So we're going to have a spate of bankruptcies in a week or so for those businesses that didn't get aid in the bailout bill?

Or robust depending on your point of view. The consequences for running out of cash are simply not that severe.

Let’s say you own a restaurant, your revenue goes to zero. You pay wages owed, then stop. Unemployment picks up a part of the loss for employees, their landlords feel the pain. Food goes bad, restaurant takes a loss on that. Rent doesn’t get paid, landlord foots the bill. Utilities go to nearly zero, etc.

By the time this is all over, we will see 3 things: 1) we will learn where safety nets did and didn’t work

2) landlords will have to lower rent to account for periodic lost income over the next 2 years or they will have to agree to self insure for losses during times of shutdowns.

3) we will have insights in to which countries have functioning healthcare systems and which don’t. Also which are efficient and not. Hopefully the globe can improve their policies.

this is both a pro and a con. If companies could hold on indefinitely without running a sustainable model, then old companies would never die and disruption would be much harder. To analogize it to a HN audience, this would likely mean that Yahoo/AOL would still be the dominant search engines.

Structural changes aren't that easy to make, and often have unintended consequences. Glibly advocating for some immense change in the system can bring about severe ripples that are not so easily undone.

Rather than see this as pointing to how fragile the economic system is, I view it as how wrong the current zeitgeist around business practices (having money is lost opportunity) and which businesses truly are viable (businesses that run up years worth of debt chasing some remote possibility of an explosion of profit).

I generalized (“TLDR”), as whether they have 13 days, 30 days, or 45 days matters little. Regardless, few businesses have enough cash reserves to survive this black swan event. When you’re dead, how dead you are isn’t terribly important (the COVID pandemic will drag on for months). Mea culpa for not making that more clear.

Just like lots of individuals aren’t able to have 6-12 months of cash on hand, many small businesses aren’t able. For a lot of restaurants, that might mean savings hundreds of thousands of dollars when a month’s profit might be $2000, so saving all your profits for a decade just to have an emergency fund. (Small restaurants aren’t a good way to make money generally)

The difference is that businesses can acquire loans. That was why 2008 was so dire -- the musical chairs game of toxic subprime mortgage made it difficult for banks to lend money. For whatever reason, it's just far simpler for a certain class of small business to piggyback on the repo market, and when that seizes, so do they.

This time around the fed has been swatting anything that looks like a credit freeze, and there's no expected deficiencies in the banks themselves.

Do you mean "small business" or "small cap"? "Small cap" publicly traded companies are bigger than "small businesses"