Nearly 300 public companies have reported receiving money from the fund, called the Paycheck Protection Program, according to the data compiled by The Post. Recipients include 43 companies with more than 500 workers, the maximum typically allowed by the program. Several other recipients were prosperous enough to pay executives $2 million or more.

After the first pool of $349 billion ran dry, leaving more than 80% of applicants without funding, outrage over the millions of dollars that went to larger firms prompted some companies to return the money. As of Thursday, public companies had reported returning more than $125 million, according to a Post analysis of filings.

Other companies have said they plan to keep the funds, saying the loans had been awarded according to the program’s rules and that they would use most of it to pay workers, as required, in order for the loans to be forgiven.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has defended the program as a success, saying three-quarters of the loans were for totals of under $150,000. But after the first batch of loans was issued, the administration also scrambled to release new guidance for the program to discourage large public companies from applying.

Officials have urged publicly traded firms with access to other capital to return the money by May 7. Mnuchin said this week that all loans of more than $2 million would be audited with potential penalties for those who don’t comply.

“I want to be very clear it’s the borrowers who have criminal liability if they made this certification,” of being a small business he said on CNBC.

The Small Business Administration has refused to release the names of companies that have received the loans, despite having released such information on its loan programs for years.

Some of the companies that received the loans were large in another way: Their CEOs have been making millions.

Veritone, a company based in Costa Mesa, California, that provides artificial intelligence technology, paid chief executive Chad Steelberg $18.7 million in total compensation in 2018, the last year for which data is available. His brother, Ryan Steelberg, the company’s president, made $13.9 million. The company received $6.5 million in funding from the program. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

At least two other companies with highly paid CEOs have said they will return the money. Each changed its stance on the loans after the Treasury Department issued guidelines discouraging companies “with substantial market value and access to capital markets” from accepting the money.

Aquestive Therapeutics, a New Jersey pharmaceutical company, paid CEO Keith J. Kendall $2.6 million in 2019. That company received $4.8 million from the program but has said it will return it.

“As a small business, we were happy to qualify for a PPP loan, as it was originally written and intended, to continue to employ and provide health coverage to our 219 employees located around the country and provide important medicines to these patients during this period of crisis,” the company said in a statement. “However, the new guidance issued on April 23 by the Federal Government appears to change the criteria for small businesses to qualify for the PPP loans.”

Wave Life Sciences, a genetic medicine company, paid CEO Paul B. Bolno $5.8 million in total compensation in 2018. The company received $7.2 million from the program but has decided to return it, too.

“We made this decision after the SBA issued new guidance that states, in effect, that public companies are not appropriate recipients of these loans,” the company said in a statement.

Chain restaurants and hotels were able to obtain tens of millions of dollars from the first pool of $349 billion in forgivable loans because Congress and the administration allowed multiple subsidiaries of large owners to each apply separately.

Those recipients include a group of hotel companies chaired by Monty Bennett, a Dallas executive and Republican donor, including Ashford Hospitality Trust and Braemar Hotels & Resorts. The companies used more than 100 filings to seek $126 million total and received $76 million.

On Friday, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., questioned how companies such as Ashford had received so much funding, writing to Jovita Carranzak, administrator of the Small Business Administration, to say that such companies “may be exploiting the Program to the detriment of small businesses around the country currently struggling to survive the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Some chains that have returned funds have done so at the expense of their workers. AutoNation, the Fortune 500 network of auto dealers, said last week that it would return the $77 million it received. The same day of the announcement, employees there said AutoNation put some workers back on furlough and rescinded wage guarantee deals to commission-based employees.

Marc Cannon, AutoNation executive vice president, issued a statement to The Post saying the pandemic had reduced sales by half and stores had rehired employees based on commitments of the federal program.

“It is regrettable that we must continue to mitigate the financial impact of COVID-19,” the company said. “Those employees who were being funded by PPP are being re-furloughed. There is no FORGIVABLE loan available anywhere to rehire 7,000 employees.”

