Toyota, hurt by the chip shortage, will reduce output 40 percent in September.

Toyota Motor, the world’s largest automaker, plans to cut production worldwide 40 percent in September because of a shortage of computer chips that the company had avoided being hurt by until now.

The move will affect 14 plants in Japan and reduce output by about 140,000 cars and trucks next month, the company said. In the United States, Toyota expects to produce about 80,000 fewer vehicles next month than it had previously planned. The company is also cutting production in Europe, China and other countries.

“Due to Covid-19 and unexpected events with our supply chain, Toyota is experiencing additional shortages that will affect production at most of our North American plants,” the company said in a statement. “While the situation remains fluid and complex, our manufacturing and supply chain teams have worked diligently to develop countermeasures to minimize the impact on production.”

The company is also expecting North American production in August to be 60,000 to 90,000 vehicles fewer than originally planned. Toyota said the production cuts were not expected to affect North American employment, at least for now.

Several months ago, many major manufacturers, including Volkswagen, General Motors and Ford Motor, began idling plants because the semiconductor industry struggled to restore production of auto chips after last year’s pandemic-related shutdowns. But Toyota was relatively unaffected because it has been keeping large stocks of chips and other components after earlier supply problems after an 2011 earthquake and tsunami devastated parts of Japan.

Many automakers have been expecting chip supplies to improve in the second half of the year, but Toyota’s announcement suggests the problem could persist for some time. Next week Ford plans to idle a plant near Kansas City, Mo. that makes its highly profitable F-150 pick up truck because of a shortage of components that include computer chips. And G.M. stopped most of its truck production in North America for parts of this month.

Stocks dropped around the world on Thursday, with the S&P 500 set for a third day of losses as traders reacted to minutes from the Federal Reserve’s latest policy meeting showing that officials were getting closer to reducing monetary stimulus.

The Stoxx Europe 600 index was down 1.7 percent, the most in a month. The S&P 500 fell as much as 0.5 percent in early trading. The U.S. benchmark index dropped 1.1 percent on Wednesday, the biggest single-day decline since mid-July.

Commodities, including oil and metals, also tumbled.

The Fed meeting minutes published on Wednesday showed that policymakers were prepared to slow the central bank’s large purchases of government-backed bonds, though they were divided over when exactly to begin the process.

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Regulators have been scrutinizing special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, more closely in recent months, as the deals through which private companies have merged with public shell companies have boomed. The Securities and Exchange Commission is focusing on disclosure and accounting practices, while Congress has discussed making banks as liable for their work on SPACs as the stricter rules that apply to traditional initial public offerings.

According to new research by Usha Rodrigues of the University of Georgia School of Law and Mike Stegemoller of Baylor University, highlighted in the DealBook newsletter, there is another urgent issue to worry about: “empty voting.”

SPAC investors can vote in favor of a merger but redeem their shares before the deal is done. The SPAC structure allows investors to get their money back at the initial public offering price, plus interest, if they don’t want to keep the shares after the blank-check firm merges with a target company. But even as redemptions are rising, in some cases with large majorities of shareholders pulling their money out, deals are still almost all being approved.

Why? One reason may be because redeeming shareholders — which tend to be institutional investors like hedge funds — can keep the warrants that come with SPAC listings, which are tradable and give them exposure to the merged company despite having redeemed their shares for cash. And for the target company, redemptions deprive it of the money in the SPAC, but outside investment at the time of a deal (known as a PIPE) is usually larger and makes the merger still worth doing.

The “ability to vote ‘yes’ and nevertheless jump ship” is worrying, the researchers write, because it is a form of “empty voting.” It creates the impression that early investors in the SPAC are in favor of its chosen merger target even as they sell their shares. Later investors — more likely to be retail investors — may misinterpret this signal.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Robinhood, the stock trading app, on Wednesday reported surging quarterly revenue as pandemic trading became a permanent hobby for many customers, but it still lost money.

In its first earnings report as a public company, Robinhood said its revenue for the second quarter soared to $565 million, up 131 percent from the same period last year.

It also lost $502 million, compared with a profit of $58 million a year prior. The company attributed a significant chunk of that loss to warrants from an emergency funding round it raised this year.

Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s chief executive, said in a statement that he was “encouraged” by the number of people trading stock for the first time via Robinhood. The company reported 22.5 million user accounts with funding in them, a 130 percent increase from 9.8 million in the same period last year.

A significant portion of Robinhood’s growth in the quarter also came from cryptocurrency trading after the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies hit record highs in the spring. Revenue from cryptocurrency trading fees totaled $233 million, a nearly 50-fold jump from $5 million a year earlier. More than 60 percent of its customers traded cryptocurrency during the quarter, and more new customers used the app to trade cryptocurrencies than stocks, the company said.

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Kmart’s two-decade slide has transformed the commercial real estate market in unexpected ways, bringing churches, truck washes and self-storage facilities to places that once sold Martha Stewart sheets and Joe Boxer pajamas. In cities and towns across the country, former Kmarts are being used by tenants that might not typically get a crack at such a large haul of commercial space at an affordable price. READ THE ARTICLE →

• A cyberattack on T-Mobile exposed the information of approximately 7.8 million current T-Mobile accounts, as well as records of more than 40 million former or prospective customers who had applied for credit with the company.

  Some of the exposed data included customers’ first and last names, Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers and other information, T-Mobile said. It also included the PINs of about 850,000 active prepaid customers.

• Walt Disney World in Florida is permanently retiring its free, line-skipping FastPass system and for the first time will charge $15 a person for the privilege, opening up a potentially colossal new revenue stream.

  For most people, Disney vacations are already formidably expensive — entry to one park for one day can easily approach $500 for a family of four. But the company has long signaled that Disney World would eventually charge for what it is now calling Lightning Lane access to rides. That may minimize grumbling. Disneyland in California eliminated FastPass in 2017 and began charging $20 for a perk called MaxPass; after the initial displeasure wore off, MaxPass became popular.