He made his remarks after visiting the oil depots and gas stations of PSP Specialities in Samut Sakhon province on Friday (May 8). He said he aimed to hear out oil depot operators’ problems during the Covid-19 crisis.

“We found that the demand for various fuels had dropped as people have to stay at home to contain the spread of Covid-19.

“Therefore, we have asked energy business entrepreneurs and academics to propose solutions and recommendations to the government, so that measures can be implemented to help the economy recover after the Covid-19 crisis is resolved.”

He said that the economic cabinet is currently considering a recovery plan focusing on boosting the grass-roots economy.

“We have instructed ministers of related ministries to propose recovery packages to the Cabinet as soon as possible,” he said.

He added that the Energy Ministry will discuss an economic recovery package for energy next week, adding that they would focus on boosting the grass-roots economy.

“We will consider using the ministry’s budget and take loans under the emergency decree,” he said.

He said the Energy Regulatory Commission would announce next week the purchase of electricity not exceeding 100 megawatts.

“Meanwhile, we expect the community power plant project to be approved within June this year,” he said.

He added that the ministry would consider scrapping sales of some diesel and benzene fuels, which would help reduce storage cost and types of fuels.

“However, we will promote B10 and E20 biofuels to generate income for farmers,” he added.

Meanwhile, Sint Krongphanich, chief executive officer of PSP Specialities, said that oil sales in April this year had dropped by some 30 per cent due to the Covid-19 outbreak.

“We have advised the government to consider tax assistance to increase the liquidity of entrepreneurs,” he said.

Millions have been pushed into part-time hours, or want a job but aren’t currently looking for one. Taking these people into account, 26.4% of American workers are employed below their capacity.

The official unemployment rate looks only at the labor force: people who are currently working, who have been “temporarily” laid off but expect to be recalled to their jobs, or who are actively seeking work. In ordinary times, this calculation makes sense. Retired people or stay-at-home parents shouldn’t count among America’s unemployed.

But these are not ordinary times. During the pandemic, many people have stopped looking for work. They may not feel safe working, or they are discouraged by the lack of jobs available during stay-at-home orders. 9.5 million Americans who worked in March exited the labor force in May, according to this month’s job report. That’s twice the number that went from employed to out of the labor force in January.

Most people who leave the labor force want to return to work at some point. The Bureau of Labor Statistics collects information about people who are not in the labor force but want a job. That group jumped by 4.4 million between the March and April jobs report. If you added these Americans to the official unemployment rate, you’d get a new rate as high as 19.8%.

But for millions of workers, keeping their jobs didn’t mean avoiding hardship. The number of people working part-time nearly doubled, from 5.8 million in the March report to 10.7 million in the April report. Every month some workers choose to go part-time, but this trend was driven by those who had their hours cut by their employer or were unable to find a full-time job.

Working hours dropped more in some industries than others. Manufacturing workers dropped to an average of 38.3 hours per week, down from 40.4 in March. That may seem like a small drop, but in a typical jobs report, the average hours worked changes by about six minutes from the previous month.

It’s by far the largest drop in hours in manufacturing since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking average hours in 2006. The construction and wholesale trade industries also saw large drops in weekly working hours.

Henry Farber, an economist at Princeton University, explained that cutting hours could save on hiring and training down the road. “Many employers are laying people off reluctantly and expecting to bring them back,” Farber said. “It’s expensive to hire and train new workers, and the best way to stay attached to your workers is cut hours but keep them on the payroll.”

On the other hand, the cost of health insurance may push employers to cut jobs, rather than hours. “The fact that we tie health insurance to work complicates the labor market in all kinds of ways,” Farber said.

So if you take the official unemployment figure, add in people who want a job but are not looking for one, and then include everyone who has been pushed into part-time work, you could say that 26.4% of people lost work or work hours in April. More than one in four workers has been hit by the coronavirus fallout.

Even these measures don’t capture the breadth of economic pain. There are millions more Americans who don’t earn paychecks on their own, like stay-at-home parents, but are just as affected by losses in household income. An entire generation of new workers has seen their education disrupted.