Lindblad Expeditions, an operator of high-end cruises, also returned its PPP funds. The company initially said it planned to keep the money because it qualified for the loan and planned to use it to retain employees. On an earnings conference call Friday, chief executive Sven-Olof Lindblad repeated that the company met the application requirements, but said it would return the $6.6 million loan.

“We wanted to protect our employees for as long as possible,” he said, but added there had been “much negativity” around public companies that received the loans.

While much of the program’s criticism has focused on the relatively large companies that received the money intended for small businesses, there is some evidence that the program missed its target in other ways, too.

Research by academics at the University of Chicago and MIT indicates that the areas where small businesses have been most affected – New York and New Jersey, for example – were less likely to see loans from the program. The authors defined “most affected” using small-business employment data, cases of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and other factors.

According to the research, only about 15% of businesses in the congressional districts most affected by business losses were able to obtain PPP help; by contrast, in the least affected congressional districts, 30% were able to obtain them.

“The loans were disproportionately allocated to areas least affected by the crisis,” according to authors Joao Granja, Christos Makridis, Constantine Yannelis and Eric Zwick.

In his first press conference since recovering from covid-19, Johnson promised to set out details next week on how businesses can get back to work, suggesting that people will be encouraged to wear face masks as the restrictions are lifted.

“For the first time we are past the peak of this disease,” Johnson said. “We are past the peak, and we are on the downward slope.”

The prime minister’s words show the government is preparing the pathway for the swathes of the economy that have been shuttered to begin operating again, amid concern that millions of people are facing the loss of their jobs and companies are collapsing. Ministers are due to review the restrictions — unprecedented in peacetime — on May 7.

“I will be setting out a comprehensive plan next week to explain first how we get our economy moving, how we can get our children back to school, back into childcare, second, and thirdly how we can travel to work and how we can make life in the workplace safer,” Johnson said. “In short, how we can continue to suppress the disease and at the same time restart the economy.”

The premier, who hasn’t held a press conference since before he tested positive for coronavirus on March 26, predicted the economy “will bounce back strongly,” but also repeatedly stressed the need to avoid a second spike in virus cases that overwhelms the National Health Service while lifting the curbs.

“We’ve come through the peak, or rather we have come under what could have been a vast peak, as though we have been going through some huge alpine tunnel,” Johnson said. “And we can now see sunlight and the pasture ahead of us, and so it is vital that we do not now lose control and run slap into a second and even bigger mountain.”

Official figures released Thursday showed the total number of deaths in the U.K. rising to 26,771 from 26,097, up 674 on the previous day.

England’s Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty cautioned that, while the first phase of the outbreak is coming to an end, there remains “a very long way to run” in the fight against the virus.

The prime minister promised a “menu of options” for the lockdown, which will be deployed at different times, depending on the development of the outbreak.

“As part of coming out of the lockdown, I do think face coverings will be useful both for epidemiological reasons and giving people confidence it’s safe to go back to work,” Johnson said. “We will be saying a lot more next week and in the coming weeks about how and when we propose to unlock the various parts of the U.K. economy.”

Johnson’s spokesman, James Slack, on Friday told reporters ministers are “still considering” what advice they give the public on face coverings, adding that scientific evidence suggests a “weak but positive effect in reducing the transmission of coronavirus from asymptomatic members of the public, where social distancing isn’t possible.”

Speaking on LBC Radio on Friday, Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick said the government is taking scientific advice on easing the lockdown, which could be done on a regional basis if transmission rates vary across the country — though he said the “strong preference” is for the whole country to move together. Officials have regularly talked up the benefits of a unified approach.

Jenrick also said construction and building firms should resume operations.

The government has announced more than 60 billion pounds ($75 billion) of direct aid to companies and individuals to help them weather the pandemic, and offered 330 billion pounds of loan guarantees. The Office for Budget Responsibility on Thursday said the government’s virus response has cost almost 105 billion pounds in the current fiscal year.

