Lockdown Leaves Britain Dreading When the Money Runs Out

For Graham Lancaster, the owner of a real estate agency in the English county of Kent, the alarm will go off in three months.

Britain is headed into its peak of the coronavirus outbreak, and companies and households are busy doing the math to see how long they’ve got before the money runs out, just as they are across Europe. The difference is that the U.K. economy, vaunted by the government and Bank of England as flexible and resilient, already entered a new era of uncertainty after the country left the European Union just weeks before the pandemic hit.