British manufacturers are stepping up to the mark with efforts to cover a shortfall in ventilators, a key piece of equipment to battle Covid-19. But doubts are emerging on whether it will be enough.

Hospitals could be left without enough medical ventilators at the height of the UK coronavirus outbreak, with manufacturers struggling to build thousands of new machines in time for the likely mid-April peak in cases, write the Guardian’s Rob Davies and Jennifer Rankin.

The NHS already has 8,175 ventilators but the government believes up to 30,000 could be needed and has enlisted manufacturers in a wartime-style effort to boost stocks to to at least 61,000. Officials are working on deals to increase that number and are expected to announce new orders for hundreds more machines in the coming days.

But sources involved in projects to import or build ventilators told the Guardian that ventilator production was highly unlikely to be in full swing before the end of the month, despite unprecedented collaboration within British industry.

The full report can be read here:

The FTSE 100 loss has been finalised at 1.2%, closing at 5,415.5 points.

For the week the FTSE 100 has lost less than 2% - it could almost have been a normal week.

But within that there is a lot of variation:

On a provisional reading the FTSE 100 has closed down by 1.4% to 5,406 points.

France’s Cac 40 lost 1.6%, while Spain’s Ibex gained 2.2%. Germany’s Dax edged down by 0.5%.

European oil and gas stocks were the strongest performers among different sectors. The sector rose by 8% - perhaps unsurprisingly given Thursday’s record increase in oil prices.

Here is the full report on Debenhams, which is preparing to call in administrators after it was forced to close all its outlets under the coronavirus lockdown.

The company, which has 22,000 staff and was rescued by its lenders after collapsing into administration only a year ago, is understood to be considering filing a formal notice of intention to appoint administrators next week, writes the Guardian’s Sarah Butler.

The legal process provides protection from creditors for 10 working days while a company tries to secure a rescue deal. Potential administrators lined up this time around include KPMG, the advisory firm that handled a restructure of Debenhams last May.

More here:

Approaching the close in Europe the FTSE 100 is down by 1.4%, with something of a late selloff gaining pace.

Legal & General is the biggest faller, down 10.7% after EU calls for insurers to abandon dividend payments were backed by the Bank of England.

Rolls-Royce, the aerospace manufacturer, lost 9.5%. It may be related to the sale of a large part of its stake by ValueAct, an activist investors.

On the FTSE 250 losses have been worse. Shares on the mid-cap index are down by 2.3%.

Property company Hammerson is the big loser, down 25%. Companies have been withholding rent payments in its shopping malls, as retailers have little cash to hand.

However, the government’s bus bailout has boosted Go-Ahead, with shares up 13%.

The move to online video conferencing has been one of the defining features of the crisis so far.

Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland are among the latest to jump on the trend, with decisions to hold “virtual” annual meetings for the banks.

Barclays switched its meeting from Glasgow to London, due to take place on 7 May, and RBS said its AGM would go ahead as planned on 29 April in Edinburgh.

Shareholders will be able to vote electronically, but executives won’t get the same kind of in-person barracking that they sometimes do. Here’s an example of discomfort for Barclays boss Jes Staley two years ago.

Hell hath no fury like a small shareholder scorned (and given the opportunity to make management squirm).

A fair few executives appear to have learned the lesson of the last decade that huge pay packets are not acceptable when workers are struggling. It appears that message has now filtered through to the Premier League, which is closed for lockdown.

Premier League players will be asked to take a 30% drop in their wages, via cuts or deferrals or both, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, the clubs agreed at a meeting on Friday, writes the Guardian’s David Conn.

The move came as the 20 top-flight teams said they would give £125m to the EFL and National League to help their clubs through the crisis and donate £20m to support the NHS, communities, families and vulnerable groups.

You can read the full report here:

It’s choppy trading on US stock markets today: all three of the major indices have now lost more than 1%.

Shares had appeared to shrug off a historically bad non-farm payrolls number, but they have reversed their gains.

The boss of one of the world’s biggest makers of personal protective equipment (PPE) has hit back at Donald Trump after the president warned the manufacturer “will have a big price to pay” and invoked the Defence Production Act to force the manufacturing giant to produce more protective N95 protective masks for the US coronavirus fight.

