I have left my November Blog contribution until now as we look forward to the new democratically elected US president and look forward to the possible impact that a more outward-facing America will bring to the world economy and stability. At least now we can look forward to a period of increasing certainty and confidence. Whilst writing this I am also pondering the uncertainty that the latest COVID 19 lockdown is having and will continue to have on us all. Economically the Bank of England figures estimate an 11% contraction to the economy in Q4 compared to the same Q4 last year. In economic terms, the percentage is enormous and certainly, whilst not a ‘Crash’ level definition is unsustainable. The bank has pumped into the economy (Quantitative Easing) an additional £32,000 per household during 2020. An unbelievable figure, that will ultimately mean the amount of money the UK Government is borrowing, especially, now that the furlough scheme has been extended to March 2021 will be way past 100% of Gross Domestic Product.

During most of August, I was on leave and enjoying the remains of the summer heat and the last of the lighter evenings. Consequently, I didn’t sit down and capture any musings in the form of a blog. That didn’t mean however I didn’t have lots to capture or wasn’t constantly musing about what the autumn would bring for us all.

It has been made crystal clear by the PM and the government, that the get back to work message sits clearly on the shoulders of those of you in the organisation making the productivity and safety decisions that will inevitably come back to bite you fairly quickly if you don’t get things correct, right from the off.

As we emerge from lockdown, we wait to see what the real and practical effects of the COVID 19 crisis are having on our economy, society, organisations and individuals, I thought I would avert my gaze away from attempting to predict the economic future and shift towards the leadership qualities that are going to be required across all organisations to deal with the future instead.

Writing this at the end of a sunny week in June, it’s easy to think that the auto-reset function on our society and economy will kick in and everything will snap back to ‘normal’. 

I've got this wrong. It's not the V, U or L of economic recovery that might occur. It's the worst of all worlds, it's a W.

Over my last few blog postings, I have covered the work and theories of John Maynard Keynes and the impact that this had on the post-war economic recovery. This, I admit was purely by accident and not by design, as I never expected that only a few posts later I would using his work as part of a recovery discussion from what will be our worst economic depression for more than three hundred years.

In my last blog called “Unprecedented times require realistic expectations of what the future may be like”, I commented on what our future economic recovery may look like and used the letters V, U and L as visual representations. I wrote this during the latter half and the beginning of the first week in April when predictions of infection rates, deaths and both the social and economic impacts were just that, predictions.

Having been a student of Business and Economics for too long to mention, I have never been in a position to observe and comment like this before. I have written and commented on the good times and the bad and all of the bits in between when the good times seemed to last for a long time. My first real memory of economic policy shift came as Thatcher came to power and began the change to a market-led system, where ‘Trickle Down’ policies and privatisation replaced state control and the Keynesian theories previously discussed were sent to the ‘Seldom Leant’ shelf in the library of theories. I can recall the miners strike vividly and the shocks the policy changes had on unemployment figures. 

Little did I appreciate when I posted my last blog with John Maynard Keynes as its main protagonist that I would be writing the next one, over which such a short passage of time has seen the Bank of England, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund together with the new Chancellor, employ every economic tool in the toolbox to try and avert a global meltdown, including those commented on by Keynes.