Sometimes change is so vast and dislocating that it is hard to tell disaster from opportunity. In March Ocado, a British online grocer, saw its servers so overloaded that it suspected hackers.“We thought that we were under a denial-of-service attack,” says Tim Steiner, the company’s boss. In fact, Britons were desperately trying to arrange to get food and drink deliveries for the weeks ahead. After Boris Johnson, the prime minister, announced a national lockdown the site filled three weeks’ worth of delivery slots in an hour.
释：
[if !supportLists]1、[endif]dislocate使脱臼；扰乱，使混乱。dislocate就是把某物从正确的或规则的地方移走，或使其中断。当一个家庭搬到一个新的城镇时，孩子们会感到dislocating，如果你扔保龄球动作不当，你的肩膀可能会dislocating。
用在这里形容经济或社会混乱。【经济学人常见用法】如These policies could cause severe economic and social dislocation.这些政策可能引起严重的经济和社会混乱。
[if !supportLists]2、[endif]slot n.位置；狭槽
He has a regular slot on the late-night programme.他在深夜节目中有一档固定栏目
有时变化是如此巨大和混乱，很难区分灾难和机遇。今年3月，英国一家在线杂货商Ocado发现其服务器超载，怀疑有黑客入侵。该公司老板蒂姆·施泰纳（Tim Steiner）说：“我们以为自己遭到了“拒绝服务”的攻击。事实上，英国人在接下来的几周里都在拼命寻找食物和饮料。在首相鲍里斯约翰逊（Boris Johnson）宣布全国性封锁之后，该网站在一小时内填满了三周的投递时段。
Companies for which the ill wind of covid-19 has blown some good have been very much in the minority. In February, even as stockmarkets began to crash, business leaders could console themselves with three observations. First, they bore no blame for the crisis. Some downturns, such as the dotcom bust of 2000-01 and the financial crisis of 2007-09 are seen through a quasi-biblical lens of retribution—just deserts for orgies of speculation. This was more like a tsunami, or a war; its casualties had some hope of being treated as innocent victims deserving of support, rather than the authors of their own fate.
新冠病毒的逆风吹来了一些好消息，但对这些公司来说，这只是很少数的部分。今年2月，即使股市开始崩盘，商界领袖也可以通过三点观察来安慰自己。首先，他们对这场危机不负责任。一些经济衰退，如2000-01年的互联网泡沫破裂和2007-09年的金融危机，都是通过一个准圣经的视角来观察的，这是对投机狂欢的惩罚。这更像是一场海啸或战争；它的伤亡者有希望被视为应该得到支持的无辜受害者，而不是他们自己命运的缔造者。
释：
[if !supportLists]1、[endif]ill wind (使人因祸得福的)坏事
But it's an ill wind; I recovered and married one of my nurses from that hospital.
但是因祸得福：我恢复了健康，并娶了那所医院护理我的一位护士
[if !supportLists]2、[endif]quasi-biblical 准圣经的
[if !supportLists]3、[endif]retribution严惩;惩罚
People are seeking retribution for the latest terrorist outrages.
人们在设法对恐怖分子最近的暴行进行严惩。
4、orgies 狂欢
Second, most companies—particularly in America—went into the crisis in pretty solid shape; employment was booming, order books were relatively full and the easing of America’s trade war with China augured well. Third, within days of global markets melting down China was tentatively reopening some factories and lifting some of its draconian lockdowns. This suggested a v-shaped recovery, or at worst a u- shaped one, something requiring not life- and-death measures but a battened-down Sufi stoicism: “This, too, shall pass.” As Dara Khosrowshahi, who runs Uber, said confidently as late as early March, “At least from what we’ve seen the bounceback can be pretty quick.”
释：
[if !supportLists]1、[endif]augured是…的预兆
The doubts she had felt augured ill for the enterprise.
她心存疑虑，这对企业来说是个坏兆头。
2、draconian 严酷的;残忍的（extremely cruel and severe）
draconian measures to lower US healthcare costs.
