The engineers are already back to work at the facility in southern China, which makes medical equipment for several Western companies. Hundreds of assembly-line workers are supposed to return on Sunday, Mault said.

“We’re about a month to six weeks delayed in receiving product,” Mault, the founder of Denver-based BioIntelliSense, said, calling that a bearable situation. “But it certainly will impact us dramatically if it goes beyond that.”

The next few weeks will be crunchtime for U.S. companies awaiting products from stalled Chinese factories. If their suppliers spring back to life soon, many companies say they should be able to manage without disastrous disruption. But the uncertainty is keeping managers up at night.

The variables go beyond the number of employees allowed to return to work after weeks of quarantine. Factories will need enough raw materials to restore production, and enough protective masks to keep workers safely in place for the foreseeable future. They’ll also need Chinese truckers and functioning ports to ensure that goods can make it to market.

Unease over the timeline caused stocks to plunge Monday, with major U.S. indexes falling by more than 3 percent. The virus’s continued spread outside China, to countries including Italy and South Korea, has compounded fears over the impact on the global economy.

For many U.S. companies, the coronavirus has exacerbated troubles they were already having manufacturing in China, after the Trump administration last year levied large import tariffs on Chinese-made goods.

The virus is also hitting multinational companies that sell their goods inside China, where mass quarantines have stalled one of the world’s biggest markets. Deere last week said its sales of road-building equipment have softened over the past month as construction has halted in China, which usually makes up 10 to 15 percent of sales.

Fast-food chains and other retailers, including Starbucks, Domino’s Pizza and Lululemon, have closed stores in China or postponed new-store openings. American Axle & Manufacturing, an auto parts maker based in Detroit, said it expects about $25 million in lost sales during February and early March as car manufacturing slumps in China. Tesla, which recently opened a Shanghai factory to build its Model 3 for Chinese customers, said in January that it expected the virus to “slightly impact” profitability.

Even businesses operating far from China expect some distress, though the magnitude is still unclear. “You can’t shut the factories that produce the goods that go on the ships that come to the trains that feed North American appetite for goods down and not have some kind of impact,” Keith Creel, chief executive of Canadian Pacific Railway, told a gathering of investors last week, according to a transcript.

Some nimble U.S. companies have shifted manufacturing out of China to escape the coronavirus shutdown. Azazie, an online bridal retailer headquartered in San Jose normally makes its dresses at 50 factories across China but has moved some of its production to Cambodia and Vietnam in recent weeks.

“I’m going to be honest: It is impacting us,” said Ranu Coleman, Azazie’s head of marketing. “So much of the wedding market requires skillful handwork, and it’s really hard to find that outside of China.” Some Chinese workers have continued to pitch in despite factory closures by doing handwork and beading from home, she said.

But many multinational companies are deeply entrenched in Chinese manufacturing, making their production difficult to move. Apple last week warned that it expects to fall short of revenue goals in the current quarter because of stalled iPhone production in China and lower demand from Chinese consumers.

Mault, the founder of BioIntelliSense, said the start-up considered moving production of its medical devices to another location in Asia, Mexico or the United States. “But the time it would take us to relocate the tools and get a manufacturing line stood up right now, we’re still looking at a much more reliable scenario” to stay put in China, he said.

The company had been planning to start shipping its new product – a battery-powered sensor that monitors patients’ vital signs – to hospitals by the end of March but is now aiming for April or May.

MGA Entertainment, the company behind Bratz and L.O.L. Surprise! dolls, said some of its factories in China are beginning to open but they’re having trouble getting raw materials, from resin and cardboard to steel and doll hair.

The company’s factory in Hudson, Ohio, is running overtime to churn out Little Tikes toys, but chief executive Isaac Larian said the facility only has enough Chinese-supplied raw materials – including wheel axles for toy cars and electronics for play kitchens – to last another month. The company is trying to find U.S. sources for some materials, including steel and resin, he said.

“Every day is crucial and, really, the next two weeks are going to show whether we can turn things around or not this year,” Larian said. “The timing couldn’t be worse. In 41 years in the toy business, this is the worst disaster I’ve seen.”

The hardest-hit manufacturers are in the heart of the coronavirus outbreak, in Hubei province. Cummins, a diesel-engine manufacturer headquartered in Indiana, said its Chinese manufacturing sites outside Hubei province have reopened, but some of its sites in Hubei won’t open until at least March 11.

