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World’s Oldest Central Bank Keeps Sounding Alarm on Fragility of Cashless Economies. Are Other Central Banks Listening?

May 11, 2024

World’s Oldest Central Bank Keeps Sounding Alarm on Fragility of Cashless Economies. Are Other Central Banks Listening?

At a time when the dominant narrative around cash is that its demise is all but inevitable, as well as broadly desirable, the 2024 payment report by Sweden’s Riksbank may offer a cautionary tale.

In October last year, in More Good News for Cash in Europe, More Bad News for Digital Dollar in US, we reported that recent developments suggest that the trend away from cash and toward purely digital-only payment systems may not be quite as smooth or as seamless as some may have wished or expected. One of the developments we highlighted in that report was growing concern among central bankers and politicians in Sweden, one of Europe’s most cashless economies, about the unintended consequences of driving cash out of the economy:

Even by late 2020, Sweden had less cash in circulation than just about anywhere else in the world, at around 1% of gross domestic product, according to the latest available data. That compares with 8% in the U.S. and more than 10% in the euro area. As a recent piece in Interesting Engineering notes, Sweden is already “officially cashless”:

Cash is never needed, not even for small purchases like hot chocolate at a Christmas market in Stockholm. All vendors have a mobile payment chip-and-PIN card reader like the one offered by Stockholm-based mobile payments company iZettle, or they accept payments through the mobile application Swish. Swishing is perhaps the easiest way of payment for everyone.

The Risks of Going Fully Cashless

But now the country is beginning to realise that an almost exclusively digital payments system comes with significant risks, especially at a time of heightened geopolitical tensions. In time-honoured fashion, the article in the UK Telegraph began with a spot of fearmongering about Vladimir Putin.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Big Brother Unchained: UK Government to Abolish Biometrics and Surveillance Safeguards As It Embraces Facial Recognition

November 1, 2023

Big Brother Unchained: UK Government to Abolish Biometrics and Surveillance Safeguards As It Embraces Facial Recognition

“The lack of attention being paid to [public safeguards] at such a crucial time is shocking, and destruction of the surveillance camera code that we’ve all been using successfully for over a decade is tantamount to vandalism.”

The United Kingdom is at the leading edge of many of the digital authoritarian trends sweeping ostensibly democratic nations. In one of the many dark ironies of our age, it is the government of George Orwell’s native Britain that is seeking to massively escalate its deployment of live facial recognition (LFR) technologies, despite the concerns raised about its potential impact. In late September, 180 rights groups and tech experts called on governments around the world to halt their use of facial recognition surveillance.

On the other side of the English channel, the EU Parliament has voted for a blanket ban on the use of LFR in public spaces, as too have some US cities. By contrast, the UK government is escalating its deployment of the controversial surveillance technology.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the son-in-law of Indian tech billionaire N R Narayana Murthy, is determined to transform the UK into a world leader in AI governance. Said governance apparently involves gutting many of the limited safeguards protecting the public from the potential downsides and dangers of AI, of which there are many. This, of course, is no accident; if there was any time the British public needed those safeguards, it would be right now, as the government unleashes facial recognition technologies across the urban landscape.

As we reported in early August, live facial recognition (LFR) surveillance, where people’s faces are biometrically scanned by cameras in real-time and checked against a database, is being used by an increasing number of UK retailers amid a sharp upsurge in shoplifting — with the blessing, of course, of the UK government…

…click on the above link to read the rest…

From Covert to Overt: UK Government and Businesses Seek to Unleash Facial Recognition Technologies Across Urban Landscape

August 6, 2023

From Covert to Overt: UK Government and Businesses Seek to Unleash Facial Recognition Technologies Across Urban Landscape

The Home Office is encouraging police forces across the country to make use of live facial recognition technologies for routine law enforcement. Retailers are also embracing the technology to monitor their customers.

It increasingly seems that the UK decoupled from the European Union, its rules and regulations, only for its government to take the country in a progressively more authoritarian direction. This is, of course, a generalised trend among ostensibly “liberal democracies” just about everywhere, including EU Member States, as they increasingly adopt the trappings and tactics of more authoritarian regimes, such as restricting free speech, cancelling people and weakening the rule of law. But the UK is most definitely at the leading edge of this trend. A case in point is the Home Office’s naked enthusiasm for biometric surveillance and control technologies.