削减美国医疗保健费用的严厉措施
第二，大多数公司，特别是美国的公司，都以相当稳固的形式进入了危机；就业率迅速增长，订单相对充足，美国与中国的贸易战有所缓和，这是一个好兆头。第三，在全球市场崩盘的几天内，中国开始有节制地重开一些工厂，并解除了一些严厉的封锁。这意味着一个v型复苏，或者最坏的情况下是一个u型复苏，不需要采取生死措施，而需要一个坚定的苏菲坚忍：“这也会过去的。”正如Uber的运营商达拉•科斯洛沙希（Dara Khosrowshahi）在3月初自信地说，“至少从我们所看到的反弹可以相当快。”
Unfortunately, many European countries and some American states immediately began to impose social-distancing measures and, soon thereafter, lockdowns. Businesses found themselves looking into the abyss of a largely moribund economy. According to the International Labour Organisation sectors now facing a severe decline in output, and thus a high risk of layoffs and furloughs, employ almost 38% of the global workforce: some 1.25bn workers (see chart 1 on next page).
释：
[if !supportLists]1、[endif]abyss深渊
Ahead of them was a gaping abyss.他们前面是一个巨大的深渊
[if !supportLists]2、[endif]moribund即将倒闭的;濒于崩溃的
the moribund economy毫无生机的经济
[if !supportLists]3、[endif]furlough休假
This could mean a massive furlough of government workers.
这可能意味着大量的政府工作人员要暂时下岗。
不幸的是，许多欧洲国家和一些美国国家立即开始实施社会疏远措施，此后不久便实行封锁。企业发现自己正在寻找一个基本上奄奄一息的经济的深渊。根据国际劳工组织（International Labour organization）的数据，目前面临产出严重下滑、因而面临裁员和休假高风险的行业，雇用了全球近38%的劳动力：约12.5亿名工人（见下页图表1）。
Government handouts in America and Europe should ease the pain of some of that unemployment—if fully implemented and if the benefit systems work. But many of the proposed beneficiaries, such as florists, gyms and bakeries, will still go short. Whether they scrape by or go under, that will prolong the slump in consumer confidence—as will the possibility of a second wave of illness after restrictions are lifted. One pessimistic Wall Street banker talks of a future neither v-shaped, u-shaped or even w-shaped, but “more like a bathtub”.
[if !supportLists]1、[endif]scrape by勉强维持
So he would scrape by as well.所以他倒是可以勉强通过。
2、prolong the slump in consumer confidence延长消费者信心的衰退【写作推荐】
美国和欧洲的政府救济措施如果得到充分实施，如果福利制度奏效，应该可以减轻部分失业者的痛苦。但许多被提议的受益人，如佛罗伦萨艺术家、健身房和面包店，仍然会缺钱。不管他们是勉强过活还是破产，这都将延长消费者信心的衰退，以及取消限制后可能出现的第二波疾病。一位悲观的华尔街银行家谈到，未来既不是v形，u形，甚至w形，而是“更像一个浴缸”。
Yet even as they walk through the valley of the shadow of death, chief executives and corporate strategists are beginning to look to the post-covid world to come. What they think they see, for good or ill, is an acceleration. Three existing trends—the de- globalisation unpicking the business world that grew up in the 2000s; the infusion of data-enabled services into ever more aspects of life; a consolidation of economic power into the hands of giant corporations—look likely to proceed at a faster rate than before, and perhaps to go further, too. Optimists—and business folk tend to look on the bright side—see this acceleration as offering new possibilities for rein- vention, even resurrection. Pessimists see inefficiencies and insularity weighing on profitability for many years to come.
[if !supportLists]1、[endif]consolidation（企业、诉讼和诉讼人的）合并；巩固，加强，联合
But change brought about the growth and consolidation of the working class...
但是变革使得工人阶级发展壮大起来。
[if !supportLists]2、[endif]Pessimist悲观主义者 乐观主义者是optimist
[if !supportLists]3、[endif]Insularity孤立;心胸狭隘
然而，即使他们走过死亡阴影的山谷，首席执行官和企业策略师们也开始展望未来的后科维德世界。他们认为他们看到的，无论好坏，都是一种加速。三个现存的趋势：全球化使21世纪成长起来的商业世界失去了羁绊；数据服务进入了生活中越来越多的方面；经济力量被庞大的公司掌控，这三个趋势看起来可能会以比以前更快的速度前进，或许还会走得更远。乐观主义者和商界人士倾向于乐观地看待这种加速，认为它为控制甚至复苏提供了新的可能性。悲观主义者认为，在未来的许多年里，低效率和偏狭影响了盈利能力。
Whether or not such doldrums lurk in the future, the present is a mad swell of chop and change in which the fortunes of different regions and sectors vary wildly. China’s economy shows distinct signs of recovery. Bernstein, an investment firm, notes that many of the swanky metropolitan restaurants it tracks there were full by the first weekend in April. That said, many migrant workers have yet to return to work. Air and rail traffic remain severely cur- tailed, as do car sales. The Chinese, though, are at least making cars to sell. European and American plants are shuttered.
