| Renewed growth warnings, claims data due, and more Archegos fallout. Uneven The surge in Covid-19 cases has the potential to damage overall global growth, while threatening to widen the gap between rich and poor nations. India reported a world record one-day jump in cases at 314,835 yesterday amid reports the country's health system is close to collapse. The World Health Organization also warned on increasing infections in Argentina, Turkey and Brazil. A new law allowing the federal government in Germany to impose curfews and lockdowns was passed in the lower house of parliament there. Eco day The European Central Bank announces its latest policy decision at 7:45 a.m. Eastern Time, with analysts expecting no policy changes. ECB President Christine Lagarde will likely be questioned on how long the bank plans to keep buying bonds at an accelerated pace in the press conference beginning at 8:30 a.m. In the U.S., the latest weekly jobless claims numbers will land just as Lagarde starts speaking, with consensus predicting a rise to 610,000. Ache goes onCredit Suisse Group AG announced it is raising $2 billion from investors and cutting the hedge fund unit at the center of the Archegos Capital Management losses. The bank said the total hit from that mess now stands at $5.5 billion. Shares in the lender dropped more than 6% in the wake of the announcement. The SEC is considering tougher disclosure requirements for investment firms, with officials exploring how to increase transparency for the types of derivatives bets that sank Archegos. Markets riseEarnings are dominating market moves this morning ahead of the ECB meeting and U.S. economic data. Overnight the MSCI Asia Pacific Index added 0.9% while Japan's Topix index closed 1.8% higher. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 Index rose 0.6% by 5:50 a.m. with technology among the best-performing sectors. S&P 500 futures pointed to a small move lower at the open, the 10-year Treasury yield was at 1.559%, oil slipped and gold was down. Coming up... U.S. existing home sales for March is at 10:00 a.m. Kansas City Fed Manufacturing Activity is at 11:00 a.m. President Joe Biden hosts a virtual climate summit which will be attended by dozens of leaders. It is another mammoth day for earnings with Intel Corp., AT&T Inc., Biogen Inc., Southwest Airlines Co. and American Airlines Group Inc. among the many companies reporting. What we've been readingHere's what caught our eye over the last 24 hours. And finally, here's what Joe's interested in this morningPeople have this conception that there is a thing called "zombie companies" that are kept alive only by exceptionally cheap money or some other government arrangement and that in a truly free market they would disappear. Without getting into the debate about whether these zombie companies actually exist or not, let's first talk about why we would even care. We would theoretically care because in theory if these companies proliferate, then they could be using up resources -- labor, land, commodities, equipment, etc. -- that could instead be employed in more productive areas. And if these zombie companies exist, they're holding back the broader economy, depriving more productive enterprises of capital. Anyway, I'll get back to all that in a second.
Lately we've been hearing more and more about supposed labor shortages, and the difficulty that many businesses are having in hiring workers. There are dozens of stories every day about companies offering big signing bonuses, or other incentives to get workers in the door to even do an interview. There's probably a lot going on. Some of the issue is probably overstated. Some of it might simply be that people don't want to return to jobs where they might get Covid. Some of it might have to do with UI making poorly paid work less appealing. A big part of it could be the lack of childcare options where schools haven't opened up for in-person learning. Anyway the point is companies clearly aren't used to having to compete to find workers, instead of workers having to compete to find a job.
We don't really know how long this state of ostensible labor market tightness really is. It might slacken with the expected normalization later this year. But for now it's a good thing and hopefully things stay tight. It's good when it's easy to find a job. And so now we might find out who the real zombies companies were -- the companies that were only able to succeed due to cheap labor caused by a precarious market, and thus bringing the economy down as a whole. Joe Weisenthal is an editor at Bloomberg Like Bloomberg's Five Things? Subscribe for unlimited access to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. | 
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