slump of 50% over the next two months.

Channel 4’s top management, including chief executive Alex Mahon and director of programmes Ian Katz, are to take a 20% pay cut and will not take bonuses this year - although performance targets will not be reached in any case.

The broadcaster said that it intends to cut £150m from its £660m programming budget, admitting that it will mean fewer new shows on screens this year.

It is also seeking to make £95m in additional savings, including through a hiring freeze, cutting marketing budget and delaying investments.

In addition, Channel 4 has said it will draw down an emergency £75m revolving credit facility for the first time, after agreeing the measure with the government.

Mahon said:

As a commercially funded business the Covid-19 outbreak has had a severe impact on our advertising revenues.

And so we are taking action now to manage our costs appropriately and ensure that we both protect our staff and our ongoing ability to serve our audience.”

Beleaguered hospitals provider NMC Health says it expects to be placed into administration “in due course.”

That is despite efforts to bat away a court application by one of its largest lenders, Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, for the company to appoint administrators who it hopes will fully investigate the group.

NMC Health has been at the centre of an accounting scandal after the company revealed last month that it had nearly $3bn more debt than previously disclosed.

There has also been a lack of transparency over who ultimately owns the shares held by the company’s billionaire co-chairman and largest shareholder, Bavaguthu Raghuram Shetty.

In a very legalese-laden regulatory statement on Wednesday, NMC said:

Notwithstanding strenuous efforts to address creditors’ concerns, it has not been able to secure their alignment and support and has been advised by its counsel that it is not in a position to oppose the application successfully. Accordingly, it expects the company to be placed into administration in due course.

Big pharma is teaming up with the government in an effort to produce millions of testing kits, the UK’s health department has said.

Astrazeneca and GlaxoSmithKline have been creating new national business collaborations, Reuters reported citing the health department.

The government has set up a consortium to make the tests, in a similar way to the earlier ventilator challenge.

Astrazeneca and GSK are also providing expertise on automation and robotics, while Thermo Fisher has also committed to supplying tests.

Wall Street indices have diverged from European shares, rising by about 1% at the opening bell.

The Nasdaq and the S&P 500 both gained about 1.5%, while the Dow Jones industrial average rose by 1.4%.

The FTSE 100 is still down by 0.9%, after one of the quietest days since the crisis took hold in Europe.

EasyJet has confirmed that it has received Stelios Haji-Ioannou’s request for a meeting to vote on the removal of two directors from its board.

They are Andreas Bierwirth, who is also the chief executive of German telecoms provider T-Mobile, and Andrew Findlay, easyJet’s chief financial officer. EasyJet said shareholders should sit tight while it considers the notice:

The Board is considering the contents of the Requisition Notices and further announcements will be made as appropriate. Shareholders are advised to take no action at this time.

It’s worth noting that goods trade was already slowing mainly because of the trade war between the US and China, as well as weakening industry in some economies such as Germany.

The World Trade Organization said that the value of merchandise trade exports (goods as opposed to services) fell by 0.3% in 2019 to $18.89tn. The value of commercial services exports rose 2% to US$ 6.03tn in 2019, according to the WTO’s release.

And the scenarios for trade this year, with the coronavirus pandemic freezing large parts of the world economy, are astonishing. An optimistic scenario would mean a bigger fall in volumes than the financial crisis.

On a pessimistic scenario, trade would fall below the absolute levels hit during the financial crisis. That would undo 15 years of growth, taking the world economy to 2005 levels. See the depth of the damage in this graph - and note the difficulty in getting back to trend growth:

Bear in mind that in 2005 the Chinese economy was only a sixth of its size in 2018 (World Bank figures). To wind back that growth is a huge development; there’s little doubt that this pandemic will change the course of globalisation.

Easyjet’s biggest shareholder, Stelios Haji-Ioannou, has described the bosses of the budget airline he founded as “scoundrels” in his latest attack on the board.

He is furious that easyJet is ordering new planes from Airbus at a time when the airline has grounded all of its planes and has next to no revenues.

