The Financial Times did something last week that it has never done before. It held a three-day global business conference on Zoom. Important people said interesting things about how Covid-19 might reshape the world, a lot of which was alarming.

The sentence I cannot shake from my mind was uttered early on the first day by Guy Ryder, head of the International Labour Organization. He was speaking about the 60 per cent of global workers who get by in the informal economy, doing things such as changing money or selling street food.

Their incomes sank by an average of 60 per cent within a month of the pandemic taking hold, thrusting huge numbers of workers into strife. This, he said, was why one of his UN colleagues had recently warned: “There’s another pandemic coming and it’s a pandemic of hunger of biblical proportions.”