Not alright alright alright

Dazed and confused

“I feel sorry for people that don’t drink, because when they wake up in the morning, that is the best they are going to feel all day-”― Frank Sinatra

Red lights abound ; restaurants closing, social circles contracting, millions of global job losses — one would not be remiss in declaring 2020 null and void.

Global economic growth will be negative this year and the worst since the Great Depression of the 1930s according to latest IMF data.

K shaped recovery — main street vs wall street

A K-shaped recovery occurs when, following a recession, different parts of the economy recover at different rates, times, or magnitudes. This is in contrast to an even, uniform recovery across sectors, industries, or groups of people. A K-shaped recovery leads to changes in the structure of the economy or the broader society as economic outcomes and relations are fundamentally changed.

‘In the City of London, the number of people visiting cafés, restaurants and retailers in the first week of October was less than one-third that of pre-pandemic levels — with some of the gains over the summer lost in recent weeks as the UK fights a second wave of coronavirus infections. That stark figure shows that the City has been substantially more depressed than the UK as a whole, where visits to restaurants and entertainment venues were just above 70 per cent that of pre-pandemic levels. In Manhattan, the number of visits to amenities was less than half that of pre-pandemic levels, compared with 85 per cent for the national average, with similar depressed levels seen in the technology hub of San Francisco.’ — source FT

Small business without easy access to liquid capital is faced with little choice but to shutter or drastically cut costs — in turn exacerbating the pain for already hard hit regular wage earners. An issue exemplified in sectors that have been hugely affected by the pandemic such airlines, tourism and hospitality.

Conversely its a golden time for the epoch of big business and asset rich individuals which has led to large increases in an already very extreme measure — global wealth inequality.

The world’s richest have seen their wealth climb 27.5% to $10.2trn (£7.9trn) from April to July this year, according to a report from Swiss bank UBS.

It comes as a World Bank report on Wednesday showed extreme poverty is set to rise this year for the first time in more than two decades due to the pandemic…

Time to kill

Rather than continually pondering the stasis of the current situation — individuals and businesses where possible should take advantage of the low opportunity cost of new endeavours.

Indeed this global pause should allow us all ample time to reflect, assess and evaluate our positions both personally and professionally such that we are primed and ready for inevitable greenlights…

guv@fuel.ventures