Haji-Ioannou has also threatened to pursue easyJet’s directors if they fail to pay back £600m in government-supported emergency loans while still paying Airbus - although he has declined to pay back his near-£60m share of a dividend paid last month.

He wants to call a vote to remove directors of the airline until it complies with his wishes, but accused easyJet chairman John Barton of “dirty tricks” in delaying a meeting he called, saying he used a technicality.

Haji-Ioannou has now called a vote on removing easyJet chief financial officer Andrew Findlay. Along with his family Haji-Ioannou holds 34% of the company’s shares, meaning he can call shareholder meetings unilaterally.

He said:

If a penny of easyJet’s monies goes to Airbus whilst easyJet defaults on other future financial obligations (repayment of the UK government loan in March 2021), I will personally make sure that any scoundrels responsible will go to jail for breach of their fiduciary duties.”

HSBC has reported itself to Australian regulators over possible money laundering breaches.

The bank’s Australian subsidiary has notified the Australian anti-money laundering regulator, AUSTRAC, of the possible underreporting of cross-border transactions, according to an annual report published in March. The breach was first reported by Banking Day, a newsletter.

HSBC’s report said:

In December 2019, the Bank raised with AUSTRAC one such matter relating to the underreporting of a limited category of cross-border transactions involving Non-Bank Financial Institutions and other Financial Institutions. The Bank is continuing to work with AUSTRAC in relation to this matter in line with our open and transparent approach with regulators.

Talks on a coronavirus economic rescue plan for the eurozone worth up to €540bn (£476bn) have broken up without a deal amid north-south divisions over the strings to attach to financial aid for the most-stricken countries.

Negotiations were suspended after a marathon all-night video conference call between the 19 finance ministers of the eurozone ended early on Wednesday morning.

The coronavirus pandemic is testing European Union unity, especially the inner circle of 19 countries that use the single currency, where there are stark differences over the question of shared debt. A dispute between the Netherlands and Italy, the two countries at opposite poles of the EU’s debt divide, thwarted an agreement on a package of loans that could be worth up to €540bn.

You can read more details of the dispute here:

More on the UK’s huge bond sales: the Debt Management Office has just got away a five-year bond at a record low average yield of 0.119%.

The £2.75bn bond issue was 2.7 times oversubscribed - signalling very strong demand, albeit only the strongest since, er, earlier this morning.

Reuters suggests the yield is the lowest ever for a conventional bond sale by the British government. That reflects the Bank of England’s emergency interest rate cut last month which took bank rate to only 0.1%, the lowest ever.

And this gives an excuse for this reporter’s favourite monetary policy chart (if only for the sources): interest rates over the last 5,000 years. This needs an update after the aforementioned cuts though:

Feeling hungry before lunch? Take a look at this to tide you over.

A doughnut cooked up in Oxford will guide Amsterdam out of the economic mess left by the coronavirus pandemic, writes the Guardian’s Daniel Boffey.

While straining to keep citizens safe in the Dutch capital, municipality officials and the British economist Kate Raworth from Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute have also been plotting how the city will rebuild in a post-Covid-19 world.

The conclusion? Out with the global attachment to economic growth and laws of supply and demand, and in with the so-called doughnut model devised by Raworth as a guide to what it means for countries, cities and people to thrive in balance with the planet.

You can read the full report here:

The competition regulator has indicated that it will let a merger between two British private healthcare companies go ahead, but only if they assuage concerns about reduced competition in Bath and Birmingham.

Circle and BMI operate private hospitals as well as providing some elective services to the NHS. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said that the companies had until 17 April to address the issues.

Joel Bamford, CMA senior director, said:

If local concerns can be overcome, we will clear this merger. At the moment though, we have found that it if it goes ahead as planned, competition will be reduced and it could negatively impact patients in Bath and Birmingham.

Expect to hear more on the Tesco dividend...

Here’s Labour peer Andrew Adonis:

The government’s fundraising efforts are continuing apace - and there’s no sign of a let-up in demand for gilts.

The UK Debt Management Office just issued £2bn in bonds, with £7.8bn of orders coming in. That gives a very healthy coverage ratio of almost four.

