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President Biden on Thursday laid out a wide-ranging plan to tackle the coronavirus pandemic, including requiring companies with more than 100 employees to mandate that their workers get vaccinated or face weekly testing. The move comes as airlines, restaurants and other businesses are already feeling the pain of an economic pullback caused by the Delta variant of the virus. The new rule will affect some 80 million workers.<\/p>\n
Many companies were already moving toward mandates. <\/strong>In a recent Willis Towers Watson survey, 52 percent of respondents said they planned to institute vaccine mandates by the end of the year, and 21 percent said they already had such requirements. But many of those mandates, including at companies like Goldman Sachs and UPS, have focused on white-collar workers, who tend to have higher vaccination rates. This <\/strong>presidential directive will help industries facing labor shortages, like retail and hospitality, institute a requirement on their frontline workers. \u201cIt levels the playing field,\u201d said Ian Schaefer, a partner at the law firm Loeb & Loeb.<\/p>\n But companies will now face new decisions<\/strong>, like whether to pick up the tab for weekly testing and how to handle religious exemptions \u2014 tasks many are already finding challenging. A recent poll by Aon of 583 global companies found that of the employers that have vaccine mandates, 48 percent said they were allowing for religious exemptions; only 7 percent said they would fire a worker for refusing to get vaccinated.<\/p>\n Reaction was, unsurprisingly, mixed.<\/strong> The Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce both welcomed the Biden administration\u2019s actions. <\/span>But Gov. Greg Gianforte, Republican of Montana, the only state to ban vaccine mandates, called the new rules \u201cunlawful and un-American.\u201d The Republican National Committee said it intended to sue.<\/p>\n Whether legal challenges will prove successful is unclear. <\/strong>OSHA\u2019s emergency temporary standards pre-empt state governments\u2019 existing rules, except in states that have their own OSHA-approved workplace agencies. (About half do.) The legal basis for a challenge is likely to be weakest in states that are directly within OSHA\u2019s jurisdiction, like Montana, Texas and Florida.<\/p>\n Europe slows its pandemic bond-buying. <\/strong>Policymakers approved a moderate reduction of government bond purchases, citing \u201cfavorable financing conditions.\u201d The European Central Bank\u2019s president, Christine Lagarde, said the move was not a taper, but a \u201crecalibration.\u201d<\/p>\n A rare dialogue between Beijing and Washington tries to ease a strained relationship. <\/strong>Yesterday, <\/strong>for the first time in seven months, Biden and China\u2019s leader, Xi Jinping, held a substantive conversation. They discussed the responsibility both countries have to \u201censure competition does not veer into conflict,\u201d a statement from the White House said. Meanwhile, Chinese regulators granted Evergrande, the world\u2019s most debt-saddled property developer, more time to negotiate with its creditors, evading a $300 billion bust, for now.<\/p>\n The Food and Drug Administration delays its decision on Juul Labs.<\/strong> The F.D.A. had been expected to rule on whether products from the e-cigarette maker and other large vaping companies could stay on the market, but the agency said it needed more time. Meanwhile, the agency announced yesterday that it had denied the applications of almost one million flavored e-cigarette products, mostly made by small companies, to remain on the market.<\/p>\n Texas bans social media companies from removing or hiding posts, citing political \u201ccensorship.\u201d <\/strong>The law, which was signed yesterday by Gov. Greg Abbott, will allow Texans, or anyone who shares or post messages in Texas, to sue platforms with more than 50 million monthly users. A similar law in Florida was blocked this summer by a judge, as critics say the laws violate companies\u2019 First Amendment rights to decide what content they host.<\/p>\n The White House sets a zero-carbon challenge for aviation.<\/strong> The government announced a new target to reduce aviation emissions by 20 percent by 2030, with a $4 billion funding pot to support sustainable aviation fuel projects. Separately, Harvard said its $42 billion endowment would no longer invest in fossil fuels.<\/p>\n Proponents of President Donald Trump\u2019s 2017 corporate tax cut argued that companies would use the savings to grow their businesses, hire workers or raise wages. Instead, in 2019, the largest American companies spent a record $728 billion on stock buybacks \u2014 a 55 percent increase from 2018, before the law took effect. Now, The Times reports, Democrats are coalescing around a plan to tax those stock buybacks that is likely to be included in the Senate\u2019s budget bill.<\/p>\n The proposal would tax buybacks at 2 percent.<\/strong> Democrats say the proposed tax would bring in about $270 billion over 10 years, and would push companies to invest more in their workers and businesses instead of using excess cash for buybacks. But it can\u2019t do both. If the proposed tax does cause companies to cut buybacks, the revenue the tax generates would shrink as well.<\/p>\n The proposal will also address large business partnerships that are often used to avoid taxes.<\/strong> The rules for taxing partnerships were written with small businesses, like doctor\u2019s offices, in mind. Increasingly, though, partnerships have been used by large companies to shift profits in order to avoid taxes. The new rules would prevent a single corporate entity that controls multiple partnerships from shifting profits or debt between them in order to reduce its overall tax bill.<\/p>\n Some Democrats wanted to make buybacks illegal. <\/strong>But Democratic tax aides said on Thursday that they were trying to balance the desire to curtail buybacks with the need to raise revenue for the social policy bill. At the very least, a 2 percent tax on buybacks could persuade some companies to shift excess cash to shareholder dividends, which are taxed at an individual level.<\/p>\n \u2014 Mike Isaac, a Times technology reporter, on <\/em>his experience<\/em> trying out Facebook and Ray-Ban\u2019s new sunglasses that can take photographs, record video, answer phone calls and play music and podcasts.<\/em><\/p>\n As SPACs struggle with redemptions, they\u2019re trying new ways to connect with shareholders ahead of investor votes that will seal their deals\u2019 fates.<\/p>\n One example is the food tech company Benson Hill, which will be the first SPAC \u2014 or special purpose acquisition company \u2014 to host a retail investor webcast and Q. and A. on Say, a platform recently acquired by Robinhood, ahead of its shareholder vote expected this month. Benson Hill announced the open forum yesterday on Reddit. Say has been used by other companies, including Tesla, to allow individual investors to ask questions on earnings conference calls, access to which had previously been reserved mostly for analysts employed by Wall Street banks. \u201cWe recognize the attention paid to SPACs these days and want to leverage the platform in a positive way,\u201d said Benson Hill\u2019s C.E.O., Matt Crisp.<\/p>\nHERE\u2019S WHAT\u2019S HAPPENING <\/span><\/h3>\n
Democrats take aim at buybacks<\/h2>\n
Latest Updates<\/h2>\n
\u201cIt all made me feel that I was being dragged into some inevitable future dreamed up by people much more techie than me, one in which the seams between the real world and the technology that supports it had all but vanished.\u201d<\/h2>\n
A new way to talk about SPACs<\/h2>\n
Understand\u00a0Vaccine and Mask Mandates in the U.S.<\/h4>\n
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