I see so much talk here on about how companies should be left to go bankrupt because of their "shitty decisions", that "the weakest companies should be allowed to fail", and "shareholders have to hold the bag" (all from comments here).

This fundamentally misunderstands how businesses work.

If your business has a 5% profit margin, and you're supposed to have enough savings to weather, say, six months of essentially full fixed costs but zero revenue... that means you would need to save a full ten years of profits before ever returning them to shareholders, and if your company is less than ten years old, goodbye.

That's ludicrous.

It's also against the "accumulated earnings tax", where the IRS virtually requires companies to return their earnings to shareholders (via dividends/buybacks) yearly, because they're financially penalized otherwise.

Good management teams aren't supposed to save for pandemics. It's not normal business. Companies in general are unable to buy insurance against it (because there's no insurance company with enough money to pay out). Capitalism is about weeding out the better companies from the worse -- not ones that are arbitrarily more or less hit by an unpredictable global catastrophe.

Letting swathes of companies go bankrupt through zero fault of their own is economic disaster, and neither is there anything remotely fair or capitalistic about it whatsoever.