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Tech-industry officials warn the decision would cramp companies’ ability to recruit top talent to the U.S.

WASHINGTON—President Trump signed an order Monday temporarily barring new immigrants on a slate of employment-based visas, including the H-1B for high-skilled workers, from coming to the U.S. amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The restrictions, which are set to take effect June 24 and last through the end of the year, will prevent hundreds of thousands of new immigrants who were expected to rely on the visas to work in industries ranging from tech and consulting to landscaping and seasonal jobs at resorts.

Administration officials say the move will safeguard jobs for unemployed Americans as the economy sputters—and joblessness has soared—because of lockdowns designed to contain the pandemic.

Tech-industry officials and other business leaders warned the decision would cramp companies’ ability to recruit top talent to the U.S. and bar immigrants who fill unique skill sets or take jobs most Americans won’t perform. Colleges said it would discourage top students abroad from studying in the U.S.

The order is likely to be challenged in court by business groups.

“This is a full-frontal attack on American innovation and our nation’s ability to benefit from attracting talent from around the world,” said Todd Schulte, president of Fwd.us, a pro-immigration group that advocates on behalf of American businesses.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai, born in India, tweeted that immigration has made the U.S. a global technology leader, adding, “Disappointed by today’s proclamation—we’ll continue to stand with immigrants and work to expand opportunity for all.”

The restrictions expand on a temporary immigration ban Mr. Trump introduced in April that blocked some family members of U.S. citizens with newly issued green cards from moving to the U.S. for the time being.

In addition to the H-1B visa, the temporary ban will apply to new H-2B visas for short-term seasonal workers in landscaping and other nonfarm jobs, J-1 visas for short-term workers including camp counselors and au pairs, and L-1 visas for internal company transfers.

The administration will grant exemptions for health-care workers focused on treating and researching Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, as well as those working in the food-supply chain, including seafood and food packaging, officials said.

The administration also will develop an additional exemption for people who “are necessary to facilitate the immediate and continued economic recovery of the United States.”

The new restrictions won’t apply to visa-holders already in the U.S., or those outside the country who have already been issued valid visas.

The restrictions are set to last beyond Oct. 1, the start of the government’s fiscal year, when new H-1B visas in particular tend to be issued.

The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute estimates the restrictions will block about 325,000 immigrants and their family members through the end of the year, though a senior Trump administration official put the number at 525,000.

The senior official estimated the move would reallocate about 500,000 jobs to out-of-work Americans in what he described as an “America-first recovery.”

The expanded ban follows pressure from immigration hard-liners, who have demanded the administration take steps to limit the number of foreign workers coming to the country to ensure Americans get jobs first as the economy rebounds.

The April restrictions were issued two days after Mr. Trump teased a full immigration ban on Twitter in response to the coronavirus’s economic toll, a step criticized by immigration advocates who said it was unduly harsh and by immigration hard-liners who said it was too narrow.

“I’m very heartened by this action—not only the scope of it but also the time frame of the suspension, because it means that employers can’t just hold their breath and wait until it’s over,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates lower levels of immigration.

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows a majority of Americans, about 64%, believe immigrants primarily fill jobs Americans don’t want.

Manny Medina, chief executive and co-founder of Seattle-based Outreach, a tech platform for sales teams, called the changes “nonsensical.”

Outreach last week said it had received $50 million from investors to help fund an expansion in which it was hoping to add 100 people this year to its staff of 550.

Mr. Medina estimated that around 15% of his product and engineering team are workers in the U.S. on H1-B visas, many of whom are recruited from larger U.S. tech firms. If the pipeline dries up because of visa restrictions, he said, filling his engineering jobs will become even harder than before the curbs—when a historically tight labor market drove competition for workers.

“There was never a shortage of jobs for high-tech skilled workers,” he said.

In a May 27 letter addressed to Mr. Trump, nine Republican senators, including Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, urged him to reconsider broad new restrictions on temporary work-visa programs, which the senators said would ultimately hurt U.S. businesses.

“American businesses that rely on help from these visa programs should not be forced to close without serious consideration,” they wrote. “Guest workers are needed to boost American business, not take American jobs.”

