Crash Landing

November 1, 2021

At beginning of March 2020, the U.S. economy was basking in an 11-year glow, with the Dow Jones sailing toward 30,000 and unemployment hitting rock bottom. Then came the pandemic, with ten million out of work and CEOs begging for help. Hoffman, a senior reporter at the Wall Street Journal, argues that the efficiency-crazed, wage-freezing, growth-on-the-cheap policies pursued by businesses in the last decade especially made the economy's crash landing worse.

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January 2, 2023
Lockdowns force giant corporations to their knees in this animated recap of the Covid-19 collapse. Journalist Hoffman draws on interviews with CEOs and Wall Street investors to recreate the pandemic’s impact on companies like Hilton Hotels and Airbnb, whose occupancies cratered; American Airlines, which lost most of its bookings to travel bans and fear of contagion; Ford Motor Company, which had to close its auto factories; and investment bank Goldman Sachs, which confronted chaotic markets where, briefly, demand for U.S. Treasury bonds—“normally the most easily tradable financial asset in the world”—dried up. It’s a narrative of panic, scrambles for loans from suddenly hostile banks, supplications for government bailouts (the airlines’ epic negotiation with treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, congressmen, and union adversaries to secure a $50 billion lifeline is a centerpiece), and adroit improvisation. Later chapters find executives flummoxed by the “Great Resignation,” which saw “more than twenty-seven million Americans quit their jobs between September of 2020 and the end of 2021.” The author embroiders her lucid rundown of financial and managerial travails with piquant anecdotes. Savvy analysis and colorful reportage make this an engrossing boardroom view of an economic cataclysm. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick Literary.

January 15, 2023
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.

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