This week, for example, The Guardian revealed that the Minister for Policing Chris Philip and other senior figures of the Home Office had held a closed-door meeting with Simon Gordon, the founder of Facewatch, a leading facial recognition retail security company, in March. The main outcome of the meeting was that the government would lobby the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on the benefits of using live facial recognition (LFR) technologies in retail settings. LFR involves hooking up facial recognition cameras to databases containing photos of people. Images from the cameras can then be screened against those photos to see if they match.

The lobbying effort was apparently successful. Just weeks after reaching out to the ICO, the ICO sent a letter to Facewatch affirming that the company “has a legitimate purpose for using people’s information for the detection and prevention of crime” and that its services broadly comply with UK Data Protection laws, which the Sunak government and UK intelligence agencies are trying to gut. ..

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Bankruptcies Soar Across EU, As Companies Hit Wall At Fastest Rate Since Records Began in 2015

March 14, 2023

Bankruptcies Soar Across EU, As Companies Hit Wall At Fastest Rate Since Records Began in 2015

Legions of European companies are succumbing to the final straw of Europe’s largely self-inflicted energy crisis.

Bankruptcy proceedings in the Canary Islands, Spain’s heavily tourism-dependent island chain, soared a whopping 276% year over year in 2022, according to the latest data published by the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) in its report, “The Effects of the Economic Crisis on Judicial Bodies.” The archipelago also saw the highest rate of dismissal claims in Spain, with around 400 of every 100,000 inhabitants losing their jobs.

But this trend is not unique to the Canary Islands, nor indeed Spain. It is happening across large swathes of Europe’s economies, as legions of businesses succumb to the final straw of Europe’s largely self-inflicted energy crisis.

In the EU as a whole the number of bankruptcy declarations initiated by businesses increased substantially (26.8%) quarter-on-quarter in the fourth quarter of 2022, reaching the highest levels on record since Eurostat began collecting EU-wide bankruptcy data in 2015. The number of bankruptcy declarations increased during all four quarters of 2022. As the Eurostat graph below shows, at the current rate of business destruction it won’t be long before businesses are closing at a faster rate than they are opening.

Line graph: Registrations of business an declarations of bankruptcies in the EU, seasonally adjusted, 2015=100, Q1 2015-Q4 2022

This trend, of course, was not hard to foresee. In August 2022, I warned that the EU’s largely self-inflicted energy crisis and resulting inflation is tipping legions of small businesses over the edge:

After reeling from one crisis to another, Europe’s heavily indebted and deeply debilitated small businesses — the backbone of the economy — face the ultimate threat from energy shortages and soaring prices.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Is Switzerland About to Become First Country to Outlaw a Cashless Society?

February 18, 2023

Is Switzerland About to Become First Country to Outlaw a Cashless Society?

As in neighboring Germany and Austria, cash is still king in Switzerland albeit a much diminished one. But the Swiss will soon have the chance to vote on whether to preserve notes and coins indefinitely.

This is a rare positive news story that, perhaps unsurprisingly, has received next to no attention beyond Swiss borders. As far as I can tell, none of the legacy media in the US, UK, France, Germany or Spain have even bothered to cover the story. Indeed, it only registered on my radar a couple of days ago, over a week after the story initially broke, because an acquaintance of mine with family in Switzerland told me about it.

So, here’s the basic thrust of the story: At the beginning of last week, a Swiss pressure group with libertarian leanings called the Swiss Freedom Movement (FBS) announced it had collected enough signatures (111,000) to trigger a national vote on preserving cash for posterity. If passed, the initiative would require the federal government to ensure that coins and banknotes are always available in sufficient quantities. What’s more, any attempt to replace the Swiss Franc with another currency — quite possibly a reference to a central bank digital currency — would also have to be put to popular vote.

From Reuters:

Swiss citizens will get the chance to try to ensure their economy never becomes cashless, a pressure group said, after collecting enough signatures on Monday to trigger a popular vote on the issue.

The Free Switzerland Movement (FBS) says cash is playing a shrinking role in many economies, as electronic payments become the default for transactions in increasingly digitised societies, making it easier for the state to monitor its citizens’ actions.

