SaasOptics CEO, Tim McCormick has seen his share of businesses go from start-up to acquisition. Having helped businesses like ISS grow from $5M to over $400M and helped their IBM acquisition for $1.9B, he's the right person to detail how SaaS businesses can either misstep or experience rapid growth.

Keep on reading: M.R. Asks 3 Questions: Tim McCormick, CEO, SaaSOptics

Between April 10 - April 30, 2020, RevOps Squared partnered with SandHill Group to conduct research that will help us understand how financial planning and 2020 forecasts within the SaaS industry have been impacted by COVID-19. This is the summary report of our findings.

Keep on reading: SaaS Financial Impact Research Report: The Impact of a Pandemic on B2B SaaS Companies

Greece’s former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and Irish economist David McWilliams on the hope for a global new deal

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David McWilliams: I think it is fair to say that capitalism – in the course of this unprecedented crisis – has been suspended. We are not going back to where we were, to business as usual. The state has come back, and this episode will not be forgotten by the electorate. I don’t know where we are going, but one thing seems clear: we are not going back.

Yanis Varoufakis: I like this phrase: capitalism has been suspended. The last time capitalism was suspended in the west was during the second world war, with the advent of the war economy: a command economy that fixed prices. The war economy marked the transcendence of the standard capitalist model.

The fact that Germany is now in the same pile of shit as the rest of us offers a glimmer of hope

My sense is that the period when you could travel, engage, move, we might have reached the end of that open period.

This is an edited version of a conversation that will appear in A Vision for Europe 2020: Nothing But an Alternative, published this month by Eris.

Threadneedle Street says the economy hasn’t been as bad as this for 300 years – so it can only can get better

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It’s hard to be all that cheerful when you are bracing yourself for the biggest annual contraction in the economy since before the South Sea Bubble crisis of 1720, but somehow or other the Bank of England has managed to find some nuggets of hope amid all the gloom.

To be sure, the short-term news from Threadneedle Street was as grim as everybody had expected. Having fallen by 3% in the first three months of 2020, activity is projected to drop by a further 25% in the second quarter and by 14% over the calendar year.

Related: Don't expect a snapback for the UK economy after lockdown is lifted | Larry Elliott

One of the two main definitions of recession in the UK is at least two quarters of negative economic growth. Judged by this yardstick, the UK was last in recession in 2008-09, when there were six consecutive quarters of negative growth. 

We urgently need a fairer tax system so that rich people like me help solve the fallout from coronavirus, not just profit from it

• Gary Stevenson is an economist and former interest rate trader

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I made my first million the year Greece went under. I was 24 years old at the time.

I’d attended a presentation given by one of Citibank’s senior economists, in which he explained that government debts of the world’s major economies had grown to dangerous levels, and were continuing to grow. He warned that markets could stop lending to some of these governments, forcing a devastating round of austerity on to already battered economies.

If we repeat 2008, buying a house with one’s own wages will be a thing of the past

Related: Don't expect a snapback for the UK economy after lockdown is lifted | Larry Elliott

Pace of layoffs tests states’ unemployment benefits fund as 33m jobless Americans make claims in past seven weeks

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Another three million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week as the coronavirus pandemic continued to exact its terrible toll on the US jobs market.

More than 33 million jobless Americans have now made claims in the past seven weeks.

With biggest plunge in output in 300 years being predicted, we explore why the last great recession happened

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Queen Anne was on the throne. Work had just started on Blenheim Palace in honour of John Churchill’s victories over Louis XIV’s French armies in the war of Spanish succession. The union between England and Scotland was imminent.

1706 is how far economic historians have to look back to find a slump bigger than the one that now threatens the country as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Related: UK unemployment to double and economy to shrink by 14%, warns Bank of England

Business models reliant on maximum footfall are at odds with social distancing, leaving space for local shops and mutual aid

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With most local shops shuttered and online sales booming, it’s easy to imagine that coronavirus will deal a mortal blow to the high street. The images of empty public spaces that have come to define this crisis could be a warning of what life will be like after the lockdown, when people will fear crowds and social distancing will continue, either through self-policing or government directive.

The decline of public life is one of the biggest casualties of Covid-19. Zoom, Amazon and Netflix are unlikely to replace our human craving for it. Public discourse has shrunk to encompass the virus, while our daily lives have retreated into the private domestic sphere. Streets and public places, high streets in particular, are the physical setting for public life, and the impact of the virus is that life lived outside – socialising, shopping, working – has been almost entirely curtailed.

Social preferences, economic realities and government policy will shape the future of the high street

Related: 'It's really shocking': UK cities refusing to reveal extent of pseudo-public space