Tomorrow, the airplane engine maker Rolls-Royce will ask shareholders for £2bn to help it survive the pandemic. Shareholder advisory groups Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services have urged investors to back the fundraising.

Shareholders can buy 10 new shares for every three they own at 32p each. The company made a £5.4bn loss in the first half of the year and needs to repay £3.2bn of debt at the end of next year. As demand for its engines has fallen, Rolls’ market value has plummeted from more than £20bn two years ago to £4.7bn, roughly the same as the online fashion retailer Asos.

The aviation industry has been hit hard by the pandemic, which has led to a slump in airline travel due to ongoing travel restrictions.

‘Generation Covid’ has been hit hard by the pandemic, new research has found.

BBC Panorama said people aged 16-25 were more than twice as likely as older workers to have lost their job, while six in 10 suffered a drop in their earnings, according to the research, which also looked at the impact of school closures on young people.

A quarter of pupils – some 2.5 million children – had no schooling or tutoring during lockdown, the survey by the London School of Economics found.

But, nearly three quarters of private school pupils had full days of teaching (74%) – almost twice the proportion of state school pupils (38%). You can read more here.

While oil prices are still down more than 2%, the oil cartel Opec’s secretary general said today that he did not expect another collapse in oil prices, as seen in the second quarter.

Speaking at the virtual India Energy Forum by CERAWeek, Mohammad Barkindo said producers in the Opec+ alliance, which also includes Russia, would continue to “stay the course” in balancing the market.

US oil prices fell below zero for the first time on record in April after oil producers ran out of space to store the oversupply of crude left by the coronavirus crisis, triggering an historic market collapse which left oil traders reeling.

Wall Street has opened lower.

The Dow Jones fell nearly 150 points, or 0.5%, to 28,185, while the S&P 500 dropped 24 points, or 0.69%, to 3,441 and the Nasdaq lost more than 100 points to 11,440, a 0.9% drop, at the opening bell. The S&P 500 has extended losses and is now down more than 1%.

Business class meals sold by Finland’s national carrier Finnair at a supermarket near the Helsinki international airport have proved a hit, with 1,600 meals sold within days.

For €12.9 per takeaway meal, shoppers can choose between beef with teriyaki-radish sauce served with grilled spring onion and rice, or smoked arctic char with chantarelle risotto.

Finnair plans to sell its airplane meals in other supermarkets, as it battles to limit job losses at its catering division in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The airline said last week it would cut around 700 jobs by March.

Marika Nieminen, the head of Finnair Kitchen, told Reuters:

There are redundancies and layoffs going on already at Finnair and we are trying our best to find new innovative ways.

She said the catering firm plans to introduce new dishes, including reindeer meat from Finnish Lapland and Japanese-style pork shoulder, for supermarkets.

Kimmo Sivonen, a shopkeeper at Kesko’s K-Citymarket Tammisto in Vantaa said:

We have had very much positive feedback from our customers and this product has become one of the best selling products in our store.

It is certainly cheaper than the up to £360 per head diners have paid to eat a meal on a stationary Singapore Airlines plane parked at Changi Airport, keen to recreate the onboard experience without leaving the ground.

The German government expects growth in Europe’s largest economy to decline slightly less than previously expected this year, Reuters reported, citing a source.

The government now expects the economy to decline by 5.5% in 2020 rather than 5.8%. For 2021, the government will confirm its forecast for GDP growth of 4.4% when it publishes its latest forecasts on Wednesday.

The FTSE 100 index in London has fallen back again and is trading nearly 32 points lower at 5,828, a 0.55% drop.

Germany’s Dax has lost 2.07% after the software group SAP slashed its revenue forecast for this year, triggering a 17% fall in its share price. France’s CAC is 0.5% lower and Italy’s FTSE MiB has fallen 0.9%.

US stock futures are pointing to a lower open on Wall Street later. The Dow Jones is expected to open more than 260 points lower, a 0.9% drop, while the Nasdaq is seen down 92 points, a 0.79% fall, and the S&P 500 is set to drop almost 32 points, or 0.9%.