Mr. Graham said Monday on Twitter that he disagreed with the move.

“I fear the President’s decision today to temporarily shut down these programs will create a drag on our economic recovery,” he tweeted.

The action echoes policies to limit legal immigration the administration has long supported, even before the pandemic. A bill written by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) that the White House endorsed in 2017 would have made deep cuts to family-based immigration and many of the same work-based visa categories included in Monday’s order.

The administration has enacted several other immigration policies it has long favored during the pandemic, including a new set of rules at the border denying nearly all migrants, including unaccompanied children, the chance to apply for humanitarian protection.

Mr. Trump has shifted his support for legal immigration, at times citing its economic benefits for the country and, at others, endorsing policies and legislation to cut overall immigration levels. The administration this year adopted a policy known as the public-charge rule, which placed a wealth test on immigrants looking to become permanent residents.

Mr. Trump’s own golf clubs and resorts employ hundreds of seasonal foreign workers on H-2B visas each year, Labor Department filings show, and Mr. Trump has previously voiced support for the program.

In addition to Monday’s temporary action, the administration plans to enact several permanent changes to immigration policy. It will do away with the H-1B visa lottery, in favor of allotting the 85,000 available slots to the jobs offering the highest salaries. It will also tighten rules around H-1B workers assigned to third-party employers as contractors, and recalculate the wage scale to require companies to pay the visa holders higher salaries.

The administration on Monday also completed a policy ending the requirement for the government to issue work permits to asylum seekers, a change it has long wanted to adopt but which it argues will be an additional help to American workers.

Technical factors have propelled the rebound in equities, just as they did the sell-off

The emergence of brash retail traders who think stocks only go up has been one easy explanation for the surprisingly strong market recovery since March.

Some analysts, however, argue the rebound has more to do with the same technical factors that exacerbated the initial bear market — the rise of volatility-sensitive investors and the increasing influence of derivatives on financial markets. 

“Positioning played a huge role in the extent of the sell-off, and has been a big part of the rally as well,” said Bankim Chadha, chief global strategist at Deutsche Bank.

Markets have long been characterised by “procyclical” forces that magnify peaks and troughs. Investors are naturally flightier at times of turmoil, and become more bullish as markets rise. But volatility is now embedded into virtually all risk management tools. When turbulence rises, traders are forced to ditch positions, and when it falls they get the green light to dive back in.

There has also been rapid growth in recent years in investment strategies that are even more closely tied to the level of volatility. These include trend-following hedge funds, risk parity funds that allocate to a wide array of assets weighted according to their volatility, and managed volatility products sold by insurance companies.

Low bond yields have also nurtured the growth of derivatives-based strategies, where investors look to secure extra streams of income by selling potential market gains through call options, or protect against calamities through put options. On the other side of these transactions are banks and other investors that want to generate returns by buying the upside or selling protection against falls. 

“One of the lessons of the past decade is that long periods of low yields have a lot of side-effects, and this is one of the costliest,” said Luca Paolini, a strategist at Pictet Asset Management. “Financial engineering does nothing to help the economy long-term.” 

When markets are particularly choppy, rising volatility can force banks to hedge their exposure to these derivatives by selling their stocks in already falling markets. Many analysts say that the price swings in March were made more severe by volatility-sensitive funds ratcheting back their positions, and bank trading desks hedging their options exposures. 

When volatility falls, however, the dynamics are reversed — which some say may be a factor in the strength and speed of the market recovery. The Vix index of equity-market volatility, sometimes called Wall Street’s “fear gauge”, has slumped from a high of over 80 in mid-March to about 32 this week, though it is still above its long-term average of about 20. 

That reduction in turbulence has spurred trend-following hedge funds to cover short positions and buy stocks again, analysts note. Risk parity funds tend to move more slowly, but managed-volatility funds have added up to $20bn to their equity exposures in the past two weeks, after the longest stretch of daily increases in allocation since October 2019, according to Deutsche Bank. 

