Stocks tumble as growth concerns grip Wall Street.

U.S. stocks were expected to open lower on Thursday and bond yields dropped as investor anxiety mounted over fresh signs of the bumpy economic recovery. The world’s known coronavirus death toll surpassed four million on Thursday as the rise of the Delta variant served as a reminder that the pandemic remained a threat.

Investors parsed the latest economic figures from the Labor Department, which reported that number of new claims for state unemployment rose slightly, to 370,000, compared with 350,000 expected by economists.

Shares fell for tourism and travel companies, which have become a proxy for investor sentiment about the threat of the pandemic. Carnival Corporation and Norwegian Cruise Line were down more than 3 percent in premarket trading, and American Airlines was down 3.3 percent.

“There’s growing concern on how robust the economic recovery will be,” said Edward Moya, senior market analyst Oanda, a foreign currency exchange. “The virus spread in other countries is starting to suggest we won’t have a strong second half of the year.”

The S&P 500 was poised for a drop of more than 1 percent, futures trading indicated, while the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury bond fell to 1.28 percent.

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The European Central Bank said Thursday it would adjust the guideposts it uses to set monetary policy, giving its more room to deploy crisis measures even if inflation rises above its official target. The bank also said it would begin using its clout in bond markets to fight climate change.

After concluding an 18-month review of its strategy, the bank’s Governing Council said Thursday that it would no longer aim to keep inflation below, but close to, 2 percent. Rather, it would simply aim for 2 percent and be ready to accept “a transitory period in which inflation is moderately above target.”

The seemingly minor change gives the bank space to keep pumping credit into the eurozone economy even if annual inflation rises above 2 percent, as long as policymakers think the jump is temporary.

That situation may soon materialize. Inflation in the eurozone has been hovering around 2 percent in recent months, and could rise above the target as economies reopen and shortages of needed products like semiconductors become more acute. According to the previous strategy, the central bank would be obligated to raise interest rates or take other measures to slow the economy, even if the crisis was not over.

By law, controlling prices in the 19 countries of the eurozone is the central bank’s main priority, so any adjustment to its approach to inflation has broad implications for the interest rates that businesses and consumers pay on loans, and for employment and economic growth.

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• Initial claims for state jobless benefits rose slightly last week, the Labor Department reported Thursday.

• The weekly figure was about 370,000, up 3,000 from the previous week. New claims for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federally funded program for jobless freelancers, gig workers and others who do not ordinarily qualify for state benefits, totaled 99,000, down 15,000 from the week before. The figures are not seasonally adjusted. (On a seasonally adjusted basis, state claims totaled 373,000, an increase of 2,000.)

• New state claims remain high by historical standards but are one-third the level recorded in early January. The benefit filings, something of a proxy for layoffs, have receded as businesses return to fuller operations, particularly in hard-hit industries like leisure and hospitality.

• More than 20 states have recently discontinued some or all federal pandemic unemployment benefits — including a $300 supplement to other benefits — even though they are funded through September. Officials in those states said the payments were keeping people from seeking work.

• The Labor Department’s employment report for June showed that the economy had 6.8 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic. A separate report found 9.2 million job openings at the end of May as businesses that had closed or cut back during the pandemic raced to hire employees to meet the reviving demand.

• But there is a substantial amount of turnover, with far more workers quitting their jobs than are being laid off — a sign that many are jumping to positions that pay even slightly more.

Last week, Amazon fired a pre-emptive shot at the new chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, using a common line of attack on policymakers who held strong opinions in the past: trying to disqualify them for alleged bias.

Ms. Khan made her name with a forceful view on Amazon and antitrust, arguing that the sprawling tech giant showed how competition law was “unequipped” for the digital age. This, among other things, disqualifies Ms. Khan from participating in F.T.C. actions against Amazon, the company said. Amazon is a subject of the F.T.C.’s inquiry into Big Tech’s acquisitions of smaller rivals, and the agency is separately reviewing its proposed purchase of MGM.

So, the DealBook newsletter asks, does Amazon have a chance?

Disqualifying a commissioner isn’t easy. At her Senate confirmation hearing, Ms. Khan rejected the idea of a blanket disqualification from Big Tech investigations, saying she would consider such requests on a case-by-case basis and consult with F.T.C. counsel. Simply voicing opinions critical of companies is rarely cause for recusal, and most disqualification attempts fail.