Along with yesterday’s sales, that means the government is already well on its way with plans to shift £45bn this month to fund the deficit. The deficit is going to balloon as the government pays the salaries of millions and offers lots of business and benefit support.

All is going well but, as economist Frances Coppola points out, the prospect of the Bank of England hoovering up £200bn of bonds under its quantitative easing programme sugars the pill for bond investors.

The deadlock between EU member states on funding the recovery from the pandemic has clearly not helped European stock markets, which are down across the board today.

The FTSE 100 has lost 1.7% and the Euro Stoxx 600 has lost 1.3%.

Online fashion retailer Asos has successfully raised £247m from investors after launching an emergency cash call to manage the impact on demand and sales from the coronavirus pandemic.

The firm managed to place 15.8m new shares at 1560p per share, slightly above Tuesday’s closing price, and representing 18.8% of the company’s share capital. Asos says 95% of the new shares went to existing shareholders.

In advance, the fashion retailer had said the fundraise, coupled with a new overdraft facility, would “strengthen the balance sheet and enable ASOS to exit this disruptive period in a strong position”.

Sophie Lund-Yates, an equity analyst at broker Hargreaves Lansdown said Asos’s digital-only business model is an asset during the lockdown, allowing it to continue operating, unlike some of its rivals. However she warned shoppers in many key markets may not feel inspired to buy a new wardrobe if they are not leaving the house:

A prolonged knock to Asos’s trading wouldn’t be the best news – the group’s operating margins are already thin, meaning it’s more exposed to disruptive headwinds.

Another company sailing close to the wind on the dividend front is Tesco.

Tesco and other supermarkets have been doing sterling work in feeding the nation during the crisis, and there are significant pressures on their supply chains and workers. Tesco said costs so far may be anywhere between £650m and £925m.

However, Tesco said it will go ahead with a £656m dividend payment at 6.5p per share.

Compare that to the £585m that the company will gain from taxpayers as part of the government’s emergency business rates relief. Tesco said:

The UK Government’s emergency policy changes (most notably the 12-month business rates holiday) will be an important offsetting benefit [during the crisis].

Together the dividend cuts from Aviva, RSA (which we had previously missed), Direct Line and Hiscox today add up to £1.3bn, according to AJ Bell.

The spotlight is very much on Phoenix Group, Admiral and Prudential, none of whom have yet reacted to the Bank of England’s strong-arm tactics.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said:

The issue does not appear to be the insurers’ ability to pay. [...] All of the seven FTSE 100 firms appear well buttressed.

There may be another reason for insurers to wish toe the regulatory line, namely public perception. Paying out large amounts of cash to shareholders when tales of refusal to pay out those hit (yet again) by floods or whose livelihood has been destroyed by the lockdown is not necessarily a good look.

By contrast, it is a good look for regulators and politicians to take a tough line even if, with plenty of justification, the insurance industry can say it did not need the taxpayer bail-outs that the banks hoovered up during the great financial crisis of 2007-09.

The insurance holdouts stand in contrast to the banking sector, which promptly cancelled £7.5bn in dividends last week on the Bank of England’s request. The banks have clearly learned the lessons of a decade of public ire following government bailouts in 2008.

The insurance companies have been hit after the Bank of England repeated its warned against dividends to shareholders during the crisis.

The Bank of England has long been known to raise the proverbial eyebrow when it doesn’t get its way. Today’s statement though was more of a prod in the eye - particularly towards Legal & General, which is paying out £750m in dividends despite the warning.

The FTSE 100 insurer justified the payout on the basis that its finances were relatively unaffected, and it is not receiving any public support for furloughed staff. It also said that dividends are important for institutional shareholders including the pension funds of millions of Britons.

The statement on Friday made no reference to the optics of the move, however.

Wednesday’s share price fall is smaller than the rise on Monday, after L&G confirmed that it would pay the dividend. That suggests that at least some investors think that L&G will just take the reputational hit.

At mid-morning the FTSE 100 has lost 1.5% and the FTSE 250 has edged down by 0.2%.

