fortune--2020-03-12--Former track athletes sue NCAA, coach over alleged abuse

Former Olympic high jumper Erin Aldrich planned to die with a secret she kept quiet for two-plus decades: an affair with a college coach she began falling in love with as a teenager and with whom she had an sexual relationship as a young woman.
When Aldrich watched “Leaving Neverland,” about a year ago, the documentary featuring stories of men who say the late Michael Jackson sexually abused them as boys, she decided it was time to share her story.
“I had always told myself I was going to take this to the grave,” Aldrich said during an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday night in which she he claimed John Rembao began grooming her for a romantic relationship when she was a high school junior. “When I watched “Leaving Neverland,” it suddenly dawned on me that I was one of those boys, just a little bit older.”
Aldrich is one of three former student-athletes who say, in a lawsuit filed against the NCAA, that they were sexually abused by a track coach and allege the governing body and its board of governors didn’t do enough to protect them.
Londa Bevins, Jessica Johnson and Aldrich—who represented the U.S. in the 2000 Olympics—are seeking class action status for the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California. The women say they were sexually abused and harassed by Rembao while he worked at the University of Texas and the University of Arizona.
The suit aims to include NCAA student-athletes, who also say they were put at risk by the inaction of the governing body since 1992.
Rembao led the Longhorns’ cross country program and was an assistant for their track team from 1997 to 2001. He was an assistant coach for the Wildcats’ track program from 1993 to 1997.
“The behavior alleged in this story is disturbing,” Texas athletic director Chris Del Conte said. “Our current coaches and staff know that such behavior is totally unacceptable and will not be tolerated at the University of Texas.”
Rembao declined to comment, via email, on the allegations in the lawsuit.
The suit filed by law firms FeganScott and Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein says the NCAA failed to stop sexual abuse and harassment of student-athletes by coaches at all member schools.
The Associated Press left messages seeking comment with the NCAA as well as the University of Arizona.
Rembao was suspended Dec. 18, 2019, for undisclosed allegations of misconduct by the U.S. Center for SafeSport, an organization that investigates sex-abuse claims in Olympic sports. He has worked at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for more than seven years, according to his LinkedIn profile, and is currently the assistant director of employer relations at the school.
In an interview on Tuesday with USA Today, Rembao denied the allegations brought against him by the three women in the lawsuit.
“This is ridiculous,” Rembao said in a story published by USA Today. “It never happened. This is completely false. This is just making me angry because this is all crap.”
The NCAA, which is headquartered in Indianapolis, is a member-led organization comprised of nearly 11,000 colleges and universities and nearly a half-million student-athletes competing in 24 sports.
The plaintiffs are asking for new policies to be adopted immediately regarding coach-student relationships and for compensation for those subjected to abuse because the NCAA did not implement best practices.
The filing comes in the wake of revelations at the University of Michigan along with allegations and investigations of sexual abuse made by patients of sports doctors at other universities, including Michigan State, Ohio State and Minnesota.
Aldrich was on Arizona’s track and field and volleyball teams during the 1996-97 season and she transferred to Texas to compete in the high jump from 1997 to 2000. Rembao was one of her coaches. The Olympian and NCAA champion runner claims Rembao sexually abused her at Arizona and later harassed when she was competing for the Longhorns.
“He was my first sexual experience,” Aldrich recalled in a telephone interview. “When we were going to world juniors, when I had just turned 18, he put a blanket over my lap and he penetrated me with his fingers.”
Johnson and Bevins say Rembao sexually abused and harassed them while they were on Texas’ track team as a freshman during the 1999-2000 season.
“We had been at Texas for eight months and had enough,” Bevins recalled in a telephone interview.
Both Bevins and Johnson gave up their scholarships after one school year and transferred to Arkansas.
“After the spring semester of 2000, I was depressed, anxious and cutting myself,” Johnson recalled.
Johnson said her concerns about Rembao were expressed in a formal complaint to the University of Texas in the summer of 2000, detailing alleged abuse in a 22-page document.
“I thought because they’re adults, I’m going to tell them my story and they’re going to believe me,” Jonson said in a telephone interview. “No one did. None of them had my best interest in mind.”
New York-based lawyer Annika K. Martin, one of the attorneys who filed the lawsuit, said the three brave women are speaking not only for themselves, but for all student-athletes who the NCAA put at risk and allowed to be harmed.
“They are not just asking the NCAA to pay for past wrongs, they are also asking the NCAA to change to protect current and future student-athletes,” Martin said.
The lawsuit raises the second issue of serious misconduct by a Texas women’s track coach in the early 2000s. Former women’s head coach Bev Kearney was fired by the school in early 2013 after one of her former athletes alerted them to a consensual relationship between the pair a decade earlier.
In dismissing Kearney, Texas officials said she had crossed a line between athlete and coach. Kearney sued Texas on race and gender discrimination claims and later reached an undisclosed settlement with the university.
And in 2009, former football assistant Major Applewhite was disciplined for an improper relationship with a student trainer on a bowl game trip. He was not fired.
Martin said a team of attorneys is willing to represent anyone who says they were put at risk by the NCAA after the U.S. Olympic Committee stated all sexual contact between coaches and student-athletes should be prohibited 28 years ago.
“The NCAA should have made that same prohibition to its member schools in 1992, if not before,” Martin said.
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—How the trouble-ridden debut of a breakthrough vaccine sparked a panic
—This yachting adventure might be the world’s most exclusive escape
—The man behind some of Napa Valley’s most acclaimed wineries
—WATCH: Best earbuds in 2020: Apple AirPods Pro Vs. Sony WF-1000XM3
Subscribe to Fortune’s Outbreak newsletter for a daily roundup of stories on the coronavirus outbreak and its impact on global business.


fortune--2020-03-13--83% of Internet-connected medical imaging machines in the U.S. are ripe for hacking, report says

China ’ s number of daily new coronavirus infections has fallen into the single digits

The vast majority of medical imaging equipment in the U.S. is leaving patient data vulnerable and hospitals open to attacks that could disrupt care, a new study says.
As many as 83% of Internet-connected medical imaging devices—from mammography machines to MRI machines—are vulnerable, according to the 2020 IoT Threat Report from Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 threat security team. That’s up from 56% in 2018.
May Wang, senior distinguished engineer at Palo Alto Networks, attributes the uptick from 2018 to 2020 to Microsoft dropping support for Windows 7. While medical devices have a long life cycle, if they aren’t diligently updated with the latest version of its operating system, or are running an unsupported operating system, then hackers can exploit vulnerabilities to steal data, infiltrate a hospital network, and disrupt care.
“It’s like having a permanently broken window on the side of your house—you never know when someone might slip in,” Wang tells Fortune.
Once an attacker successfully gets in through that window, it becomes very likely they can gain access to the hospital’s broader network to steal or erase critical data. And that’s when the chaos starts to happen.
How 12-year-old malware disrupted a hospital
Hospitals typically lag behind other industries when it comes to cyber security, Wang says, which makes them especially vulnerable to a variety of attacks. For instance, the report details how a 12-year-old piece of malware, called Conficker, is making a comeback.
An unnamed hospital mentioned in the report experienced unusual traffic over one of its mammography imaging machines. Over the course of a few days, the IT team determined that the Conficker worm had infected other medical devices on the hospital’s network, including another mammography machine, a radiology machine, a digital imaging device, and others.
Conficker was first detected in 2008 when it exploited vulnerablities in Windows XP and older Microsoft operating systems. The worm would infect devices and add them to a botnet that would continue looking for devices to infect. By 2009, the worm had infected an estimated 15 million PCs, hitting hospitals, governments, and corporations.
In 2015, it was estimated there were 400,000 machines infected by the Conficker worm. The 2020 report says that number is now likely half a million.
“Conficker was designed with multiple spreading mechanisms built into it and it didn’t rely on users to do anything to enable it to spread—it was completely self-sufficient,” says Wang. “For example, it has a peer-to-peer functionality that allows infected computers to continue communicating with each other without the need for a central server to give it orders, enabling it to keep spreading.”
In the case of the hospital, rebooting the devices didn’t work, since it didn’t address the unpatched holes that enabled the Conficker infection. The hospital was instead forced to take its devices offline, install vital security patches, and tediously bring them back online one at a time.
The total downtime was one week before all the devices were back online and running without interruptions, according to the report.
Why hackers target hospitals
The Palo Alto Networks report also cautions about newer attacks that are targeting lucrative personal data.
“Hospitals and healthcare providers house highly confidential and sensitive personal information that is specifically appealing to malicious actors,” Matthew Gardiner, director of enterprise security at Mimecast, a data security company, tells Fortune. “It’s essentially a treasure trove of information that can either be directly monetized or used in identity theft or other later stage attacks.”
Hackers are looking to get in any way they can, and in the medical community, there are plenty of open windows.
Ninety percent of health care organizations were hit with email-borne attacks last year, according to research released on Tuesday by Mimecast. Of those, one in four said the attacks were extremely disruptive.
In one case, a medical office was even forced to shut down after a cyber attack. Last September, Wood Ranch Medical in Simi Valley, California was hit with ransomware.
“Unfortunately, the damage to our computer system was such that we are unable to recover the data stored there and, with our backup system encrypted as well, we cannot rebuild our medical records,” reads a message to its patients. “We will be closing our practice and ceasing operations on December 17, 2019.”
For cash-strapped hospitals, it can be a choice between buying a new imaging machine, or investing to upgrade the hospital firewall to help mitigate these types of attacks.
Attackers know hospitals are slow to upgrade and exploit them, often for profit, Wang says. “Having a system go down in an enterprise means loss of money, but downtime for a hospital can mean loss of life,” she adds. “Healthcare resorts to paying a ransomware more often than not, so they can regain control over systems and data.”
Taking preventative measures
There are some steps hospitals can take now to help help mitigate the threat.
Wang recommends organizations regularly scan their networks to see which IoT devices are connected. Anything that doesn’t belong on the network or isn’t being used should be disconnected. Other devices should be regularly updated to ensure any holes are patched. Finally, IoT medical devices should be separated from the regular network.
“As our report showed, 72% of the time, IoT medical devices are not separated from the regular network,” Wang says. “This means Infiltrating an IoT medical device means in addition to patient data being potentially stolen from the medical device its self, an attack could also potentially infiltrate the hospital’s broader network and access far more patient data.”
In other words: Quarantining IoT devices from the main network is the best way to stay safe.
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—Why investors suddenly turned on pot stocks
—How the trouble-ridden debut of a breakthrough vaccine sparked a panic
—This yachting adventure might be the world’s most exclusive escape
—The man behind some of Napa Valley’s most acclaimed wineries
—WATCH: Best earbuds in 2020: Apple AirPods Pro Vs. Sony WF-1000XM3
Subscribe to Fortune’s Outbreak newsletter for a daily roundup of stories on the coronavirus outbreak and its impact on global business.