New coronavirus infections reached record levels over the weekend and El Paso in Texas asked residents to stay at home for the next two weeks. France has also seen new cases rise to record levels.

Here’s more on the meeting of China’s top leaders in Beijing.

China’s top leaders have begun a meeting on boosting the economy’s self-reliance as the country turns inward amid diplomatic tensions and the coronavirus crisis.

The four-day session known as the plenum, which will determine China’s policy goals for the next five years, began on Monday behind closed doors in Beijing. While the new economic plan will only be made public just before approval by the rubber-stamping legislature, the National People’s Congress, details released after the close of the plenum provide key clues as to Chinese Communist party’s new priorities.

The meeting is being held amid a deteriorating global economy, historically tense ties between China and the US, and an increasingly difficult international environment for Beijing as it comes under scrutiny for alleged human rights abuses and political repression in Xinjiang and Hong Kong and questions about its transparency when the Covid-19 outbreak emerged in Wuhan in December.

In currency markets, the pound has stabilised against the dollar at $1.3043 and is up 0.4% against the euro, at 90.54p.

Brexit negotiations have been extended to Wednesday, with the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier, heading back to London for more talks.

Here is a brief summary of the Ifo findings, from the institute:

In manufacturing, the business climate indicator is back in positive territory for the first time since June 2019. A great many more companies were satisfied with their current situation. In the last quarter, companies managed to increase their capacity utilization considerably from 75.3 points to 79.8 points. However, recent optimism about the coming months has evaporated.

In the service sector, however, the business climate worsened notably. Service providers were less satisfied with their current situation. Moreover, their optimism of recent months with regard to the business outlook has disappeared.

In trade, the Business Climate Index fell slightly. While companies are more pessimistic about the coming months, they were more satisfied with their current business situation.

In construction, too, the business climate stopped climbing. Companies corrected their very strong assessments of the current situation noticeably downward. Their expectations also turned somewhat more pessimistic.

He is not the only one to talk about the risk of a double-dip recession.

Carsten Brzeski, global head of Macro at ING, says the worsening in the Ifo business climate index marks “the end of the [economic] rebound and the start of double-dip fears”.

After several leading indicators pointing to a weakening of the economy, Germany’s most prominent leading indicator, the Ifo index, has finally joined the crowd. Until September, the Ifo index seemed to be defying growing pessimism but after five consecutive increases, it dropped in October for the first time since April.

Looking ahead, as painful as the ‘smart’ lockdowns are for the already hard-hit sectors, the impact on the total economy will be much less accentuated than at the start of the crisis. However, with even more social distancing restrictions on the horizon, there is a significant risk that ‘smart’ lockdowns across Europe turn into more severe ones, which in turn would bring the third quarter rebound to an abrupt halt in the last few months of the year.

At face value, today’s Ifo index is not weak enough to fear another collapse of the economy but as all of Europe is in the second wave of the virus, today’s Ifo index definitely marks the end of the rebound and the start of double-dip fears.

The FTSE 100 index is now just 0.2% lower, a loss of 11.48 points, at 5,848, while other European indices have suffered heavier losses.

Germany’s Dax is still down 2.27% at 12,358 after the German software firm SAP said profit and sales declined in the three months to 30 September, and downgraded its outlook. SAP shares plunged as much as 20% and are still down 16.7% at €104.

The UK health secretary, Matt Hancock, has just said that “we’re not there yet” on a coronavirus vaccine, and that he does not expect hospitals to get it this year.

On my central expectation, I would expect the bulk of the roll-out to be in the first half of next year.

We want to be ready in case everything goes perfectly but it’s not my central expectation that we’ll be doing that this year but the programme is progressing well, we’re not there yet.

He also told BBC Breakfast that the government would “rule nothing out” on the prospect of a new fourth tier of measures, a fortnight after a three-tired restrictions system was brought in.