• Impartial “does not mean uninformed, unthinking, or inarticulate,” explained a federal appeals court in 1980, reversing the disqualification of an F.T.C. commissioner.

• In 2010, Intel’s attempt to disqualify a commissioner who had previously been its antitrust counsel failed because the F.T.C. said his previous work bore no “substantial relationship” to the review at issue.

• In 2012, a prospective commissioner who had worked for Google promised senators that he would recuse himself from Google-related cases for two years to avoid the appearance of impropriety. That is a point Amazon stressed in its motion — that the appearance of fairness matters, too.

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President Biden’s goal of cutting pollution by 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 would require a radical transformation of the nation’s economy away from fossil fuels, including a rapid shift by American drivers from internal combustion engines of the last century to zero-emissions electric vehicles.

To help meet that goal, the Biden administration is starting to write stringent auto pollution rules that could cut emissions deeply and force carmakers to increase sales of electric vehicles, according to four people familiar with the plan. That’s in addition to plans to restore tailpipe emissions standards to roughly the level set by President Barack Obama, Coral Davenport reports for The New York Times.

The risk for automakers is whether consumers will purchase electric vehicles that are generally more expensive and logistically challenging, because the nation lacks a network of electric-vehicle charging stations.

If Congress approves hundreds of billions of dollars for construction of charging stations as well as tax incentives for both buyers and makers of electric cars and trucks, Mr. Biden would most likely be able to secure industry support for more stringent rules that would result in more electric vehicles on the road. Currently, only about 2 percent of vehicles sold in the United States are electric.

But if a final infrastructure package includes little or no spending on electric vehicles, a tougher tailpipe rule would likely face opposition from automakers, who would be forced to build and try to sell costly electric cars.

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The model that has fueled Ireland’s economy for decades is in peril, as a coalition of 130 nations works to overhaul a global tax system that Ireland depends on to lure businesses looking to reduce the taxes they pay.

At stake is Ireland’s low official corporate tax rate of 12.5 percent and a tax regime that helps global companies based there avoid paying taxes to other countries where they make profits, a setup that has put billions of euros into Ireland’s tax coffers and created hundreds of thousands of jobs, Liz Alderman reports for The New York Times.

Ireland was one of only nine countries not to sign on to a sweeping framework last week, overseen by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, that could undermine those advantages. The accord would impose a new 15 percent global minimum corporate tax rate and force technology and retail giants to pay taxes where their goods or services were sold, rather than where the company had its headquarters. The details of the agreement are expected to be completed in October, and then each country’s government would need to adopt it.

Some might say the optics aren’t good — Ireland risks looking as if it wants to deprive other countries of their fair share of tax revenue — and the government in Dublin has been grudging in its statements on the issue. The finance ministry declined interview requests and did not respond to written questions. Similarly, multinational companies that have profited from the low-tax regime have been conspicuously silent, declining requests to discuss the issue.

An overhaul of the global tax order could cost Ireland 2 billion to 3 billion euros annually in lost tax revenue, the finance ministry estimates. Much of that money would go to other countries.

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• A group of dozens of states and the District of Columbia are suing Google on claims that its mobile app store abuses its market power, expanding the legal challenges facing the internet search giant. The suit would be the fourth state or federal antitrust lawsuit filed against Google since October, but the first to scrutinize the company’s lucrative app store. It was being filed on Wednesday in federal court in the Northern District of California, according to a public filing, which showed the suit was being led by Utah, North Carolina, New York and Tennessee. Apple, which operates the other major app store for smartphones, is also under scrutiny for the cut it takes from developers for app sales and subscriptions.

• If over the next two years Bill Gates and Melinda French Gates can’t find a way to work together at their foundation following their planned divorce, Mr. Gates will get full custody. That was one of the most important takeaways from a series of announcements about the future of the world’s largest charitable foundation made on Wednesday, overshadowing an injection of $15 billion in resources. The foundation also plans to add trustees outside their close circle, a step toward better governance that philanthropy experts had urged for years. The restructuring announced Wednesday could begin the process of making the Gates Foundation more responsive to the people its mission aims to help and loosen the grip on the reins that its founders have held for more than two decades.