Apple Inc. said Thursday that it will enact a 4-for-1 stock split, essentially giving investors three more shares for every one they own.

Once nearly a given for most firms when their shares topped $100 or so, stock splits by companies in the S&P 500 faded from prominence after the dot-com bust in 2000. They are even more rare among companies in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Apple is a component of both.

One…

LIST: Face masks required at stores including Walmart, Best Buy, Starbucks

At least 13 workers have tested positive at the Costco in Sunnyvale at 150 Sunnyvale Station Road and it is still open to customers.

Smaller clusters were also reported at the Costco locations in Mountain View, Gilroy and San Jose.

The Santa Clara County Public Health Department says it is working with the stores to investigate the situation.

“The initial investigation shows that most likely it was not inside the store. The cases were most likely infected outside the workplace,” said Marty Fenstersheib, Santa Clara County health officer.

VIDEO: We’re all making this mask-wearing mistake, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office

Essential workers at Bay Area grocery stores have been hit hard by coronavirus.

A dozen workers at Cardenas Markets in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood tested positive for coronavirus in May.

Eight workers at a Trader Joe’s in San Jose tested positive for the virus earlier this month.

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USC is dealing with an outbreak of the coronavirus spread across the university’s Greek row.

The school has detected around 40 positive COVID-19 cases involving individuals living on 28th Street, where many fraternity groups associated with the university are based, chief student health officer Sarah Van Orman said.

“A significant number of the cases were associated with four fraternity houses,” Van Orman said. To date, around 150 USC students and employees have tested positive.

USC and other universities have adapted to the coronavirus in an effort to keep students, staff and local communities safe during the pandemic. Many schools, including UCLA and USC, have moved the vast majority of fall semester classes online and canceled events, limited the availability of on-campus housing to decrease density, added mask, social-distancing and symptom-checking measures, and regularly report infection data. Still, as students continue to return officially and unofficially, on-campus and off, universities face a daunting worry: Can the spread of COVID at colleges be stopped?

That answer depends on the decisions individuals make, Van Orman said, pointing out that USC’s recent outbreaks occurred at off-campus spaces not controlled by the university.

“Unless all of us understand that right now our only tools are physical distancing and wearing masks, we’re going to continue to have devastation, not only in terms of the economy, our learning, our academics, our jobs, but people dying,” she said. “Each of us have to decide what we stand for. Frats need to do that as well.” She said that although the outbreak affected fraternity houses, it wasn’t clear that the infection involved fraternity members, who often lease out rooms during the summer.

UCLA spokesman Steve Ritea agreed that the pandemic’s toll will be depend on community members’ choices.

“If you have three or four of our students who are living together in an off-campus apartment, all we can do is give them our best recommendation and the best knowledge. They have to make those decisions from there,” he said. Students living in official UCLA dorms face certain health restrictions imposed by the school, he added.

Coronavirus outbreaks have occurred in fraternity spaces at universities across the country, including the University of Washington and UC Berkeley. Van Orman attributed the spread in such spaces to the increased household exposure that comes with congregate living situations and social gatherings.

“When we think about the population size that they expose, it can quickly become quite large,” Van Orman said.

The outbreak among USC fraternities is mostly over, she said. The school first reported 15 positive cases on 28th Street through a July 9 press release. Continued testing and aggressive contact tracing allowed the university to identify exposed individuals and new positives. Mandatory quarantining ordered by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health helped stop the spread.

“We haven’t seen any more cases for the last week or so,” Van Orman said. The testing, tracing and quarantining are all parts of USC’s pandemic plan, which is laid out on the school’s website.

In the fall, outbreaks at USC could lead to more remote classes. Hotel space has been set aside for students infected in the future, Van Orman said. The university is encouraging undergraduates to not return, working to educate students about spread and is set to enforce strong policies blocking rule-breakers from the campus, she added. Keeping students from getting together in groups will play an important role in preventing future outbreaks.