A recent surge in options trading — driven in part by gung-ho day-traders — has also likely contributed to the rally. Goldman Sachs estimates that at about $5tn, the open interest of options is now about a fifth of the S&P 500’s overall market capitalisation, compared to an average of 14 per cent of the US benchmark index in 2013-2017. 

Moreover, about 20 per cent of all S&P 500 options traded since the beginning of April have had a maturity of less than 24 hours, up from 3-5 per cent in 2011-16, according to Goldman Sachs. 

This can have an impact on the actual equity market, akin to the tail wagging the dog. Options with a closer maturity are generally more sensitive to changes in prices. For example, when an investor buys a call option maturing the next day, the counterparty in the trade may be forced to buy the underlying stock to hedge its exposure as it rises closer to the strike price.

Not everyone is convinced that technical factors such as these have played a big role in the rapid revival since March. One volatility-focused hedge fund manager stressed that the effects of such factors tend to be greater when markets are tumbling. 

However, Mr Chadha points out that stock market liquidity — a term used to describe how easily assets can be bought and sold — is still relatively low, so even modest increases in equity exposures can have an outsized impact on prices. 

Given how many volatility-sensitive strategies still have small weightings in stocks, and are likely to ramp them up in coming weeks, he reckons the rally has further to run. “The risk is that the recovery is a lot stronger than people expect,” he said. 

DAX:

MDAX:

SDAX:

Inside billionaire CQS trader Hintze’s $1.4bn loss

London philanthropist emerges as one of highest-profile hedge fund casualties of coronavirus crisis

In early April, just after the coronavirus pandemic had roiled global markets, London-based hedge fund manager CQS held a call to update investors on its performance.

Its $3bn flagship Directional Opportunities fund, personally managed by its billionaire founder Michael Hintze, had lost 33 per cent during March’s market turmoil, wiping out about $1bn in value.

Investors were looking for answers. But, to their surprise, they were told that Sir Michael had sent his apologies and would not be on the call. A fund manager would walk them through the portfolio instead. Some investors said they were disappointed that Sir Michael was not on the call to explain why the fund — which trades assets such as credit, stocks and volatility — had suffered its biggest monthly loss in its 15-year history.

Sir Michael’s investors “must be shell-shocked”, said Amin Rajan, chief executive of consultancy Create Research. The veteran trader “has always been seen as a cut above the rest”, he added.

CQS declined to comment. A person close to the firm said Sir Michael had “devoted a huge amount of time to investor communication”.

Born in China to Russian émigrés and then growing up in Australia, Sir Michael has since risen to the heart of the British establishment. A former captain in the Australian army, he moved into finance with spells at Salomon Brothers, Goldman and Credit Suisse First Boston. From there he spun out the Convertible and Quantitative Strategies business as CQS in 1999.

Sir Michael gained acclaim for his nimble positioning during the financial crisis. He limited losses in 2008 to single digits amid plummeting markets, before capturing the rally in 2009 with a series of bullish bets to end the year up 56 per cent. “When lots of people were rabbits caught in the headlights [in 2008] . . . Hintze guided us out of it,” said one former employee.

The trading profits helped grow CQS, which he still controls, into one of Europe’s biggest hedge funds and helped him build a fortune estimated at £1.5bn by the Sunday Times Rich List. He made large donations to London’s Natural History Museum, which renamed its main entrance hall the Hintze Hall, and to restore Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel.

A picture of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher hangs on the wall of Sir Michael’s office overlooking Trafalgar Square, and he is a major donor to the UK Conservative party. He is also an adviser to the board of the Duchy of Cornwall, the Prince of Wales’s private estate.

Sir Michael’s professorial manner, coupled with a tendency to interrupt himself and embark on frequent tangents, belie a fiercely competitive trader.

The 66-year-old has long had big ambitions for the firm, according to people familiar with his plans. At one stage he even commissioned a consultant to draw up a confidential report that looked at how the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock grew so large — and how CQS might emulate its success. 

To accelerate its growth and expand into equities, CQS hired former London Stock Exchange head Xavier Rolet at the start of 2019. He and Sir Michael travelled to Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative Conference last year, and the firm forged a joint venture to help sell its funds in China. Privately, Sir Michael talked about growing CQS’s assets under management to $100bn, said people familiar with his plans. A person close to the firm said there was no target. The firm’s overall assets have dropped from a peak of about $20bn to $17bn.