3M chief executive Mike Roman said accusations of price-gouging and unauthorised reselling is “absurd” and hit back at administration claims that the company is diverting supplies to overseas markets. He said:

I know how the narrative that is propagated broadly, and it’s just not true. [...] The employees of 3M around the world are working around the clock and in the United States to deliver and continue to increase production.

The narrative that we are not doing everything we can to maximize delivery is delivery of respirators in our own country … nothing could be further from the truth. We are doing everything we can to maximise our efforts against Covid-19 and support healthcare workers here in the US.

3M came under attack from the president in a tweet on Thursday evening. “We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks. “P Act” all the way. Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing - will have a big price to pay!”

Train operator Grand Central, which runs services between Sunderland and Kings Cross, has announced it will suspend running, writes transport correspondent Gwyn Topham.

It is the second open-access operator - which run a limited number of trains on bigger networks - in a week to halt operations, following Hull Trains. It had been operating a skeleton service since the outbreak began.

Northern has also announced it will cut back its timetable further from Sunday, leaving no trains at all running on some branch lines.

The coronavirus pandemic is shuttering large parts of our economy, but some companies are benefiting.

Spending on PlayStation more than doubled in March, while local convenience stores such as Nisa and Costcutter recorded a surge in sales, according to the online bank Revolut.

But JD Wetherspoon, the pubs chain, was among the biggest losers in the UK.

Revolut’s customers are likely to be younger and slightly more urban than account holders at the traditional big banks. But the data – taken from spending by the digital lender’s 3 million customers from 1-31 March – gives a strong indication of the consumption patterns that have emerged since the pandemic gripped Britain.

And the surprise winner? Online cards company Moonpig.

You can read why here:

There’s some actual good news in some US economic data just released.

The US non-manufacturing purchasing managers’ index (PMI) from the Institute of Supply Management has performed much better than economists expected, with a reading of 52.5. That was well above the 44 points expected by economists polled by Reuters. It was the 122nd consecutive month of growth in output.

Of course we already know that this is going to tumble, given the number of people who have been laid off in the US already. But at least it shows that there was some life in the US economy before the coronavirus pandemic intervened.

And US stock markets have turned positive in the last half hour: investors buy the rumour, so the shock of the non-payrolls number was well priced in already.

Oil prices are not quite matching yesterday’s record-breaking gains, but those betting prices will rise are not doing too badly either.

Investors are betting that oil producers will agree production cuts that will push prices higher. (Whether higher oil prices is good for anyone but the oil companies is another matter - although higher prices are at least correlated with lower carbon emissions.)

The price of Brent crude futures has risen by another 12% today, after yesterday’s astonishing 21% gain. One barrel of Brent will set you back $33.42, almost $12 higher than the 18-year low of $21.65 hit on Monday.

But despite Donald Trump’s apparent certainty that Russia and Saudi Arabia had agreed a deal, there is a long way to go before any agreement results in actual production cuts.

Here’s the Reuters take:

OPEC and its allies are working on a deal for an unprecedented production cut equivalent to about 10% of global supply, an OPEC source said. (Full Story)

Oil prices slumped 65% in the first quarter on a demand slump caused by the global coronavirus outbreak and moves by Russia and Saudi Arabia to flood the market after their failure last month to extend much smaller OPEC+ supply cuts.

A meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allies such as Russia, a grouping known as OPEC+, has been scheduled for Monday, the Azerbaijan energy ministry said, but details on the distribution of production cuts were thin on the ground.

The British car industry has only weeks, not months, before many companies run out of money, the sector’s lobby group boss has warned.

With every major automotive factory closed in the UK a large proportion of the 800,000 workers in the industry are furloughed, but they will not be able to access government funding to pay 80% of those salaries until the end of the month.

Here’s the Reuters report:

“The supply chain are really concerned about how quickly they can access finance because they need it now,” the chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders Mike Hawes told Reuters.

“They won’t have weeks upon weeks of funding to sustain them,” he said.

The temporary suspension of tax contributions on personnel, business rates administered by local councils and a levy on apprenticeships should all be options, he said.

“Companies need cash immediately,” he added.

US stock markets have opened lower in the wake of the non-farm payrolls data. (Indeed, it’s difficult to know what kind of reading could have been taken positively given what we know is coming in terms of unemployment numbers.)