Cash Still King in Switzerland, Albeit a Much Diminished One

Companies in UK Are Hitting the Wall at Fastest Rate Since Global Financial Crisis

February 4, 2023

Companies in UK Are Hitting the Wall at Fastest Rate Since Global Financial Crisis

As the price of everything, including debt, continues to soar, life is getting harder and harder for the UK’s heavily indebted businesses.

Business insolvencies in the UK surged by 57% in 2022, to 22,109, according to the latest data from the Insolvency Service, a UK government agency that deals with bankruptcies and companies in liquidation. It is the highest number of insolvencies registered annually since 2009, at the height of the Global Financial Crisis.

Last year “was the year the insolvency dam burst,” said Christina Fitzgerald, the president of R3, the insolvency and restructuring trade body. Insolvencies peaked in the fourth quarter, underscoring the compounding pressures on companies grappling with surging costs and rapidly slowing economic activity.

“Supply-chain pressures, rising inflation and high energy prices have created a ‘trilemma’ of headwinds which many management teams will be experiencing simultaneously for the first time,” Samantha Keen, UK turnround and restructuring strategy partner at EY-Parthenon and president of the Insolvency Practitioners Association (IPA), told the Financial Times. “This stress is now deepening and spreading to all sectors of the economy as falling confidence affects investment decisions, contract renewals and access to credit.”

Other headwinds include soaring interest rates, falling consumer demand, nationwide strikes, lingering Brexit-induced supply chain issues, an epidemic of quiet quitting and both chronic and acutely bad government.

Closest to the Edge

None of this, of course, should come as a surprise. Of all the large economies in Europe, the UK’s is arguably closest to the cliff edge. As newspaper headlines trumpeted this week, the UK economy this year will probably fare worse than Russia’s sanction-hit economy, according to the IMF’s latest forecasts. But then the same could be said of many other European economies, including Germany and Italy.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

Unbeknown to Most, A Financial Revolution Is Coming That Threatens to Change Everything (And Not for the Better)

March 27, 2022

Unbeknown to Most, A Financial Revolution Is Coming That Threatens to Change Everything (And Not for the Better)

Given how much is at stake, this financial revolution is among the most important questions today’s societies could possibly grapple with. It should be under discussion in every parliament of every land, and every dinner table in every country in the world.

Around 90 central banks are either in the process of experimenting with or are already piloting central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). In a world of just over 190 countries that is a large contingent, but given they include the European Central Bank (ECB) which alone represents 19 Euro Area economies, the actual number of economies involved is well over 100. They include all G20 economies and together represent more than 90% of global GDP.

Three CBDCs have already gone fully live in the past two years: the so-called DCash in the Eastern Caribbean, the Sand Dollar in the Bahamas and the eNaira in Nigeria. The International Monetary Fund, the world’s most powerful supranational financial institution, has been lending its expertise in the roll out of CBDCs. In a recent speech the Fund’s President Kristalina Georgieva lauded the potential benefits (on which more later) of CBDCs while heaping praise on the “ingenuity” of the central banks busily trying to conjure them into existence.

Also firmly on board is the world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, which helps many of the world’s largest central banks, including the Federal Reserve and the ECB, manage their assets while obviously keeping all potential conflicts of interests at bay. The fund was the largest beneficiary of the Federal Reserve’s bailout of exchange-traded funds during the market rout of Spring 2020.

In his latest letter to investors, the CEO of BlackRock, Larry Fink, said the Ukrainian conflict has the potential to accelerate the development of digital currencies across the world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Banks Around World Are Suffering Big Outages, Leaving Millions of Customers in Lurch At Worst Possible Time

October 1, 2021

Banks Around World Are Suffering Big Outages, Leaving Millions of Customers in Lurch At Worst Possible Time

Twenty banks (some suffering repeated outages), six countries (one in lockdown), five continents, tens of millions of unhappy customers.

There’s never a good time for your bank’s IT system to go down. But few can be worse than in the middle of a lockdown. It’s difficult to leave home, your local branch may not be open, and as a result you are more reliant than ever on digital banking services. In New Zealand, now in its seventh week of nationwide lockdown, one of the country’s largest lenders, Kiwibank, went down on Tuesday, leaving many of its customers in the lurch. It is one of a string of IT outages the bank has suffered over the past three weeks, after a DDoS attack on New Zealand’s third largest Internet provider caused IT crashes at a number of lenders, including Commonwealth Bank and Anz Bank.