There is still a long way to go before the economy recovers. While many states are starting to reopen, the number of daily deaths from the virus has not dropped off yet. April is the first jobs report to truly capture the scope of the economic crisis, but it is just the first of many.

The next 60 seconds saw the Dow Jones industrial average jump, a 300-point pop that extended through the opening bell and into afternoon trading. The Standard & Poor’s index 500, a broader indicator of corporate America, likewise surged roughly 1.4 percent.

Stocks held onto their gains and pushed them higher in the last hour. The Dow finished up 455 points, or 1.9 percent to 24,331, ending the week with a total gain of 2.4 percent. The blue chips closed above 24,300. The S&P 500 finished the day at a 1.7 percent gain, to 2,929, and closed the week up 3.4 percent.

The Nasdaq composite was up 1.5 percent Friday and nearly 6 percent on the week.

Wall Street often behaves counterintuitively, as its reaction to 14.7 percent unemployment can attest. But Friday’s gains speak to investors’ willingness to look beyond the economic wreckage wrought by the coronavirus pandemic. Here are seven reasons why:

1. The stock market is a future indicator, not a rear-view mirror.

Investors are betting on how companies will be performing a month from now, six months from now, even a year from now.

“Stock prices are based on expectations,” said Howard Silverblatt of S&P Dow Jones Indices. “The current bad news was already baked in, as is more to come. But the longer-term hopes and expectations are for a reopening and corporate recovery.”

The stock market has been one of the best real-time measures for gauging what investors are thinking. The S&P 500 index is a reliable indicator of future performance for America’s 500 largest companies. Its role as a business indicator is based on the collective wisdom of millions of investors who are wagering tens of billions of dollars a day based on untold bits of available information. The efficient market theory, as it is known to its adherents, holds to the belief that the market prices most stocks correctly, based on the information available.

2. Technology stocks are killing it.

Tech giants Amazon, Apple, Google-parent Alphabet, Microsoft and Facebook have been on a serious tear for years and are behind a big chunk of recent gains. Microsoft shares have jumped 17 percent and Amazon has soared 28 percent since the start of the year. Facebook, Apple and Alphabet’s gains are hovering near 3 percent.

The five stocks comprise 21 percent of the S&P 500. They have lifted the Nasdaq composite into positive territory in 2020 even as the coronavirus pandemic has devastated the economy. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

“These are the stocks that have empowered the economy and have been the job-creation engines,” said Ivan Feinseth of Tigress Financial Partners. “They are enabling people to work at home. Investors realize the value they provide and they create and believe they will continue to be successful. Like it or not, Facebook kept people who are isolated from being alone.”

3. There’s hope on the health front.

Despite the pandemic’s terrible toll – 76,000 American deaths and climbing – the global pharmaceutical industry has massed its resources to laser focus on finding vaccines and treatments.

Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer and biotech company Moderna are among the companies racing to find a vaccine.

The Food and Drug Administration signed off this week on Moderna launching the next phase of testing on its coronavirus vaccine candidate. The company began its testing on 45 healthy adults in March, becoming one of the first companies to begin human clinical trials for a covid-19 vaccine.

Gilead Sciences reported “positive data” in a clinical trial by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for remdesivir, another possible treatment.

The trial showed that “a drug can block this virus,” Anthony Fauci, director of the institute, said in a news conference Wednesday.

The hardest hit states of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut have reported progress against the disease, with deaths, infections and hospitalizations down from their peaks weeks ago. While the disease is spreading in other parts of the country, hospitals do not appear to be overwhelmed with virus victims.

Goldman Sachs published a report this week that shows improvements around the globe but some mixed results in the U.S. as more states relax their lockdowns and businesses begin to open.

“The new information on the coronavirus has improved in Europe but has turned a bit worse in the U.S. relative to expectations on average over the past two weeks,” Goldman said in its report. “Compared with the recent trend, the current number of new infections has been broadly stable globally on net. This reflects further declines in Europe, very few new cases in China, roughly stable but elevated gains in the U.S. and further rises in emerging markets.”

Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research, said “there are some signs of success on the health front. The market is looking at the rate of change of virus cases and deaths, and it doesn’t look like its getting worse. The market is expecting it’s going to get better as it has in China and in Italy. It is extrapolating from those countries’ experience.”