Bear market blues

This is the web version of CEO Daily. To get it delivered to your inbox, sign up here.
Good morning.
Since it’s Friday, let me start with some feedback. KZ took me to task on Tuesday, when I noted that the S&P 500 was just a percentage point shy of bear market territory, and commented: “Don’t worry; we’ll get there.”
“Incorrect,” KZ replied. So we made a $10 bet. If the S&P 500 at the end of the first week in April is above Monday’s close of 2,882, he wins. If it’s below, I win.
Yesterday we closed at 2,481. Indeed, yesterday it felt like the whole nation finally capitulated to the reality of coronavirus. (Maybe even KZ.) The string of cancellations and closings that filled my inbox was too long to mention here. I’ll only cite the big one: for the first time in my Carolina blue lifetime, March madness has been muzzled. No NCAA tournament. If that isn’t a clear sign of a recession ahead, I don’t know what is.
Most Americans, it turns out, now agree with me. Fortune Analytics, our new data service for premium subscribers, worked with Survey Monkey to reach a representative cross section of more than 2,000 Americans. We found that 75% of Americans believe the virus will have a negative effect on the economy, and 65% think a recession is likely.
At Fortune, we closed down our Manhattan office last night for a one-week work-from-home “test.” But the cascade of New York cancellations and closings makes it clear that the “test” is likely to be extended. The question is: for how long? On that point, I hear the experts disagree, with some saying 2-3 months for the virus to cycle, while others say it may take a year or more.
*********
In the midst of this virus-mania, we at Fortune are launching a new podcast next week called Leadership Next, that I have the honor of hosting. Readers of this newsletter know I believe that the way the best CEOs run their companies has changed dramatically in the last few years. Leadership Next is a chance for me to talk with the people who are driving that change. We launch Tuesday with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as our guest, and will follow up weekly after with a line-up that includes Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson, Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty, Delta CEO Ed Bastian, and former Unilever CEO Paul Polman. You can subscribe here.
More news below.
Alan Murray
@alansmurray
alan.murray@fortune.com
TOP NEWS
First, the markets
Following yesterday's historic plunge (are we done with those for now?) Japan's Nikkei 225 slipped by 6.1%, but the damage elsewhere in Asia was more limited—in Australia, the ASX 200 even recovered 4.4%. In Europe, the day started off with signs of a welcome bounce, then the bounce faded, then it showed signs of returning; the Stoxx 600 is currently up 7%. U.S. futures look similarly positive. Bloomberg
Good news!
According to Beijing, the Chinese mainland recorded only eight new cases yesterday, marking the first drop to single digits there in recent months. Bad news: the global infection count is now more than 125,000 and the death toll above 4,600. Mixed news, depending on your stance on such things: Bitcoin's tumble has continued to the point where the cryptocurrency lost around half its value in the last month. Xinhua
CEO coronavirus
Philip Jansen, CEO of British telecoms giant BT, has become the first chief executive of a major firm to come down with Covid-19. He tested positive late yesterday and is now in isolation, though as he feels alright he is continuing to lead the company. BT says it is now deep-cleaning its group headquarters, and Jansen has notified industry partners with whom he recently met. Sky News
Isolated politicians
Australian home affairs minister Peter Dutton has the coronavirus, as confirmed after he met with Ivanka Trump and Attorney General William Barr last week. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in isolation after his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, tested positive. Romania's interim prime minister, Ludovic Orban, is quarantined after coming into contact with an infected colleague. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is being tested after his press secretary, Fabio Wajngarten, tested positive—Wajngarten met with President Trump and Vice President Pence just days ago. Spanish Equality Minister Irene Montero has also tested positive, sending her husband, Deputy Prime Minister Pablo Iglesias, into quarantine as well. And the Kremlin has told journalists covering President Vladimir Putin to stay away if they feel unwell. Business Insider
AROUND THE WATER COOLER
Roche test
The U.S. government has granted Roche Holding emergency approval for a highly automated coronavirus test, which should greatly speed up the testing process in that country (it's also available in Europe). Roche diagnostics unit chief Thomas Schinecker: "We are increasing the speed definitely by a factor of 10" compared with Roche's older testing kit. Results from the test are available in just several hours, not days. Fortune
Eurozone policy
Eurogroup president Mário Centeno says he expects Eurozone member states will provide a "very large" policy response to the coronavirus economic crisis, adding up to a lot more than the €27 billion aggregate level mentioned yesterday by ECB President Christine Lagarde. Centeno said the support would include backing for health and civil protection, support for families and workers, and tax deferrals and the like for companies facing liquidity shortages. Financial Times
Paying suppliers
The British supermarket group Morrisons is to pay its smaller suppliers more urgently than usual—within 48 hours—to help them weather the coronavirus crisis. The move should be good news for local food suppliers and farmers providing eggs and meat. Yorkshire Post
Recession planning
Ritholtz's Ben Carlson has some advice for preparing personal finances for the coming recession. Tips include making sure you have enough liquidity, getting your lifestyle inflation in check, and refinancing your mortgage. Fortune
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by David Meyer.


fortune--2020-03-13--Inside the White House meeting that led Trump to make his Oval Office coronavirus speech

83 % of Internet-connected medical imaging machines in the U.S. are ripe for hacking , report says