The benchmark S&P 500 fell 8.36 points, 0.33%, to 2,518.54. The Nasdaq dropped 26 points, or 0.35%, and the Dow Jones industrial average fell 84 points or 0.39% to 21,329 points.

And a note from earlier: it isn’t a coincidence that two economists quoted earlier, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, are both commenting on the US labour market at the same time. They are, in fact, a couple. If you want a bit of diversion from what feels like a different age, this Valentine’s Day podcast from NPR’s Planet Money is fun.

Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan, estimates that US unemployment may already have reached an astonishing 13%.

Nevertheless, Betsy Stevenson, a former member of the Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers and former chief economist at the US labor department, points out that it’s the biggest one-month increase in unemployment since 1975.

Here’s a handy animation of what the non-farm payrolls numbers don’t show. Wait for the huge leap at the end...

Some reactions to the data are coming in now.

The non-farm payrolls number is, unusually, a lagging indicator this month, said James Ingram, investment manager at MB Capital. We know that almost 10m more Americans have filed claims for unemployment benefits since the data were collected. He said:

Due to the cutoff point, it was expected the number would have largely missed the amount of Americans starting to be laid off or out of work from the corona virus outbreak but this figure of minus 701,000 alongside the jump in the unemployment rate to 4.4% was much worse than had been expected.

This brings a brutal end to the 9 year and 5 month run of positive numbers but we expect today’s numbers to be overshadowed by next month’s report by the fact that 10m US workers have made unemployment claims in the last three weeks meaning this could be just the tip of the iceberg.

Neil Birrell, chief investment officer at Premier Miton, an asset manager, said:

The US jobs report just confirms what we all know. It’s much worse than expected. The economy is hurting and will be for a while, but markets are maybe getting attuned to the bad data. The key issue is how long it goes on for, rather than just how bad it is in the short term.

America’s decade-long record of continual job growth came to a shuddering halt on Frida.

Forecasting firm Oxford Economics is predicting a 16% unemployment rate by May with the loss of 27.9m jobs, more than double the 8.7m jobs cut during the 2007-2009 recession and its aftermath. Those jobs were lost over more than two years.

If the unemployment climbs above 15%, it would be the highest on record since 1940. Unemployment touched 10% in October 2009 during the last recession.

The previous peak was in 1982, when it reached 10.8%. Unemployment during the Great Depression peaked at 24.9% in 1933.

You can read the full report here:

US stock market futures are still in the red following the non-farm payrolls data.

While it was not quite as bad as expected by the most bearish economists, the big negative reading certainly gives little room for near-term optimism.

Let’s have a quick checkup on markets ahead of the non-farm payrolls number:

• US stock markets are nudging lower. S&P 500 futures are down by 0.6%, as are futures for Dow Jones industrial average index.
• The FTSE 100 has fallen by 1% to 5,423 points.
• The US dollar index is up by 0.55% today. Against sterling the dollar is up by 1%, with a pound buying $1.2281.
• Germany’s Dax index is holding on to gains (just), but France’s Cac 40 and Italy’s FTSE MIB are both in the negative, down by 0.5% and 1.3% respectively.
  

And it’s Jasper Jolly taking over from Kalyeena to take you through the next few hours.

The travel and tourism industry has stepped up calls for the government to relax rules on consumer refunds, warning that firms risk bankruptcy and the taxpayer will pick up the tab without more flexibility.

Customers whose holidays are postponed or cancelled are entitled to refunds within 14 days - and many will urgently want the money back, with their own jobs affected and livelihoods at risk. However, travel agencies say they have not had that money returned from hotels or airlines, and without revenues from new bookings simply do not have the cash.

The World Travel & Tourism Council has urged the government to show “exceptional flexibility”, as current rules and “crushing financial pressure” could see major bankruptcies, which would lead to consumers claiming on government bonded schemes anyway.

According to travel association Abta, the UK is lagging behind other EU countries in reforming the rules to avoid a wholesale collapse. It has proposed temporary reforms, including:

• Extending the 14-day window for refunds to four months;
• The government underwriting “refund credits” which would guarantee an eventual cash refund should delayed holidays not go ahead
• And an emergency fund to cover consumer hardship, repaying customers when airlines or hotels can or will not refund tour operators.

