CRASH LANDING

How the pandemic affected big business.

Former Wall Street Journal senior reporter Hoffman began to investigate the economic response to Covid-19 at the onset of the pandemic. Building on that initial reporting, she has interviewed more than 100 executives in key industries to find out how they handled the crisis and “the grief, social unrest, and general anxiety it fomented.” The author’s purview includes a wide swath of major companies in various sectors, including travel, hospitality, finance, and manufacturing. Delta, Ford, Hilton, Airbnb, and Goldman Sachs are among those whose leaders faced confusion and mounting stress as they became increasingly aware of the intensity and duration of the pandemic. “Executives who were used to three-year plans were making decisions on the fly,” writes Hoffman, “only to have to amend them days later, time and again.” American Airlines executives, for example, at first thought they didn’t need a government bailout, but as travel abated and cases mounted, they quickly found themselves begging for one. Many executives were frustrated by their negotiations with the federal government “about what it would take to forestall economic carnage.” Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin favored loans; some executives lobbied for grants. Union demands further complicated those conversations. Moreover, as executives weighed decisions affecting their employees’ well-being, they found themselves facing ever changing, and often contradictory, public health guidance. Hoffman details the legislative process that led to the $2 trillion CARES Act and the Paycheck Protection Program, which began mired in partisan conflict, with Democrats favoring protections for workers and municipal governments and Republicans siding with big business. As Hoffman sees it, the economic impact of the pandemic could have been much worse. As for top executives, “they became more communicative and transparent, found their voices on policy issues, and reestablished connections with their workers that they had lost” during the previous decade.

A well-informed perspective on a devastating crisis.