Opinion

One lesson of the Covid-19 crisis is that there are some contingencies that nobody can realistically plan for. Whether you’re an airline or the New York City subway system, there’s no rainy-day fund big enough to get through months of revenue falling 90%. Sometimes, the only entity big enough to offer financial relief is the federal government, meaning the vagaries ...

The US government is spending trillions of dollars to support the economy as it works to contain the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic. There hasn’t been much discussion about how all this spending will be paid for, but those talks are coming and they will not be pleasant. To be clear, this level of spending cannot be financed by tax ...

Former Vice President Joe Biden has gone from what political scientist Josh Putnam has called the presumptive presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to being the just plain presumptive Democratic nominee. Bernie Sanders finally saw that there was no realistic chance of winning the nomination, and that dropping out now was the way to maximise his influence. Surely his decision to suspend ...

One well-known British retailer says it has noticed a marked upturn in customers saying “Thank you” to store staff since the start of the Covid-19 crisis. Investors in another — Tesco Plc — will be doing the same after it said it would pay out 635 million pounds ($783 million) in final dividends, taking its distribution for the full year ...

All great economic crises pose two equally important challenges: they drain the liquidity necessary for the functioning of businesses, large and small, and burn up their equity capital, or a substantial part of it. Of the two, the former is the immediate challenge amid the coronavirus-induced lockdowns. Providing liquidity to companies is the top priority to ensure their survival. Yet ...

Congress is already considering another coronavirus relief bill, its third, and it probably won’t be the last — nor should it be. But as Washington continues to address the economic fallout from efforts to suppress the pandemic, it needs to think more carefully about both incentives and operational details. To be clear, Congress was right to act to swiftly to ...

Before the pandemic, 100,000 seafarers travelled in and out of the world’s ports every month. Some had spent weeks or months aboard the cargo ships, tankers and other merchant vessels that are essential to moving products and commodities across the globe. In a ritual little noticed outside the industry, new crews would regularly arrive to relieve them, ensuring that the ...

The economic fallout for Italy from Covid-19 is going to hammer its already precarious government finances. The country’s 1.7 trillion-euro ($1.9 trillion) debt mountain is the largest in Europe, and there will no doubt be a substantial jump in its ratio of debt to gross domestic product from 135% to beyond 150%. Nevertheless, Rome’s ability to manage its borrowings may ...

Andrew Bailey, the new Bank of England (BOE) governor, was at pains in an FT interview to draw a clear distinction between the BOE’s bulk buying of bonds and its direct financing of the British government’s coronavirus spending plans. The latter simply wasn’t going to happen, he said, because it would damage the central bank’s credibility in pursuing its defining ...

Just what kind of economic slump will this be? It’s too early to know, but it’s not too early to speculate. I’ve done a totally unscientific survey of economic forecasts. Some were solicited by me; others I received from regular emails. What follows is a quick summary of what I found. It doesn’t attempt to forecast peak unemployment or the ...