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Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office Wednesday before the biggest speech of his presidency, listening to his aides argue about whether barring Europeans from traveling to the U.S. would trigger a global depression.
The medical experts on his team were adamant: The best way to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus was to buy time by keeping Europeans out, they said, with the hope the virus may naturally ebb in the warmer weather, according to people familiar with the deliberations. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow, the president’s top economic adviser, pushed back strongly, saying the economic cost would be steep.
Trump let them go on for a bit, then had heard enough. He dispatched some of the advisers into the nearby Cabinet Room and told them to come back with a plan they could all stand behind, said two of the people, who like others asked for anonymity to describe internal deliberations. When they returned with almost everyone endorsing the travel restrictions, Trump agreed to do a prime-time address to tell the nation.
His aides now see this moment as the most crucial of Trump’s presidency, the time when voters will decide whether he deserves re-election. “We’re going to win or lose right here,” one said. Another said that if the stock market is lower than when Trump took office, it would shatter his claim to being the one person who can keep the economy on track.
If that’s truly the measure voters will use, Trump’s speech Wednesday did little to win their confidence or to win himself a second term.
The S&P 500 plunged nearly 10% on Thursday, chalking up its worst loss since the crash in 1987, even after the Federal Reserve took aggressive steps by flooding the market with liquidity and widening its purchases of U.S. government securities.
The speech was Trump delivering — one day late — a report he promised to the nation on his virus plan. It came after a rolling, day-long series of meetings at the White House, capped by Trump’s decision to endorse the travel restrictions. But beyond the travel ban, the economic measures he announced — paid family leave and small business loans — were modest and vague.
The hastily drafted 10-minute speech had undergone last-minute edits from the president and one of his senior advisers, Stephen Miller, after other aides had left the room, one of the people said. Among the changes they made: deleting a sentence where Trump said he and Melania were sending their prayers and love to people suffering from the illness.
The final draft that aides loaded into TelePrompter contained two significant factual errors and Trump himself inadvertently added another by mixing up his words.
Trump told Americans that “we will be suspending all travel from Europe to the United States for the next 30 days.” That wasn’t accurate. When the details were released later that evening, the rules barred foreigners who had been in Europe in the previous 14 days from entering the U.S. He stumbled over the words when announcing cargo wouldn’t be interrupted, accidentally announcing that trade would be cut off. And he said the nation’s health insurance providers had agreed to pay co-pays for virus testing and treatment, something the industry quickly denied.
But the most important and most controversial proposal came not from Trump himself but from the medical experts on his virus task force, led by Deborah Birx. A medical doctor appointed to be the State Department’s ambassador for AIDS prevention, Birx made an impassioned case to suspend travel from Europe, the people said.
She presented a detailed case on how many of the new cases in the U.S. can be traced to Europe. If travel had been shut down earlier, she added, the outbreak could have been contained to a few states. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar backed her up, two of people said.
Mnuchin was strongly opposed, saying that nobody was taking into account the damaging blow it would deal to an economy already shaken by the virus or the jobs that would be lost.
Some of Trump’s closest advisers argued for even tighter restrictions, including a complete halt of flights to the U.S. for 30 days, two of the people said.
National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien was among those who favored flight limits beyond Europe but didn’t support a total lockdown.
In the end, that idea of a full shutdown was abandoned as too extreme.
In the moments before the speech, a smaller group of aides spoke with Trump as he prepared to focus on the health urgency that underscored his travel decree. The group included Vice President Mike Pence, his daughter Ivanka Trump, his son-in-law Jared Kushner and Azar.
By the next morning, with markets plunging, Trump spoke with reporters about his address.
“I made a very tough decision last night,” Trump said. “And whether it affects the stock market or not. Very important. But it’s not important compared to life and death. So I had to make that decision and, frankly, the people that are professionals praised the decision. And it’s something I had to do. I think you’ll see the end result is very good because of it.”
As of Thursday afternoon, there were more than 1,300 cases in at least 46 states.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—How coronavirus is affecting the global concert industry
—Politicians around the world are going into quarantine
—Some of the most extreme ways companies are combating coronavirus
—How Europe is adapting to the coronavirus outbreak
—What Xi Jinping’s visit to Wuhan says about China’s coronavirus recovery
—Conferences go online amid coronavirus fears—minus the hallway schmoozing
—Coronavirus may not be all bad for tech. Consider the “stay at home” stocks
Subscribe to Fortune’s Outbreak newsletter for a daily roundup of stories on the coronavirus outbreak and its impact on global business.


fortune--2020-03-13--The markets bounce back after yesterday’s Black Thursday rout

This is the web version of the Bull Sheet, Fortune’s no-BS daily newsletter on the markets. Sign up to receive it in your inbox here.
Good morning, everyone. Ok, take a deep breath. After the Black Thursday bloodbath, today we have…a modest bounce.
Where are these green shoots appearing? Let’s take a look.
Markets update
We start in Europe, which suffered its worst day for equities-trading ever on Thursday. If you think the Wall Street carnage was bad, cast an eye on these eye-watering numbers: The FTSE in London cratered by 11%. Germany’s Dax yesterday plummeted 12%. Italy bombed by 17%. You get the idea.
But at the open today, the European bourses were in the green. Even battered Italy was on the up. It may help that the Italians have placed a partial ban on short-selling, joining South Korea and Spain. Germany may do so as well. You may remember this playbook from the low point of the 2008-2009 financial crisis.
Before we go to the U.S., a quick roundup of Asian stocks. They’re falling the furthest today, a reaction to yesterday’s routs in Europe and the States.
Now, as I type, the U.S. futures are set to open higher, with the Dow up above 900 points, or 3.4%, on hopes Congress can patch together a coronavirus stimulus plan. That’s nice, but hardly enough to chip away at yesterday’s 2,352-point fall, it’s worst day since Black Monday in October 1987.
Scott Wren, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, told Fortune‘s Anne Sraders he’s looking beyond the ups and downs of the indices. “Consumers sitting at home and not out spending money because they fear catching the coronavirus is the ultimate negative outcome,” he said, an anxiety that could spread into the housing market, and the wider economy.
For a while there yesterday, these markets were beginning to take on a sell-everything, panic mentality—no surprise when regions across the world enter bear territory so quickly, and all at once. Just look at the situation with gold. The classic safe-haven sold off sharply on Thursday, along with commodities, oil and equities. That kind of coordinated sell-off isn’t common; it happens when big players are forced to liquidate all positions, even the ones generating a decent return, to meet margin calls. Oh, and bitcoin bombed too, its worst sell-off in seven years. Read into that what you will.
This morning, the dollar and gold are down slightly. Crude is up, in line with the U.S. futures.
As we do every Friday, let’s look at the big figures moving markets.
***
By the numbers
28.3. The Dow has fallen 28.3% since its Feb. 12 high of 29,551, which was within 449 points of 30k. Don’t look now, but, as of yesterday’s close, the benchmark is a mere (on an absolute basis) 1,374 points, or a drop of 6.5%, from erasing all the gains from the Trump era. Here’s an updated table looking at the recent rise and fall of the Dow.
Single digits. China is reporting some good news today. The numbers are a little bit delayed, put show promise. As of March 12, there were just eight new infections and seven new deaths, down from 15,000 per-day just one month ago. The Chinese put into force some of the most stringent lockdown efforts anywhere in the world, a move that may prove to be a kind of model in hard-hit regions. I know all about that here in Italy, where the outlook is not as rosy. There are 15,000 cases here, and more than 1,000 deaths.
Nothing. The ECB stunned markets on Thursday by not cutting its benchmark interest rates. You could argue the central bank had no room to do so, seeing as rates are already in negative territory. But the move, combined with some tough-love remarks by ECB chief Christine Lagarde about not planning to bail out any virus-ravaged member states (she’s looking at you, Italy), absolutely obliterated the European markets Thursday afternoon, and pushed the spread on Italian bonds into the red. The move (or lack of one) underscored investor concern that central banks have far less ammunition in this crisis to goose the economy, and the markets, than they did in the financial crisis of 2008. Look for this theme to play out in the coming days and weeks.
Postscript
Yesterday, I mentioned the piccolo sacrificio (small sacrifice) the Italian government is asking all of us here to endure during a few weeks of lockdown. We can still go out, get some air, and buy supplies. And you can still get to your job in the morning if you work in a vital sector that cannot be shut down.
But police are cracking down on some frivolous movement. I heard a local radio news bulletin this morning that thousands of Italians have been fined in recent days. The offenses range from meeting others for an aperitivo to gathering in groups in parks and elsewhere. It’s not clear whether I can get on my bike to pedal around the trails here without getting hassled. We await further guidelines from The Ministry of Fun.
But, it’s important to note, daily life goes on here. The measures at least seem to be preventing panic-buying, no small feat. Here’s a picture from my local supermarket in Rome this morning.
Compare that with what my brother, in New Jersey, sent me last night.
I’ve heard of no shortages here. But if they ever run out of prosciutto di Parma here, we’re in trouble.
Have a good weekend, and stay safe.
Bernhard Warner
@BernhardWarner
Bernhard.Warner@Fortune.com
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Today's reads
Buyback. Japanese tech investor SoftBank Group, bowing to pressure from a leading activist shareholder, plans to spend up to $4.8 billion buying back up to 7% of its own shares. SoftBank’s second major buyback in as many years is a sign of the company’s attempts to shore up a market capitalization that for years has languished below the value of its accumulated investment holdings, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Take cover. With recession now looking increasingly likely, it’s time to batten down the hatches and get your personal finances in order. Think about right-sizing your spending habits and have some ready money you can fall back on in an emergency, suggests Ben Carlson, director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management.
Wedding washout. Coronavirus is taking a heavy toll on the hundreds of thousands of small businesses that support the $300 billion wedding industry worldwide. Many of the florists, caterers and cake bakers are mom-and-pop organizations that are left scrambling as couples postpone, cancel, or put a halt to planning for their big day, says Stephanie Cain in Fortune.
Market candy
Quote of the day.
"We're a small box shop close to your home. They just don't want to travel to the big box [stores].”
Those are the words of Todd Vasos, CEO of discount chain Dollar General, one of the few companies that thinks it will benefit from the coronavirus epidemic on the grounds that its small, local stores will attract shoppers looking to practise recommended “social distancing” by avoiding large, crowded stores.


fortune--2020-03-13--Don Cheadle on ‘Black Monday,’ Wall Street in the Trump era, and hope about the climate change fight