In a DDoS attack hackers overwhelm a site by getting huge numbers of bots to connect to it all at once, rendering it inaccessible. Servers are not breached, data is not stolen but it can still cause plenty of disruption.

24 Million Unhappy Customers

New Zealand is not the only country to have suffered major outages within its banking system in recent weeks. Other countries include the UK, Japan, South Africa, Venezuela and Mexico, though there are no doubt more (if you know of any, It would be great if you could provide details in the comments section).

On September 12, operating failures at Mexico’s largest bank, BBVA Mexico, left 24 million account holders unable to use the bank’s 13,000 ATMs, its mobile app or in-store payments for almost 20 hours. It being a Sunday, customers could not even avail of the lender’s in-branch cash services.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Spiking Inflation, Rate Hikes, and Debt Defaults in Latin America

May 16, 2021

Spiking Inflation, Rate Hikes, and Debt Defaults in Latin America

Mexico and Brazil, having seen the economic destruction that high inflation can wreak, don’t want to see it again.

Latin America will soon be hit by a wave of business bankruptcies and defaults, according to Jesús Urdangaray López, the CEO of CESCE, Spain’s biggest provider of export finance and insurance. CESCE insures companies, mainly from Spain, against the risk of their customers not paying due to bankruptcy or insolvency. It also manages export credit insurance on behalf of the Spanish State.

CESCE’s biggest clients are large Spanish companies with big operations in Latin America. For many of those companies, including Spain’s two largest banks, Grupo Santander and BBVA, Latin America is its biggest market. CESCE’s three biggest shareholders are the Spanish State and, yes, Spain’s two largest banks, Grupo Santander and BBVA.

BBVA, which is heavily invested in Argentina, warned about the worsening situation in the country. If Argentina’s economy continues its inflationary spiral, it could end up affecting BBVA’s overall performance and financial health, the Spanish bank said.

Argentina’s government is once again trying to restructure its foreign-currency debt with the IMF, having already defaulted on the debt once since the virus crisis began.

Ecuador was first to default on its foreign currency debt, followed by Argentina, then Surinam, Belize, and Surinam twice more — six sovereign defaults so far in 13 months.

Latin America has been hard hit by the virus crisis. But the region’s cash-strapped governments with weak currencies and surging inflation cannot afford to provide the sort of financial support programs being rolled out in more advanced economies. Fiscal response has added just 28 cents of extra deficit spending for every dollar of lost output…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Producer Prices Surge. Germany, China, other Countries Are Now Exporting Inflation, Adding to US Inflation Pressures

April 26, 2021

Producer Prices Surge. Germany, China, other Countries Are Now Exporting Inflation, Adding to US Inflation Pressures

Central banks still brush it off as just “temporary.”

Producer prices of German industrial products in March rose by 0.9% from February, after having risen by 0.7% in February from January, and after having spiked by 1.4% in January from December, the biggest month-to-month jump since 2008.

Compared to March last year, producer prices jumped by 3.7%, according to the German Federal Statistics Office (Destatis), the biggest year-over-year jump since November 2011. The surge began last fall, after sharp declines earlier in the year:

Part of what caused the 3.7% increase from March last year — but not the surge over the past few months — is the “base effect“, since in February and March last year the producer price index was declining, and the latest year-over-year results are measured from those low points.

But factory prices have been rising on a month by month basis for the seventh straight months — with large increases over the past three months. And that has nothing to do with the base effect.

Prices of intermediate goods jumped by 5.7% year over year in March, the fastest since July 2011, due mainly to sharp rises in the price of secondary raw material (47%) and prepared feed for farm animals (16%). There were also increases in durable consumer goods (1.4%) and energy (8%), which in large part were driven by a sharp increase in electricity prices (9.6%).

Producer prices are now rising fast in the major manufacturing economies.

