Stocks on Wall Street Slump Amid a String of Concerns

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Stocks on Wall Street slumped on Monday as indexes across Europe tumbled amid a string of concerns for investors — including the troubled Chinese property giant Evergrande, soaring energy prices in Europe and questions over how the Federal Reserve will manage its exit from its large bond-buying program.

The S&P 500 fell 1.7 percent in early trading, its sharpest decline yet this month. The index has dropped for two consecutive weeks, and before the decline on Monday, it was down more than 2 percent since it hit a record on Sept. 2.

In Europe, the Stoxx Europe 600 fell 2.1 percent, while the FTSE 100 in Britain was down 1.4 percent. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong dropped 3.3 percent, to its lowest in nearly a year. Most other Asian markets were closed for a holiday.

Investors pushed the Hong Kong-listed shares of some of China’s biggest property developers deep into the red amid worries that Evergrande’s spiraling debt woes could spill over, affecting the funding abilities of other developers at a time of heightened regulatory scrutiny. Hong Kong shares of the Chinese developer Sinic Holding fell by 87 percent after regulators in one Chinese province said they would punish certain sales practices by developers.

“These concerns around what’s going on with Evergrande and China and a possible default there are having spillover effects into the European markets,” said Mike Bell, a strategist at JPMorgan Asset Management in London. But he said it appeared the market was too worried.

The troubled property giant Evergrande, once China’s most prolific developer, has become the country’s most indebted company, a position that means its default could ripple across the country’s economy.

The company, which was founded in 1996, rode China’s property boom that urbanized large swathes of the country and resulted in nearly three-quarters of household wealth being tied up in housing. This put Evergrande at the center of power in an economy that came to lean on the property market for supercharged economic growth.

But Chinese regulators are cracking down on the reckless borrowing habits of property developers. Adding to the company’s misery, China’s property market is slowing and there is less demand for new apartments.

Today, Evergrande is seen as a rickety threat to China’s biggest banks:

• It owes money to lenders, suppliers and foreign investors.

• It owes unfinished apartments to home buyers and has racked up more than $300 billion in unpaid bills.

• It faces lawsuits from creditors and has seen its shares lose more than 80 percent of their value this year.

While the Delta variant of the coronavirus has delayed plans by many U.S. companies to bring employees back to offices en masse, New York City workers who have been trickling into Midtown Manhattan are discovering that many of their favorite haunts for a quick cup of coffee and a muffin in the morning or sandwich or salad at lunchtime have disappeared. A number of those that are open are operating at reduced hours or with limited menus.

By the end of 2020, the number of chain stores in Manhattan — everything from drugstores to clothing retailers to restaurants — had fallen by more than 17 percent from 2019, according to the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research and policy organization.

Across Manhattan, the number of available ground-floor stores, normally the domain of busy restaurants and clothing stores, has soared. A quarter of the ground-floor storefronts in Lower Manhattan are available for rent, while about a third are available in Herald Square, according to a report by the real-estate firm Cushman & Wakefield.

Starbucks has permanently closed 44 outlets in Manhattan since March of last year. Pret a Manger has reopened only half of the 60 locations it had in New York City before the pandemic. Numerous delicatessens, independent restaurants and smaller local chains have gone dark.

But in a city where one person’s downturn is someone else’s opportunity, some restaurant chains are taking advantage of the record-low retail rents to set up shop or expand their presence in New York City.

Lanson Jones, an avid tennis player in Houston, did not want to spoil his streak of good health during the pandemic by getting a vaccine.

Then he contracted Covid. Still, he chose not to get vaccinated. Instead, he turned to another kind of treatment: monoclonal antibodies, a year-old, laboratory-created medicine no less experimental than the vaccine.

In a glass-walled enclosure at Houston Methodist Hospital this month, Mr. Jones, 65, became one of more than a million Covid patients, including Donald J. Trump and Joe Rogan, to receive an antibody infusion.

The federal government covers the cost of the treatment, currently about $2,100 per dose, and has told states to expect scaled-back shipments because of the looming shortages. Seven Southern states account for 70 percent of orders.

Amid the din of antivaccine falsehoods circulating in the United States, monoclonal antibodies have become the rare coronavirus medicine to achieve near-universal acceptance. Championed by mainstream doctors and conservative radio hosts alike, the infusions have kept the country’s death toll — nearly 2,000 per day and climbing at a rapid rate — from soaring even higher.

The largest U.S. accounting firms have perfected a remarkably effective behind-the-scenes system to promote their interests in Washington, Jesse Drucker and Danny Hakim report in The New York Times.

Their tax lawyers take senior jobs at the Treasury Department, where they write policies that are frequently favorable to their former corporate clients, often with the expectation that they will soon return to their old employers. The firms welcome them back with loftier titles and higher pay, according to public records reviewed by The Times and interviews with current and former government and industry officials.

From their government posts, many of the industry veterans approved loopholes long exploited by their former firms, gave tax breaks to former clients and rolled back efforts to rein in tax shelters — with enormous impact.

Even some former industry veterans said they viewed this so-called revolving door as a big part of the reason that tax policy had become so skewed in favor of the wealthy, at the expense of just about everyone else. President Biden and congressional Democrats are seeking to overhaul parts of the tax code that overwhelmingly benefit the richest Americans.

This revolving door, with people cycling between the public and private sectors, is nothing new. But the ability of the world’s largest accounting firms to embed their top lawyers inside the government’s most important tax-policy jobs has largely escaped public scrutiny.

• Airlines sold tickets in June and July at prices on par with what they charged in 2019, but fares dropped in August and early September as the spread of the Delta variant of the coronavirus weighed on travel, according to the Adobe Digital Economy Index. In August, when holiday planning typically begins in earnest, flight sales for Thanksgiving were down about 18 percent in August compared with the same month in 2019.

The Biden administration will lift travel restrictions starting in November on those from abroad who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, ending a travel ban implemented to limit the spread of disease and reopening the United States to relatives who have been separated from families and employees from businesses.

Foreign travelers who provide proof that they are fully vaccinated before boarding a flight will be able to fly to the United States starting in “early November,” Jeff Zients, the White House pandemic coordinator, said Monday.

“International travel is critical to connecting families and friends, to fueling small and large businesses, to promoting the open exchange ideas and culture,” Mr. Zients said. “That’s why, with science and public health as our guide, we have developed a new international air travel system that both enhances the safety of Americans here at home and enhances the safety of international air travel.”

The administration has restricted travel for foreigners looking to fly to the United States from a group of European countries, Iran and China for more than a year. Fully vaccinated travelers will also need to show proof of a negative test for the coronavirus within three days before coming to the United States, Mr. Zients said.

Unvaccinated Americans overseas aiming to travel home will have to clear stricter testing requirements. They will need to test negative for the coronavirus one day before traveling to the United States and will need to be tested again after arriving, Mr. Zients said. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will also soon issue an order directing airlines to collect phone numbers and email addresses of travelers for a new contact-tracing system. Authorities will then follow up with the travelers after arrival to ask whether they are experiencing symptoms of the virus.