Over in media and telecoms news, companies are rushing to assure that they’ve got the crisis under control.

Firstly, ITV has been added to the list of execs eschewing pay in light of the lockdown. My colleague Mark Sweney has the details:

And if anyone was worried that the telecoms giants might buckle under the weight of homeworking, BT has assured it’s got things covered...

In our full write up of UK and eurozone PMI’s, Claus Vistesen captures most people’s reaction to the bloc’s business activity figures:

In one line: horrid, hideous, harrowing … you get the picture.

We are struggling to come up with words to describe these numbers, which are now so far out of any reasonable range that they are difficult to interpret.

You can find the full story here:

“The likelihood of a global recession is now a given.” That’s according to Duncan Brock, group director at the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply which publishes the PMI market data.

Commenting on the latest UK services figures, Brock said:

The services sector was sucked into a black hole and flung into the unknown by the forceful impact of the COVID-19 coronavirus, affecting every area of supply chains from transport to purchasing levels and job creation.

The abrupt drop in new orders was the sharpest since the survey began in 1996 according to the PMI data. Export orders were hit particularly hard and, in some cases, dissolved into nothing as border closures and travel restrictions resulted in the immediate cessation of normal business activities.

He adds that this had a severe knock-on effect on employment, with job losses jumping to levels last seen in June 2009.

It’s increasingly difficult to find the words to describe the devastation as every region in the world fights to save human life as the first priority. The likelihood of a global recession is now a given, though its duration and severity has yet to reveal itself.

One thing is for certain, with the lowest business optimism for over 20 years, the immediate outlook for the services sector is beyond grim.

And in case you’d like a visual representation of what’s been going on between Moscow and Riyadh:

More on the oil price moves amid reports that Opec+ (the cartel led by Saudi Arabia and Russia) is set to hold a virtual meeting on Monday.

Here is the latest from our energy correspondent Jillian Ambrose:

Global oil markets appear torn between hope and despair after US President Donald Trump triggered the fastest oil price surge in history by claiming to have brokered a ceasefire in Russia and Saudi Arabia’s oil price war.

The oil price retreated from its biggest ever one day gain on Thursday by tumbling from brief highs of $33 a barrel to below $29 in early trade as growing scepticism of the President’s claim set in.

Since then, the price of Brent crude has climbed back above the $30 a barrel mark, nearly 20 per cent higher than its levels 24 hours earlier, after Opec sources reportedly confirmed that the cartel is debating whether they can make the cuts.

Trump’s tweet claiming that Riyadh and Moscow plan to put aside their rivalry to strike a deal which would cut at least 10 million barrels a day from global production may have been premature - but, for now, the market is pricing in the chance it just might happen.

Unsurprisingly, European stocks have fallen even further since the disappointing PMI data this morning.

Italy’s FTSE MIB has suffered the worst decline amongst its blue chip peers, down -1.5%.

Away from the top tier, the FTSE 250 is down -1.8%.

Senior management at Primark’s parent group Associated British Food have agreed to cut their pay in half during the coronavirus crisis, our colleague and retail Sarah Butler explains.

George Weston, the chief executive, John Bason, finance director, and Paul Marchant, the boss of Primark, are all cutting pay by 50%. Bonuses relating to the current financial year will also not be paid to the executive directors on ABF’s board.

The group’s non-executive directors, including the chairman Michael McLintock, have reduced their pay by 25%. The company said that the pay cuts were appropriate as they now expected full year earnings to be “much lower than envisaged at the start of the financial year.”

That exceeds cuts announced by bus and train operator Go-Ahead Group. This morning Go-Ahead confirmed management would take a 20% pay cut as it, and other bus companies, welcomed £167m in government aid to keep commuter services running for essential staff during the lockdown. More from Reuters on that Go-Ahead story here.

While all of the decline in business activity across the UK and eurozone aren’t necessarily be surprising given the coronavirus lockdown, the falls are proving even worse than initial estimates and are causing a re-think about how severe the contraction will actually be.

The beleaguered airline industry may have at least one rescue package on the horizon.

Air France-KLM is said to be in talks with banks about securing a multibillion euro loan package backed by both the French and Dutch governments.

