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Hello and welcome to the programme.

In this series of the bottom line, we're focusing on a few of the very many business questions

that arise from the COVID pandemic, mainly focusing on the aftermath at the moment.

And if there is one huge problem about to engulf us, it is a potential wave of business failures.

Failures of good businesses sometimes, normally viable businesses, employing millions of people.

Some we may not be able to save. A few we may have to let go as the world will be different and their services are out of fashion.

But many we will want to be up and running,

paying tax, employing staff as soon as practical, and we don't ideally want them entangled in

disputes about rent or utility bills stemming from period when they were in the deep freeze with no

revenue. So we'll give a little thought to this today, but first, let me play the inspiration for this program.

It's a clip from a Nobel Prize winning economist, Joe Stiglitz, talking to me on the PM program

last month. He was right there at the heart of the hugely disruptive Asian financial crisis

in the late 1990s. I was chief economists of the World Bank in the East Asia crisis,

and as that crisis struck Indonesia, Thailand, Korea, 70% of the firms in Indonesia

wound up in essentially a bankruptcy-like situation, more than 50% in Korea and almost 50% in Thailand. So with that kind of systemic

financial crisis, far worse than just the banking crisis that we had in 2008. And I propose

with Marcus Miller at the University of Warwick, a policy reform. When you have that many firms in default,

you can't even sort out who is able to pay whom. It's an enormously complex, systemic problem.

And we proposed a framework with a new set of presumptions that would not require the level of bankruptcy law,

the delays that we currently have, which would be devastating for the restoration of our economy.

Well, we will be picking up on some of those themes.

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