My world: June 2021…
This is part of a series of articles where our contributors describe how they think things will look a year from now.
Permanent QE keeps stock markets buoyed, but financiers have no one to finance as companies turn instead to government support programmes
What will the world look like in June 2021? A dystopian, destroyed economy, mass unemployment, and a daily struggle to survive? Or a massive post-crisis boom time as economies double-time into recovery? I suspect it will be somewhere in between: the world will be recognisably the same, but very different…
We’re still working from home, not sleeping terribly well as we fret about job security, and cursing the dismal weather that arrived soon after the first lockdown easing was proposed (and quickly abandoned). We’ve given up on the endless patronising BBC propaganda, watched everything watchable on Netflix, and even started reading proper books again.
The past year proved to be not as bad as we had feared; the hospitals were never swamped. But we were kidding ourselves about recovery. As company after company collapsed, it was like nothing we’d ever seen before. Thank goodness it rained here from June to September so that Britain never experienced the riots which burned most of Paris to the ground. But there isn’t much to look forward to. There’s no skiing, for one thing. And large-scale events are still closed – no Six Nations or Football, though small- scale gatherings are allowed. Once a month the office gets together for a strategy meeting over lunch in a denuded city.
