Martin Vander Weyer

Keep your eye on GlaxoSmithKline. The UK-based multinational drug-maker represents the future, both as a mass-producer of the vaccines that we pray will finally defeat Covid-19 and as a beacon of the way shareholder capitalism will re-position itself in the post-pandemic era. GSK last week announced a collaboration with its French rival Sanofi to create a Covid-19 vaccine that it aims to manufacture at the rate of ‘hundreds of millions of doses annually’ by the end of next year. That’s 20 months before we might begin to feel safe again but still ‘a significantly faster timeline than for normal vaccine development’.

Ah yes, the banks. They weren’t in the front line when the crisis began, but it wasn’t going to be long before they came in for a kicking. Sure enough, they’ve just had one for throwing bureaucratic hurdles and demands for personal guarantees in the way of the government’s business interruption loan scheme and for resisting a Bank of England directive to cancel £7.5 billion of dividends to shareholders, cash that would be better used to bolster reserves against a coming tide of bad debts. They backed down on both issues but, disliked and distrusted as they have been since 2008, they’ll always be a target for snipers — and bank bosses need to remember two things.

The suspension of the residential property market is disheartening for those who were hoping to buy a first flat or new-build house this spring. But spare a thought also for estate agents, who are usually well back in the queue for public sympathy but are nevertheless a familiar part of our high-street fabric, their windows and websites feeding the national aspiration to home ownership that also fills so many hours of Kirstie-and-Phil television. With government urging completions to be deferred, mortgage lenders tightening their terms, viewings and removals impossible and shares in the bellwether London agency Foxtons down by half, the whole sector is now in what Niraj Shah of Bloomberg Economics calls ‘an induced coma’.

The world needs airlines — and, barring Armageddon, will still have some when this crisis is over. It will also still have aircraft, pilots and airports. The aviation industry, accustomed to volatility as it is, should be well capable of restructuring and regrowing in response to renewed demand, even if bankruptcies are left behind. I know that sounds glib, but airlines on both sides of the Atlantic have been loud in calling for state aid as traffic has collapsed — and in the cruel process of deciding how governments can equitably relieve the virus’s financial impact on every business and family, all such claims demand scrutiny.

‘It’s a ghost town,’ said the officer manning the body scanner at Manchester airport — Manchester, New Hampshire, that is, a city of some 112,000 citizens. I don’t know how many of them would normally be passing through its departure hall on a Sunday morning, but today there are no more than 50, plus me and a bottle of hand sanitiser to remind us why it’s so quiet. A spokesman for the global airline industry says carriers collectively foresee worst-case revenue shortfalls of $113 billion as a result of virus fears and travel restrictions, similar to what hit them after the 2008 financial crash.

So farewell Bernie Ebbers, former chief executive of WorldCom, the long--distance phone operator that became America’s biggest-ever bankruptcy case in 2002. Ebbers has died aged 78, having been released on health grounds in December from a 25-year jail sentence for his part in an accounting fraud that concealed the perilous state of WorldCom’s finances, misleading investors after a series of high-risk acquisitions by the bejewelled ‘telecom cowboy’ Ebbers during the dotcom boom. By repute, US justice aims to make examples of high-profile corporate miscreants, starting with the humiliating ‘perp walk’ into court and concluding with harsh sentences and scant hope of parole.