Few airlines can be entirely confident of their survival right now. Travel restrictions prompted by the new coronavirus have forced carriers to burn rapidly through their cash, with no guarantee of when any semblance of normality will return. The ones in most danger are those that overextended themselves financially before the pandemic. Among the big European carriers, nobody pushed boundaries ...

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 ...