New year, new lockdown. I’m instinctively sceptical that such severe restrictions on our lives can ever be justified, but two factors have surely tipped the balance in their favour.
The first, of course, is the far more rapid transmission of the new Covid variant. This has increased the benefits of locking down, as the risk of the NHS being overwhelmed by Covid patients is now much greater.
The second, more positively, is the rollout of the new vaccines, which has reduced at least some of the costs of locking down. This is because there is now light at the end of the tunnel, and households and businesses can be more confident that this is the final push.
Here we can take some comfort from the strong public support for the new lockdown, and the relative sanguine response in financial markets. In particular, the FTSE has continued to grind higher. Even…
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