Asked whether the government would need a new period of austerity, including cuts to public services in order to restore the country’s finances, Johnson rejected the approach.

“I think the economy will bounce back strongly, I think that this government will want to encourage that bounce back in all kinds of ways,” he said. He added that he’d “never particularly liked” the term “austerity,” saying “it will certainly not be part of our approach.”

The Treasury is considering allowing companies to claim support from the government’s furlough program for staff returning to work part-time once lockdown measures are eased, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing a person familiar with the matter.

Earlier Thursday, Johnson’s spokesman, James Slack, shot down Justice Secretary Robert Buckland’s earlier comments to Sky News that it’s “probable” the government would miss a goal to carry out 100,000 coronavirus tests per day by the end of April, saying the target remained. Johnson said 81,611 tests had been carried out Wednesday.

Ministers are under fire for abandoning the tracing and testing of contacts of positive cases in March, as capacity was overrun by the rate of infections.

Now, they’re working to develop a program to test track and trace contacts that’s seen as vital to containing the virus as the country comes out of lockdown. Similar systems are credited with reducing the pandemic’s spread in countries including South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Work is ongoing to recruit 18,000 contact tracers, 15,000 of whom will do tasks like staffing telephones and giving advice, and 3,000 who will work in the field, Slack said. The government is also working on developing its contact-tracing app, he said. It is due to be trialed next week.

Another measure that’s under consideration is quarantining U.K. arrivals, according to Transport Secretary Grant Shapps. He said that at current transmission rates of the virus in the U.K., such a policy “makes no great difference,” but as the domestic caseload becomes lower, it could be a useful policy.

“It’s something that very much as we get to the smaller numbers and not wanting to see a repeat of the infection, it’s something very much there’s a live discussion” about, Shapps told BBC’s ‘Question Time’ program late Thursday.

An indisputable takeaway from the crisis is a massive expansion in global debt — given the more than $8 trillion in fiscal measures worldwide, according to a Bloomberg compilation. Corporate balance sheets will have changed, as CFOs seek to bolster their capital through equity and debt raisings. Millions will have lost their jobs at least for a time, and labor mobility between nations may be impaired. And supply lines will be reshaped, at least in some fashion.

Depending on how it all shakes out, there will be implications for corporate earnings and interest rates that will affect investment decisions for years if not decades to come, some analysts are now saying. Should the epidemic continue to ebb, that’s set to become the key debate in markets as the year progresses.

“The high debt levels across all sectors and large-scale nationalization of the economy will, in absence of an exit plan, restrain investment and reduce productivity in the long run, giving rise to secular stagnation or at some point stagflation,” said Commerzbank strategist Christoph Rieger. “Corporates will have to shoulder a large part of the bill.”

Even as they cheer news about economies reopening and progress on medical solutions for the coronavirus, investors are being diluted by corporate capital raising. And the biggest source of demand for shares in recent years — companies themselves — are unlikely to return to their previous pace of buybacks for years, if ever, according to Inigo Fraser-Jenkins and fellow analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein.

A deeper change could be sustained support for payments to portions of the labor force that have been severely affected by the crisis or at the fringes of economic prosperity in recent decades. As Stephen King, senior economic adviser at HSBC Holdings, put it, there could be “pressure to deliver new domestic ‘social contracts,'” not unlike occurred after World War II — when Europe built welfare systems and the U.S. enacted the GI Bill.

A new broad set of commitments “would be affordable only with a sizeable increase in the tax burden on corporations, high earners and the wealthy,” King wrote in an April 23 note. “To raise such taxes may require worldwide income-tax regimes for a country’s citizens (in line with existing U.S. tax policy) and significant restrictions on the mobility of wealth and capital.”

A stronger long-term role for the state is emerging in other aspects, as well. The long-term trend of privatizing public-sector enterprises “could now be slowed or even reversed,” Deutsche Bank wealth-management investment chiefs say.