Don Cheadle won’t say what the future holds for his Marvel character, “Rhodey” Rhodes/War Machine, for fear of being taken out by a sniper. “I could talk about that, but the red dots show up every time I start to, so I’m not,” he tells Fortune. But what he can discuss is the new season of Showtime’s Black Monday, the ’80s-set dark comedy in which he stars as the aggressively amoral Wall Street trader Mo Monroe.
The first season followed Mo and his conniving, cocaine-loving employees engaging in a scheme that ultimately brings about the titular 1987 stock market crash, with all the excesses, racism, sexism, and homophobia of the decade played to the extreme. Costarring Regina Hall, Andrew Rannells, Paul Scheer, Casey Wilson, and Ken Marino, the second season picks up after the chaos of that day, with Mo framed for murder while his former colleagues work on their next hustle—charming and blackmailing politicians into deregulating banks.
Fortune recently caught up with Cheadle just as the stock market was reeling owing to coronavirus fears, which he said he was watching “as much as you would if you were riding on a roller coaster with your eyes closed.”
Karen Gillan as Nebula, Cheadle as James Rhodes/War Machine, in “Avengers: Endgame” from 2019. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures/Marvel Studios / courtesy Everett Collection
Before the season premiere on Sunday, March 15, the 55-year-old actor spoke about how the show’s profane take on politics and financial greed relates to the Trump era; toeing the line of offensive comedy while discussing serious issues; his climate-change activism; and what Democrats need to do in 2020.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
What was the big-picture idea going into this season?
Well, it’s really just visiting these characters. For Mo, sort of his descent, I guess, but then seeing where he ends up and seeing where Blair [Andrew Rannells]—just ascending obviously—and Dawn [Regina Hall] are going in the other direction. We decided it would be interesting to take them in opposite directions and figure out how we can get them back together. I think the first thing to do is blow up the room and then, you know, see what you can do.
And where did the long hair come from?
Probably some very well-adorned women who were trying to make money. [Laughs] These are the things that we kick around—“What’s the look going to be?”—and it’s always based on the time. The styles of the ’80s kind of covered the waterfront, so it’s fun to play with that, for sure.
It must be a blast being able to pick out the most ridiculous parts of culture from that decade and run with them.
Well, the most fun is how seriously everybody took that. I mean, look, we’re going to look back at this era and go, “Really? That’s what we were doing?” Twitter is just going to be something that people are like, “Why did you ever engage?” Some of the best fun about the show is finding those cultural touch points and lambasting all that stuff, lampooning it.
“The styles of the ’80s kind of covered the waterfront, so it’s fun to play with that, for sure,” says Cheadle, pictured (right) in a scene with Regina Hall from the second season of “Black Monday.” Nicole Wilder—Showtime/Courtesy Everett Collection
You couldn’t make fun of it in the same way during the ’90s, because the wounds were too fresh.
Yeah. The ’90s, wait till we get there. It wasn’t much better.
The one-liners and cutting jabs have a really loose feel. Does the cast improvise a lot of it?
We do in the rehearsals, for sure, and then a lot of those things become what we will do in the takes. The cowriters, David [Caspe] and Jordan [Cahan], are very open to that and encouraging of that. They’re joke whores, and, you know, the best answer wins. We really encourage it. Everybody’s trying to make each other laugh and see, “How far can this thing go?”
It must be also freeing to play a character like this who doesn’t have much of a filter or moral compass.
Absolutely. It’s what made me want to play it in the first place. This guy is operating directly from his id. He’s absolutely “shoot, ready, aim.” That’s who he is, for sure.
What’s it like getting in that headspace? It’s so stereotypical of traders from that era who don’t really think of consequences outside of how much money is going into their accounts.
It’s not necessarily that different now. I mean, there are obviously more regulations now, and…well, it’s fits and starts, right? There’s regulations, and then this administration comes in, they want to take all of them away again. It’s just really human nature when you gravitate toward that. That job is a zero-sum game. When that’s your true north, just to make as much as you can, the rules tend to be pretty slippery. And especially at that time, when all of those rules started to come in place to deal with these robber barons at that level, it was kind of the Wild Wild West. When we were doing the research for it, a lot of guys I talked to—some that were there at that time—said, “Yeah, everybody was fucked up, and everybody was just going for it. You do whatever you can do to win.” That was the bottom line.
Really, it wasn’t enough just to do well. Somebody had to be smoldering on the other end of the deal to feel good about it. You had to destroy the people that were on the opposite ends of your trades. One of my really good friends who was there—gained a ton of weight, drinking every night, heart attack candidate—and it wasn’t until he got out of it and looked back that he was like, “Oh, my God, I was insane. I was a very sick person.” That was just the culture. Take no prisoners.
From left, Horatio Sanz, Andrew Rannells, Yassir Lester, Don Cheadle, and Paul Scheer in a scene from season one of “Black Monday.” Erin Simkin—Showtime/courtesy Everett Collection
So much of the show is skewering the ridiculousness of the ’80s, but a lot of the laughs come from the sad fact that these things haven’t changed: sexism, racism, the corruption of greed, etc. What issues are going to be covered this season?
We definitely dip more into politics this year. I don’t want to give it away, but we’re trying to dip into whatever the cultural sort of divide was at that time. There’s more in that way with racism and sexuality, with what the characters are going through. There’s a lot of grist for the mill.
Was delving into politics this season an inevitability, given the times we live in?
Well, we’re obviously trying to draw allusions to today and ground the show and have there be relevance to where we are right now. But it just seemed also to be a natural progression for Andrew [Rannells]’s character, Blair, to be moving up as they’re trying to figure out how to get a bank, like, “Who do we need to have in our pocket, and how do we go about doing that?” Politics is also another area, as we can see, that lends itself sometimes to the worst kinds of motivations in us.
Sadly.
Very sadly. But it’s a comedy, so obviously we do it with jokes and laughs and fart jokes and stuff. That’s the goal, to find how to play that balance, to be able to hit those down notes but always undercut it and come back to being about how ridiculous these people are. Never let it get too somber, but don’t be afraid to go there, too, because I think the show is elastic enough that it can hold both of those [sentiments] in the same container. When you have the actors to do it, do it.
And setting it back then gives you that sort of leeway to say offensive stuff you can’t get away with in 2020.
Well, that’s tricky, right? It’s a fine line because it’s how people talked, it’s how they worked, it’s how they interacted. These things that you would never say today, that’s how they communicated to one another. If you don’t have some measure of that then you’re not being authentic. But at the same time, you have to tread the line because it can totally take you out for a 2020 audience to hear certain things. So, we’re always walking that line, and often you don’t know how far the line is until you’ve walked across it.
It’s like any comedy these days. You want to push the limits, but you have to realize when something is just racist or sexist and you’re not actually making any points or bringing people in on the joke.
Exactly. You want to make a point of it. You just have to keep in mind what it is you’re trying to accomplish. You want them to be in it, but you want to play these characters for real so you’re going to have them use the language and the tropes that were happening at that time.
You mentioned that in 30 or so years, we’re gonna look back on Twitter and laugh, but you’re on there a lot now. How do you stay sane?
You have to already understand what it is. I don’t really get shook up when dealing with it. Sometimes it’s just people venting their spleen and not really attempting to do anything other than agitate. Those people tend to have the least effect [on me]. It’s when you really feel like, “Wow, there’s an opportunity here, hopefully, to change your mind or even have my mind changed,” to engage with people who are really going through stuff, that’s the value of it. That’s one of the great things that it affords us, but at the same time with all the proliferation of bots and accounts that are literally just trying to sway opinion and not deal genuinely, it’s a tricky minefield. But I anticipate that going in, so it doesn’t really affect me.
Just like the show, you balance it out with some humor.
Absolutely. God, if we don’t have that, then it’s just a wrap, you know? I’ve been tweeting #Asteroid2020. That might be our best way out.
Researching this season, how closely are you paying attention to Trump’s attempts to deregulate the financial sector?
It’s like, “Didn’t we just do this dance?” It’s shocking to me how many supporters he has from places that seem to not have an awareness about what the bottom line really is. They’re supporting a President who gave the top 1% a trillion dollars of tax breaks. I can’t really qualify how it works, other than thinking, “Oh, well, it’s gotta be racism or tribalism.” It’s something other than logic, but somehow they’re behind it. Somehow. There’s a belief, I guess, that they’re going to get there, and they’re going to be able to take advantage of these kinds of breaks. It defies logic to me.
Like, climate change becomes a red or blue issue, not just the “human beings on this planet” issue. Every issue like that is now a wedge issue. You have to pick a side, and you can’t sort of cherry-pick what you want to believe in—that’s when we get in these problems. It’s like if you’re a conservative, you have to believe in all of these things, and if you’re a liberal, you have to believe in all of these things. You can’t parse it. That’s dangerous.
There’s no room for nuance. You have to be on a team.
Yeah, “Pick a team, pick a side.” It’s because people, rightly so in some ways, are feeling the real desperation of where we’re at with our environment, with income inequality. These things are real, we feel them, and it’s what animals tend to do, right? We want to think of ourselves as something much more elevated than just an animal, but we’re just trying to get from rock to rock and not be eaten by a tiger. That’s in our DNA. You’re easy to manipulate when you’re afraid, and that’s what we see happening. You get out of your brain and into your emotions, like, “I need a team. I can’t be out here by myself. There’s a tiger over there!”
So many people are despairing over climate inaction right now. Can you share some reasons for people to be hopeful?
First, awareness is as big as it’s ever been. All of the candidates, no matter who’s the nominee on the Democratic side, they’ve all made climate change a part of their platform and know that this is a critical issue. It’s not something they’re glossing over. That’s a big deal, and a big change. Second, I think that the youth are all over it. Thank God we have people like Greta [Thunberg] and AOC [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez] and the Green New Deal. There’s a groundswell that’s starting to reach critical mass. Hopefully, we’re able to reengage and be a part of the larger community around the world to push for this. We know we have to get it done. There’s no option.
People often have an inability to act on things that they don’t believe affect them directly. As long as it’s sort of abstract and feels like it’s something that’s happening “over there” to somebody else, a lot of people won’t act. You have to continue to figure out ways to say, “No, this is climate change. This will happen to you. This is happening to you.” That’s going to take constant effort and innovation. You have to tell those stories, and, hopefully, it won’t be, “The water is at your knees. There’s no more Florida. Now, do you see what I’m talking about?”
I’m on the board of a group called The Solutions Project, which is trying to get cities to agree to 100% green energy, dealing with frontline communities, the poor communities, and communities of color that are often the first to have to deal with the results of inaction on climate change, and trying to attempt to get action from a grass-roots level, working to broaden that lens. There are places all over where we’re having success stories and the solutions are coming from people who are having to deal with it—communities showing how to fight when fracking in their neighborhoods or wastewater is coming from factories right into where their kids are going to school. They’re on the front line, fighting these big corporations and winning, but it’s not really a part of the national story, because so many other things are on fire right now. We absolutely need a champion. We need a President and a government that will champion those things and be on the front lines with us.
So how do you plan on staying active during this election year?
Um, I’m going to nap a lot. [Laughs] We’ll see. Once we’re through with this primary and have a nominee, then we’ve just got to get out and really, really, really push and fight for them and try to bring the party together because we’re fractured right now. We’ve all got to get on the same team or we’re just going to deal with four more years of Trump. Or eight years or 12 years. He says that with a smile, but is he joking? We can say that that’s ridiculous, but there are probably a lot of countries around the world we can point to and go, “Yeah, that’s what they thought, too.”
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—China’s box office was supposed to surpass North America’s this year. Then came the coronavirus
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fortune--2020-03-13--China’s number of daily new coronavirus infections has fallen into the single digits