In China input costs rose 4.4% in March from a year earlier up from a 1.7% increase in February. It was the sharpest rise since July 2018. As the world’s biggest exporter, China’s rising prices stoke inflation around the world.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Paper Dollars in Circulation Globally Spike amid Hot Demand. But a Mexican Bank, after Run-ins with the US, Can No Longer Unload its Hoard of Paper Dollars

January 4, 2021

Paper Dollars in Circulation Globally Spike amid Hot Demand. But a Mexican Bank, after Run-ins with the US, Can No Longer Unload its Hoard of Paper Dollars

Triggering a showdown — Government of Mexico v. Central Bank — over paper dollars, with ramifications in the US and globally.

The amount of “currency in circulation” – the paper dollars wadded up in people’s pockets and purses, stuffed under mattresses, or packed into suitcases and safes overseas – jumped again in the week ended December 30 to a new record of $2.09 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, where currency in circulation is a liability, not an asset. This was up by 16%, or by $293 billion, from February before the Pandemic. The amount has doubled since 2011:

This amount of currency in circulation is a function of demand – and that demand has been red hot: US Banks have to have enough paper dollars on hand to satisfy demand at ATMs and bank branches. Foreign banks will also request paper dollars from their correspondent banks in the US, or return unneeded cash to them.

When there is demand for paper dollars, banks buy more of them from the Fed. They pay for them usually with Treasury securities they hold or with excess reserves they have on deposit at the Fed.

The surge of paper dollars is a sign of hoarding, not of increased payments. In the US, the share of paper dollars for payments has been declining for years, replaced by electronic payment methods, such as credit and debit cards, PayPal, Zelle and similar systems, all kinds of smartphone-based payment systems, the automated clearinghouse (ACH) system, and checks every now and then.

During periods of uncertainty, people load up on cash, as they have done leading up to Y2K, during the Financial Crisis, and now during the Pandemic.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Three Big Retailer Casualties in One Week: UK Retail Landlords Reel after Worst Week of Nightmare Year

December 8, 2020

Three Big Retailer Casualties in One Week: UK Retail Landlords Reel after Worst Week of Nightmare Year

Some property owners are more exposed to the fallout than others.

The UK’s retail property sector was hammered by three big corporate casualties last week, even as the country’s shopping centers began reopening after another lockdown. Two of them occurred on the same day: December 1. First, the fashion retail group Arcadia — owner of brands such as Topshop, Burton and Miss Selfridge, with 422 stores in the UK — crashed into bankruptcy. Hours later, the 242-year old department store Debenhams, with 124 stores in the UK, and which had already entered administration twice since April 2019, went into liquidation, after its last remaining prospective buyer, JD Sports, lost interest and walked away from rescue talks. This came just a day after women’s fashion retailer Bonmarche Ltd. filed for administration, putting over 225 stores in jeopardy.

Debenhams will now be closing all of its stores while it remains to be seen how many of Bonmarche Ltd and Arcadia’s stores will be shuttered. One thing is for sure: an even larger hole is about to be left in the UK’s already decimated retail property landscape.

Between them, Debenhams and Arcadia rented a grand total of 16.6 million square feet of store space, with the former accounting for more than 11 million square feet, according to Estate Gazette’s Radius Data Exchange.

Over 28 million square feet of retail space has already been permanently shut so far this year in the U.K. That’s nearly eight times the total amount shut (3.6 million square feet) in 2019 and over double the amount in 2018 (12.1 million square foot). And the 2020 figure doesn’t even include the fallout from Debenhams’ demise and Arcadia’s bankruptcy.

Some property owners are more exposed to that fallout than others:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How the Unemployment Fiasco in Europe Is Kept out of Official Unemployment Rates

November 16, 2020

How the Unemployment Fiasco in Europe Is Kept out of Official Unemployment Rates

The massive and once-again extended Pandemic-era furlough programs serve their purpose, but…

In Europe, people who are furloughed are paid under government programs via their employers. Many of these programs have been created during the Pandemic. In theory, these people still have jobs. In practice, they’re not working, or are working heavily reduced hours. But they do not count as “unemployed” and are not reflected in the “unemployment” numbers. So throughout the Pandemic, the official unemployment rates barely ticked up, compared to the last crisis, and remain low for the EU era, despite tens of millions of people who’d stopped working due to the lockdowns (chart via Eurostat):

Under these furlough programs, the government pays companies, who in turn pay employees between 60% and 84% of their monthly wage. In some cases, the workers work fewer hours for less pay; in others, they don’t work at all. The workers take a hit to their income but their jobs remain intact, at least for the duration of the program.