“State ownership of industry will force a new debate on the role of competition and profit margins,” Christian Nolting and Markus Muller wrote in an April 29 note. “All this will create major challenges for economies and investors, but also opportunities.”

As for investors in government bonds, given how debt levels will have expanded versus GDP — the Congressional Budget Office says the U.S. government’s ratio could hit 101% by the end of this fiscal year, from 79% last year — it’s unlikely policymakers will let interest rates exceed inflation. So-called financial repression also helped major nations run down debt after WWII.

The surge in borrowing has also revived the debate about central banks directly monetizing government financing. At the end of the day, however, that simply swaps one type of obligation — government bonds — for another: reserves deposited with the central bank, as Commerzbank’s Rieger puts it.

“In the end, the asset side of central bank balance sheets will consist of giant quantities of low-yielding debt — inhibiting rate increases for decades,” he wrote.

Net-net, lower borrowing costs ought to be good for companies, and equity valuations in particular. Stephen Jen, who runs hedge fund and advisory firm Eurizon SLJ Capital, argues it “ought to be a major tailwind” for strong firms with good balance sheets. But his take suggests not all will benefit — something Deutsche Bank AG wealth-management investment chiefs agree with.

“Those sectors better able to innovate and adapt to the new post-coronavirus world will fare better; ‘creative destruction’ could force corporate failure and defaults elsewhere,” Nolting and Muller wrote. “Corporate earnings are likely to fall further than current consensus estimates.”

The bottom line: the debate on long-term effects for investors is just beginning.

Futures in New York traded above $18 a barrel and are up 9% this week. OPEC+ is officially starting its unprecedented 9.7 million barrels a day of output reductions from Friday. The price of real crude is reacting to the curbs, with key grades from the Caspian to the North Sea trending higher in recent days.

There are also signals that the peak of the demand destruction may have passed. U.S. government data showed gasoline consumption rose by the most in almost a year last week, while rush-hour traffic in some of the biggest cities in China has recovered to pre-virus levels.

“We started last month with a focus on demand destruction and now we’re starting this month with a focus on the supply reduction,” said Olivier Jakob, managing director of consultant Petromatrix.

Still, the industry is nowhere close to being out of the woods as a massive glut persists. Royal Dutch Shell on Thursday forecast that its refineries won’t run at more than 70% of their capacity in the current quarter. Turkey will halt a 238,000 barrels a day plant as a result of a slowdown in demand. Global storage is also close to filling up and Citigroup warned the worst is likely yet to come for the oil market.

Since crude plunged into negative territory last week, investments have been fleeing the nearest futures contracts, increasing volatility. The United States Oil Fund LP, which came under pressure from regulators last month due to the size of its WTI position, said on Friday that it will halve its holdings in the July contract. It earlier said it may expand investments to include products beyond the benchmark New York crude grade.

There will be some respite from the big oversupply starting Friday as OPEC+ begins its cuts and producers from outside the group join them. Norway will curb output for the first time since 2002, while ConocoPhillips said it will cut more than 400,000 barrels a day in June. Shell said its upstream oil and gas production could fall by as much as a third.

The Department of Agriculture (DoA) requested access to the Indonesian market at the end of December, also asking the Indonesian Agricultural Quarantine Agency (IAQA) for technical information on pest-risk analysis for the flowers.

DoA director-general Sermsuk Salakphet confirmed on Friday (May 1) that Indonesia will accept shipments of Thai dried butterfly pea flowers from this month onwards.

Interested businesses must have a phytosanitary certificate issued by the Department of Agriculture attached with the product for export. Products must not be contaminated with live insects, pests, weeds, soil, roots, or materials that can carry pests. They must be oven-dried at a temperature of 50-60 degrees Celsius for 8-10 hours and packaged in a labelled container for verification.

Thailand already exports dried butterfly pea flowers to countries including Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea and Malaysia. In Australia, Thai butterfly pea flowers have an export value of up to Bt4,000 per kilo. The blue and purple flowers are mainly used to make tea and to dye sticky rice.