Finance

Remember when analysts and economists were saying we’d see a V-shaped recovery? They may be rethinking that thesis now.

There are early indicators that the recovery, which quickly gained traction as states started reopening, may be losing steam as cases continue spike across the country.

New cases of the coronavirus have skyrocketed in recent weeks, hitting a record of roughly 60,000 new cases on July 9. Big states like Texas, Florida, and California, are now battening down the hatches once more, by reimposing restrictions for bars, restaurants, beaches, and more. But cases of the virus are now on the rise in many states.

Moody’s Mark Zandi recently told Fortune there’s a “zero chance” of a V-shaped recovery now.

Instead, another shape may be, well, taking shape.

Deutsche Bank senior U.S. economist Brett Ryan was among those who predicted a “reverse square root symbol” shaped recovery months ago.

“This speaks to what we’ve been saying for a long time, which is that this is not going to be a straight line, lock-step recovery, up and up and up. It’s going to have some bumps along the road,” Ryan tells Fortune. Indeed, Ryan told Fortune in …

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U.S. banks had only a few weeks’ experience with the full-blown pandemic when they last tried to forecast how bad things would get. Now, they’re about to reveal what three more months of Covid-19 did to the industry.

Second-quarter results, set for release next week, will probably show that the trends that took hold at the start of the year only intensified: surging provisions for loan losses and slumping consumer spending, with trading gains helping some banks weather the storm.

“We’ve got a full three months of the pandemic coming through the numbers now,” Kyle Sanders, an analyst at Edward Jones, said in an interview, adding that the second quarter was probably the worst for bank earnings since the financial crisis. “The first quarter was rough, but it really only reflected a couple of weeks in March.”

Soaring unemployment left many consumers unable to pay back their debts or take on new borrowing, forcing banks to set aside more to cover souring loans and crimping their net interest income. At the same time, nationwide stay-at-home orders left once-bustling downtowns and …

The trio of clients that got Deutsche Bank AG in regulatory trouble this week had a shared back story: They were all castoffs of JPMorgan Chase and Co.

Deutsche Bank moved millions of dollars across the globe for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in the past decade, and billions on behalf of international lenders Danske Bank A/S and FBME Bank Ltd. Along the way, the German bank missed or disregarded compliance red flags for years, New York’s Department of Financial Services said Tuesday in levying $150 million in penalties.

JPMorgan’s moves to offload those same clients years earlier may have helped it dodge a similar bullet. The biggest U.S. bank stepped away from handling money for FBME in 2009. It distanced from the others around 2013, the same year it undertook a broad purge of higher-risk clients from its correspondent banking business.

The bank had incentive to offload risky clients. JP Morgan’s primary U.S. regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, put it on notice in early 2013, faulting its due diligence processes and ordering it to clean up its anti-money laundering controls. Later that year, the bank said it would spend $4 billion to shore up its …

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Investors cheered Uber’s $2.65 billion acquisition of Postmates Monday, bidding up the buyer’s shares by 6%. That rise was an endorsement of the deal, perhaps, but also a reflection that Wall Street values cost cutting. The company said it can take out $200 million in costs once the deal closes next year.

There’s the expression “horses for courses,” and Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber, is a dealmaking horse on an industry-consolidation course. He cut his teeth at Allen & Co. and helped build Expedia into an M&A-fueled collection of online travel brands. Now he is running the same playbook at Uber. Its food-delivery business is the only pandemic-resistant line it has, so after failing to buy Grubhub, he’s adding Postmates to the stable. Uber is also in the process of buying Cornershop, a Latin American grocery delivery business.

Postmates was rumored to be going public itself, but that was far from certain. Indeed, Uber said it will provide “bridge financing” to Postmates until the deal is finalized. This means Postmates …

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Good morning, Bull Sheeters. It’s a risk-on Monday with Asia, Europe and U.S. futures all soaring. China is very bullish on its second-half recovery, and in the capital markets—for investors, that’s enough to drown out weak data elsewhere, plus bearish forecasts and new global records in coronavirus cases.

Let’s see where investors are putting their money.

Markets update

Asia

• The major Asia indexes are soaring in afternoon trade, with Shanghai up more than 5% .
• Investors in mainland China and Hong Kong are seeing their best day in over a year as the influential state-run China Securities Journal turned bullish on “the wealth effect of the capital markets.” That enthusiasm is lifting global markets.
• Alas, the coronavirus crisis is worsening, as the WHO this weekend reported a new record daily tally (212,000) led by Brazil, India and the United States.

Europe

• The European bourses jumped out of the gates, with the benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 up 1.7%.
• The U.K. is now expected to phase Huawei out of its 5G buildout plans as