“Gatherings are a huge issue. Whether that’s at a church or a fraternity, that’s what we’re seeing: People get together, and if you have 20 or 30 people in the room you can quickly have half of them infected in one gathering,” Van Orman said.

On Wednesday, UCLA’s COVID total was similar to USC’s. The university reported 153 individuals have tested positive and reported their diagnosis to the university since testing began. 52 cases have been reported since June 15. Ritea said the data include self-reported cases from out-of-state students and that the Westwood campus is not experiencing a COVID-19 outbreak. UCLA isn’t seeing abnormal spread involving conjugal living spaces, he added.

UCLA has its own COVID procedures written up online too. The intentionally that’s gone into preparing makes Ritea feel better about the school’s outlook.

“When you’re talking about a global pandemic where there’s no vaccine yet, I would never say that any of us feel good about any number of cases,” he said. “But what I do feel good about is that our leadership has taken this so seriously. There’s been so much thought and care and planning that goes into how we’re doing this,” he said. He noted, however, the planning can only go so far.

“The best we can do is minimize the risk as much as we can,” Ritea said.

Both schools’ student populations are full of young people, who Van Orman acknowledged COVID-19 typically hits less hard. She said no one infected at USC has been hospitalized yet. But young people aren’t immune to the virus’s worst consequences, she added.

“We still see young, healthy people who contract the virus, who have severe disease, who are hospitalized and even die,” she said.

She added that a developing understanding of the virus’s long-term effects should concern young people, along with the fact that they can pass on the virus to more vulnerable people.

“They’re exposing their parents and their grandparents, they’re exposing the person that’s working in the store,” she said.

Apple Inc. is planning a 4-for-1 stock split and it has important implications for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, of which it is a key component.

The iPhone maker on Thursday announced that its board approved the stock split. The split, intended to make Apple “more accessible to a broader base of investors,” will impact owners of record as of Aug. 24 and Apple’s shares
AAPL,
+1.21%,
which closed at $384.76 on Thursday, will trade on a split-adjusted basis on Aug. 31.

Amazon

Apple

Facebook

Alphabet

Rep. Pramila Jayapal is on a roll. Over the past two days, the Democrat from Washington has orchestrated two of the most memorable exchanges in two separate House hearings. In the first, she exposed the naked racism and political motivations behind Attorney General William Barr’s attacks on Portland protesters. In the second, she all but caught Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a series of lies about Facebook’s business practices.

During Jayapal’s questioning of Barr on Tuesday, the attorney general tried to dispute that law enforcement officers used tear gas to disperse protesters for the president’s photo op near Lafayette Square in June. Officials have admitted to using chemical eye irritants in the attack on demonstrators, but, Barr said on Tuesday, “tear gas is a particular compound” that was not used. Jayapal stood firm. “I’m starting to lose my temper,” she told him, after he refused to address the substance of the question for the third or fourth time.

Barr also attempted to defend the deployment of federal agents to quash racial justice protests in Portland under the guise of protecting a federal building. Meanwhile, he denied ever hearing about the armed protesters in Michigan who, demanding an end to stay-at-home orders, stormed the state capitol and threatened to lynch Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in May. Jayapal pointed out the disparity in his responses to these two groups of demonstrators. When Barr tried to interrupt her to say he only cared about protests that affect federal property, Jayapal cut him off. “This is my time, and I control it,” she said. She went on:

When protesters carry guns and Confederate flags and Swastikas and call for the governor of Michigan to be beheaded and shot and lynched, somehow you’re not aware of that … because they’re getting the president’s personal agenda done. But when black people and people of color protest police brutality, systemic racism, and the president’s very own lack of response to those critical issues, then you forcibly remove them with armed federal officers, pepper bombs, because they are considered terrorists by the president.

