Corporate DispatchPro Matthew Bugeja
From profits to resilience We live in a time in which our very way of life has changed both drastically and abruptly. The global economy was growing at an acceptable rate, although economists and institutions warned that the number of downside risks were both visible and growing. No one, outside of the scientific community, could have foreseen the impact of such an event on our day to day lives.
Imagine being on an underground train which is quite full of people. The train is speeding along, and all of a sudden, it hits the brakes. People, young and old, of all colours and creeds, find themselves flying across the train car, with injuries varying depending on how and where the person landed when the train stopped. The train in this case is the global economy. The passengers are the countries, companies, employers and employees. Everyone has been hurt simultaneously, but to varying degrees. In the capitalist model, companies are driven by profit, which they use to pay employees, issue dividends to shareholders, and to reinvest into the company to achieve higher growth. The model is a good one (though with its own set of imperfections, which are well-known, and we will not delve into here), but has proven time and time again to be far from resilient from shocks emanating from both within the economy, and outside of it. This is not a call to scrap capitalism completely and replace it with something else. It is a system which has, for the most part, allocated people, goods and capital quite effectively for a few centuries now. But in times of crisis, the drive to make maximum profits means that companies inevitably invest in products and services that will yield the greatest return for the lowest possible cost. Industries grew according to their profitability, and most Western countries have interfered very little in shaping and moulding key economic sectors as the years went by. As a result of COVID19 and the unprecedented government interventions in national economies, CNN estimated 15
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