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by ModernMech 2248 days ago
The virus would have shut them down anyway if they had stayed open and their employees and customers became ill. The bad decision making here is the lack of foresight to keep cash on hand to weather a storm like this, despite making record profits in the billions. We are all told if we don’t keep 6 months of cash on hand we are financially negligent. Large companies were begging for money within two weeks of shutdowns happening, after spending so much of their cash on stock buybacks to pump up stock prices.
1 comments
thu2111 2248 days ago
Sweden shows that view is wrong.
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ModernMech 2248 days ago
These data show that retail, travel, and restaurants were all taking huge hits before lockdowns went in to wide effect: https://www.ft.com/content/d184fa0a-6904-11ea-800d-da70cff6e...

Bay area issued the first national stay at home order on March 13. By then demand had already dropped precipitously. If your restaurant is seeing 60% fewer bookings, are you going to keep as many wait staff? Are you going to order as much food? How is that going to impact your supplier? And their supplier?

On the flip side we have places like Smithfield food that stayed open and their workforce became infected. Smithfield alone has as many infected as the entire country of Sweden reported newly infected yesterday. These are problems of different orders of magnitutde. How does a factory stay open with 500 people infected at once?

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thu2111 2248 days ago
Given how many people have mild symptoms and how age-dependent it is, it's entirely plausible that 500 infections would yield only a handful of employees to sick to work.

And yet Sweden still disproves your point. Businesses have stayed open, including restaurants and other such businesses, and yet Swedish companies are not evaporating due to their workforces being too sick to work. That's not even close to happening, is it?

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ModernMech 2248 days ago
Again, Sweden is not the US, they have not been hit nearly as hard. More people will die today in the US than have died total in all of Sweden. Sweden is not immune from the effects of Covid. They have imposed measures to limit the size of gatherings, have closed secondary schools and colleges, and have imposed restrictions on restaurants. Despite their looser restrictions they are still expecting to see the economy contract and have experienced record unemployment:

``` A record 36,800 people were handed their notice in March, more than 10 times the number from the same month last year.

The government has offered loans and guarantees and expects to increase expenditure by around 84 billion Swedish crowns ($8.35 billion) this year.

At the same time, the central bank has poured money into the financial system, offering 500 billion Swedish crowns in loans to companies via banks and boosting its purchases of securities by 300 billion crowns.

Banking group Swedbank said recently it expected the economy to contract 4% this year. ``` https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-sweden...

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