"To be blunt, rather than blame the government, the banks could have done more to help small firms and change their procedures."
That's the view of economist Dylan Jones Evans on the row between banks, businesses, and government in the UK over the apparent ineffectiveness of government-backed loans designed to mitigate the pandemic effect.
You can read the rest of our interview with Jones below – but don't worry, it's not at all as bleak as his initial outlook.
As well as some of the more obvious sectors hit by the virus, today we look at one of the potentially overlooked industries: fashion.
Oil firms and airlines have been covered frequently since the outbreak of the pandemic, because they have lost so much money over such a short period.
But what about the makers of sunglasses and sun cream? With few people hopeful of a summer holiday this year, sales of sunglasses have fallen. The recently merged EssilorLuxottica has already suffered a 10 percent fall in sales and said there's worse to come. And Beiersdorf, which owns several skincare brands, said it's had a nearly 40 percent drop in sales of sunblocks and lotions.
Finally, Qantas has put its "Project Sunrise" on the backburner. While the prospect of flying direct from the Australian hubs to New York might sound luxurious to some, I can't think of much worse than 24 hours on a plane without the chance to stretch out and explore a new airport on layover. It's important to concentrate on the small things during lockdown…
Happy reading,
Patrick Atack
Digital business correspondent
P.S. Did you know we send this briefing by email, too? You can sign up to receive it here.
A landmark ruling by a German court could scupper the European Central Bank's main stimulus scheme, the Public Sector Purchase Program. Judges in Karlsruhe said the German central bank must stop buying government bonds under the 2015 program. The court disagreed with the European Court of Justice, which previously ruled the scheme legal and proportionate.
The U.S. Treasury Department announced on Monday it is borrowing about $3 trillion this quarter. The money is being used in large part to subsidize economic rescue efforts in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
HelloFresh, the meal delivery service, said its number of active customers in the first quarter increased by 68 percent year-on-year, to 4.18 million. Strong revenue grew 66 percent compared with 2019, to $758 million.
UK preliminary car sales figures from industry body the SMMT show only 4,000 cars were registered in April: the lowest monthly level since 1946. April's figure marked a 97 percent plunge in sales from the same month last year.
Chinese electronics firm Xiaomi said it will restart its production in India by June, after it was shut down due to the coronavirus. Xiaomi led sales of smartphones in India over the first quarter of 2020.
The Irish beef industry is suffering severe losses as prices drop and the pandemic puts stress on the production and export of meat. The Irish Farmers' Association said around $200-per-cattle was being lost due to the pandemic.
The Iranian parliament has approved a government-proposed change to currency, with four decimals taken off the rial, and the currency renamed the "toman." The move is designed to lessen the internal psychological effects of sanctions, which have left the rial worth $0.000024.
Australian airline Qantas has shelved plans to launch the world's longest non-stop commercial flights, after the global pandemic affected both the global air travel market, and Qantas's cashflow. Project Sunrise, which aimed to fly from Melbourne and Sydney to New York and Europe, will be put on hold while an internal review is held.
Fiat Chrysler Automobiles scrapped its 2020 outlook and revealed a first-quarter loss of $1.8 billion. The Italian-American firm said it remains committed to its deal to merge with PSA "by the end of this year or early 2021."
Oil output will drop to levels not seen since 2003 in the second quarter of 2020, according to Reuters. The accumulated output of Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, and Total is on track to be the lowest level in the past 17 years.
French oil giant Total reported that its first-quarter net income, group share, dropped to $34 million from $3.11 billion in the same quarter last year.
Beiersdorf, which owns Nivea and other cosmetics firms, said its hand cream, soap, and first-aid plaster sales have increased, even as sales of its La Prairie suncare products dropped 36 percent.
Microsoft will invest $1 billion in Poland's cloud computing provider Chmura Krajowa [National Cloud], which was set up by PKO Bank Polski and the Polish Development Fund to speed up digitalization of public administration and business.
Denmark's wind turbine producer Vestas suffered a surprising slip into an operating loss in the first quarter, despite reporting healthy sales. The firm blamed transportation and supply-chain issues, which it said were caused by the pandemic.
A $5.6 billion Czech government loan guarantee scheme has been approved by the European Commission's competition head, Margrethe Vestager. It will be used to support companies for which exports represent at least 20 percent of annual revenue.
Danish jewelry retailer Pandora revealed a spike in online sales in the first months of 2020, which, along with a reopening of high street stores in Germany, has encouraged investors.
Air France has said passengers must wear face masks from 11 May, to cooperate with French government rules. The airline will not provide masks, however. It comes as Irish carrier Aer Lingus said it would "review" its procedures after footage of a full plane flying from Belfast to London sparked anger on social media for lack of social distancing.
EssilorLuxottica, the sunglasses firm that owns brands including Oakley and Ray-Ban, reported a 10 percent drop in Q1 sales and warned that worse is yet to come, with the pandemic likely to affect sales over the European summer.
The Great Depression and World War II transformed people's wardrobes and COVID-19 unavoidably also become a new trendsetter, but it is up to designers to lead this change.
Dylan Jones Evans is professor of entrepreneurship at the University of South Wales. He spoke to CGTN Europe about how small- and medium-sized enterprises are faring during the pandemic lockdown.
Dylan, small businesses are crying out for these loans. The government says it provided for loan guarantees. What's the problem here?
Well, the main issue has been that the banks have been reluctant to lend to businesses. They actually are the most risky, the smaller firms, because the UK government was only guaranteeing 80 percent of the loans under their COVID-19 scheme.
And the other issue, of course, is the banks have been using their normal procedures, which take a considerable amount of time, despite the urgency of this crisis. So, to be blunt, rather than blame the government, the banks could have done more to help small firms and change their procedures to do so. But they haven't.
However, what's been really, really useful is to see the launch of these new bounce-back loans, which is something the UK government's introduced, which is now 100 percent guaranteed by the UK Treasury. And it seems to have transformed the lending environment here in the UK in that in its first day, 45,000 businesses have been processed by the banks and something like $1.6 billion of funding has actually gone out, which is far more than anybody expected.
And, of course, the challenge now is for the banks to be able to deal with the amount of applications they will have over the next few days.
The banks have blamed the government for dragging their feet. But banks have been widely criticized, haven't they, for failing to understand UK businesses. You work with small businesses, startups, SMEs. Is that your experience?
It is. I think this is a general misconception that people have about different sizes of businesses. And what you see is that, since the last recession of the last decade, it's those businesses employing less than 10 people that have created over 50 percent of the new jobs in the UK, not large businesses, not medium-sized businesses, not even small businesses, but those with less than 10 people.
And they've created over 2.3 million jobs. And what's important to realize is those are the ones that have been struggling to get access to funding from the government. And these bounce-back loans will help because, essentially, if these firms fail, then it's going to hit the employment market and the UK economy will take a far longer time to actually recover from the recession we're about to go into.