Cummins and other companies are scrambling to ensure that they have enough masks to protect returning workers. Different provinces have different rules about how many masks factories must provide each worker per day, before they can reopen, said Steve Lamar, chief executive of the American Apparel & Footwear Association.

He said U.S. apparel companies usually import extra inventory before China’s Lunar New Year celebrations, which began this year in late January. That extra supply has helped prevent empty U.S. retail shelves so far, Lamar said. But with almost 40 percent of U.S. apparel and 65 percent of footwear originating in China, the clock is ticking.

“There really is a lot of uncertainty,” Lamar said.

THAI president Sumeth Damrongchaitham said the cut would take effect from March 1 and last for six months.

The national flag carrier has felt the pinch of the outbreak, which has resulted in a decline in passenger numbers. It has also reduced its flights on many routes, including those to China and Japan. This situation has prompted the carrier to cut costs.

The salaries of those in the executive vice president level will be slashed by 20 per cent and their travelling expenses cut by 30 per cent.

Vice presidents will see their salaries cut by 15 per cent and travelling expenses by 20 per cent.

The president’s salary will be cut most, Sumeth said.

The carrier will launch additional measures if the situation does not improve after six months, he added.

Comparable-store sales – a key measure of restaurant and retail performance – and revenue also fell more than anticipated in the fourth quarter, as delivery growth slowed amid a shift to a partnership with Grubhub.

The stock fell as much as 14% in late trading.

The company is expanding in both the U.S. and internationally, and with restaurant competition as fierce as it’s ever been, investors may be spooked by any signs that sales growth is tapering off. Expansion into suburban areas means lower average unit sales, and the chain is also facing pressure from higher wages and increased staffing. It’s trying options such as a four-day work week to attract and keep workers.

“We recognize this level of growth and investment, at times, can have a near-term impact on same-Shack sales and other aspects of our financial performance, but we believe the company will ultimately benefit from this strategy over time,” Chief Executive Officer Randy Garutti said in a statement.

The company sees revenue of $712 million to $720 million this year – that trails the $736 million average estimate of analysts compiled by Bloomberg. Same-store sales, meanwhile, fell 3.6% in the fourth quarter, deeper than the projection for a 2.8% drop from Consensus Metrix.

Shake Shack decided last summer to partner solely with Grubhub for delivery services. The chain said that while most of its restaurants were still using multiple providers as of the end of the fourth quarter, its delivery channel experienced “a significant slowdown” in growth compared with earlier in the year.

Grant McGrail, a senior vice president of account sales and strategic alliances, allegedly had a romantic relationship with a member of his team whom he promoted, said the people, who asked not to be identified.

After the allegations were raised this month, human resources began an investigation. WeWork was prepared to fire the San Francisco-based executive for cause after completing its probe, but McGrail resigned Feb. 14, one of the people said.

A representative for WeWork confirmed McGrail’s departure, but declined to comment further. McGrail didn’t respond to requests for comment. Business Insider previously reported McGrail’s departure, without detailing the reasons behind it.

McGrail, who reported to WeWork Chief Sales Officer Nick Worswick, joined the SoftBank Group-backed office-sharing giant in 2017 in New York before relocating to San Francisco, according to his LinkedIn profile. He had been the head of enterprise sales, a key role as the company targets large companies such as Merck, Microsoft, Salesforce and KPMG rather than smaller startup clients.

Reeling since its abandoned public offering, WeWork has seen its culture come under scrutiny, stung by claims of discrimination during the tenure of co-founder Adam Neumann. The former CEO is known for his recreational marijuana use and for encouraging drinking – particularly tequila – at work events.

Companies across corporate America are parting ways with senior executives who engage in consensual relationships in the workplace. Companies including Oaktree Capital Group, BlackRock and McDonald’s have terminated senior executives, in part because the #MeToo era has brought heightened awareness of power dynamics in the workplace.

WeWork, which laid off 2,400 employees as part of a broader restructuring, fired 13 employees for violating company policies, Bloomberg News reported last year.

At the time, executive chairman Marcelo Claure told his staff in a memo that WeWork “will not tolerate behavior that disrespects our people, members or business.”