4. Oil markets are calming down and prices are rising, which is good for a key industry.

The price of oil is not where it needs to be, but it is going in the right direction for producers. U.S. crude oil is back near $25 per barrel and Brent crude, the international benchmark, is up near $30.

Producers need $50 or so per barrel to make money, but current prices are far better than they were just a couple of weeks ago. Holders of U.S. crude were paying people to take oil off their hands last month.

There is still a massive oil glut, but with the U.S. shale industry shutting down wells at a swift rate, the balance between supply and demand is getting close. The U.S. pumped 13.1 million barrels a day a few weeks ago. Now it is closer to 12 million and heading south. Meanwhile, drivers around the world are slowly getting back on the road. Gasoline usage is still down 30 percent from pre-virus levels, but it has improved from the 50 percent decline in March.

“The oil price stabilization and rise is a ray of light that we are getting through this economic darkness,” said John Kilduff of Again Capital. “It’s clear there is pent-up demand waiting to be unleashed, and we are seeing that in the rebound in gasoline numbers toward normal levels.”

5. The Federal Reserve and the U.S. government have flooded the economy with trillions in cash and easy credit.

Investors have credited the central bank with saving the markets from collapse and preventing a new financial crisis from making the recession worse. As trading seized up in March amid the initial panic, the Fed swiftly launched plans to buy massive quantities of government, corporate and municipal bonds.

The Fed is launching a program to lend directly to Main Street businesses that fall in the crack between financial markets and existing small-business programs. But the unusual effort is only getting started.

“The Fed went from bazookas that had mostly run out of ammo and skipped helicopters and went straight to the B-52s carpet bombing tons of cash on the financial markets and the economy,” Yardeni said.

The super-low interest rates promulgated by the Fed have sent investors out of bonds and running to equities in search of returns, helping raise stock prices.

The Trump administration launched an unprecedented small-business loan program designed to prevent companies from laying off their workers, part of nearly $3 trillion Congress approved to counter the pandemic’s medical and economic toll.

6. The U.S.-China trade war truce looks like it may not unravel, which is good for the economy.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert E. Lighthizer and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Thursday held a conference call with Liu He, China’s vice premier and point man on the trade deal, to make sure the “phase one” agreement was on track.

Trump has said he is unhappy with China, which he has held responsible for allowing the virus to take hold and spread. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pointedly criticized the Chinese for its role in the virus, raising fears of retaliation. But more than 30 million unemployed, many economists say it would be a bad idea for the administration to engage in a trade war.

7. Shanghai Disneyland has sold out.

Disney said tickets to it’s park in Shanghai, which opens Monday, sold out in minutes. Although the park will only admit 30 percent of it’s capacity, peoples’ appetite to get out and spend money bodes well for the U.S. Disney is looked at as a model for crowd control, so hospitality and entertainment companies will watch closely.

This new method of calculating interest charged on overdue debt was enforced on May 1, Thanyanit Niyomkarn, the Bangkok of Thailand’s assistant governor, said on Friday (May 8).

She added that this new practice is fair for both the borrower and the lender as the interest charged will be based on actual instalments that debtors have defaulted on.

Thanyanit explained that in the past, if a borrower failed to pay an instalment, the bank would charge extra interest on that instalment plus interest on the remaining balance of the principle. Under the new system, however, interest will only be charged on the defaulted instalment.

For instance, an individual has taken a 20-year housing loan to be paid in 240 instalments, and has paid the first 24 instalments without fail. However, if the borrower failed to pay the 25th instalment, the bank would charge interest on both the 25th instalment as well as the remaining 215 instalments.

However, under the new practice, banks can only charge extra interest on the 25th instalment.

This new practice takes into account the interest of both the creditor and the debtor, or credit risk and affordability risk respectively, she said.

Since many people’s income has either reduced or even stopped due to the pandemic, they may not be able to pay their debts on time. Hence, this new method of interest calculation will ease some burden on them and potentially cut down on the number of defaulting debts, she said.

At the same time, fair and transparent banking services will boost consumers’ confidence as well as benefit the sector in the long run, she said.

Banks can apply this new practice for debts that were overdue before May 1.

