Day 1: Spain in lockdown.
Day 1 of 15 days to see if we can get the virus slowed… here is a video showing how society is currently handling this (jk).
Every night at 8 pm or 10 pm the city erupts in applause for the health care personal and emergency personal. Very cool and def a strong sense of solidarity currently :). It has been hard to explain to Calico why we can’t go to the park, going to be a long couple of weeks. If not a few months.
My main worry is how do you protect and reboot the people living paycheck to paycheck, as well as restaurants and the travel industry? 15% of Spain’s GPD is tourism. From the 07/08 crisis, Spain’s economy dropped ~4%, unemployment hit 27%, and tourism growth dropped only 13%. This has the potential to be much larger than that. Everyone likes to talk about a V-shaped recovery since this is artificial, but if it lasts longer than 2 to 4 weeks the economic damage isn’t going to be artificial. Even harder, is how does the Gov reboot this. This isn’t a liquidity problem, this is a problem where a huge swath of your economy is 100% shut down but still has rent payments on the building and payroll. I’ve seen several restaurants in Seattle post that they fired everyone last week, closed for 2 months, and hope to reopen then. Maybe the Gov can super beef up unemployment payouts, as I am not sure those will cover an apartment in most places in the USA. Not to mention all the other costs.
On the good side… maybe the EU will get their shit together and reboot financial integration for the entire block. And, really start spending to help everyone reboot as well as demand better labor conditions. Spain is really broken when it comes to hiring with almost no flexibility and no incentives for businesses to take a risk and hire someone. They should shift a lot of labor protections to the government to keep it balanced.
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