Unlike her Democratic colleagues, who effectively questioned Barr on racism within police forces and his fear-mongering around mail-in voting, Jayapal didn’t get Barr on the record with any particularly damning statements. But her line of questioning offered more than just the hollow satisfaction of a good burn and the pleasure of watching a righteous legislator exert her power over a man who routinely abuses his. Most people don’t have the time or inclination to watch lengthy Congressional hearings. If there’s big news, they’ll read the headlines or watch clips on their nightly news shows, but much of the substance of these hearings often goes unnoticed. By reacting to Barr’s outrageous deflections with the outrage they warranted, Jayapal ensured she’d make headlines. Then, she gave viewers and readers a concrete example of the Trump administration’s racist hypocrisy, in bracingly clear language. Unlike Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, who said in an address on Tuesday that “anarchists should be prosecuted”—leading some progressives to argue that Trump and Biden are “two sides of the same coin”—Jayapal made no mealy-mouthed qualifications. She focused the blame where it belonged: not on political dissidents, but on state entities that are violently attempting to suppress them.

Her line of questioning offered more than just the hollow satisfaction of a good burn.

On Wednesday, Jayapal emerged in the spotlight again. The House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee convened the giants of the tech world—Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Apple’s Tim Cook—to answer questions about their anticompetitive business practices. Jayapal began her Zuckerberg interrogation by quoting emails and statements from multiple Facebook executives, including the CEO himself, who’ve said that Facebook should block competitors from gaining traction in the marketplace and copy their products if necessary. Then, she asked him, “Has Facebook ever taken steps to prevent competitors from getting footholds by copying competitors?”

Zuckerberg dodged. So she rephrased: “Since March of 2012, after that email conversation, how many competitors did Facebook end up copying?” “Congresswoman, I—I can’t give you a number of companies,” Zuckerberg replied.

After Zuckerberg said he didn’t remember any conversations in which he’d threatened to copy competitors’ products if they didn’t let Facebook acquire their businesses, Jayapal read aloud quotes from an online chat transcript that showed Zuckerberg doing exactly that, in conversation with Instagram’s founder. “Facebook is a case study, in my opinion, in monopoly power, because your company harvests and monetizes our data and then your company uses that data to spy on competitors and to copy acquire and kill rivals,” Jayapal said. “These tactics reinforce Facebook’s dominance, which you then use in increasingly destructive ways.”

These hearings aren’t trials. In some cases, their public value is largely theatrical: The bigshots who are called to testify hedge and stall, while the members of Congress pontificate from their seats, putting on a show for their constituents. Wednesday’s hearing fit this mold. The antitrust subcommittee had already been investigating these companies for more than a year, conducting hundreds of hours of interviews and collecting more than 1 million documents. At the hearing, the members didn’t extract much new information. Their main job was to make public the information they already had—and to make their constituents care. And Jayapal has proven herself to be remarkably skilled at merging performance with substance.

If there was ever any illusion that elected officials in this pseudo-democracy could be trusted to uphold the laws that govern it, the events of the past few years should have extinguished that hope. Powerful corporations and politicians will not police themselves, and many members of Congress will not risk angering the donor class unless there’s a public outcry to justify it. Jayapal didn’t just catch Zuckerberg in a defensive posture about Facebook’s unjustifiable consolidation of power in the tech industry. She laid the groundwork for the rest of America to understand what Facebook has been doing, grasp the cynicism of Zuckerberg’s attempted self-exoneration, and connect the dots between Facebook’s anticompetitive strategies and its role in the erosion of American democracy. If Congressional Democrats ever hope to build popular support for breaking up or imposing stricter regulations on monopolies like Facebook, they’ll need people like Jayapal—who represents a district where many Amazon employees live—to sell the public on the urgency of the issue.

There is great value in confronting abuses of power directly, in public view, with such clarity.