Bitcoin bloodbath : What people are saying about the crypto collapse

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New infections of the coronavirus in China dropped to single digits for the first time since the country began reporting daily numbers in mid-January.
As of March 12, China has eight new cases and seven additional deaths, said the National Health Commission on Friday. The dramatic plunge to a single-digit increase — from the height of nearly 15,000 cases added in one day on Feb. 13 — is another sign that viral outbreak has come under control at its epicenter for now, despite accelerating its spread in Europe and the U.S.
Still, with people returning to work as Beijing tries to restart its embattled economy and the virus now embedded in over 100 other countries, China is likely to meet further waves of cases.
The increase of eight new cases is the lowest since Jan. 16, when Wuhan, the city in central China where the virus first emerged, reported four new cases of what had been recently referred to as an “unidentified viral pneumonia”. A week later, China instituted the world’s biggest mass quarantine over Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, that continues today.
While there’s been an enormous social and economic cost to the lockdown especially for the 60 million people in Hubei province, experts say that it helped slow the spread of the pathogen through the rest of the country and the world.
There are still more than 13,000 Chinese patients sickened with the virus, including more than 4,000 people in critical condition, said the National Health Commission Friday. Over 64,000 people have recovered.
Globally, more than 130,000 people have been infected, including Tom Hanks, while there are almost 5,000 deaths.
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fortune--2020-03-13--U.S. gives ’emergency’ authorization to new Roche coronavirus test that’s 10 times faster

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Roche Holding AG said it won emergency approval from the U.S. government for a highly automated coronavirus test, potentially speeding up the ability to test patients by a factor of 10.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted “Emergency Use Authorization” to the test, which runs on Roche’s cobas 6800/8800 systems. The tool also is available in Europe and countries that accept its CE marking for medical devices, Roche said.
The 8800 version is capable of testing 4,128 patients a day, and the 6800 can test as many as 1,440, the Basel, Switzerland-based company said.
“We are increasing the speed definitely by a factor of 10,” Thomas Schinecker, head of Roche’s diagnostics unit, said in an interview.
Testing is crucial to stem the spread of Covid-19 because it allows health care workers to identify the infected and quarantine them, even if they’re not experiencing many symptoms. That can potentially reduce the overall number of infections and buy time for drugmakers to come up with better treatments and, ultimately, a vaccine.
The U.S. and much of Europe have been criticized for testing their populations too slowly, allowing the virus to proliferate. Roche’s cobas systems, launched in 2014, are widely available globally, with 695 of the 6800 systems and 132 of the 8800 systems already installed.
“We definitely extended the capacity of the testing significantly throughout the U.S,” Schinecker said.
The cobas 8800 system can test patients about 10 times faster than Roche’s existing test for the coronavirus, which runs on its MagNA Pure 24 and the LightCycler 480 devices. While those instruments require more human attention, there are more of them in labs and hospitals around the world. They’ll continue to play a crucial role in testing people, especially outside the U.S., Schinecker said.
The cobas 6800/8800 systems provide test results within four hours. Roche can provide millions of tests every month for the systems and is “going to the limits of its production capacity,” the company said.
The tests analyze nucleic acids extracted from patients’ saliva or mucus, and compare them against sequences found in coronavirus strains, including SARS and the one that emerged in Wuhan, China.
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—Coronavirus may not be all bad for tech. Consider the “stay at home” stocks
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fortune--2020-03-13--Bitcoin bloodbath: What people are saying about the crypto collapse

Even as the Dow Jones crashed 10% on Thursday, leading one analyst to describe the market as “screaming out for help,” the collapse of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies was even worse.
Prices for Bitcoin tumbled by over a quarter to around $5,800 as of end of day. The price of the digital currency was around $10,400 on Feb. 12, meaning its value has fallen around 50% in a month. Even for an asset accustomed to volatility, Thursday’s tumble was staggering:
Down 26%: Bitcoin Sees Worst Sell-Off in 7 Years as Coronavirus Spurs Flight to Safety https://t.co/X9LhQeta3u via @coindesk — Brad Keoun (@Liqquidity) March 12, 2020
If Bitcoin closes below $6120 (down 23%), today will be its largest daily drawdown in 6 years. pic.twitter.com/XHHK1jmqvP — Yassine Elmandjra (@yassineARK) March 12, 2020
While much of the sell-off is likely tied to the general market panic over the coronavirus, one long-time crypto investor suggested that large margin calls have forced professional traders to liquidate their positions:
Likely the same is happening with bitcoin… I underestimated this possibility. https://t.co/0XF1yM72Sw — Tuur Demeester (@TuurDemeester) March 12, 2020
The sell-off led some to call for Bitcoin to “hodl”—cryptocurrency slang for holding on and not selling, even in dire moments.
I've seen worse moments in Bitcoin's history.
We are on the path of maximum pain. Those who survive will earn the title of HODLer! https://t.co/jHwsnhuXbH — Dan Hedl (@danheld) March 12, 2020
Hunter Horsley, a crypto entrepreneur and former Facebook executive, noted that, while professional traders were selling, many retail investors on the consumer platform Coinbase had decided to buy.
72% of orders on Coinbase are Buys.
Looks like retail is mostly a buyer today so far.
Current word from trading desks is institutional selloff due to liquidity needs eg market makers who also make traditional equities / bonds markets need the cash. pic.twitter.com/SG3rCnnXYN — Hunter Horsley (@HHorsley) March 12, 2020
Barry Silbert, one of the biggest Bitcoin holders in the world, also declared the meltdown provided an opportunity to buy, while Bitcoin fan and celebrity makeup artist Michelle Phan echoed the same sentiment.
I'm buying. This is why bitcoin was invented — Barry Silbert (@barrysilbert) March 12, 2020
All my friends have been hitting me up asking if they should buy. YES. Buy in the dips. #bitcoin pic.twitter.com/YpNiBw2cBe — 𝓜𝓪𝓰𝓲𝓬 (@MichellePhan) March 12, 2020
Not everyone in the crypto community was so cheerful. Samson Mow, an insider close to Bitcoin’s core programming team, shared a bloodbath image from The Shining:
Others in the crypto community, many of whom are longtime critics of the U.S. government’s fiscal and monetary policy, weighed in on recent developments. One brought up former Presidential candidate Andrew Yang—a favorite among Bitcoin fans—and noted his calls for universal basic income would be timely.
All he needed was another month https://t.co/Wb8ns5iEzy https://t.co/d3RLsjxPq2 — Neeraj K. Agrawal (@NeerajKA) March 12, 2020
Meanwhile, Eric Voorhees, a crypto entrepreneur and staunch libertarian echoed the sentiments of many Bitcoin owners by sneering at the Federal Reserve’s latest intervention:
How long until The Fed is literally printing toilet paper to help alleviate the crisis? — Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) March 12, 2020
Even toilet paper is now more scarce than fiat. — Erik Voorhees (@ErikVoorhees) March 12, 2020
Finally, the CEO of the research firm Messari showed how cryptocurrency workers—many of whom have been warning about the pandemic for months—are adapting to work from home.
It’s 5 o’clock in some non-dystopian hellscape right now. pic.twitter.com/Ytt5p2Pj1f — Ryan Selkis (@twobitidiot) March 12, 2020
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fortune--2020-03-13--Life in lockdown: How luxury designers in Italy’s fashion heartland are facing coronavirus

