After the Pandemic: A Market Oriented Analysis

By Ulderico Santarelli

All Nations are struggling to bounce back from the economic downturn due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The impact on GDP has been devastating. The future is unknown. However, general principles will remain in place. The market will die if a war can't be averted. The clash between religions and atheism, combined with the rift between capitalism and communism, could lead to a new cold war— if not a hot one

Drawing from ten general principles, it is possible to sketch new future consumer trends. After an overhaul of the production system the market will recover very fast. However, it may look vastly different than before.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 1900
• ISBN: 9781098320959

Book preview

Copyright 2020

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

ISBN: 978-1-09832-095-9

Table of Contents

Introduction

Recurring Events

Economic Forecasts during the Pandemic

The Impact on the Supply Chain

The Accuracy of Models

Supplying Models with more Predictive Power

Lessons Learnt under Pain Last the Most

A New Creeping Divide

Strategic Opportunities for Italy

Summary and Conclusions

Introduction

The Covid-19 pandemic took the world by surprise. Almost unnoticed for some time, unexpectedly the contagion grew and grew speedy and lethal. Quietly sweeping across at first, Covid-19 escaped a prompt detection. Ongoing researches in Italy show that it was around well before the first official case. Strange pneumonia hospitalizations are now revised as Covid-19 infections. When at last the infection was detected, epidemy breeding grounds had multiplied. Circumscribing the infection within narrow borders was thus impossible. Many breeding grounds were turned on in the meantime. They made Covid-19 result in a pandemic.

Overlooked even by experts as a common flu and described as a threat for faraway countries, never to reach your own, people didn’t worry at all until, all of a sudden, they found themselves in a whirl of many chaotic and erratic government’s decisions. A single week was enough for overturning people’s mood from why worry? to we are lost. After a few weeks the balance was sheer tragic.

The fear that Covid-19 could eventually hit the economy at large soon materialized. The economy resulted in a downturn seldom seen in history before.

This book tries to focus a little bit on the permanent market changes the pandemic may trigger. Without pretending a full range analysis, it seemed important to me to share some perceptions about what the future of consumptions may become. Hopefully, readers will enrich their own vision with my perceptions.

To better appreciate the fatal blow Covid-19 has delivered to humans at large, an obvious comparison with the 1918 pandemic is useful. For the moment, the comparison can be done between the infection of 1918, that lasted two waves, with the single wave contagion of 2019.

After adjusting for the technological progress over one hundred years, that enabled so many to survive the scaring bilateral interstitial pneumonia, Covid-19 pandemic is perhaps the deadliest in history. For instance, the combined death toll of the two 1918 waves in Italy was probably less than 400,000. Now, after the inclusion of the unknown number of patients who died in their homes, the Covid-19 death toll in Italy may eventually overcome 50,000.

The patients who recovered from Covid-19 at the end of the wave, probably more than 250,000, should be computed as deaths as well. In fact, the narrow capacity of the 1918’s Health Care system would have let them to die. In addition, the stricter citizens’ compliance to the lockdown’s restrictions in 2020 remarkably flattened the contagion curve. To sum up, we can confidently formulate the hypothesis that Covid-19 has been till now as deadly as the 1918 pandemic was, by many deemed the worst one in history before the Covid-19’s outbreak. Hopefully, a second wave will never occur, otherwise the hypothesis would become a certainty.

After some timid and at times confused initial reactions, countries almost unanimously moved towards the lockdown of the economy. The political apparatus is facing now the problem of bouncing back to the previous normal situation. As often, normal is a meaningless word. In this case, it refers to the situation in place before the outbreak.

All countries are now struggling for recovery plans. Their implementation is expected cautious, however. Though all countries are fighting the pandemic with ardor, the fear that a resurgence may lead to a stop and go tactic curbs the optimism in a fast recovery.

Some companies are preferring an honorable death to a shaky and painful survival. Some other ones will change a lot. Hardly will the economic downturn be fully recovered without changes. The economy can undergo an overhaul similar to the after-WWII’s period, when a radical change in consumers’ preferences took place and the production system was updated accordingly.

In this short book I try to discuss some already stabilized evidences and to sketch possible ways to fix the negative impacts of the pandemic.

I intend to add my humble contribution to the many views and suggestions already in place, in the hope that a few fellow humans will find some help in recovering from such a dire plight. In this moment, future is what matters the most.

All in all, the synthesis of my book is that economy will experience an overhaul due to changes in consumers’ preferences. As it happened after World War II, employment shares by Industry sector will sharply change due to the production revolution following new consumers’ trends. After some years of painful adaptation to the new consumers’ choices, the economy will skyrocket much faster than expected.

Provided Nations will stem a new war, new green jobs will multiply, new dematerializations will keep money more liquid, people’s awareness will have grown at a level where a new vision of what is today and what should be tomorrow will take place.

Examples in this book are taken mainly from the Italian case for two reasons: first, Italy is my birth country so that I know it much better than US, where I now live; second, Italy is the typical country always on the brink of being declassified due to its public debt so that it represents a limit case, useful perhaps for comparisons.

Recurring Events

As the outstanding Italian philosopher Giovan Battista Vico wrote over three centuries ago, history uses to go by cycles, he dubbed corsi e ricorsi or runs and re-runs. After a very dramatic century, when mass graves have been so common, we are again in a ravage of deaths