People can call the central bank 1213 hotline for more details.

More than 20 million Americans lost their jobs in April during the covid-19 crisis, but restaurants are still finding it hard to hire help.

Some former employees are making more money now thanks to an extra federal emergency payment of $600 weekly on top of state unemployment benefits. Others have found new jobs or are staying home with kids. Many are simply too nervous to interact with the public before the coronavirus outbreak subsides.

The labor challenges compound the financial hurdles for the restaurant industry, which, according to the National Restaurant Association, has lost about $80 billion in sales through the end of April due to the coronavirus shutdowns.

Companies eyeing a return to normal operations, including Dunkin’ Brands Group Inc., Salsarita’s Fresh Cantina and Shake Shack Inc., are grappling with how to staff their restaurants.

“Some stores are definitely having a challenge,” said Scott Murphy, president of Dunkin’s Americas region. Especially in hard-hit areas such as New York City, he said, the restaurants are “having trouble getting workers.”

Tina Watson used to work every weekday at a Wendy’s in Santee, South Carolina. But with broad stay-at-home mandates going into effect in March, her hours were cut back sharply, reducing her $500 biweekly paycheck to less than half.

She doesn’t qualify for unemployment at the moment. Despite the financial strain, Watson, 41, is wary about working. Sometimes she can’t go because she doesn’t have anyone to watch her 11-year-old son, whose school is closed, leaving her restaurant short-staffed.

“I don’t think I’m going to be able to go back to work knowing my son can’t go to school and I don’t have a reliable sitter,” she said.

Of the job cuts announced from mid-March to late April, almost two-thirds have been in the entertainment and leisure sector including dining, according to consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

U.S. government efforts to support people who have lost their jobs has had the unintended consequence of keeping some restaurant workers away. Under March’s federal stimulus act, people eligible to get state unemployment assistance get an extra $600 a week funded by the federal government through the end of July.

The median pay for food preparation workers was $11.92 an hour in 2019, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, or $476.80 for a 40-hour week.

Steve Joyce, chief executive officer of Applebee’s-owner Dine Brands Global Inc., said the extra federal assistance “creates in a lot of markets a relatively high reimbursement rate for a limited amount of time.”

This is why some restaurants are resorting to financial incentives to get workers back. Shake Shack, for instance, is offering an extra 10% in pay as a “thank you” to new hires, according to job postings in Texas and Seattle. Some Dunkin’ franchisees are using bonuses and free meals to keep staff on the payroll, while the parent company weighs a new-hire ad campaign.

Not every company is having such a hard time finding workers. Papa John’s International Inc. has brought on thousands in the last six weeks amid a broad hiring effort, which CEO Rob Lynch said is intended to get locations “appropriately staffed” to handle higher demand.

“I think people want to work now even more so than they did even four to five weeks ago,” he said. “We’ve been hiring like crazy and we’re going to continue to do so.”

In fact, companies may need to hire even more workers than they had before the pandemic, to deal with extra cleaning measures, said Peter Saleh, a restaurant analyst at BTIG. “They’re probably going to want to over-staff in this environment and be prepared.”

These type of “labor inefficiencies” have been flagged by restaurants planning their reopening strategies. And refilling the same position can introduce new costs, particularly if restaurants have to hire inexperienced workers.

“If you can’t bring back people you know, you have to go through training,” said Salsarita’s CEO Phil Friedman.

Salsarita’s has had to delay reopenings in certain locations, including South Carolina, because it can’t find enough people. Hourly staff particularly are reluctant to return because many have found new jobs or are nervous about working, and it could take weeks to fill out the ranks, Friedman said.

“It really is a day by day,” he said.

Shares of energy, industrial and financial companies put the S&P 500 on pace for its first weekly gain in three. The latest jobs report showed a cut of 20.5 million workers in April, propelling the jobless rate to 14.7%. While that was the highest since the Great Depression, investors were anticipating the damage and speculating it will mark a low point during the pandemic-fueled economic slump.

“The jobs report marks a sobering moment in our history, while it also likely marks the bottom of the economic contraction with hope for a better remainder of the year,” said Bryce Doty, senior portfolio manager at Sit Fixed Income Advisors.