This article is part of a Fortune Special Report: Business in the Coronavirus Economy—a look at the impact of the pandemic on more than 50 industries.
Italian hatmaker Giuseppe Grevi was hoping for a brief respite from coronavirus headlines when he went off to the Italian Alps on a family skiing holiday in early March. But then, following on a subpar trade fair in Milan last month where few buyers from coronavirus-ravaged Asia were on hand to place orders, the Florence-based milliner found himself again foiled by the virus, forced to return home early with Italy under nationwide lockdown to combat the pandemic.
Grevi is just one of scores of Italian luxury goods makers who are desperately trying to right businesses that have been doubly whipsawed by the coronavirus—first by the plunge in China’s luxury retail market, and then by its brutal arrival in Italy’s fashion heartland. Some have turned to selling and meeting online, while others have doubled down on traditional manufacturing practices that get around coronavirus restrictions.
While Grevi’s 145-year-old label has had a litany of high points—including screen time for the company’s hats when they were worn by Julia Roberts and Cher in Pretty Woman and Tea with Mussolini—he, like almost all other luxury goods makers in Italy, is suffering.
First China
Big global players like Gucci and Louis Vuitton are scaling back orders from Italian-based suppliers, as demand from China has dried up—the country now makes up a third of luxury spending worldwide and an estimated 40% of the customer base for some of the big Italian brands.
China’s customers accounted for 90% of the global luxury market growth in 2019, according to Bain analyst Claudia D’Arpizio, and accounted for 35% of luxury goods in value sold in the world last year.
But even before the coronavirus, that market was starting to wobble. Hit by protests, Hong Kong’s luxury market shrunk by 20% in 2019, to €6 billion, according to Bain.
The aftershocks from that drop and even more from the coronavirus continue to hit Italian designers like Grevi. At recent fashion weeks in Milan and Paris, the absence of Chinese and South Korean visitors was hard to miss because of the viral outbreak. It’s estimated that from China alone, where Grevi gets about 20% percent of its €2.5 million annual revenues, some 1,000 press and buyers cancelled their European fashion show trips due to the fast spreading virus.
Italian hat designer Giuseppe Grevi’s (L) business has been doubly whipsawed by the coronavirus—first by the plunge in China’s luxury retail market, and then by its brutal arrival in Italy’s fashion heartland. Amy Sussman—WireImage/Getty Images
Grevi’s current concern focuses on boxes of two-tone floral cloches and summery broad-brimmed straw hats—destined for department stores and boutiques in mainland China—that have been sitting for weeks in the company’s warehouse on the outskirts of Florence. Grevi has €65,000 euros of goods waiting for payment before they can be shipped to China.
“No one was out shopping in China so clients there asked us not to send merchandise for spring and summer,” he said. “That translates into us not getting paid for orders.”
And while Grevi has hundreds of retailers in places like the U.S., France and Japan to compensate for a drop in Chinese sales, he knows there will be more fallout as the coronavirus’s footprint grows.
No longer business as usual
While Grevi’s slump in the China market may soon improve as things there begin to return to normal—a key distributor for southern China just paid for a shipment of a 1,000 hats to be delivered—it still doesn’t diminish the fact that Italy faces an unprecedented nationwide lockdown that will require him, and other brands in Italy’s $80 billion fashion and accessories sector, to significantly change the way they do business.
One fashion designer who has quickly shifted gears is Massimo Alba. At his showroom in Milan’s Navigli district, Alba has been manning the phones to organize photo shoots of his entire spring/summer collection. He plans to load them up on his label’s website this month so shoppers, whether quarantined in Italy or living abroad, can purchase his knitwear and deconstructed garments without human contact.
“We typically have 70 pieces online at most each season,” Alba said. “Now we will show all 220 garments so the customer gets the same selection you find in the store.”
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His boutiques in Rome and Milan have always been the preferred sales points—his niche label survives on the word of mouth that has brought in Hollywood types such as Stanley Tucci and John Malkovich. Still, Alba is acutely aware that the coronavirus outbreak requires a new approach.
“It is a waste of time trying to blame a virus,” he said. “It’s a problem, but we have to think positively. We’ve invested online in the past and now we are trying to accelerate our e-commerce platform. We can’t fall victim to panic.”
The homepage of massimoalba.com now displays a watercolor sketch of his most talked-about piece, a 3-button tan suit that Daniel Craig wears in the upcoming Bond film No Time to Die—a movie that itself fell prey to the virus when its April release was pushed back to the fall.
Old ways
For others in the Italian luxury goods sector, old-fashioned ways of doing business create hurdles in times of coronavirus—but also offer some advantages.
In Milan, Italy’s fashion capital, owners of Petronius, a small-scale producer of elegant neckties, are moving quickly to get the final shipments of next season’s orders out to overseas clients, who range from Atlanta-based menswear retailer Sid Mashburn to Bergdorf Goodman. The problem for Gigliola Wollisch, who together with her brother and sister represent the third generation of the company, is she relies on face-to-face appointments with customers—and still writes orders by hand in a carbon copy book.
Concerns about flying with the virus swirling saw her skip a flight to Copenhagen, but she risked a day trip to Vienna a few days before the lockdown to see a long-standing client. “It’s hard to replace these one-on-one meetings where clients get a feel for the fabrics and the colors.”
Italy’s recent national quarantine will make such trips impossible, for now. But it won’t shut down the business. For decades, Petronius has relied on a half dozen Italian women, some with 30 years of experience under their belt, who work from home sewing the label’s pure silk neckties, which retail for $195.
Social distance
Back in Florence, the fourth-generation hatmaker Grevi is trying to address the coronavirus crisis through the lens of history—such as how the company survived the Great Depression, which sparked an enduring trend of fewer men wearing hats to work.
Today, he and his two sisters oversee an annual production of 70,000 hats, performed by a few dozen artisans at the factory who braid, stitch and steam straw hats by hand. Today, their cavernous factory space, cluttered with 1930s-era sewing machines and piles of grosgrain ribbon to embellish hats, is now set up so staff are seated several meters apart to prevent infections. Each employee gets up every thirty minutes to wash their hands.
With a tightly knit family structure, Grevi believes the firm is nimble enough to navigate the increasingly turbulent waters, just as it did after the 1929 market crash.
“Our family has been in business since 1875,” Grevi said. “We know how to manage the ups and downs.”
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—How coronavirus is affecting the global concert industry
—Politicians around the world are going into quarantine
—Some of the most extreme ways companies are combating coronavirus
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—What Xi Jinping’s visit to Wuhan says about China’s coronavirus recovery
—Conferences go online amid coronavirus fears—minus the hallway schmoozing
—Coronavirus may not be all bad for tech. Consider the “stay at home” stocks
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fortune--2020-03-13--Cindy Cone becomes first female president of U.S. Soccer Federation

Carlos Cordeiro resigned as U.S. Soccer Federation president on Thursday night, three days after the organization filed legal papers in a gender discrimination claiming women players had less physical ability and responsibility than men.
His decision elevated former American midfielder Cindy Parlow Cone to become the first woman president in the history of the federation.
Cordeiro announced his resignation on Twitter without even telling the federation’s communications staff. He stepped down on a day several USSF board members issued extraordinary rebukes that criticized the governing body’s legal filings. Among them were Major League Soccer Commissioner Don Garber and Cone, the federation’s vice president.
A night earlier, U.S. women wore their warmup jerseys inside-out to hide the federation crest during the national anthem before a game against Brazil. Several of the federation’s sponsors issued this week backing the players and condemning the USSF.
“It has become clear to me that what is best right now is a new direction,” Cordeiro wrote. “The arguments and language contained in this week’s legal filing caused great offense and pain, especially to our extraordinary women’s national team players who deserve better. It was unacceptable and inexcusable.”
“I did not have the opportunity to fully review the filing in its entirety before it was submitted, and I take responsibility for not doing so. Had I done so, I would have objected to the language,” he wrote.
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fortune--2020-03-12--Amazon tells employees to work from home if they can. Warehouse workers can’t

Amid concerns over the coronavirus outbreak, Amazon has asked employees to work from home if their jobs allow it—a policy that excludes warehouse workers and drivers.
The online retailing giant revealed its updated work-from-home guidance on Thursday. Previously, the company had only asked employees who worked in certain offices, including in Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area, to stay home.
The revised policy does not apply to most warehouse workers or delivery drivers who are unable to do their jobs remotely.
“We continue to work closely with public and private medical experts to ensure we are taking the right precautions as the situation continues to evolve,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an email. “As a result, we are now recommending that all of our employees globally who are able to work from home do so through the end of March.”
Other big tech companies that have implemented work-from-home policies include Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Salesforce. However, they don’t have large retail operations that require warehouses that are staffed around the clock.
Amazon also said on Wednesday in a blog post that any employee “diagnosed with COVID-19 or placed into quarantine will receive up to two-weeks of pay.” Hourly employees who are sick but not diagnosed with the virus are eligible for unpaid time off through the end of March.
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fortune--2020-03-12--It’s time to start preparing your personal finances for a recession. Here’s how

