"Explosive," "shock" and "relief" are some of the adjectives being used to describe the rally on Thursday as stocks recorded their best session since the early days of the pandemic in 2020. When all was said and done, the  S&P 500 closed out the session up 5.5%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index skyrocketed 7.4%. U.S. government bond yields also recorded their steepest one-day decline in more than a decade, with the rate on the 10-year Treasury falling 32 basis points to 3.82%.

Embattled vaping company Juul Labs has announced hundreds of layoffs as the company weathers lawsuits, government bans and increasing competition for its electronic cigarettes. Juul said it has obtained new financing to stay in business and continue operations, which includes challenging plans by the Food and Drug Administration to ban its products. The layoffs include 400 staffers and are part of a cost-saving plan to immediately cut Juul's operating budget by at least a third.

Office-share company WeWork is closing sites in a bid to cut costs and has failed to post a profit more than a year after it went public. The group announced it would shut about 40 “underperforming” offices domestically. Taken together, the closures will cut almost 5 per cent of WeWork’s total desk space and hit revenues. But WeWork said that shutting offices would help to reduce costs, as it announced a third-quarter net loss of $629mn, two-thirds of which was restructuring, depreciation and other non-cash expenses. Revenues for the period were up 24 per cent year on year to $817mn.