Meanwhile, oil headed for its first back-to-back weekly gain since February as output cuts from the biggest producers and a nascent recovery in demand began to rebalance a market awash with crude.

Stocks remained higher even after President Donald Trump cast doubt on the future of his “phase one” trade deal with China, saying Friday that he’s struggling with Beijing in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.

Building and travel stocks pulled the Euro Stoxx Index higher while U.K. markets were closed for a holiday. Japanese equities led a surge across Asia. Italian bonds climbed before a sovereign ratings decision.

Equities have so far managed to weather miserable economic data as well as a string of poor earnings reports as investors bet on a swift recovery, but the strong rebound in risk assets has left others questioning whether further gains are warranted.

“There had been some concerns that unemployment would hit closer to 25%, so today’s data is in some ways a positive surprise,” said Seema Shah, chief strategist for Principal Global Investors. “Today’s data has been weighing on negative sentiment for several weeks, so just having it out of the way lifts a cloud.”

Elsewhere, gold fluctuated. Bitcoin rose briefly above $10,000 for the first time since late February.

Stocks:

– The S&P 500 Index gained 1% to 2,915.15 as of 10:29 a.m. New York time.

– The Dow Jones Industrial Average climbed 1.2% to 24,195.10.

– The Nasdaq Composite Index increased 0.6% to 9,084.85, hitting the highest in 10 weeks with its fifth consecutive advance.

– The MSCI All-Country World Index rose 1.2% to 488.42.

Currencies:

– The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index decreased 0.1% to 1,246.87.

– The Japanese yen weakened 0.3% to 106.58 per dollar.

– The euro was little changed at $1.0838.

– The British pound was little changed at $1.2425.

Bonds:

– The yield on two-year Treasuries decreased two basis points to 0.12%, the lowest on record.

– The yield on 10-year Treasuries rose one basis point to 0.65%.

– Germany’s 10-year yield gained one basis point to -0.54%.

– Britain’s 10-year yield increased less than one basis point to 0.235%.

Commodities:

– West Texas Intermediate crude gained 3.8% to $24.39 a barrel.

– Gold weakened 0.2% to $1,718.97 an ounce.

With that jobs report comes further confirmation that a severe economic downturn will loom over the 2020 election. And traditionally, that has meant curtains for an incumbent president like Donald Trump.

But is that necessarily the case today? There are reasons to be skeptical.

The comparison to the Great Depression will be tempting, given the size of the economic challenges we face. After the market crash in 1929, Herbert Hoover went on to lose to Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide in 1932.

But there are two very important and very different questions here: 1) How bad and sustained will the current economic downturn be? And 2) How much do people actually blame that on the president rather than on a situation they believe to be largely out of his control?

While in a traditional economic downturn, it would be rather easy and logical to blame the policies of incumbent politicians, but this one is a special case. The pandemic was something that we were going to have to contend with, to one degree or another. What matters from there is how much people actually attribute the loss of life and economic strife to Trump and other leaders, and how much they think those leaders exacerbated an already-bad situation.

And on that front, things are indeed less dire for Trump than the jobs numbers might suggest – though that could certainly change depending upon the actual numbers and what lay ahead.

While the growing jobs and economic crisis has been well established by this point, Americans by and large still see the economy as one of Trump’s strong points. An Economist/YouGov poll this week showed 53% of people continue to approve of Trump’s handling of jobs and the economy – a number similar to where he’s been at for months. An NPR/PBS/Marist College poll from a couple weeks ago showed an even, 49%-to-49% split on that question.

The YouGov poll, similarly, showed people have more confidence in Trump than in presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden on the economy. It asked whether the economy would get better or worse if either man was elected. Voters were split on the question on Trump (36% said it would get better, compared with 35% who said it would get worse), but were slightly negative on Biden (30% better vs. 38% worse).

The poll also asked how each man would handle a recession, and again the advantage was to Trump. While Americans were split (43%-43%) on whether they were confident in his ability to manage a recession, just 33% were confident in Biden’s ability to do so, while 44% said they were “uneasy.”

