As the spring of 2020 ground on, I waited for the people I still thought of back then as the grownups — executives running public companies, big Wall Street investors, successful tech entrepreneurs and scientists — to speak out.
After all, they were mostly political moderates. They could see the same data and run the same analyses I could. Tens of millions of Americans were being laid off. Their companies were at stake. The economy was at stake.
They had to speak. And they had cover. After all, Elon Musk, among the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, had already spoken out. So I waited for them to join him.
And waited.
But they didn’t. They never did, really.
The tech bros and the hedge funds had cynical reasons to stay quiet. The tech companies saw immediately how lockdowns increased our dependence on screens. The smartest investors stopped caring about the impact lockdowns would have jobs or ordinary Americans very quickly.
They realized the Federal Reserve would need to pour massive liquidity into the financial system to stop a depression, and that liquidity would drive an equally massive increase in asset prices. Bitcoin was trading at about $7,000 before Covid, at the end of 2019. It briefly dipped as the panic spread in March 2020, but by March 2021 was at $50,000.
I said Silicon Valley and Wall Street were cynical. I didn’t say they were dumb.
But what about the executives outside those industries? The ones at hotel companies? Or retailers? Or restaurants? Or manufacturers? Or banks? Or grocery stores? Or Big Pharma? Or energy companies? Or airlines? Or consumer-goods companies? Or hospitals? What about all the medium to large companies that collectively employ tens of millions of people in what we quaintly call the real economy?
Well. The airlines and hospitals got straight cash handouts for the business they lost. The grocery stores and big retailers like Walmart realized they had an advantage, they would be allowed to stay open as essential businesses.
A lot of other companies had a rough go in the spring and summer of 2020. But their executives quickly saw the score. The economy was in the tank, sure. But executives know they don’t get fired for having bad years when the economy’s in the tank.
They might get fired if they pushed back against the public health and media consensus too loudly, though. And they’d definitely get fired if they demanded to bring their employees back to offices and even one of those employees died of Covid.
Hellbound and Down 