Jayapal’s week of scorchings comes on the heels of another notable show of strength in the House. Last week, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stood on the House floor and addressed her Republican colleague, Rep. Ted Yoho, who’d called her a “fucking bitch” in front of an audience of reporters. She got a lot of approving (and deserved) press coverage of her speech, in which she laid into Republicans who’ve used their wives and daughters as shields against allegations of misogyny. Some would dismiss quotable, passionate, made-for-TV addresses like hers—and heated exchanges like Jayapal’s—as sound-bitey clapbacks with little concrete political import. But there is great value in confronting abuses of power directly, in public view, with such clarity. It gives people who haven’t been paying much attention an accessible explanation for why they should be worked up and the language they need to explain it to others.

It also gives many of us a worthy proxy for our impotent anger, transforming feelings of powerlessness into those of power. Yoho insists he said bullshit, not bitch, and besides, he says, Ocasio-Cortez deserved it; Zuckerberg insists that the threat he delivered to Instagram was no threat at all. It’s enough to make any rational, incensed observer wonder if she’s going mad—and yet, here are two members of Congress who firmly assure her she’s not. It is a formidable prophylactic against political apathy to see one’s fury at seemingly unchecked injustices expressed on a public stage by an elected official. It’s representative democracy at work.

LIKE MOST international jamborees these days the Farnborough air show wrapped up on July 24th as a virtual event. Webinars featuring grim-faced executives were not as entertaining as noisy acrobatic displays by fighter jets. But commercial aviation’s most important showcase at least marked a point when heads began to turn away from the devastation wrought by covid-19 and towards what comes next.

As airlines sell fewer tickets, owing to pandemic travel restrictions or travellers’ fear of infection, the industry that makes flying possible faces a reckoning. Aircraft-makers will make fewer passenger jets and so need fewer parts from their suppliers. Ticket-sellers will see less custom and airport operators, lower footfall. Many firms have cut output and laid off thousands of workers. The question now is how far they will fall, how quickly they can recover, and what will be the long-lasting effects.

The airline-industrial complex is vast. Last year 4.5bn passengers buckled up for take-off. Over 100,000 commercial flights a day filled the skies. These journeys supported 10m jobs directly, according to the Air Transport Action Group, a trade body: 6m at airports, including staff of shops and cafés, luggage handlers, cooks of in-flight meals and the like; 2.7m airline workers; and 1.2m people in planemaking. In 2019 they helped generate revenues of $170bn for the world’s airports and $838bn for airlines. Airbus and Boeing, the duopoly atop the aircraft supply chain, had sales of $100bn between them. For the aerospace industry as a whole they were perhaps $600bn. Add travel firms like Booking Holdings, Expedia and Trip.com, and you get annual revenues of some $1.3trn in normal times for listed firms alone, supporting roughly as much in market capitalisation before covid-19—and rising.

Taxiing times

Instead, the coronavirus has lopped $460bn from this market value (see chart 1). Airline bosses are reassessing trends in passenger numbers, which had been expected to double in the next 15 years, just as they had with metronomic regularity since 1988, despite blips after the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 and the financial crisis of 2007-09. Rather than increase by 4% this year, air-transport revenues will fall by 50%, to $419bn. After ten years of unusual profitability the $100bn of total losses forecast for the next two years is equal to half the nominal net profits the industry raked in since the second world war, calculates Aviation Strategy, a consultancy. Luis Felipe de Oliveira, director-general of ACI World, which represents the world’s airports, gloomily predicts that revenues there will fall by 57% in 2020.

The engine-makers provide a case in point. Besides lower demand for their kit—Rolls-Royce was gearing up to supply 500 units a year to Airbus but will now probably make 250—they face a collapsing aftermarket for spares and fewer overhauls, points out David Stewart of Oliver Wyman. Airlines with in-house maintenance divisions can scavenge parts or whole engines from grounded planes. Rolls-Royce, whose engines power two-fifths of all long-haul jets, has suspended dividends, said it would cut 9,000 jobs and taken a £2bn ($2.6bn) loan. It may have to ask investors for another £2bn. GE’s second-quarter revenues from its aviation business fell by 44%, year on year, dragging down the conglomerate’s overall results (see article).