The UK adopted a sweeping furlough program at the beginning of its last lockdown. Businesses can claim 80% of a staff member’s regular monthly salary, up to a maximum of £2,500. The money must be passed on to the employee and can also be topped up by the employer.

But the unemployment rate has begun to rise as people come off furlough, and those whose jobs disappeared entered official unemployment. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.8% in the three months to September, from 4.5% in Q2 and from 3.9% a year earlier, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS). In London, the unemployment rate surged by 1.2 percentage points from the previous quarter, to 6%, the largest quarterly increase in unemployment since the ONS started tracking the data in 1992.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Extend-and-Pretend Caused Bankruptcies to Plunge in Germany, France, Spain. Now Central Banks Tell Banks to Prepare for Bankruptcy Surge

October 17, 2020

Extend-and-Pretend Caused Bankruptcies to Plunge in Germany, France, Spain. Now Central Banks Tell Banks to Prepare for Bankruptcy Surge

The “second wave,” if prolonged, could cause bad loans to almost triple, to €1.4 trillion, says the ECB.

German banks need to prepare themselves for a sharp spike in corporate bankruptcies early next year, the Bundesbank warned this week in its 2020 Financial Stability Review. It anticipates around 6,000 insolvencies in the first quarter of 2021. While this would be a little lower than at the peak quarter of the Global Financial Crisis, the Bundesbank cautioned that it “cannot rule out that … a lot more companies will go bankrupt than is currently expected.”

Although Germany is in the grip of its worst economic contraction since World War 2, fewer insolvencies have been filed this year compared to 2019. This is the result of the weird bailout-and-stimulus economy, and includes these factors:

Banks’ broad application of forbearance measures, which has given businesses extra financial leeway;
The roll out of state-backed emergency loans and grants for struggling businesses, large and small, which forms the backbone of the country’s €1.3 trillion (so far) stimulus program;
Germany’s “Kurzarbeit” social insurance program, which enables employers to reduce their employees’ working hours instead of laying them off, picking up government subsidies in the process.
And most importantly, the temporary suspension of bankruptcy-declaration requirements.

Helped along by these measures, the number of firms declaring insolvency in Germany fell 6.2% to 9,006 in the first half of this year from the same period last year, trending at their lowest level in 25 years, even as the economy shrinks at its fastest rate in over 70 years.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What’s to Be Done Now with All These Zombie Companies?

September 15, 2020

What’s to Be Done Now with All These Zombie Companies?

Saving the Zombies in Europe.

Europe’s zombie firms are multiplying like never before. In Germany, one of the few European economies that has weathered the virus crisis reasonably well, an estimated 550,000 firms — roughly one-sixth of the total — could already be classified as “zombies”, according to research by the credit agency Creditreform. It’s a similar story in Switzerland.

Zombie firms are over-leveraged, high-risk companies with a business model that is not remotely self-sustaining, since they need to constantly raise fresh money from new creditors to pay off existing creditors. According to the Bank for International Settlements’ definition, they are unable to cover debt servicing costs with their EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) over an extended period.

The number of zombie companies has been rising across Europe and the Anglosphere — due to of two main factors:

Central banks’ easy money forever policies, which brought interest rates down to such low levels that even firms with a reasonable chance of default have been able to continue issuing debt at serviceable rates. Many large zombie firms have also been bailed out, in some cases more than once. Spanish green energy giant Abengoa has been bailed out three times in five years.
The tendency of poorly capitalized banks to continually roll over or restructure bad loans. This is particularly prevalent in parts of the Eurozone where banks are especially weak, such as Italy.

A Bank of America report from July posits that the UK accounts for a staggering one third of all zombie companies in Europe. They represent 20% of all companies in the U.K, up four percentage points since March, according to a new paper by the conservative think tank Onward. In the two hardest-hit sectors — accommodation and food services, and arts, entertainment and recreation — the proportion of zombie firms has soared by 9 and 11 percentage points respectively, to 23% and 26%.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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