Monday
It is not just the businesses that were already marginal that will not re-open. Wiser heads in previously sound businesses will see the writing on the wall and pull out such money as they can now. It will be a spiral to the bottom.
When the dust has settled, then new businesses will open again, slowly and tentatively. There will be a lot of time for dust-swallowing in-between.
As is being belatedly realized, the psychology of not just business, but the consumer, has changed for at least a generation.
Our politicians utterly failed to comprehend the fragile complexity of the system. The business eggs that were pushed off the wall can never be put back together in a recognizable form.
Confidence will never return to its pre-shutdown level. Not one of us, not even battle-hardened cynics like me, predicted that governments would be so stupid as to voluntarily shut down their economies. In that sentence is encapsulated the problem; governments really did regard the economy as ‘theirs’ – theirs to regulate, tax, control, manipulate, humiliate, order around and, ultimately, to close down.
Never again will a job be taken for granted; never again will the dangers of debt be underestimated. No matter how ‘easy’ the credit, it will not tempt the prudent.
Suicides and bankruptcies are going to skyrocket.
What will the government do? You know the answer to that. They will use force, for that is the source of all their power and what they always fall back on.
As noted before, the history of the world is a continuous cycle of businesses creating civilizations and governments destroying them. The peaceful wealth-creation of business is never a match for the money-grabbing violence of governments.
Time to get out of the cities.