Evening Briefing

Nobody wants to be in London anymore. Barclays, Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley are all in some stage of shrinking their footprint, moves that were planned before the coronavirus hit, back when the big calamity was something called Brexit. Now, with thousands of pandemic-induced job cuts likely to follow what’s forecast to be the worst recession in three centuries, the tenants of those glass and steel towers that dominate the City of London and Canary Wharf may really clear out. —David E. Rovella

Here are today’s top stories

Businesses associated with President Donald Trump and members of his administration were among the recipients of pandemic bailout loans. So was one with ties to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Meanwhile, it turns out that in those parts of the country across the South and West where coronavirus cases are spiking, and people are beginning to die,Trump’s poll numbers are falling. Meanwhile, Wall Street is starting to look at the implications of a President Joe Biden.

The bad news is that a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, if one is discovered, is six months away at the earliest. The worse news is that any such shot will eventually wear off. Globally, the pace of new infections in Japan, Iran and elsewhere is raising concerns about a fresh wave. India’s epidemic is now the third-biggest in the world, surpassing Russia. In Israel, bars and gyms have been closed, and capacity at restaurants and on buses has been limited. In the U.S., Americans all over the nation spent the July 4 holiday weekend without masks or social distancing, as the infection rate continues to skyrocket.

The three northeastern states that lost more than 50,000 citizens earlier this year are trying to fight off reinfection. People traveling from states that ignored warnings about reopening too soon may be bringing the pathogen back to the blue states that suffered the most.

It would seem logical that nervous employers navigating the pandemic landscape as they reopen offices would implement mass employee testing. Well, many companies think testing workers is more trouble than it’s worth.

While much of Japan continues to debate the pros and cons of remote working, one of the country’s largest employers has made up its mind—and it could be a bad sign for Japan’s commercial real estate sector.

A rally in the shares of Square over the past few months has pushed the market valuation of the digital-payment company into the ranks of some of the biggest U.S. banks.

What’s Joe Weisenthal thinking about? The Bloomberg news director is mulling job losses—the permanent kind. Last Friday’s jobs report was better than expected: Some 4.8 million people went out to work, and the headline unemployment rate dropped to 11.1%. But the number of people losing their jobs on a permanent basis continues to rise, Joe says. In just four months, the number of people who characterize their layoff as permanent has jumped by over 1.6 million. By contrast, after the official start of the recession during the last crisis, it took 11 months to see more than 1.6 million permanent layoffs.

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Here are today’s top stories

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