While CQS’s long-only business grew strongly, the firm’s flagship remains Sir Michael’s Directional Opportunities fund. It has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from US investors such as Texas County & District Retirement System, and before March’s losses had gained an average of nearly 14 per cent a year.

Sir Michael entered 2020 “cautiously optimistic”, according to an investor letter. Markets should be supported because “global growth is intact [and] an imminent recession is unlikely”.

That lent support to his bet in recent years that the “backbone” of the fund would be structured credit — a more complex branch of credit where instruments such as loans or credit default swaps are sliced up to back new debt and equity — which offered a higher yield relative to many bonds.

“It’s very much a function of my view on the world, that the world was in expansion and we’d be able to generate sensible returns,” said Sir Michael on a private investor call in early June, a recording of which was heard by the Financial Times.

To boost returns, the fund would ask banks to structure investments that bundle together default protection on individual companies, said multiple people familiar with its positioning. CQS would often then buy the riskier slices of these deals. This so-called “first-loss” insurance means the fund would quickly be on the hook if defaults started to pick up. Positions were often short-dated — meaning it would take an extreme and sudden event to prompt large losses.

Such a bet is known among options traders as “selling the wings”, as it focuses on rarer, more extreme outcomes. Returns, however, could be lucrative — especially as CQS did not hedge all its positions. Effectively, the fund was betting that a sudden halt in economic activity across a number of companies would not occur. 

When coronavirus hit markets, many of CQS’s structured credit bets turned sour. This drove almost all of the fund’s roughly $1bn of losses in March. The fund’s hedges were a “disaster” and did little to cushion the losses, said one person familiar with the fund. Wagers on rising equity prices also hurt performance. “It was a shocking loss,” said an investor.

Unusually for Sir Michael — who is well-known within CQS for his forensic consumption of analyst research, even on his holidays, which is then forwarded to staff with his comments — the fund was hurt by some defaults, including car rental firm Hertz. It was also hit as Chesapeake Energy bonds fell to price in an expected bankruptcy.

The losses appear to have convinced Sir Michael to turn more cautious. He responded by cutting some peripheral trading books, selling some positions, for instance in distressed credit, which cost the fund, and trying to hedge individual credit positions to prevent further losses from defaults.

“To be clear, at the moment I’m more focused on the downside than the upside,” he said on the call this month.

Sir Michael also sold down positions in stocks. That meant that, unlike many other investors, CQS’s fund missed out on much of the equity rally in April — the best month for US stocks since 1987 — and May. It even suffered some losses, as markets were lifted by massive central bank stimulus.

“I’m also running significant shorts, hedges if you like, because I believe the market will be too optimistic around the economic recovery,” Sir Michael said on the call. “Despite the QE being bullish, the weight of money that QE produces, in my view, cannot overcome the depth of the recession and the reality of company earnings and defaults.”

“For him to cut at the lows was very unlike him,” said one person familiar with the fund. Unlike in previous crises, coronavirus meant Sir Michael spent less time on the trading floor at CQS, or in his nearby “situation room”, whose walls are covered in screens and maps that help him assess market risk.

In January Mr Rolet left after only a year in the job, “for reasons not related to CQS”, the firm said. It also suffered the departure of chief risk officer Ahmad Deek. Now the fledgling equities business is being spun out, following a decision by Sir Michael, said a person familiar with his thinking. Mr Rolet declined to comment.

Amid the losses, CQS has stopped reporting its performance to HSBC’s private database of fund returns. Sir Michael, meanwhile, appears to remain upbeat. He told investors that most losses remain “unrealised and mark-to-market” and emphasised that the fund’s biggest exposures were to “large, well-known corporates” such as Barclays, Altice, AT&T and Aegon.

He has also been looking ahead to a CDS roll — when old contracts expire and new contracts are opened — this month, which removes 28 per cent of the fund’s first-loss risk. A further 26 per cent are rolling off later this year.

