I have a friend who owns a factory in a very unsexy niche industry (packaging). They're relishing this crisis, because they manage the business very conservatively in terms of cash flow and leverage, and are expecting many of their competitors to go bankrupt in the near future. When the dust settles, they'll be one of the few left over, which means they can charge much higher rates. This'll likely be the story in many industries.
Rich monopolies like Google and Facebook are going to do fine. (And note that both of them are still hiring, meaning they can potentially clean out the supply of engineers while many of the newer growth unicorns have instituted hiring freezes.) Marginal players in competitive industries are going to get killed.
Both of those are primarily dependent on ads for revenue and ad spending is already dropping precipitously, as far as I've heard?
Same...always better to thrive than to survive and we all get to choose :)
1. Essential+Unaffected: demand will be steady because there is no other choice, i.e. food, communication, ecommerce.
2. Horribly Affected: maybe even illegal to open right now, and when they open demand will be down significantly i.e. restaurants, bars, live entertainment, travel, some segments of education like language schools that cater to international, conferences and trade shows. Maybe back to full strength in 2 years but not going to be fun for a while, huge hit to demand.
3. Affected proportional to total global economy: If the overall economic activity goes down 20%, some businesses are going to track that. Transportation, business services, maybe banking.
The governments of the world certainly have the ability to stimulate asset bubbles, but I'm not sure that they can generally stimulate business activity other than on the demand side, i.e. rising incomes for labor. I think there could be a stratification of national economies performance over the next 2 years based on the ultimate success of their COVID-19 response. I'm seriously considering if I should try to predict the most robust regional response and look at moving there post crisis for the next 2 years or so. I think there could be significant differences. Not necessarily who is suffering the least, but who is going to emerge most vigorously.