The choice is to build an emergency fund, just like you would do for yourself, so you can pay your rent, your bills if an accident in your life happens.
Yet, financial crashes happens quite regurlarly but companies expect the gouvernment (citizens) to pay the rescue bill. And I'm not going to cry for the execs taking a 20-30% pay cut.
Almost half of Americans don't have $400 to cover an unexpected emergency. For many of them it's because they simply don't make enough money to save a lot.
Yelp is in a similar situation; they're simply not profitable enough to have been able to sock away 6+ months of expenses to be able to weather a black swan pandemic event. The FANGs are profitable enough and they do have that much money saved up, but Yelp isn't and doesn't. Their business model was already a little creaky before this started and all their customers shuttered.
I don't really expect companies to plan for the government ordering the majority of economic activity to halt for an undefined length of time.
This isn't just some "rainy day" to save for. This is unprecedented, and it's only necessary because the government did not take steps to contain the outbreak sooner.
Money given to companies after this is not a bailout in the 2008 sense. It should be viewed as compensation for damages caused by the government's bungled response to the virus.
I'm not defending the US's response at all, but pretty much every country has shut down over this. It's not clear how that could have been prevented. Yes, it would have prevented a lot of deaths, but the total shutdown seems to have been inevitable everywhere.
Look at South Korea and Singapore and Taiwan as examples of countries that applied testing early and haven't needed to tell everyone to shelter in place. They have seen some economic disruption, but nothing like the what the US and the EU are experiencing.
> This is unprecedented, and it's only necessary because the government did not take steps to contain the outbreak sooner.
The whole world is shut down over COVID. Even with borders closed as much as possible it has spread. There is no intervention by the US government that could have been done in January that would mean the country would be open for business today.
> There is no intervention by the US government that could have been done in January that would mean the country would be open for business today.
Sure there was. Other countries did it. The US and the EU were caught unprepared but several countries in Asia did the right thing, probably because they had previous experience with SARS.
A total societal lockdown is not the only viable response to a disease like COVID-19. It might be the only viable late-stage response, but early testing, tracing, and quarantining has worked in other countries and it could have worked here if our government had been on the ball.
This is objectively incorrect. There were many countries that took a far more aggressive stance against the coronavirus and as a result have been able to better deal with it and the economic impacts.
The fact that people are repeating this lie is mind boggling and deserve to be called out because we literally saw this coming. We had months to prepare when we saw other countries dealing with the problem and did nothing.