BGRIM, a leading private power producer in Thailand, ended 2019 with a net profit from October-December of Bt816 million, with Bt409 million attributable to major shareholders, a 215 per cent jump. Normalised net profit in the period soared 118 per cent to Bt832 million, Bt428 million of which was attributable to major shareholders which represented a 94.5 per cent growth, according to BGRIM CEO Preeyanart Soontornwata.

For the whole year, BGRIM’s consolidated net profit was Bt3.977 billion on a 20.6 per cent increase in revenue from sales and services to Bt44.132 billion.

Net earnings attributable to major shareholders were Bt2.331 billion, up 25.1 per cent from the previous year.

The robust 2019 results were driven by a 40 per cent rise in production capacity from both local and international projects which were acquired or newly developed, as well as the fuel efficiency improvement of gas turbines at two co-generation facilities, and the reduction of financial cost by loan refinancing, the CEO said.

BGRIM has put in place a water management to ensure maximum benefits from water utilisation in pursuance of conservation under the sustainability guidelines.

The company has also ensured that its generation is efficient to support effective water management in collaboration with the industrial estate operators, the company said.

The company has a large number of world-class creditworthiness customers, resulting in its overall power sales to industrial customers in January 2020 remaining strong at a stable level compared to the same period last year. There are new power-purchasing agreements with new industrial clients with total volume of 23 megawatts, scheduled to start over the first seven months of this year.

Meanwhile, there are still demands from more than 1,000 potential clients in industrial estates at sites under operation or development which could well become potential clientele of the company.

BGRIM said it was confident of exceeding the 5,000MW capacity target with joint venture investment in several projects being explored.

Among those being considered are gas-fired and renewable energy schemes in Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, Malaysia, Cambodia, Laos and other countries.

There are also many merger plans both at home and abroad under scrutiny.

BRGIM’s combined capacity of facilities in operation and under development currently stands at 3,424MW.

Some of the projects under construction are the 16MW Bo Thong wind farm, the 39MW solar energy scheme in Cambodia, the 6MW solar rooftop project in the Philippines and a 30MW development for partners in Oman.

BGRIM has declared a dividend of Bt0.22 per share for the second half of 2019, payable on May 11, to shareholders with the record date on March 13, 2020.

“If we can’t pay back the bonds, it will be very, very bad,” said Brigita, whose company has 10,000 employees and sells mid- to high-end car brands such as BMWs. She asked that only her first name be used and that her firm not be identified because she isn’t authorized to speak to the press.

With much of China’s economy still idled as authorities try to contain an epidemic that has infected more than 75,000 people, millions of companies across the country are in a race against the clock to stay afloat.

A survey of small- and medium-sized Chinese companies conducted this month showed that a third of respondents only had enough cash to cover fixed expenses for a month, with another third running out within two months. Only 30% of such firms have managed to resume operations due to a complicated local government approval procedure as well as a lack of employees and financing, a government official said at a press conference on Monday.

While China’s government has cut interest rates, ordered banks to boost lending and loosened criteria for companies to restart operations, many of the nation’s private businesses say they’ve been unable to access the funding they need to meet upcoming deadlines for debt and salary payments. Without more financial support or a sudden rebound in China’s economy, some may have to shut for good.

“If China fails to contain the virus in the first quarter, I expect a vast number of small businesses would go under,” said Lv Changshun, an analyst at Beijing Zhonghe Yingtai Management Consultant Co.

Despite accounting for 60% of the economy and 80% of jobs in China, private businesses have long struggled to tap funding to help them expand during booms and survive crises. About two-thirds of the country’s 80 million small businesses, including many mom-and-pop shops, lacked access to loans as of 2018, according to China’s National Institution for Finance & Development.

President Xi Jinping over the weekend pledged a greater focus on reviving the economy, with a more proactive fiscal policy, accelerated construction projects and freer reserves for commercial lenders to unleash more funding.

Support from China’s banking giants in response to the outbreak has so far been piecemeal, mostly earmarked for directly combating the virus. Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., the nation’s largest lender, has offered relief to about 5% of its small business clients.

In an emailed response to questions from Bloomberg News, ICBC said it has allocated $770 million (5.4 billion yuan) to help companies fight the virus. “We approve qualified small businesses’ loan applications as soon as they arrive,” the bank said.

