Something will have to give

Subject: Something will have to give.

As bad as the corona virus is for our health how draconian is it for our financial stability. On the one hand a large swath of the populous are losing their incomes without sight of their work reappearing in the near future. The small business's or self employed individual has been cut off at the knees with his outgoings, the mortgage, the credit card servicing, the food on the table all still having to be met but no income to do it.
The flower seller, the barber, the sandwich bar, the garage, are all involved in the lockdown which includes their clients. The trades people who service the increasingly complex infrastructure on which we all depend are soon to be left floundering without even the fragile resource of people who are employed on contracts which protect them, in part, from the day to day vagaries of the self employed. Much of business and the financial health of the country requires that the wheels of commerce keep turning, its a juggle as money flows in and out to meet fixed the overheads but what will happen when it all seizes up and multiple bankruptcy papers are served. Will these business's return to the high street or their places in the back ally, will the trauma be too much or will the entrepreneurial spirit survive.
Is the spectre of Mad Max raging outside the city gates a nightmare too far or is it what men and women do when the structures are destroyed. How close to unraveling does the social contract have to go before gangs roam the streets and fathers take matters into their own hands to feed their families.
There was always a fine line between what the people could be expected to accept and what neoliberal capitalism exploited from the system. Zero hours contracts and welfare top ups which allow the minimum payed employed individual to survive whilst assisting the employer who was unwilling to see his or her profit reduced to pay a living wage whilst we the consumer, always fixated on low prices to sustain that love fest we all have for that thing called consumerism. If we were prepared to pay the right price even if  it limited our consumption, at least the old fashioned relationship between what you could afford and what you couldn't would be re-established. We have become hoodwinked into believing we are wealthier than we are. The credit card has distorted our sense of value, we buy when we can't afford it, we are oblivious of our shaky finances and it's at times like this when the financial pledges made by governments across the world will have to be paid back that the final reckoning comes and it's usually the poor who lose most. A sticking plaster is being applied but the underlying fault line of too much unsecured credit will haunt us when the creditors ask for their loans back.
Who will come out on top it's hard to say but the Chinese response to the virus makes them the front runner in dictating the terms of any recovery. We in the west will have to come to terms with the trillions of un-backed dollars which are being printed as we speak in an attempt to keep the US ship afloat but following the banking bailout in 2008 which already severely weakened the fiscal arrangement, something will have to give.