To the extent the economic downturn is truly registering with people, it doesn’t seem to be something they lay at Trump’s feet – at least not yet. And it doesn’t seem to be a situation in which they are thinking a change would help. That could always shift as the coronavirus outbreak progresses, but views of Trump on that response track strongly with his overall approval numbers, and views of his handling of the economy (which are better than his overall numbers) haven’t changed much.

Regardless of those numbers, this is clearly something that concerns Trump a great deal. From the beginning of the outbreak, he has made clear how concerned he is about being robbed of what he hoped to make his signature reelection issue: the economy. He’s now pushing for a reopening of the economy despite a steady death rate and despite cases in the country still growing outside the early hotbed of New York City. This has led to tensions with health officials who worry that relaxing mitigation measures might not just lead to increased loss of life but force a longer outbreak – a situation that would logically lead, by extension, to more economic turmoil.

As Trump presses forward, though, he may be better served paying attention to how much people truly blame him for the economic troubles versus how much they blame the virus. Viewing this as a zero-sum game in which a bad economy means Trump loses is overly simplistic. It’s true that Trump is polling like an underdog right now, but that’s been the case for a while, and the fundamentals of the race don’t seem to have changed significantly yet. It’s entirely possible that whatever economic pain comes won’t be laid at his feet.

A prolonged outbreak resulting from a failure to appreciate the size of the crisis and easing up too early, though? That could be just as dangerous – if not more. And that’s a much simpler question for voters to ask themselves, if the situation in this country continues to be one of the worst in the world or even deteriorates.

Back in February, before the coronavirus pandemic brought the U.S. economy to a standstill, the rate hovered at just 3.5%. That had been the lowest level in five decades. April’s is the highest since just after the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Labor Department said the unadjusted unemployment rate in April would have been almost 5 percentage points higher had workers been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff, rather than employed but absent from work due to other reasons. Furloughed workers accounted for about 4 out of every 5 unemployed Americans.

April’s losses erase roughly all of the jobs that the economy had added in this past decade’s expansion and lay bare just how precarious employment is for vast swaths of Americans.

With a steep recession now in progress, the destruction of jobs heaps election-year pressure on President Donald Trump to restart the economy and show results by November. But with little containment of a contagious disease that’s killed 75,000 Americans and counting, business is returning unevenly and slowly if at all, and signs are mounting that many employers will be forced to make the cuts permanent.

In the minutes after the report, the Bloomberg dollar index pared its decline for the day while the yield on benchmark 10-year Treasuries rose to its highs of the session after the report. S&P 500 futures maintained their gains.

Key details:

– Average hourly earnings rose 4.7% from the prior month and 7.9% from a year earlier, skewed higher by the disproportionate loss of low-wage workers from payrolls — rather than any wage pressures boosting employee pay.

– The labor-force participation rate fell to 60.2% from 62.7%.

– The underemployment rate, which includes discouraged workers and those working part-time who want full hours, rose to 22.8% from 8.7%.

Almost every industry was hit hard. Leisure and hospitality employers cut 7.65 million, manufacturers cut 1.33 million positions and retailers 2.1 million. Even health care jobs fell by 1.44 million as non-Covid visits and elective procedures dried up or offices closed.

The job losses may also fan calls for a fourth round of fiscal aid from Congress on top of trillions of dollars already dispatched, even with signs many Americans are having difficulty tapping the funds. The Federal Reserve is likely to keep pumping money into the economy while leaving interest rates near zero for an extended period.

Trump said Friday that the massive U.S. job losses from the coronavirus outbreak aren’t a surprise and that he shouldn’t be blamed for it.

“It’s totally expected, there’s no surprise,” he said on Fox News Channel, where he was being interviewed as the report was released. “Even the Democrats aren’t blaming me for that. What I can do is I can bring it back.”

While the pandemic has crushed economies around the world, job losses hurt more in the U.S. than in most other developed nations. That’s because about 160 million Americans get health insurance through employers, and without jobs, they could face steep monthly premiums or lose coverage entirely — which may exacerbate the economic impact of Covid-19.

The response rate for the household survey — which determines the unemployment rate — was 13 percentage points lower than usual, as in-person visits were halted. The establishment survey’s response rate was in line with typical rates.