The Federal Reserve announced Thursday that it was expanding a major lending program to provide support for businesses struggling to cope with the economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
The Fed said that it was expanding the scope and eligibility of its Main Street Lending Program which is designed to provide up to $600 billion in loans to small and mid-size businesses that have been harmed by the pandemic and the efforts to contain it.
The Fed said it was allowing businesses with up to 15,000 employees and $5 billion in annual revenues to qualify for loans. That is up from earlier limit of 10,000 employees and $2.5 billion in revenue.
The minimum loan size is being reduced to $500,000, down from an original minimum loan size of $1 million.
This support program, one of many the Fed has unveiled over the past two months, is designed to provide businesses with loans of up to four years from banks at below-market interest rates. Unlike a separate program being run by the Small Business Administration, the loans from the Fed must be repaid but payments can be deferred for one year.
A federal appeals court has ruled that a 2018 Twitter post by Tesla CEO Elon Musk unlawfully threatened Tesla employees with the loss of stock options if they decided to be represented by a union.
Major news organizations such as The New York Times and Washington Post are declining to pay to have their accounts verified on Twitter ahead of the anticipated changes on the platform Saturday.
Netflix said it plans to reorganize its film unit with the aim of making fewer movies a year as it looks to cut costs with layoffs and a reorganization in the works.
The Week's Top Stories is a guided tour through the biggest market stories of the week, from winning stocks to brutal dips to the facts and forecasts generating buzz on Wall Street.
Board members picked by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to oversee the governance of Walt Disney World said Wednesday that their Disney-controlled predecessors pulled a fast one on them by passing restrictive covenants that strip the new board of many of its powers.
The federal government has filed a lawsuit against railroad Norfolk Southern over environmental damage caused by a train derailment on the Ohio-Pennsylvania border that spilled hazardous chemicals.