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It’s increasingly becoming apparent that the outbreak of the coronavirus is going to cause an economic slowdown. Global supply chains are being disrupted. The travel industry is taking a nosedive. Conferences and other large events are being canceled left and right. Even pro and college sporting events are being postponed or called off.
The stock market is getting pummeled, now down 25% from all-time highs and while past economic data looks great, those numbers are quickly going to fall off a cliff. It’s time to start preparing for a recession.
Here are some ways to get your affairs in order as we approach what is likely to be a painful economic slowdown:
Get your lifestyle inflation in check
When the economy and markets are humming along it becomes tempting to let lifestyle inflation get away from you. Now is the time to review your spending to understand which non-essential areas of your budget can be cut in case of a slowdown. One of the best ways to survive an economic downturn is by right-sizing your spending habits.
Credit card debt is never a good idea because the rates are so astronomically high but it can spiral out of control during an economic contraction. If you hold a balance and have trouble paying it off, now is a good time to call your credit card company to negotiate lower rates or figure out a more reasonable pay-off plan. Many of these companies will work with you if you ask.
It’s also worth putting in a phone call to your cable, phone and insurance providers to ensure you’re getting the best rates. Many of the companies will negotiate with you for better rates. And the worst they can do is say no if you ask.
Make sure you have enough liquidity
Stock markets around the globe are down across the board. Many investors have been waiting years for lower prices. Well, they’re finally here. There are only two ways of taking advantage of this situation:
1. Asset allocation
Have an asset allocation in place with enough liquid assets to allow you to rebalance into the pain. The simplest options here are high-quality bonds or cash.
2. A high enough savings rate
A high savings rate is beneficial in a number of different ways. It not only gives you the option to buy financial assets at lower prices as they are in freefall but also offers a cushion when it comes to your finances.
And for some, liquidity is not just about ensuring their investment portfolio can withstand a storm, but their personal finances. Personal finance experts often preach the benefits of holding 6-12 months of expenses in a safe emergency savings vehicle. Those who don’t have an emergency fund in place need to shore up alternatives just in case. This could be a home equity line of credit, zero interest rate credit cards, brokerage accounts or even Roth IRA contributions.
Hopefully your own personal emergency plan never gets triggered but it makes sense to have one in place to avoid panicking if it does.
Refinance your mortgage
If you took out a $350,000 mortgage a year ago from today you likely locked in a 30 year fixed rate mortgage at around 4.5%. That equates to a monthly payment of roughly $1,775 (ignoring taxes and insurance).
Today 30 year fixed-rate mortgages are closer to 3.3%. On that same $350,000 mortgage, that works out to a monthly payment of around $1,530, a savings of $240 a month. That extra money can provide a cushion during a potential economic slowdown. The one bright spot from the crashing stock market is interest rates have made borrowing more affordable.
Recessions are personal
The following table shows the increase in the U.S. unemployment rate during each recession since WWII:
The average rise from the pre-recession low to the post-recession high is 3.2%. That would take us from the current rate of 3.6% up to 6.8%. In a labor force of roughly 160 million people, that would be more than 5 million people out of a job.
Obviously every recession is different and this one will surely pose its own unique sets of risks and challenges. But it’s important to remember that recessions go beyond economic data. Some people are hurt much worse than others.
There’s an old saying that “It’s a recession when your neighbor loses their job but a depression when you lose your own.”
Whether you lose your job or not, now is the time to prepare financially for the next downturn.
Ben Carlson, CFA is the Director of Institutional Asset Management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. He may own securities or assets discussed in this piece.
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fortune--2020-03-13--Walmart, Target, CVS, and Walgreens will loan space for coronavirus test centers

Google is developing a coronavirus testing website for the U.S .

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Walmart, Target, and pharmacy giants Walgreens and CVS Health will play a central role in the U.S. government’s plan to make COVID-19 tests accessible across the country as the outbreak of the illness worsens.
The CEOs of the four retailers, along with their peers from a number of healthcare companies, stood on Friday afternoon in the Rose Garden as President Trump announced a plan to widely expand the availability of tests for the coronavirus.
Trump pledged that there would be 500,000 more novel coronavirus tests available by early next week, and 5 million within a month. As the virus has spread through the United States, the Trump administration has been criticized for being too slow in making the test available. Trump also declared a coronavirus-related state of emergency on Friday.
The administration recruited a number of health companies to produce more tests at a faster pace, and, thanks to their massive store fleets across the country, the four retailers as test centers.
Walmart, which operates some 4,600 stores in the United States, will make parts of some of its parking lots available for drive-through testing. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said his company would add more of its parking lots as the availability of the test grows. Walmart’s lots have often served as staging areas during emergencies, most notably after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Target, which has 1,800 stores, will do the same.
“Normally you could view us as competitors,” Target CEO Brian Cornell said during the press conference, “but today we are focused on a common competitor,” he added in reference to the coronavirus. (Cornell did not waste the opportunity to plug Target during his short address, noting that stores are open and selling food and other essentials.)
CVS Pharmacy and Walgreens, which operate about 10,000 locations across the U.S. will also take part.
Beyond any points for good corporate citizenship, the four retailers all stand to benefit from the move.
Walmart, already one of the top four pharmacy operators in the U.S., could burnish its health credentials at a time it is experimenting with health care clinics.
It opened the first Walmart Health clinic in Georgia last year, offering primary care, lab work, imaging, dental, and counseling services at lower prices than many doctor’s clinics. The largest retailer in the U.S. stated clearly last September that its ambition was to become America’s “neighborhood health destination” though it has not said how quickly or widely it would expand the health clinic format.
That will bring it into more direct competition with CVS, which is looking to reduce its reliance on traditional retail, like selling toothpaste and soda, with a new format, called HealthHUB, where 20% of its store space is allocated to health services. The goal is eventually to have 1,500 CVS stores become HealthHUBs.
A few years ago Target sold its pharmacy business to CVS, which now operates small pharmacies inside Target stores. And helping out with the coronavirus testing could help drum up store visits at a time when, after two very strong years, Target’s growth is expected to cool. What’s more, Target has also made a big push into wellness and healthier foods so it stands to benefit as a retailer associated with health services.
CVS and Walgreens have both struggled with retail sales in the last few years, though both are seeing improvement in their pharmacy businesses. General merchandise has not picked up at either chain. Some of that is because more customers are choosing to pick up prescriptions at drive-throughs rather than inside the stores. But both chains, similarly to Walmart, Target, and Costco have been big destinations in the last week for shoppers stocking up on essentials, so the drive-up testing is a natural fit and could also generate more store visits.
The retailers’ contributions to the coronavirus fight is consistent with their traditional place in shoppers’ minds in times of national emergencies, when, as Walgreens president Richard Ashworth put it, “our stores are beacons of the community.”
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fortune--2020-03-13--Bill Gates is stepping down from Microsoft’s board

Bill Gates said he’s stepping down from the board of Microsoft Corp., the company he founded in 1975 and grew into the largest software maker, to devote more time to philanthropy.
“Microsoft will always be an important part of my life’s work and I will continue to be engaged with Satya and the technical leadership to help shape the vision and achieve the company’s ambitious goals,” Gates wrote in a blog post Friday. “I feel more optimistic than ever about the progress the company is making and how it can continue to benefit the world.”
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fortune--2020-03-13--Google is developing a coronavirus testing website for the U.S.

Walmart , Target , CVS , and Walgreens will loan space for coronavirus test centers

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Google is helping the U.S. government build a website to speed testing for the coronavirus, President Donald Trump said at a news conference.
However, shortly after the president’s comments, Google indicated that the effort by its Verily life sciences subsidiary is far more limited than the president indicated and that it is nowhere near ready for a nationwide debut.
“We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing,” Google said on Twitter. Verily is in the early stages of development, and planning to roll testing out in the Bay Area, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time.
The website will help people figure out if they need testing and direct them to the closest location, which will include drive-through testing centers, Trump said. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has roughly 1,700 engineers working on the project, he added.
Verily has partnered in the past with biotech companies to track and combat widespread diseases, including the Zika virus.
On March. 3, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Principal Deputy Director Anne Schuchat told Congress that the agency was using Google location data for “travel patterns and for other means.” She didn’t provide more details and Google and the CDC have not commented on this.
Google Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai has sent a steady stream of memos to his employees in recent weeks, calling on them to rise to the challenge of helping people communicate and access the best information during the pandemic.
The company has aggressively intervened in some of its most popular online services to limit the spread of hoaxes and misinformation and provide its users with helpful and accurate health information. Google searches related to the virus trigger an “SOS Alert,” which shows updates from mainstream news publications and health authorities ahead of regular search results.
Update: This article was updated from the original with a comment from Google.
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fortune--2020-03-13--Walgreens, Target and Becton Dickinson stocks rise during Trump press conference as CEOs address cor

Walgreens, Target and Becton Dickinson stocks rise during Trump press conference as CEOs address coronavirus response