[if !supportLists]1、[endif]doldrum忧郁;郁闷
He's been in the doldrums ever since she left him.自从她离开他以来，他一直很消沉。
[if !supportLists]2、[endif]Swankyv摆阔的;时髦
She goes to a swanky private school.她上的是一所昂贵的私立学校。
[if !supportLists]3、[endif]shutter活动护窗;百叶窗
More than 70 000 shopkeepers have been forced to put up the shutters (= close down their businesses) in the past year.去年，有7万多家商店被迫关了门。
无论这种低迷是否潜伏在未来，现在是一个疯狂的波折和变化的浪潮，不同地区和部门的命运变化很大。中国经济显示出明显的复苏迹象。投资公司伯恩斯坦（Bernstein）指出，该公司跟踪的许多豪华的大都会棕褐色餐厅在4月的第一个周末就已经客满。也就是说，许多农民工还没有返回工作岗位。航空和铁路交通仍然严重受阻，汽车销售也是如此。不过，中国人至少在制造汽车来销售。欧洲和美国的工厂都关闭了。
Neither is the gloom within countries evenly spread. Some sectors are doing worse than others, and in all the fortunes of the most and least resilient are far apart (see chart 2 on next page). Should the com- ing recession not kill off animal spirits en- tirely, there will be lots of opportunities for corporate upheaval, takeovers and strate- gic shifts.
China’s government may encourage its state-owned firms to go global by buying distressed car companies in Europe. The share price of Daimler is less than half what it was when Geely, a Chinese carmaker, bought a 10% stake in 2018. Car companies may also see offers from technology giants keen to improve co-operation between metal bashers and the engineers of autono- my—currently wary at best. The healthier airlines, such as Qantas and iag, owner of British Airways, will snap up airport slots from their bankrupt rivals and may try to acquire others only just staying aloft. Priv- ate-equity firms, which have mountains of committed investor cash, may start buying up fundamentally sound but impecunious suppliers in various industries, aware that when demand returns such companies will see its first fruits. Anand Mahindra,chairman of the Mahindra group, one of In- dia’s largest conglomerates, says that as well as big corporations buying smaller ones, many smaller firms will look to merge with peers.
Around the world, small and medium- sized firms are particularly exposed. In America, a survey published on April 3rd by MetLife, an insurer, and the us Chamber of Commerce found that 54% of non-sole- proprietor firms with fewer than 500 em- ployees were either closed or expected to close in coming weeks. It has been a similar story in China. As well as driving unem- ployment, this has systemic implications. Though such firms are often relatively in- efficient, the nimbler ones can play a role in supply chains that would be hard to du- plicate. Aware of this, some big firms, such as Unilever, are attempting to buoy up sup- pliers by paying them more quickly.
Much of this activity will happen on the fly, as disasters and opportunities present themselves. As time goes by, though, the currents of the great acceleration will begin to assert themselves. For companies en- meshed in the comparatively freewheel- ing, Anglo-American model of business that has been in competition with Chinese- style state capitalism in recent years it will be a distinct shock.
Take China and its supply-chain pri- macy first. By 2017, when average Chinese manufacturing wages had become as high as those in the poorer parts of Europe, it was clear that the logic which saw a large
fraction of the world’s supply chains pass through the country needed re-examining. The former boss of a big American com- pany’s Chinese operations says that in the past few years the trade war and other risks of business disruption saw many global firms seek to reduce their dependency on China. One of their favoured strategies was to put more business into factories else- where in Asia.
But the acute stage of China’s covid-19 crisis made it clear how essential China re- mains as a provider of inputs to such fac- tories elsewhere in Asia and around the world. “What people thought was a global supply chain was a Chinese supply chain,” says Mr Mahindra. The quest for supply chains independent of Beijing needs to go further, and deeper.
