JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup, the nation’s largest and third-largest banks, said they planned to begin donating money gathered by their political action committees to candidates.
“A PAC is an important tool for JPMorgan Chase employees to engage in the political process in the United States,” the bank’s political action committee wrote in a note that was distributed to workers on Friday.
1 and would not throughout the current election cycle leading up to the 2022 midterm elections, according to Patricia Wexler, a JPMorgan spokeswoman.
After the Capitol attack, which resulted in five deaths, a wide array of corporations paused their giving, arguing that objections to the election certification were destructive to democracy.
It’s due in no small part, first of all, the cooperation of the American people in responding to my effort to get Covid under control, wearing masks initially and getting vaccinated.
But the report, which fell short of analyst expectations for the second straight month and showed a slight shrinkage in the labor force, also provided fodder for Republican critics of the president.
White House economists said last month there was not yet evidence in the numbers that the supplement was discouraging work, pointing instead to constraints like school closures and child care issues keeping women with children from returning to work, along with a large number of working-age Americans who had not been fully vaccinated.
“The American people need all the support they can get, especially Black and Hispanic communities that were among the hardest hit by the pandemic,” Representative Don Beyer of Virginia, the chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, said in a news release.
Employers added 559,000 jobs last month, below the 675,000 new jobs that economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected.
Central bank officials have said they need to see “substantial” further progress toward their two goals — maximum employment and stable inflation — before scaling down that bond buying.
Inflation has been moving higher this year, but Fed officials have said they expect much of the pop in prices to be temporary.
Quarles, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, said in a recent speech that he expected price gains to meet the Fed’s criteria for slowing bond buying later this year.
Powell, the Fed chair, said at an April event that “we want to see a string of months like that,” referencing a recent jobs report that had showed a near-million jobs.
Those purchases tend to push asset prices higher, and the announcement of a policy shift has the potential to be disruptive: Markets jerked wildly when the Fed in 2013 hinted that it would slow a post-financial crisis quantitative easing program.
Average earnings for all workers rose 15 cents an hour in May, down from a 21-cent gain in April, the Labor Department said Friday.
Many companies, particularly in the service sector, have been complaining that they are struggling with hiring as they try to return to business as usual.
Still, those workers have seen significant pay gains in recent months: Their average earnings were $15.90 an hour in May, up from $14.80 in April.
Staples said Friday it had sent a letter to the board of Office Depot outlining a $1 billion offer — or $18.27 a share — for its consumer business, which includes the Office Depot chain of stores and OfficeMax.
The retail landscape, though, has changed significantly since then, given the rise of Amazon and other online retailers.
In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a set of technical guidelines to help cruise companies start sailing again, but an industry trade group called the instructions “burdensome and ambiguous.” On May 25, Royal Caribbean became the first cruise line to receive approval from the C.D.C.
Walmart said on Friday that it would close all of its stores in the United States on Thanksgiving Day this year as a show of appreciation to its workers.
Investors and policymakers are trying to deduce what is happening in the labor market, in which millions of people are unemployed but some employers say they are struggling to hire.
The slower than expected increase in jobs is likely to give the Federal Reserve more time before policymakers consider pulling back monetary stimulus.
IAG, which owns British Airways, dropped 0.9 percent after falling 5.4 percent on Thursday when the changes to the travel list were announced.
Mr. Ackman’s SPAC, Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, would invest $4 billion for a 10 percent stake in Universal, of which the French conglomerate Vivendi owns 80 percent and China’s Tencent owns 20 percent.
There would still be $1.5 billion left in what remains of the SPAC, and that would be rolled into a new publicly traded vehicle into which Mr. Ackman’s Pershing Square hedge fund would put more money, for a total of $2.9 billion.
Vivendi had already been planning to take Universal public in Amsterdam; those plans will go ahead, meaning that unlike a traditional SPAC deal, Pershing Square Tontine won’t give Universal its stock listing.
The complex transaction is unlike any other SPAC deal, and in many ways doesn’t resemble a SPAC at all.
The outcome for Pershing Square Tontine’s various investors is more complicated.
Those investors could also take a stake in the SPARC, giving them the option of participating in whatever deal the new fund strikes at a set price.
Shares in Pershing Square Tontine plunged in after-hours trading on Thursday after news reports about the Universal transaction emerged, and opened about 10 percent down on Friday.