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Amid a disastrous week in the markets, a few notable companies got some publicity on Friday—and a stock pop—during a press conference with President Donald Trump.
The president ushered a lineup of “the biggest business people, the greatest retailers anywhere in the world,” Trump said on Friday, to address the spread of coronavirus—which has now become an official national emergency.
Walgreens, Walmart, Target, Becton Dickinson, Roche Diagnostics, Quest Diagnostics, CVS, LHC Group, and LabCorp all saw their stocks shoot up shortly before market close after their respective executives spoke alongside Trump during a White House press conference on Friday, addressing new measures to stem the spread of coronavirus in the U.S.
Walmart’s stock popped nearly 5% before market close, as CEO Doug McMillon addressed plans to keep parts of Walmart parking lots open per a request from the White House—giving Americans better access to its drive-through testing experience. Walgreens’ president Richard Ashworth also announced the company would continue to partner with the administration and the CDC—its stock popped 5%.
Other CEOs like Target’s Brian Cornell assured Americans the retailer would continue keeping stores open amid consumer efforts to stock up on household goods, and Becton Dickinson’s Tom Polen announced the medical device maker was “ramping up [its] manufacturing capacity” to ensure ample testing equipment was available. Quest Diagnostic’s Steve Rusckowski said the company has been working with the FDA and CDC and is “up and running” with tests in its facilities, while Roche’s Matt Sause said the company has partnered with laboratories to get a new coronavirus test approved and soon distributed. (LHC Group’s Bruce Greenstein appeared to show Trump how to bump elbows to avoid a handshake).
The group notably saw their stocks skyrocket at least 4% to 5% (and even as much as 9% for LabCorp) during the conference.
But upon watching the lineup of the big CEOs addressing the nation one after the other, some took to Twitter to suggest the president was highlighting companies to boost their stock.
He's trying to pump their stocks! — Will Wilkinson 🌐 (@willwilkinson) March 13, 2020
Despite a volatile week in the markets, major indexes like the S&P 500 and Dow rose 9% to close on Friday, with the stocks posting their biggest rally since 2008.
Stocks were pushed to session highs following an announcement from President Trump that 50,000 new coronavirus tests will be available next week.
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fortune--2020-03-13--Major indices jump 9% in monster rally—but traders expect more ‘uneasiness’ next week

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What did you expect on Friday the 13th?
With an opening jump, midday drop, and then late rally fueled in part by Trump’s covid-19 emergency declaration, it was another action-filled day on Wall Street.
The S&P 500 was up 230.38 (9.3%). The Dow jumped by 1,985.00 (9.4%) while the Nasdaq climbed 672.43 (9.3%). The Russell 2000, which has taken a beating during the slump, saw an 86.14 (7.7%) lift. Trump’s announcement of buying oil to fill the national reserves sent West Texas Intermediate crude up more than 7%.
Donald Trump’s expected declaration of a national emergency, including up to $50 billion to support states and local efforts to address covid-19, helped push already rising markets into a big end-of-day jump.
“The market was up…before he even started talking,” said Mark Charnet, founder and CEO of American Prosperity Group. “I think the markets, the pundits, the advisors, the traders, the brokers [had] realized this is not a science fiction movie come to life.”
Plus, “the market likes $50 billion thrown at companies,” said Charnet. Still, even with what he sees as a basically strong economy, Charnet thinks next week will likely be “more of the same uneasiness up and down.”
“It’s been a week, even a month, of superlatives,” said Lauren Goodwin, economist and multi-asset portfolio strategist at New York Life Investments. Fastest 10% correction ever. Fastest bear market from peak ever. And all that interspersed with upward drives as investors and traders face ongoing uncertainty.
Max Gokhman, head of asset allocation at Pacific Life Fund Advisors noted that much of the week was defined by sheer confusion. “On Monday, after the markets were closed, the president comes on and promises a lot of things,” Gokhman said. “Then we start getting headlines like almost all the things he promised weren’t going to happen or didn’t get discussed with other people.”
For example, health insurance companies had to explain that they weren’t offering free covid-19 treatment but only testing at no charge.
“The President keeps downplaying the severity of the situation,” noted Gokhman.
There were also big questions Trump didn’t address. “For the markets to calm, they would want to see extended pay leave, especially for hourly workers, so companies wouldn’t have to let them go and [the workers are] incentivized to stay home if they’re sick,” Goodwin said. She thought liquidity aid to small companies “already experiencing a cash crunch because of this crisis” would be necessary. “They still have to pay rent and payroll,” Goodwin said. “They need help to get through the cash crunch through the next six to eight months.”
“This expansion has been borne on the back of the U.S. consumer,” Gokhman said. If businesses close and people aren’t working, the lack of spending could undermine the U.S. economy, where 78% of GDP is ultimately attributed to consumer spending. “We wouldn’t be talking about [the possibility of] a two-quarter recession but a longer-term contraction,” Gokhman said.
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fortune--2020-03-13--Coronavirus pandemic: Let’s remember what we learned in WWII, as well as in 2008

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There’s been a lot said in recent days comparing the COVID-19 pandemic to the 2008 financial crisis, including whether lessons learned then are applicable now. Granted, the situations are very different: that was a financial crisis that caused a recession, this is a public health crisis which is causing a recession that could become a financial crisis. But the main lesson from 2008 applies—act fast and with overwhelming force. The U.S. government has not yet done that.
Having been on the frontlines of the response to the 2008 crisis, I believe there’s a lot to be learned from 2008 regarding what it takes to act fast, such as what it takes to implement assistance programs quickly. But it’s equally important to remember some lessons from World War II about what a government can do in a crisis.
In the early 1940s, the government took aggressive action to mobilize private industry to produce aircraft, armaments, rubber, and all sorts of other supplies needed to fight the war. The administrative machinery for doing so involved the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an agency created in the Great Depression to help stabilize the financial sector, whose existence was extended for the war effort. We would not have won the war without this massive effort.
Today, the federal government needs to mobilize—and finance if necessary—the production of whatever is needed to eliminate bottlenecks and limitations on the ability to contain the virus and treat the sick. More testing is an obvious need, as Dr. Anthony Fauci stated earlier this week. Public health experts can say what else is a priority, whether it is more hospital beds, more respirators, or other supplies. Taking such credible steps to contain the pandemic and treat the sick is necessary—though not sufficient—to calm the financial anxiety.
As is being debated in Congress, priorities should also include aggressive fiscal policies that help cushion the impact of contracting COVID-19 and the related social and economic disruptions, especially for lower- and average-income people. This includes subsidizing the cost of testing and treatment, sick leave or family leave pay, extended unemployment pay, and nutrition assistance for kids not at school. Putting more money in everyone’s pocket obviously helps too.
Acting fast doesn’t simply mean Congress passing legislation quickly, it requires adopting policies that can be implemented quickly. That’s one of the main lessons we learned in implementing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the centerpiece of the response to the 2008 financial crisis. It was much easier and faster to provide capital injections to banks based on broad programmatic criteria available to most institutions, than the original idea to buy mortgage-related assets from banks, which would have required more difficult valuations and more complex procedures. It was easier to help homeowners if programs did not condition assistance on lengthy certifications or documentation.
While Congress should give agencies discretion, the government should avoid designing programs whose implementation requires many discretionary judgments at the front line about who receives help. That takes longer to get the money out the door, invites second-guessing by those tasked with government oversight functions, and leads businesses and elected officials to lobby the implementers to favor particular recipients. Of course, there may be some moral hazard or distribution of funds to those who may be considered “less deserving” than others, but speed and breadth are more important than precise targeting.
Another lesson from 2008 that applies is to try different policy options. Hopefully enough of them will work. That’s not to suggest contradictory measures should be tolerated; responses need coordination. But with imperfect information, it’s better to do too much than too little.
In addition, there’s the administrative nuts and bolts part of this that’s easy to overlook, but that will determine whether implementation is successful. Congress should provide agencies implementing significant new programs (such as the Treasury Department) with the necessary ancillary powers to get things done quickly. That includes direct authority to hire the necessary expertise quickly without standard government hiring procedures; ability to waive certain federal contracting requirements to expedite purchasing if the circumstances are urgent and compelling; and ability to staff an operation through temporary employees and detailees from other government agencies.
While this is not a financial crisis, at least not yet, it is good that the Federal Reserve is acting to supply greater liquidity to the financial markets. It should broaden those efforts by ramping up more facilities similar to those used in 2008. If this were to become a financial crisis, the government must be ready to stop runs on the system by injecting capital and providing broad based guarantees. Unfortunately, some of the powers used in the last crisis—such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s power to guarantee bank liabilities, and the Treasury’s ability to guarantee money market funds—were limited after the crisis. Congress should restore those authorities, just in case they are needed.
Americans will come together and rise to the occasion to meet adversity, just as we have so many other times in our history. But we need honest, credible leadership and sound government action.
Timothy Massad is a senior fellow at the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard University. He was assistant secretary for Financial Stability at the U.S. Treasury Department from 2010 to 2014, and chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2014 to 2017.
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