(Bloomberg) -- Southwest Airlines Co. is losing “big money” on every flight, raising the risk of worker furloughs in the longer-term despite billions of dollars in immediate aid from the U.S. government.The biggest U.S. discounter is “appreciative” of the package of loans and cash assistance approved by the Senate and awaiting a vote in the House of Representatives, Chief Executive Officer Gary Kelly said Thursday. If approved and signed by President Donald Trump, the program would provide an option to secure cash “that’s at least accessible, and quickly and simply,” he said.Airlines have been battered as the spread of coronavirus and related government-imposed travel restrictions have caused demand for flights to collapse. On March 25, security officials at U.S. airports screened just 239,000 passengers, down from 2.2 million a year earlier, according to trade group Airlines for America.“The load factors are at levels we’ve never seen,” Kelly said in a video...
(Bloomberg) -- Canadian heavy crude has become so cheap that the cost of shipping it to refineries exceeds the value of the oil itself, a situation that may result in even more oil-sands producers shutting operations.Western Canadian Select crude in Alberta dropped to a record-low close of $5.06 a barrel on Friday, according to Bloomberg data going back to 2008, cheaper than a Starbucks venti-sized pumpkin spice latte. WCS is composed of bitumen mixed with light condensate so it can flow through pipelines. The bitumen’s value was at about $1.42 a barrel. Synthetic crude, produced from oil-sands bitumen that’s been run through an upgrader, fell to $9.56 a barrel.Canadian heavy crude now costs less than the price paid by a company with long-term contracts to ship it down Enbridge Inc.’s Mainline and Flanagan South systems to Texas. That’s a problem for oil-sands producers like Cenovus Energy Inc., which has commitments to...
(Bloomberg) -- The coronavirus and cheap oil are hitting the fuel business so hard that ethanol plants are shutting down. Some may never come back.The entire biofuel industry is facing a reckoning. Long before the pandemic emptied roads and exacerbated an oil price war, producers were battling chronic oversupply and trade upheaval. Now slumping demand and prices mean smaller producers and those with heavy debt loads will struggle to ride out the losses.“When we come out of these two Black Swan events -- the price war in oil and now the coronavirus -- we will probably look differently as an industry,” said Todd Becker, chief executive officer of U.S. ethanol producer Green Plains Inc. “There are definitely plants out there that are going to run out of capital.”Seen as a greener alternative to gasoline and once promoted as a way for countries to wean themselves off foreign oil, the industry is...
On Friday, Loop Capital analysts led by Laura Champine upgraded shares of Home Depot from hold to buy despite decreasing its price target from $240 to $235, on the belief that it will be less impacted than most retailers through Covid-19, based on the simple fact that its stores are expected to remain open. The firm also expects construction projects to continue despite high unemployment nationwide due it being an essential industry. ...
