Good morning. Two WeWork directors filed a lawsuit against SoftBank Group on behalf of the co-working company after the Japanese conglomerate backed away from a deal to buy up to $3 billion in WeWork’s shares.

The stock purchase would have been a major windfall for WeWork’s former chief executive, Adam Neumann, who had the right to sell up to $970 million in shares, as well as investors and numerous current and former employees.

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SoftBank said last week that it terminated the offer on its April 1 deadline, citing “multiple, new and significant pending criminal and civil investigations” into WeWork that it claimed came to light after it agreed to the offer in October.

The lawsuit was filed in Delaware on Tuesday in the name of WeWork’s parent, We Co., by the special committee of WeWork’s board of directors. The board is made up of Benchmark general partner Bruce Dunlevie and former Coach Inc. CEO Lewis Frankfort. In a statement, the committee said pulling the offer is a breach of contract “as well as a breach of SoftBank’s fiduciary obligations to WeWork’s minority stockholders, including hundreds of current and former employees.”

Public companies should disclose to shareholders whether they plan to tap coronavirus-related bailout funds from the federal government, the nation’s top securities regulator said Tuesday.

Speaking on CNBC, Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Jay Clayton said investors are “thirsting for information” about how the pandemic has affected companies’ earnings power and their need for capital. The roughly $2 trillion aid package passed by Congress last month includes tens of billions of dollars for airlines and cargo carriers, $17 billion for businesses deemed critical to national security and almost $350 billion for small businesses that need financial aid to stay alive.

The need for bailout money or other sources of cash is “sensitive information,” Mr. Clayton said. “I encourage companies to get out there [and] disclose where they stand” in order to limit speculation about the companies’ plans.

• The U.S. plans to block Iran’s requested $5 billion emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund for funding Tehran says it needs to fight its coronavirus crisis. Senior officials in the Trump administration said Iran’s government has billion-dollar accounts still at its disposal. If allowed to tap IMF financing, the officials said, Tehran would then be able to divert those or other funds to help its economy, which has been weakened by U.S. sanctions, or finance militants in the Middle East, rather than on containing the pandemic.
   
• Business groups said a newly approved state mandate to pay higher wages on a broader range of government-backed construction projects will hurt firms as they attempt to recover from the novel coronavirus.
   
• A top U.S. regulator said he isn’t likely to heed mortgage companies’ calls to help ease the cash-flow crunch they are expecting when Americans who lose their jobs stop making mortgage payments. 
   
• China’s Communist Party said it is investigating alleged wrongdoing by an influential businessman who has been an outspoken critic of President Xi Jinping, signaling harsh punishment for the author of a scathing essay decrying the Chinese leader’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
   
• India is ending a ban on the export of hydroxychloroquine, an antimalarial drug that may help treat victims of the new coronavirus. The South Asian nation’s decision comes just days after President Trump urged India to release supplies of the medicine, as it is one of its biggest producers.

The severity and unusual nature of the current economic contraction, in which governments across the U.S. have forced businesses to close and workers to stay at home, will require the Federal Reserve to respond more aggressively than it would during an ordinary recession, said Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester.

The U.S. economy is likely to go through a significant adjustment after the coronavirus pandemic recedes as businesses evaluate how the crisis has reshaped demand for their goods and services, Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan said in an interview.

Even the best-managed small businesses are in a very vulnerable position as they try to weather the shutdown of much of the U.S. economy during the coronavirus crises, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration and top lawmakers said they hope to move within days to approve hundreds of billions of dollars in new funding for small-business loans, citing widespread demand for assistance from firms hit by shutdowns related to the coronavirus pandemic.

• Italy’s Economic Pain Shows Burden of National Lockdowns

• Thousands of Instagram accounts are hawking medical face masks that could be fraudulent or pose a safety risk, according to a report by an independent research group, a sign of Facebook's struggles to police users who appear to be taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic.
   
• When the coronavirus started spreading in the U.S., office owners with long-term, stable leases hoped their buildings would become a haven for skittish investors. But nearly a month into the pandemic, the opposite has happened. Investors are dumping shares of major office real-estate investment trusts. Sales of skyscrapers are unraveling, and office tenants across the country are negotiating to lower their rent bills.

• Institutional Shareholder Services Inc., an influential proxy adviser, has taken the unusual step of urging shareholders to withhold votes for the chairman of Williams Cos. after the pipeline operator adopted a poison pill to fend off unwanted suitors.
   
• Macy’s chief financial officer will leave the company at the end of May, placing pressure on the beleaguered retailer to fill a key executive position while battling plummeting sales due in part to lockdowns related to the coronavirus pandemic.
   
• Dylan Howard, the National Enquirer editor who played a central role in burying stories damaging to President Trump, has parted ways with the supermarket tabloid’s parent company, people familiar with the matter said.

Equinox joins a number of companies, including Macy’s and Steelcase, that are citing the federal government’s beefed-up unemployment benefits as they furlough or lay off staff amid the coronavirus pandemic. The stimulus package is changing the calculus for some employers, which can now cut payroll costs without feeling they are abandoning their employees.

The new stimulus package will give employees who have been laid off or had their hours cut an extra $600 each week for up to four months on top of their state’s regular unemployment payments. By itself, the $600 is the equivalent of working 40 hours a week at $15 an hour. For someone working full-time and normally earning $7.25 an hour that comes to more than double their income before getting laid off.

Meanwhile, two of Japan’s largest car companies, Nissan and Honda, are furloughing U.S. factory workers without pay, adding to unemployment in an industry that has seen sales plummet during the spread of the new coronavirus.

• Finance chiefs are considering hastening investments in automation initiatives to better manage their companies’ finances and operations despite facing revenue declines stemming from the coronavirus pandemic.
   
• Companies including Macy's, Equinox and Steelcase are citing the federal government’s beefed-up unemployment benefits as they furlough or lay off staff amid the coronavirus pandemic. 
   
• Exxon Mobil said it would cut its 2020 capital spending by 30% as global demand for oil is sapped by the coronavirus.
   
• UnitedHealth Group is accelerating payments to doctors and hospitals, starting with about $2 billion over the next week, to ease a cash crunch that has led some health-care providers to furlough workers amid the coronavirus pandemic.
   
• Amazon will halt a delivery service for non- Amazon packages, according to people familiar with the matter, as it re-evaluates the nascent offering that competes directly with FedEx and UPS.

Facebook’s WhatsApp is limiting users’ ability to forward content on its encrypted messaging platform, as misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic proliferates on the service in its biggest market, India.

In one of the biggest changes WhatsApp has made to a core feature, the company said Tuesday that its more than two billion users globally can now send along frequently forwarded messages they receive to only one person or group at a time, down from five.

• CNN said it has acquired Canopy, the maker of a news-reader app whose technology the company is planning to use for its forthcoming news-aggregation service. CNN, a unit of AT&T’s WarnerMedia, didn’t disclose the financial terms of the deal.
   
• A growing number of property investors are preparing for what they believe could be a once-in-a generation opportunity to buy distressed real-estate assets at bargain prices.
   
• Sewing shops and mattress-case makers have switched to producing cloth masks as orders for their usual product lines fall off with much of the economy shut down.

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