At the other end of the air-travel industry are airports. About 60% of their revenues comes from charges on airlines and passengers, and the rest from things like retail and parking. All are taking a hit. Airport shops and restaurants in America will lose $3.4bn between now and the end of 2021, forecasts the Airport Restaurant & Retail Association. As Mr de Oliveira of ACI World notes, two in three airports were losing money before the crisis; now all are. Some smaller ones may close if subsidies to support tourism from regional and national governments start to dwindle. Outside America commercial operators have not been treated by governments as generously as airlines have.

In July Standard & Poor’s again downgraded the debt of four European airports, including Amsterdam’s Schiphol and Zurich, and placed London Gatwick and Rome on watch, questioning their ability to raise charges while airlines continue to bleed cash. The rating agency estimates a cut of €10bn ($11.8bn) in planned capital spending by European airports in 2020-23, which may crimp efforts to install contactless technology that could help reassure travellers that terminals are safe to re-enter.

As dark as the skies have grown for the air-travel complex, there are some opportunities. Airlines are restructuring. Europe’s big legacy carriers, under pressure from low-cost rivals, are slashing costs. BA has suspended 30,000 workers and wants to rehire them on less generous terms. Bankruptcies and cutbacks will leave gaps in the market, aircraft are cheap, once-scarce pilots are plentiful, and airports will have spare slots, if they are allowed to redistribute them.

Strong challenger carriers have a chance to gain market share. Wizz Air, a Hungarian low-cost carrier, hopes to add capacity by March; its main markets in central and eastern Europe have been hurt less by the pandemic than those elsewhere, its customers are generally young and less worried about getting on a plane, and two-thirds of demand is related to visiting family and friends, which seems more resilient to covid-19 than business travel is.

Some carriers may radically rethink their financial structures, which could help leasing grow even faster. Domhnal Slattery, boss of Avolon, a big lessor, thinks that heavy debts airlines incur to survive the pandemic may convince many of them that they need not own aircraft but should instead concentrate on sales and marketing, just as hotel chains have turned their backs on owning property.

The industry is also rethinking its environmental footprint. Bolder airlines with stronger balance-sheets may use the crisis to renew their fleets, making them greener. They have bargaining power: everything is negotiable, including deferrals, prepayments and price.

Rolling with the punches

Warren East, boss of Rolls-Royce, suspects that the “pre-covid call for sustainability will come back stronger than ever”. Airbus is still committed to the journey to zero-emissions flying, Mr Faury says; he sees it as an opportunity. Boeing would have to respond to stay competitive. European governments in particular regard it as a priority. France’s €15bn aid package for its aerospace sector includes a €1.5bn research-and-development fund to help Airbus launch a zero-emissions short-haul passenger jet by 2035 (probably powered by either biofuels or hydrogen). Mr Faury accepts that there is less money to invest. But also, he says, “more need”. The crisis has led to greater collaboration with suppliers that could make innovation “faster, leaner and cheaper” (though that has meant laying off 15,000 workers).

China, desperate to become a power in commercial aerospace, may see the disruption as a way to speed up entry into the global market, says Robert Spingarn of Credit Suisse, a bank. He speculates that Brazil’s Embraer, whose merger with Boeing fell apart in April, might collaborate with China’s COMAC to build a plane capable of competing against Airbus and Boeing. The Brazilians could supply the industrial knowhow and the Chinese the industrial might.

To the masked passengers on half-empty planes, boarded from ghost-town airports of shuttered shops, it may seem that the experience of flying will never be the same again. Yet aviation has bounced back before. It is likely to do so again—and may change for the better in the process. ■

Editor’s note: Some of our covid-19 coverage is free for readers of The Economist Today, our daily newsletter. For more stories and our pandemic tracker, see our hub

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Terminal conditions”