“The key point for me is to make your money back,” Sir Michael told investors, adding he was “heavily” invested in the fund himself. “Not just make our money back but make the money back and then some.”

Group acknowledges for the first time the potential scale of a multiyear accounting fraud

Where to start with Wirecard? The €2bn of “missing” cash? The 80 per cent share price drop? The relentless attacks on its critics and journalists who looked into the company? 

Or perhaps we should talk about the bank analysts who continued to tell clients they should buy Wirecard shares even as reports about accounting irregularities continued to mount? Special shout-out to Heike Pauls at Commerzbank. 

We could also start with BaFin, the German regulator, who called the scandal “a complete disaster” but last year imposed a short selling ban even as Wirecard’s Asian headquarters were raided by Singapore police. 

There is also, of course, Wirecard’s auditors. How did they miss a multiyear accounting fraud of this scale? Oh and let’s not forget the poor souls who continued to pour money into the German company despite reports from the Financial Times that it appeared that a large part of Wirecard’s revenue and profits did not, in fact, exist. 

Among them SoftBank Investment Advisers, that agreed to invest €900m in Wirecard after the accounting scandal had come to light. DD’s Robert Smith and Arash Massoudi have the goods on how that worked out. Hint: no bueno. 

And last but not least, Wirecard chief Markus Braun, pictured above, who was always ready and willing to bat away allegations of wrongdoing. Most recently just one month ago: 

Our colleagues at the FT — Dan McCrum, Paul Murphy, Olaf Storbeck and Stefania Palma — have been reporting on Wirecard’s accounting scandal for the past 18 months. 

It all started with an FT investigation into Wirecard’s meteoric rise back in October 2018. Over the next year, Dan and the team delved into its suspected use of forged contracts, a preliminary report by a top law firm that there was evidence suggesting Wirecard employees engaged in a pattern of book-padding and made up partners that couldn’t be found, which gave us one of the best FT intros: 

“Agostin Antonio was mystified. A retired seaman living quietly with his extended family of 12 in a suburb of the northern Philippine city of Cabanatuan, he had no idea why a company called ConePay International had used his address.”

To save us from linking every fantastic piece of journalism from the team, you can access all the reporting under the FT section Inside Wirecard and Alphaville’s House of Wirecard series where Dan has been looking into the company’s accounting since 2015. 

Dan also took everyone on a tour of internal documents from the payments company that indicated a concerted effort to fraudulently inflate sales and profits. Throughout the entire time, Wirecard disputed the FT’s reporting and claimed the documents were fake (unfortunately the company has decided to delete the statement). But they did follow up another one of Dan’s stories with accusations of market manipulation. 

Back to the present. Everyone wants to be on the right side of history. Even Akshay Naheta, the man behind SoftBank’s investment in Wirecard took to Twitter to blame EY for its auditing job. He quickly then locked his Twitter account. 

Everyone that is except Olaf Scholz, Germany’s finance minister, pictured below, who rebuffed calls for tighter regulation as a consequence of the Wirecard case. “The supervisory institutions worked very hard and did their job, which we see today,” he said. 🧐

The curtains have been pulled back. Wirecard has conceded that the missing money probably never existed. The Philippine banks, where the cash was supposed to be located, told the FT that Wirecard was not a client and the head of the Philippine central bank said the money never entered the country. It seems clear that it was Wirecard’s internal records that were fake, not the documents the FT had reported on. 

In October last year, as Wirecard pushed back on much of the FT’s reporting, Dan provided some food for thought: 

“Are the internal documents published today by the FT really fake, or should that description be applied to much of the profits at one of Germany’s largest and most popular companies?”

We have the answer now. 

Covid-19 has forced auctioneers to rethink their businesses, both for the present and the post-crisis era

When Charles Stewart walked into Sotheby’s New York sale rooms earlier this month, he paused to take in the sight of promotional posters from an art auction held in March, just as the city was frantically pulling down the shutters in the coronavirus crisis.

“It was frozen in time,” the chief executive of Sotheby’s says. “It brought it all back to me.”

The sale of South Asian art on March 16 was the last to take place there before the US hit the pause button on its economy — and left the auction market scrambling to salvage its business plans under a ban on public gatherings and travel.

