Companies have raised more capital in 2020 than ever before

IN MARCH THE corporate world found itself staring into the abyss, recalls Susie Scher. From her perch overseeing global capital markets at Goldman Sachs, a bank, she witnessed firms scrambling for money to keep going as the wheels of commerce ground to a halt amid the pandemic. Many investors panicked. Surely, the thinking went, public markets would freeze in the frigid fog of covid-19 uncertainty—and then stay frozen.Instead, within weeks they began to thaw, then simmer, kindled by trillions of dollars in monetary and fiscal stimulus from governments desperate to avert an economic nuclear winter. In the past few months they have turned boiling hot.