Air France may get as much as €4bn euros in French-guaranteed loans while KLM could get close to €2bn backed by The Hague, Reuters reported, citing sources.

Taken alone, the UK services sector suffered its steepest decline for more than two decades.

The reading came in at 34.5 for March, below flash readings of 35.7 and down from 53.2 in February.

The report from IHS Markit/CIPs explains:

The slump in activity was almost exclusively linked by survey respondents to business shutdowns and cancelled orders in response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

That exceeded the previous record low logged during the height of the global financial crisis. It was also the fastest downturn for the services sector since the survey started in July 1996.

That is despite an uptick in technology services, where there were pockets of expansion (which is pretty much to be expected following the surge in remote home working).

You can read the full survey here.

Commenting on the shocking drop in Eurozone business activity, IHS Markit’s chief business economist Chris Williamson says:

The data indicate that the eurozone economy is already contracting at an annualised rate approaching 10%, with worse inevitably to come in the near future.

The service sector is currently seeing an especially severe impact from the COVID-19 outbreak, with travel, tourism, restaurants and other leisure activities all hit hard by virus containment measures.

No countries are escaping the severe downturn in business activity, but the especially steep decline in of Italy’s service sector PMI to just 17.4 likely gives a taste of things to come for other countries as closures and lockdowns become more prevalent and more strictly enforced in coming months.

Correction: In my intro, I’ve corrected the Caixin services sector data which came out this morning. The reading was 43.0, signalling a contraction, but at a slower rate than February when the reading was 26.5.

With minutes to go until our next PMI reading (next up: Italy), time to check in on oil prices.

Despite slipping overnight, Brent prices are back up over the 30-dollar mark, rising more than 1.7% on the session to $30.52.

You’ll remember yesterday’s whopping 30% jump in prices, following Donald Trump’s tweet, which suggested that both Russia and Saudi Arabia might be ready to cut output by as much as 15m barrels a day.

Those comments were (slightly) dampened after Putin’s spokesman reportedly told journalists that “no one has started talking about any specific or even abstract deals”.

And in the first of a string of PMI data out this morning, Spain’s services sector performed worse than expected in March.

Economists had been expecting a reading of 25.5, according to a Reuters poll. But even that wasn’t pessimistic enough, with the actual figure coming in at 23.0, down from 52.1 a month earlier.

A reminder that 50 is the neutral reading, and any reading below signals a contraction in the sector.

It’s a bit of a mixed bag of companies that are making up the biggest fallers on the FTSE 100 this morning:

European stock markets are open and have followed Asia’s lead into negative territory:

• FTSE 100 down -0.7%
• Germany’s DAX down -0.4%
• France’s CAC 40 down -0.4%
• Spain’s IBEX down -0.2%

And Europe’s STOXX 600 has fallen 0.4%

Good morning, and welcome to our rolling coverage of the world economy, the financial markets, the eurozone and business.

Despite a positive end to trading on Wall Street, new services PMI data out of China has hit sentiment and sent Asian stocks and US futures back into the red.

The Caixin services PMI showed the country that first bore the brunt of the coronavirus outbreak is still struggling to return to normalcy.

The reading of 43 was up from 26.5 a month earlier. It shows a sector still struggling to reach expansion territory, and one which is nowhere near the levels of growth that economists have come to expect from the Asian nation.

Ipek Ozkardeskaya, Senior Analyst at Swissquote Bank, explains:

Stocks in Tokyo, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Sydney traded in the red, as all three US majors were pulled lower. The Caixin services PMI confirmed a slower contraction in the Chinese activity, but the number also illustrated that life in China has certainly not gotten to a normal pace just yet, with the manufacturing being an exception to this.

We will be keeping an eye on a swathe of data out of Europe and the US, which is expected to confirm a sharp contraction in economic activity and employment.

Here’s what we’re expecting today:

The agenda:

8:15am BST: Spain services PMI for March

8.45am BST: Italian services PMI for March

8.50am BST: French services PMI for March (final reading)

9.00am BST: Eurozone services and composite PMI for March (final reading)

9.30am BST: UK services and composite PMI for March (final reading)

13.30pm BST: US non-farm payrolls for March