As a group, Chinese banks had offered about 794 billion yuan in loans related to the containment effort as of Feb. 20, according to the banking industry association, with foreign lenders such as Citigroup Inc. also lowering rates. To put that into perspective, China’s small businesses typically face interest payments on about 36.9 trillion yuan of loans every quarter.

Stringent requirements and shortlists restrict who can access special loans earmarked by the central bank for virus-related businesses, while local governments and banks have imposed caps on the amounts, according to people familiar with the matter. A debt banker at one of China’s largest brokerages said his firm opened a fast lane to ease debt sales by businesses involved in the containment effort, with borrowers required to prove they will use at least 10% of the proceeds to fight the disease.

That’s of little help to a car dealership. Brigita, whose firm owes money to dozens of banks, said she has so far only reached an agreement with a handful to extend payment deadlines by two months. For now, the company is still paying salaries.

Many of China’s businesses were already grasping for lifelines before the virus hit, pummeled by a trade war and lending crackdown that sent economic growth to a three-decade low last year.

At most risk are the labor-intensive catering and restaurant industries, travel agencies, airlines, hotels and shopping malls, according to Lianhe Rating.

Yang, a property manager of a seven-story mall in Shanghai, says a tenant who runs a 150-room hotel that’s usually busy has called asking for a month’s rent waiver after business dried up. She expects the massage parlor that rents space in the mall is also struggling and is open to extending some help.

A deputy financing director at a small developer in central Anhui province said his firm is even being denied loans under existing credit lines. A drop in sales has hurt the company’s credit profile and a dearth of new projects means there’s no collateral to put up. Without access to credit, the business can survive for about four months, or maybe longer if some payments can be delayed, he said.

Banks are hardly any better off themselves. Many are under-capitalized and on the ropes after two years of record debt defaults. Rating firm S&P Global has estimated that a prolonged emergency could cause the banking system’s bad loan ratio to more than triple to about 6.3%, amounting to an increase of 5.6 trillion yuan.

Wu Hai, owner of Mei KTV, a chain of 100 Karaoke bars across China, took to the nation’s premier outlet of discontent, social media platform WeChat, to voice his despair.

KTV’s bars have been closed by the government because of the virus, choking off its cash flow. The special loans from the authorities will be of little help and no bank will provide a loan without enough collateral and cash flow, he said on his official WeChat account earlier this month.

Wu couldn’t be reached for a direct comment, but on WeChat he gave himself two months before he has to shutter his business.

Central and local governments are loosening the criteria for factories to resume operations as they walk a tightrope between containing a virus that has killed almost 2,600 people and preventing a slump in the world’s second-largest economy.

The rush to restart has been propelled by China’s leader Xi Jinping and top leaders, who are urging companies to resume production so the country can continue to meet lofty 2020 goals for growth and economic development. At stake are the fates of millions of Chinese businesses facing collapse because of the shutdowns, and the ability of companies across the globe from Apple to Nissan to access crucial components.

Officials in China’s provinces have taken up Xi’s call, with one region after another relaxing rules that had kept more than half the nation’s industrial base idle following the Lunar New Year holiday. After weeks of empty streets and shuttered shops, signs of life are emerging along the manufacturing belt in the country’s coastal regions.

On Monday, at least six provinces lowered their emergency response levels from the highest rating.

Chinese authorities, however, reiterated that Wuhan — the epicenter of the outbreak — will stay locked down, retracting a statement sent earlier in the day that had announced partial easing of travel curbs. The conflicting messages underscore the dilemma China faces on how to spur its ailing economy and curb the deadly virus.

About 600 kilometers east of Wuhan, vendors and customers at the Yiwu wholesale market in Zhejiang province are having their body temperatures tested at the entrances after the vast complex that wholesales manufactured goods reopened last Tuesday, three days earlier than expected. Power demand has also started to pick up in China, with six major generators reporting that coal consumption — while still below pre-holiday levels — rose 7% on Feb. 20 from the previous day.

But labor is still a big issue for many.

“Our factory is still missing quite a lot of workers, so we can only resume limited production,” said Dong Liu, vice president of a textile manufacturer in Fujian, southeastern China, that employs more than 400 workers. Dong said he applied to the government on Feb. 17 to restart and the inspector came the next day and gave permission. “More and more factories are allowed to reopen this week,” he said.

