For many firms, a Covid reckoning is coming, and it won’t look pretty
Article summary
Structural economic change is almost invariably painful, but the repeated lesson of history is that it is best not to try and get in its way; the sooner such change is allowed to take its course, the sooner resources are released to invest in the new, allowing the economy to transition to a different and hopefully better form. Rewind to Seventies Britain, and we see a case study in what not to do when companies and even whole industries become uncompetitive and therefore unviable. […] Inefficient capacity in these industries is going to take a hammering while that process works its way through. […] Finding new tenants, and uses, for all that real estate is going to be a major challenge for the likes of Canary Wharf and other major office space clusters. […] But it is going to cost money to mitigate and smooth the transition.
