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Seven Years Later, What The Rana Plaza Factory Collapse Teaches Us About COVID-19 - By Michael Posner
"Seven years ago this week, the Rana Plaza factory complex in Bangladesh collapsed, killing more than 1,100 garment workers, mostly young women, and injuring 2,500 more. It was the largest industrial accident since 1984, when a gas leak at a factory in Bhopal, India, killed more than 3,500 people and exposed thousands more to toxic gas fumes. In the days following the Rana Plaza collapse in 2013, haunting images circulated online showing family members desperately sifting through the debris to locate their loved ones. These images caught the world’s attention and became a catalyst for unprecedented collective corporate action on factory safety."
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How Covid-19 Is Making Millions of Americans Healthier - By Hans Taparia
"At a scale not seen in over 50 years, America is cooking, a healthy move in the middle of a pandemic. Yes, we are using restaurant delivery services more and demand for packaged goods has skyrocketed. Even sales of the unpalatable Hamburger Helper are up. But the frequency and consistency of cooking presents a tremendous public health opportunity."
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In This Corona Quarter, Take Earnings Reports With A Grain Of Salt - By Baruch Lev
"So, how will investors during the current earnings season be able to distinguish between the regular losers (50%-70% of all companies) and the corona-related losses? Even more generally, what is the relevance of reported earnings in the time of corona shutdown? In what follows I address these two questions."
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Why Does India Have So Few Covid-19 Cases and Deaths? - By Arpit Gupta
"India is four times more populous than the US, but has just 2% the number of cases and only 1.5% of the number of Covid-19 deaths. How has the country, whose per capita income is just tenth of the US, avoided being flattened by the pandemic?"
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The Case for State-Owned Pseudo-Equity: Saving Singapore SMEs - By Marti Subrahmanyam
"The Covid-19 pandemic is an extraordinary event in human history that has had epic health and economic consequences. On the economic dimension, many responsible governments, including Singapore's, have come up with large stimulus, care and support financial packages to firms and their employees that will help sustain households, jobs, the citizen's health and the overall economy."
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Coronavirus: When and How Should We Reopen – By Nicholas Economides
The virus, after originating in and sweeping through China, has now resulted in serious damage in the United States, and especially in Europe. Without a known cure or vaccine, it has already resulted in over one hundred thousand dead, and 1.7 million infected with serious symptoms. With light or no symptoms infections running nine times as many, we are already at over 17 million infections.
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Saving Journalism Is a Business Problem - By Michael Posner
"While the demise of journalism, especially at a local level, has escalated rapidly since the arrival of the digital age and the collapse of the print ad-based revenue model, the trend has accelerated dramatically in recent weeks, and now demands even more urgent attention."
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Germany Will Be a Post-Coronavirus Winner - By Marti Subrahmanyam
"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 this doesn’t guarantee their healing, or their ultimate durability and growth. Equity capital, the stuff that’s needed to invest and thrive, is essential to the second stage of recovery."
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The Best Way to Get Americans Back to Work Faster - By Arpit Gupta
"The Covid-19 pandemic has paralyzed the US economy, with millions of Americans being urged to stay home and many businesses shuttered. Now that the stimulus package has passed, our policymakers should be working on a credible and feasible way to reduce the length of the lockdown and get the economy back on its feet."
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An Equity Fund for Europe and Its Companies - By Marti Subrahmanyam
"Rescue programs of enormous proportions are currently being put together in the countries affected by the corona pandemic. We economists from Italy, the Netherlands, the United States and Germany are proposing the creation of a Europe-funded fund that participates in Europe's small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) - thereby limiting corporate debt and creating a profit sharing scheme."
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3 Ways to Ensure SBA Aid for Small Businesses Helps Those Who Need It Most - By Viral Acharya
"Small businesses are the backbone for job creation in the economy. It is thus commendable that an important part of the government’s $2 trillion stimulus package to tackle the economic downturn caused by the coronavirus and the COVID-19 illness is the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) — a $349 billion program targeted at small businesses that launched Friday."
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Memo to Trump: Don’t Bail Out the U.S. Shale Industry - By Paul H. Tice
These are dire times for the U.S. shale industry. Oil and gas producers are now faced with plummeting demand caused by the spreading coronavirus, along with a massive supply shock triggered by the current market share war between Saudi Arabia and Russia. World oil prices have now dropped to 20-year lows and many smaller and over-leveraged domestic companies will probably not make it.
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Stimulus Funds Should Be Delivered Via Mobile Payments - By Robert Seamans
"Now is the time for governments to be promoting and employing mobile-based tools to assist families and businesses harmed by the pandemic. From mobile passports to re-admittance into normal life to mobile payment methods, mobile technology could be our best weapon in the fight against coronavirus. Delivering stimulus funds via mobile payments will help more people get stimulus funds faster, and may help spur adoption of mobile payment systems and reduce the unbanked percent of the U.S. population."
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Access to Mobile Technology Can Be a Matter of Life and Death - By Anindya Ghose
"What if the best tool to fight the coronavirus right now is not a vaccine—likely at least a year away—but a mobile phone? Smart mobile phones, app developers, and governments around the world can help deliver timely and accurate public health information and aid rigorous contact tracing to limit the spread of coronavirus."
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The Priority for the Social-Distancing Period - By A. Michael Spence
"With COVID-19 quickly spreading around the world, much of the attention has correctly centered on the need for social distancing to slow transmission of the virus. But limiting human interactions should be regarded as merely the first step in a more comprehensive targeted strategy."
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