The push to get production rolling again risks a renewed spread of the virus, about which much is still not yet known. While more than 79,000 people have been infected worldwide, the vast majority of those cases are in seven Chinese provinces, and mostly in the central province of Hubei, where restrictions on movement were imposed in a number of cities, but not before a lot of people had already left the region for the New Year break.

“A peak may come at the end of this month for the whole country but it won’t necessarily indicate a turning point,” Zhong Nanshan, a respiratory disease expert who led research into a treatment for SARS, told reporters in Guangzhou. “The epidemic could have a new peak after people travel back to work.”

China’s economy was likely running at about 50% to 60% capacity in the week to Feb. 21, according to a Bloomberg Economics report. Official statistics showed that more than 70% of plants in provinces such as Shandong and Jiangsu have now restarted, with the rate above 90% in Zhejiang, though most are running below capacity with many workers still missing. In Hunan, the province just south of Hubei, the restart rate was only 46% on Feb. 17 with fewer than a third of staff returning.

Cities that rely heavily on manufacturing such as Dongguan and Zhongshan are now saying they won’t require workers to be quarantined as long as they are healthy, and factories that meet new safety rules don’t need to wait for government approval to resume.

“It is extremely important to get factories back to operate at their normal capacity, otherwise, it will hurt workers’ wages, companies’ cash flows, and therefore external exports,” said Iris Pang, an economist with ING Bank NV in Hong Kong.

But it’s a risk.

“Imagine if a factory resumes work today but has a worker found to be a confirmed case a week later, then the factory has to close for another two weeks,” she said.

That’s making local governments and plant owners wary of how they proceed.

In Dongguan, a key manufacturing city in the Pearl River Delta, a government document sighted by Bloomberg requires manufacturers to carry out a checklist to ensure facilities are clean and staff are healthy. Plants can then restart after posting notices of resumption inside and outside the plant. The document warns that the companies are responsible for handling significant risks to controlling the virus and may face punishment if they fail to do so. Healthy workers with a temperature lower than 37.3 Celsius from outside Hubei and other badly affected regions can work immediately after they return to Dongguan.

But granting permission to restart is only the first hurdle in getting back to full production. Workers from heavily infected areas are still barred from returning to work in big industrial cities. Manufacturers must also wait for suppliers to begin shipping, villages to dismantle roadblocks and transport companies to restart distribution.

“As the requirements to resume production in each region are rather different, even if we restart our factory, we still need to figure out a slew of issues ranging from upstream and downstream materials, to logistics, packaging, and storage,” said Jacky Han, owner of a car parts factory in Qingdao, a city in Shandong province. “Basically, every enterprise is freelancing on their own and using their own resources and networks to solve the puzzle.”

Since the Lunar New Year holiday began in late January, only about 20% as many trips have been taken each day compared to the previous year, meaning millions of people still haven’t traveled back to the cities where they work and live. Long-distance buses were only allowed to operate at 50% of capacity to reduce the risk of viral transmission.

China’s central and local governments are taking other steps to try to reduce the economic effects to the outbreak. President Xi told U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a phone call last week that China is confident in achieving its growth targets set for this year, according to China Central Television.

The government is considering direct cash infusions or mergers to help the airline industry, including a proposal for a provincial government to take over indebted conglomerate HNA Group Co.

About 80 million migrant workers have returned to where they work, and 120 million more will return by the end of February, according to a transport ministry official, Liu Xiaoming. Another 100 million will return from March onwards, Liu said.

Even if factories can get all their employees back to work, restrictions on work practices may mean that they aren’t able to resume full employment anyway.

In Zhenjiang, a city in Jiangsu province, an LED car lighting factory recently resumed production, but only after finally getting enough supplies to fulfill local government requirements to provide five masks per worker, along with disinfectant and protective suits.

“Every day several government departments send representatives to spot check our efforts to curb the virus,” said Melissa Shu, the company’s export manager. “They come from the district government, the center for disease control, the city government, at different times of day and check if we disinfect in time, whether we test the temperature of workers, whether workers have masks, whether one person has a separate lunch seat, whether lunch is properly arranged, etc, etc.”

Shu said at lunchtime, workers need to sit at least about three feet apart.