Auction houses furloughed staff, postponed events and moved sales online. Directors and specialists were forced to question how they sourced, marketed and sold works in a global health emergency. The past three months have been a concentrated phase of experimentation, accelerating shifts that most had assumed would take years. But as the world tentatively emerges from lockdown, will the auction houses and their clients embrace innovations that were forged in adversity — or demand a return to the status quo ante?

As with so many businesses lashed by the crisis, the internet has been the port in a storm.

“The crisis has brought a moment of truth for online sales”, says Guillaume Cerutti, chief executive of Christie’s. After a decade of talk about digital sales being “the new frontier for the art market”, he says, progress had nonetheless been slow-going. Now the barrier has been broken: Christie’s, like most auction houses, is replacing live sales with online versions, and many of these switches will stay for good, he says — “even in the post-Covid era”.

Stewart says the crisis has swept away the last redoubts of online scepticism among in-house specialists who feared resistance from longstanding clients. Since the beginning of the year, Sotheby’s has conducted more than 80 internet sales, twice as many as in the same period in 2019 and with three times as many lots. These sales raised $139m in the year to June 2, versus around $23m over the same period in 2019. Christie’s has 83 scheduled for the year and more in the pipeline.

The growth rates are eye-catching. However, online sales start from a very low base, providing less than 10 per cent of overall sales revenues last year for the top houses. And there is a big gap to make up: Sotheby’s overall sales dropped by around 75 per cent in the year to the end of May, from $2.2bn in 2019 to $541m this year, according to Arts Economics, a research company. It estimates Christie’s sales fell from $2.3bn over the same period in 2019 to $364m this year, including an online component of $32.2m.

Some of this ground may be made up when the crucial evening sales — postponed from May — take place in late June and July. These glittering occasions are normally the highlights of the auction calendar, when the most coveted works are dangled in front of the richest collectors. It’s unlikely that any buyers will be in the room, so the houses are looking to technology to recreate the pizzazz of a live auction and the competitive bidding it fosters.

In its “One” sale on July 10, Christie’s will stage a “relay” auction, streamed online, as four auctioneers pick up the hammer in sequence in Hong Kong, Paris, London and New York over the course of around three hours. Unusually, the auction will sell works in different categories such as Impressionist, contemporary and design alongside one another including highlights by Picasso, Lichtenstein and Zao Wou-Ki.

Sotheby’s is splitting its evening auctions across a series of locations. Its June 29 sale will be the first time an auctioneer takes to the rostrum in London to preside over a New York evening sale. A bank of video screens will connect Oliver Barker to colleagues manning phone banks in New York and Hong Kong, as well as online bidders. The top lot is a Francis Bacon triptych, carrying an estimate of $60m.

Even in the excitement of a live event, multimillion-dollar bids do not arrive out of the blue. In the weeks leading up to a sale, works may be flown around the world to be shown to the handful of people with the money and inclination to bid on them. Pre-Covid, collectors would attend parties or private lunches organised by the auction house, attended by specialists, friends and their own art advisers. This activity is likely to remain stilted even as lockdown rules begin to ease.

Anders Petterson, founder of art market research group ArtTactic, says the crisis has exposed the vulnerability that stems from auction houses’ reliance on a few big live events, each containing hundreds of works. Simply placing these online risks overwhelming the potential buyer. Instead, the industry is reconsidering its model and moving towards a “flow” of art and objects. “Houses are curating more frequent, smaller, targeted sales, with maybe 25 lots rather than packing everything into a 300-lot sale,” he says.

Convincing buyers to stump up millions of dollars for works of art is one thing. Private sales, which offer confidentiality for vendors, are booming. But many owners are sitting on their hands. The bigger challenge is persuading sellers to put their objects up for sale at a time of deep economic uncertainty. “Why would you sell now? That’s the problem. That top end is so discretionary,” says Melanie Gerlis, editor at large at The Art Newspaper and an FT columnist.

