Let's save companies and self-employed workers

It is not an economic discovery that a large part of business activity and employment worldwide has micro, small and medium-sized enterprises as its main pillar. 

Destroying this fabric is a suicide; there is a highly worrying circumstance that is happening right under our noses as a result of an explosive cocktail with the pandemic as its main ingredient; however, it is not the only one because government decisions, together with people's fear, serve as the fuse to blow it up. Pure dynamite. 

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has some preliminary figures on how the health emergency combined with closure and containment decisions to contain the first shockwave of SARS-CoV-2 has so far put at least 436 million companies globally - mainly in the four sectors most affected by the restrictions - at risk of outright closure.  

There are productive sectors which have been hit hard by the restrictions on the mobility of people, from the hotel and catering industry, the tourism sector, the hotel industry and the air transport sector; other activities equally located in the tertiary sector of production such as commerce, real estate, manufacturing and a multitude of services linked to tourism, leisure and cultural activity. 

The even more worrying figure reveals that out of these 436 million companies, some 389 million are self-employed workers who have suddenly found themselves up against the wall without sufficient savings or the necessary liquidity to meet their usual monthly commitments to their suppliers and the public treasury.

It has to be said: they have been left alone... we have left them unjustly and ungratefully as if they were the culprits when they are the victims; some of whom we have sent to intensive care units to finish dying in the absence of quick, accurate and realistic government decisions. 

Is there any country to grant them a tax amnesty? None that I know. On the contrary, several banks and financial institutions have agreed to renegotiate debts or extend deadlines.  

They are alone with their obligations, with immediate commitments and no sales, where will they get the income from? Furthermore, they have to cover mortgages and their respective family expenses full of loans and insurance payments.  

In Europe, the booming insurance industry has at least one insurance policy in someone's pocket, and I say at least one because some households pay up to five or more per month on average: home, business, car, health, life, school and even motorbike.  

Neither Germany, France, Spain, the United States, Mexico or even China have done enough to throw a huge lifeline to micro, small and medium-sized enterprises and to many of those brave self-employed people who believed, one day, in entrepreneurship. 

If these companies die, their efforts will be buried and their heritage burdened; and these are people who have had faith and believed in the productive system, who have believed in the formal economy, in paying taxes, creating jobs and making their dreams come true.  

Nor have I seen a huge effort on the part of any international organisation to come to their aid; macroeconomics has come to the rescue, but microeconomics has clearly not.  

This is not a financial crisis, it is not a debt crisis, it is not a current account crisis, it is not a systemic crisis, it is not a crisis derived from some commodity... it is a crisis generated by the absence of consumption; by the sudden collapse of demand for orderly closures, confinements and quarantines mixed with people's fear of being infected. 

Serious measures are urgently needed to avoid bankruptcy, ranging from a tax amnesty, freezing payment of debts for a time, injecting non-refundable resources so that they can have the solvency to avoid going into poverty, suspending payments of rent, insurance and services, and soft loans to cover suppliers. 

We, as consumers, must support small stores by buying and consuming; this is how we will help small businesses. If we let them go bankrupt, the damage to the middle class will be quite significant and we will end up regretting it.