INTERNATIONAL - The New York Stock Exchange will temporarily close its equities and options trading floors, moving to all-electronic trading starting Monday.
“While we are taking the precautionary step of closing the trading floors, we continue to firmly believe the markets should remain open and accessible to investors,” said NYSE President Stacey Cunningham. The markets will continue to operate under normal trading hours.
The European Central Bank launched an extra emergency bond-buying program worth 750 billion euros ($820 billion) as financial and economic fallout spread from a credit market rout.
The US Senate passed a relief package that would provide paid sick leave, food assistance and financial help for coronavirus testing. The New York Stock Exchange will close trading floors and go fully electronic from Monday. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo mandated that non-essential businesses have no more than half their staff in the office.
Europe surpassed China in the number of coronavirus infections. Schools in England and some London Underground stations will close. German Chancellor Angela Merkel signaled she may be open to joint European Union debt. Early drug trials on coronavirus patients yielded mixed results.
The combination of lopinavir and ritonavir, marketed by AbbVie Inc. as Kaletra, didn’t improve the condition of patients or stop them from dying more than standard care in a randomised, controlled trial of 199 patients. The research was published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Twitter Cracks Down on Misinformation
Twitter Inc said it’s expanding rules to capture misinformation around the virus, following a similar escalation of measures from Facebook Inc.
Twitter will require users to remove tweets that deny expert guidance, encourage fake or ineffective treatments and preventions, or falsely purport to be from experts or authorities.