Auction sales tend to follow the political and economic cycle, falling 17 per cent last year amid broader fears over trade wars and the market outlook, according to Arts Economics. Specialists now have a job on their hands to entice people to sell but Stewart expects a longer term resurgence in consignments. “The big drivers of that activity include financial distress, mortality rates, family and generational planning. I think all of those factors will be higher than they have been.” And in the US, museums have been given the green light by the Association of Art Museum Directors to sell works to cover operating losses for the next two years, he adds.

The rules of engagement between longtime competitors have also been turned upside down, with partnerships designed to preserve the fortunes of the whole sector. Sotheby’s, for instance, is hosting a “Gallery Network” on its website, where external dealers can ply their wares to its large global audience, with the auction house taking a cut on any sales.

Christie’s this month announced a partnership with the Paris Biennale to organise an online sale in September after the physical art fair was cancelled. Such co-operation would have been “inconceivable” just a few months ago, says Cerutti, but is now regarded as essential in the wider effort to rebuild the market. Will these pacts survive the Covid emergency? “I’m quite sure this will continue,” he says.

Auction house directors caution that the fundamentals of their business — the value of expertise, client trust and the ability to find buyers and sellers of unique objects — will not disappear. But the trade is likely to look rather different in future. As Stewart says: “We used to be in the live theatre business. Now we’re going into the streaming business.”

Nikkei +0.90% Hang Seng +1% CSI +0.19% Shanghai +0.05% Shenzen +0.30%

Eur$ 1.1261 CNH 7.0724 CNY 7.0782 JPY 107.12 GBP 1.2456 CHF 0.9476 TRY 6.8476 WTI$ 40.53 -0.49%

S&P -0.18% NAsdaq -0.29% EuroStoxx +0.65% FTSE +0.42% Dax +0.72% SMI +0.39%

Macro :

- *ACKMAN SAYS U.S. MAY BE BACK TO NORMAL ECONOMY 2ND HALF OF 2021

- German Unemployment Forecast to Exceed 3 Million People: SZ

- Schwarzman Sees ‘Big V’ Economic Rebound Over Next Few Months

Keep an eye on :