“As a result, we can’t ask all the workers to come to work even when they’re in town ready to work,” she said, adding that the plant has 40 to 50 staff members working in rotation, about half the number employed before the virus.

Ironically, some Chinese factories already have plenty of space, thanks to the long-running trade war with the U.S.

“Compared with the virus, that was much worse” said Hui Zhuo, founder of a wooden furniture manufacturer in Zhongshan, in the Pearl River Delta. “We’ve cut a lot of workers in the last two years — so I’m not too worried this time because the space in my factory is big enough to avoid being crowded.”

Like nearby Dongguan, the government in Zhongshan has relaxed restart rules. Zhuo has been studying the government checklist carefully, preparing sanitizer, masks and thermometers.

Factories must disinfect facilities and check workers’ temperatures every day. Each worker dormitory must delegate one person to shop for them every other day, and the others are not allowed to leave the factory. Zhuo’s confident that if he sticks to the rules, he won’t have a problem with the virus.

In the longer term, the outbreak is likely to exacerbate the damage wrought on China’s factories by the trade war. For some overseas customers in fast-moving industries like fashion, the factory shutdown amid the virus has been another wake-up call that may spur them to reduce their reliance on Chinese suppliers.

“I think for the next season or the next year’s goods, retailers would be looking at sourcing more from other countries,” said AJ Mak, CEO of Chain of Demand, which provides artificial-intelligence systems to retailers in Asia and the U.S. to predict product demand. “I think those conversations which started from the trade war would be definitely accelerated.”

Meanwhile China’s push to salvage its growth targets won’t be complete until the virus is fully under control — something that is impossible to predict.

“When can everyone come back to work? No one knows,” said Shu at the Zhenjiang LED factory. “Logistics is still not yet fully resumed, inter-city transportation is still restricted. Only after the epidemic is fully controlled, we can truly return to normal work and life.”

But in a move that disappointed climate activists, JPMorgan will still provide loans to oil and gas projects in the Lower 48 states and other parts of the world.

The bank has increasingly become a target of climate activists, who have denounced the bank for providing $196 billion in financing for coal, oil, natural gas and pipeline projects from 2016 through 2018 after the Paris climate accord. Among American banks, JPMorgan was the top financier of oil and gas drilling in the Arctic and of tar sands extraction in Canada during that three-year period.

The bank has also come under criticism because its board includes former ExxonMobil chief executive Lee Raymond, who has a long record of dismissing concerns about climate change.

“JPMorgan has been the biggest banker of fossil fuels,” said Ben Cushing, a climate campaigner at the Sierra Club.

Bill McKibben, an environmental studies professor at Middlebury College and leading climate activist, said the bank’s new commitments were disappointing and closely resembled pledges made recently by Goldman Sachs.

“It seems like weak beer to me, basically just copying Goldman,” McKibben said. “But it shows that even the biggest bank on Earth feels citizen pressure, so we will keep supplying that!” He added that JPMorgan would “retain the title of the doomsday bank.”

The bank’s outsize role in underwriting the oil, gas and coal industries have made it a top target for climate activists who have staged protests at local branches in recent months.

Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, environmental groups have turned their attention to Wall Street banks, insurance firms and other private sector players as their increasingly urgent calls to address climate change have largely fallen on deaf ears in the White House and the GOP-controlled Senate.

Climate activists “have been looking for other ways to stop the growth of the fossil fuel industry,” Cushing said. “Getting major Wall Street firms to take climate change seriously is important no matter what party is in power.”

The Sierra Club has issued a report called “Banking on Climate Change.” And McKibben, who was arrested while protesting at a Chase ATM in New York on Jan. 10, has rallied people online around the slogan “Stop the Money Pipeline.”

JPMorgan Chase’s announcement said that it would complete – five years early – a commitment made in 2017 to facilitate $200 billion in financing for projects that meet the United Nations’ sustainable development goals. The bank said it would include $50 billion for “green initiatives.”

It spelled out terms for lending to the coal industry that will effectively end such loans. It said it would not refinance loans on existing coal plants or provide money or advice to companies making most of their revenue from coal. Existing loans would be phased out by 2024.

Yet under that policy, the bank could still do business with big coal-mining companies that have other major revenue streams. “That’s a big loophole,” said Jason Disterhoft, a campaigner at the Rainforest Action Network.

