In normal times it is still the case that industry cannot survive without a never-ending supply of debt from which to borrow. With the pandemic, the only way economies could survive pandemic countermeasures was for governments to artificially create great quantities of new money, forcing it into the financial system to bail everyone out. There is hardly an engineering company in the world that would survive the freezing of the debt markets because without the ability to roll the bonds and loans all large companies carry, they would become insolvent and fall into bankruptcy. This is why when central banks speak, everyone listens, because they control the levers of that system and even small changes have big impacts.
As I write it is not proven but it is definitely hoped that the Omicron variant of Covid, while wildly infectious, is not a killer and that it might even act as a road to herd immunity. This could see an end or at least the beginning of the...