Joerg Wuttke, president of the eu Cham- ber of Commerce in China, says that if there is one lesson people are drawing from the pandemic in this regard it is that “single source is out and diversification is in.” In other words, companies do not just need suppliers outside China. They need to build out their choice of suppliers, even if doing so raises costs and reduces efficiency. Mr Mahindra expects to see new de- mand for production in Vietnam, Myan- mar and possibly, if it can grasp the opportunity, India.
For some, the need to have more suppli- ers looks like an opportunity to promote possibilities at home. The government- owned Development Bank of Japan plans to subsidise relocation costs of companies that bring production facilities back to the country. Rich Lesser, the ceo of Boston Consulting Group (bcg), which advises big global firms, says that robotics and other new approaches to manufacturing make the case for moving factories closer to home more compelling, because they re- duce the cost difference. Just as previous information technology was put to work
underpinning the spread of supply chains, so today’s can be used to shorten them— potentially making companies more re- sponsive to local tastes.
And the range of the changes informa- tion technology makes possible will only increase: that is the essence of the second current of post-covid acceleration. The growth of firms built on digital connec- tions with and between hundreds of mil- lions, or billions, of people, and which col- lect reams of cloud-based data in the process, was central to the bull market that met its end in February. That growth still has plenty of room to run.
Responding to covid-19 has seen many people and companies realise that it had more to offer them than they had realised. Zoom, an online videoconferencing ser- vice, was serving 10m customers a day at the beginning of the year, most of them in business meetings. Now it is providing 200m people a day not just with meetings, but with Tai Chi classes and “quarantinis”. Slack, which provides a medium by which far-flung colleagues can co-ordinate things, has become part of dinner-table conversation. It is not only young tech- companies, and tech companies that were previously mostly used by the young, that have prospered. Microsoft’s Teams product is gaining many converts. No one expects the amount of distance working ever again to be as low as it was before the virus hit.
Restrictions put in place during the sars outbreak of 2003 helped accelerate China’s embrace of e-commerce. Covid-19 is having a similar effect, even in econo- mies where e-commerce is already com- mon. Chris Grigg, boss of British Land, one of Britain’s biggest retail and office land- lords, says that as a result of covid-19 his company has brought forward by several years the time when it expects the share of shopping done online in Britain to double from its current 20%—already among the highest levels in the world. The pandemic may not just highlight the convenience of online life; it may also make some of its drawbacks less disturbing. Germans, who have historically well-founded privacy concerns, are resistant to anything that looks like “surveillance capitalism”. But Karl Haeusgen, chairman of hawe, a maker of hydraulic pumps, says an app that helped maintain public health by tracing covid-19 infections could make them less protective of their data. If that were the case, they might become converts to other data-driven business, too.
This trend will be good news for giants of the tech scene such as Alphabet, Amazon and Apple. So will other factors. The need for economic resilience will be added to the arguments against breaking up the big- gest tech companies. If the tech world splinters into rival Chinese and Western camps each side will want its champions. If things look pretty good for big tech, though, they look none too shabby for big everything else. As the world gets back on its feet, big firms will have better access to capital markets, giving them an extra edge over smaller competitors. And across the world there will be one increasingly big customer, too—the state. As Mr Mahindra says, “the only engine of consumption for the next 12 to 24 months will be govern- ment.” Big companies fit well with big gov- ernment: they make its life simpler; they
lobby it more assiduously.
These trends will inevitably have pernicious side-effects. Less dependence on
China will mean less access to the rapid- fire innovation that takes place there. The bigger the tech firms, the harder it will be for startups to gain sufficient scale to chal- lenge them. Not impossible; Zoom has done well in a world where bigger compa- nies offer services along similar lines. But more difficult.
But though innovative businesses may face challenges in the post-covid world, they may also help bring it into being. This is not just because pharmaceutical and bio- tech companies are feverishly searching for drugs and vaccines. It is because busi- ness can knit people together. Mr Lesser of bcg argues that companies which build a bond with “emotionally vulnerable” con- sumers during the crisis may help reduce their anxieties on the other side—anxieties which might otherwise linger. Businesses will need to encourage people back to res- taurants, bars and boutiques when lock- downs end but fears persist. And because small companies are being badly hit, re- covery in these sectors will need to see new relationships formed.
Mr Lesser recalls the anxiety he used to feel walking through Grand Central Station after September 11th 2001. He would look at the throngs and queues for coffee and quicken his step at the thought of another catastrophic attack. Eventually, though, that fear subsided and the cavernous space regained its appeal. This, too, shall pass.
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