The bank also said it would join the Climate Leadership Council, a group that has been promoting a carbon “fee” that would be fully returned to Americans in the form of a dividend. It is one of many climate proposals in Congress.

The International Energy Agency said that all energy investment – including renewables, energy efficiency, coal, oil and gas, and the power sector – totaled $1.85 trillion in 2018, stabilizing after three years of decline. There was an increase in investment in fossil fuel supplies. And the largest growth in investment came in the United States, mainly due to oil and gas supply and electricity networks.

Other leading lenders to such projects include Wells Fargo, Citibank and Bank of America.

Pavel Molchanov, senior energy analyst at the investment firm Raymond James, said that divesting from coal or curtailing lending to coal companies were among the first things any firm does when adopting a policy for environment, sustainability or governance.

“Oil and gas activity in the Arctic is so slim anyway that lending for such activity is essentially meaningless,” he said.

Tucker is now conducting the search for a new CEO in the spotlight — his first pick lasted just 18 months — with shareholders demanding answers and some insiders questioning the board. Mustier’s exit further complicates an already drawn-out process and deepens the uncertainty around interim CEO Noel Quinn and the plan he announced last week to cut 35,000 jobs.

“It’s not a good time to join the bank, especially for an external candidate,” Ronald Wan, CEO at Partners Capital International in Hong Kong, said by phone. “HSBC is going through a challenging operating environment — economic slowdown, the coronavirus outbreak, Brexit — and the bank’s new strategy will all make the CEO’s job difficult.”

Mustier, who led a turnaround at Milan-based UniCredit in the past four years, plans to stay and is committed to the new strategic plan announced in December, according to a UniCredit statement on Monday. The Frenchman informed Tucker of his decision to withdraw by phone on Sunday, a person with knowledge of the matter said.

HSBC shares fell 2% in London on Monday, sliding to 550.80 pence, the lowest close since August 2016.

The Mustier interlude highlights the churn at the top of European banking. UBS Group on Wednesday picked ING Groep CEO Ralph Hamers to take over from Sergio Ermotti. Rival Credit Suisse Group replaced Tidjane Thiam with Thomas Gottstein earlier this month, and Marco Morelli said he won’t seek another term as chief of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA.

A recent history of troubles at HSBC may make it even tougher to recruit an external candidate. For example, in the U.S., Wells Fargo, another lender in need of a revamp, took six months to attract an outsider as CEO in the wake of scandals that claimed two chiefs in three years.

If Tucker “doesn’t want to appoint Noel Quinn to the position on a permanent basis, then he needs to convince the market that he has some other credible options,” John Cronin, an analyst at the Dublin-based Goodbody stockbrokers, wrote in a note. “Or maybe he will just move to appoint Quinn without delay — perhaps within the next two weeks. Our bet is on the latter.”

Mustier had emerged as a key external contender for the role, pitting him against HSBC lifer Quinn. After being approached by HSBC, he engaged in informal talks before deciding that the timing wasn’t right to move because of UniCredit’s new strategic plan and brewing Coronavirus worries in Italy, according to a person close to his thinking. He informed UniCredit board members of the approach over the weekend before his call to Tucker.

After John Flint’s surprise ouster in August, HSBC said that it could take six to twelve months to find a permanent successor.

A CEO search extending into its seventh month and the appearance that Quinn would be a second choice had some clients and staff worried about the potential outcome, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“The bank’s situation remains tough,” said Alex Wong, Hong-Kong based director of asset management at Ample Capital Ltd. “It’s not easy to ask another CEO to join you when they are already performing in their current position.”

At UniCredit, Mustier has been cutting costs and accelerating the cleanup of the balance sheet, focusing on simplifying the bank’s structure and improving the way it allocates capital. Since 2014, UniCredit has cut about 20,000 jobs, 14,000 of which took place during Mustier’s tenure. He also oversaw a 13 billion-euro ($14.1 billion) rights offer in 2017 to help pay for a clean-up of bad loans. Under the new strategic plan he expects to cut 8,000 jobs in total.

That track record would have been appealing at HSBC, which is going through the third strategic overhaul in a decade. Tucker, who ejected Flint last year after he failed to revive growth at the Asia-focused lender, has struggled to explain why a bank with such a stronghold in some of the world’s fastest-growing economies has been unable to produce a better return.