Insurance companies are among the biggest fallers on both indices. Aviva has lost 8.8% and Legal & General is down by 5.4%. Among mid-caps Direct Line is down by 6.8%.

Pretty much everybody agrees that the world will look very different after the coronavirus pandemic, but perhaps the biggest challenge will remain: the climate crisis. Environmental campaigners hope that the response to the former will not prevent the later from being tackled.

Airlines are lobbying to rewrite the rules of a global agreement designed to tackle aviation emissions, with the coronavirus outbreak expected to make its targets tougher to meet, write the Guardian’s Gwyn Topham and Fiona Harvey.

Campaigners accused airlines of attempting to “dodge their obligations”, but the industry said it was “a matter of survival”, with most international travel currently frozen in the Covid-19 crisis.

The International Air Transport Association (Iata) has called on the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) to amend the carbon offsetting and reduction scheme for international aviation (Corsia), or risk airlines pulling out.

Activists are furious. You can read more here:

German carmaker BMW will start producing face masks to help protect its own staff and the public against the spread of the new coronavirus, chief executive Oliver Zipse said today.

Zipse said BMW would soon be able to produce several hundred thousand masks per day, according to Reuters:

The company has already delivered 100,000 masks to the government from its own existing stocks, and handed over another 50,000 masks and a million medical gloves on Wednesday, with a further million masks to be handed over in the next two weeks.

BMW said on Monday that a production stoppage at its factories is being extended by two weeks until April 30.

A quick update on Boris Johnson’s condition: the prime minister spent a second night in intensive care and was last reported to be in a stable condition.

The prime minister was said to be breathing without assistance and was conscious at St Thomas’ hospital in London. From Edward Argar, a junior health minister, today:

He is comfortable, he’s stable, he’s in good spirits. While he’s had oxygen, he hasn’t been on a ventilator.

We will of course bring any new developments as soon as they emerge, but you can follow the main coronavirus live blog for political details and analysis:

Travel company Tui has cancelled all holidays up to and including 14 May, with the coronavirus lockdowns still taking their toll.

The FTSE 250 company has lost 60% of its value over the past year (although shares are up by 7% today).

Travel companies are under massive pressure to give refunds to customers, but many do not have the cash to do so.

The EU finance ministers’ video conference lasted an eye-watering 14 hours - putting endless Zoom lockdown parties into the shade - the Financial Times (£) reports:

EU finance ministers failed to break an impasse between Rome and The Hague over the issue of coronabonds and how to construct loans from the bloc’s bailout fund during an all-night teleconference that ended on Wednesday morning. The dispute meant ministers could not agree on a report for EU27 leaders that lays out crisis fighting measures and for a post-pandemic recovery.

Italy wants the aforementioned joint bonds, “coronabonds”, but Dutch fiscal conservatives do not want to cross that Rubicon, which could theoretically put the eurozone on a path to debt sharing even beyond the crisis.

The decision to regroup on Thursday will at least allow ministers and aides the chance to grab some sleep.

To put today’s bond yield rise into context, here is the year so far for the Italian 10-year yield.

While it’s a notable increase in the yield (meaning prices have dropped as demand falls), it does not yet rival the market turmoil as the scale of the crisis in Europe became clear in mid-March. Italy has been the hardest hit by the coronavirus in Europe.

Nevertheless, the European Central Bank will be watching closely - particularly after Christine Lagarde’s previous missteps.

Tesco sales jumped 30% in the first few weeks of the coronavirus outbreak as shoppers stockpiled in the run-up to the lockdown but additional costs involved in feeding the nation could reach almost £1bn.

Dave Lewis, the chief executive, said: “Initial panic-buying has subsided and service levels are returning to normal. There are significant extra costs in feeding the nation at the moment but these are partially offset by the UK business rates relief.”

The supermarket said the stockpiling had cleared the supply chain of certain products but supply levels had now stabilised, with more normal sales volumes being experienced.

You can read more here:

The FTSE 100 has fallen by 1.2% in initial trading. Rolls-Royce and Tesco are among the biggest fallers.

The Stoxx 600 index, tracking the biggest companies across Europe, fell by 0.6%.