- AALB NA : Aalberts Jan-May Organic Reveue Shrinks 12% Y/y

- ATL IM : Autostrade Available to Extend Talks With Gov Beyond June 30

- BAYN GY : Bayer Wins Court Ruling Blocking California’s Roundup Warning

- BMW GY : DOJ Defends Autos Probe Ahead of House Inquiry on Enforcement

- COP GY : CompuGroup Medical Offering Prices 5.32m Shares at EU64/Share

- DANSKE DC : Danske Says Extra Large Impairments Driven by Tougher Watchdog

- DTE GY : *T-MOBILE TO SELL ~134M SHARES AS PART OF SOFTBANK MONETIZATION

- DSV DC : DSV Panalpina Making the Best of Air, Ocean Freight Shock: React

- HIK LN : Hikma Pharmaceuticals Holder to Sell Shares Worth GBP700M: Terms

- IBE SM : Iberdrola Signs Option for Stakes in Swedish Offshore Wind Farms

- IFX GY : Infineon Says Covid-19 Crisis Delays Cypress Integration: FAZ

- ISP IM : Intesa Says Italy’s Consob Can’t Conclude UBI Deal Review Today

- KCO GY : Klöckner & Co. Sees 2Q Positive Ebitda of EU0-10m, Ex-Items

- LHA GY : France Takes Aim at Budget Carriers With Ban on Short Routes

- LEG GY : LEG Sees FFO 1 in Upper Half of Range After Deal for 7,500 Flats

- LSE LN : LSE Still Expects Refinitiv Deal to Close in 2020

- MAS SM : Masmovil, Telefonica Reach Accord for Fixed, Mobile Network

- NESN SW : Nestle to Rename Red Skins, Chicos Brands in Australia

- PFV GY : Pfeiffer Vacuum Prelim Second Quarter Ebit EU3 Mln to EU6.5 Mln

- PSM GY : KKR Raises Voting Rights in ProSiebenSat.1 to 6.61% vs 5.21%

- RHK GY : Rhoen-Klinikum CEO Stephan Holzinger Resigns

- SAN FP : Sanofi, Translate Bio Expand Pact to Develop MRNA Vaccines

- SNBN SW : SNB FX Interventions ‘In Principle’ Unlimited, Zurbruegg in NZZ

- TCH FP : France’s Technicolor Files for Chapter 15 in Texas Court

- TUI LN : TUI Considers Hotel Disposals: FAZ

- VOD LN : Vodafone Is Said to Invite Pitches for $2 Billion Tower IPO

- WDI GY : Wirecard Said to Have Explored Deutsche Bank Tie-Up in 2019

- WDI GY : Wirecard Drama Risks Tainting Germany’s Image, Altmaier Says

* ArcelorMittal Raised to Hold at SocGen; PT 10.30 euros

* ASA International Group Raised to Buy at Citi; PT 239 pence

* Bouygues Raised to Overweight at JPMorgan; PT 35 euros

* Kingfisher Raised to Reduce at AlphaValue

* LafargeHolcim Raised to Buy at SocGen

* Lonza PT Raised to 590 Swiss francs at Jefferies

>>> Down

* Ackermans Cut to Hold at Kepler Cheuvreux; PT 124 euros

* Bellway Cut to Underperform at BofA; PT 2,300 pence

* BillerudKorsnas Cut to Hold at SEB Equities; PT 133 kronor

* BillerudKorsnas Cut to Underperform at Jefferies; PT 115 kronor

* Cyan Cut to Hold at MainFirst; PT 15 euros

* Deutsche Bank Cut to Reduce at Kepler Cheuvreux; PT 6.50 euros

* Moncler Cut to Hold at Jefferies; PT 36 euros

* RBI Cut to Reduce at Kepler Cheuvreux; PT 14.50 euros

* Saint-Gobain Cut to Hold at SocGen; PT 34 euros

* Schoeller-Bleckmann Cut to Hold at Erste Group; PT 29 euros

>>> Initiation

* Admiral Rated New Hold at Berenberg; PT 2,566 pence

* Aegon Rated New Buy at Berenberg; PT 4.50 euros

* Ageas SA/NV Rated New Hold at Berenberg; PT 45.90 euros

* Aviva Rated New Hold at Berenberg; PT 477 pence

* Barratt Cut to Neutral at BofA; PT 550 pence

* Buzzi Unicem Rated New Buy at SocGen; PT 24 euros

* Capgemini Resumed Buy at Citi; PT 120 euros

* Direct Line Rated New Buy at Berenberg; PT 341 pence

* Gjensidige Rated New Hold at Berenberg; PT 200 kroner

* Hannover Re Rated New Hold at Berenberg; PT 175 euros

* Hastings Rated New Buy at Berenberg; PT 248 pence

* Legal & General Rated New Hold at Berenberg; PT 263 pence

* M&G Rated New Buy at Berenberg; PT 200 pence

* Munich Re Rated New Buy at Berenberg; PT 306 euros

* NN Rated New Hold at Berenberg; PT 38.70 euros

* Poxel Rated New Market Outperform at JMP; PT 21 euros

* Redrow Cut to Underperform at BofA; PT 400 pence

* Sabre Insurance Rated New Hold at Berenberg; PT 284 pence

* Scor Rated New Buy at Berenberg; PT 32 euros

* Swiss Re Rated New Buy at Berenberg; PT 99 Swiss francs

* Taylor Wimpey Cut to Neutral at BofA; PT 160 pence

* Topdanmark Rated New Hold at Berenberg; PT 290 kroner

* Tryg Rated New Buy at Berenberg; PT 212 kroner

* Vistry Group Cut to Underperform at BofA; PT 710 pence

>>> Call

* Aggreko Estimates Cut Amid Virus’s Impact on Oil, Events: Citi

* BillerudKorsnas Stock Rally Has Gone Too Far, Cut at Jefferies

* Carlsberg More Than ‘Covid-19 Trade;’ PT Raised at Jefferies

* DSV Panalpina’s 2Q Ebit ‘Phenomenal From Any Angle’: Bernstein

* LSE’s Refinitiv Purchase Still Likely to Be Approved, Citi Says

* Offshore Drillers Equity Negative Under Liquidation: Barclays