Without limits, allowing a government to finance itself by creating money can lead to hyperinflation. But these risks can be manageable: the quantitative easing of the past decade, despite predictions, has not lifted inflation above the main central banks’ 2 per cent targets.
The economic consequences of the lockdowns put in place to try to contain the spread of the coronavirus will stretch well into this century and the way money is created, distributed and spent will, for better or worse, never be the same.
The European Central Bank has ditched a cap on how many bonds it can buy from any single euro zone country, clearing the way for potentially unlimited money-printing as it scales up its response to the coronavirus outbreak.
Lockdown is a form of quarantine, a practise used to try to stem the spread of disease for hundreds of years by controlling humans.
The Overseas Development Institute's SET (Supporting Economic Transformation) examines the vulnerability of countries to the coronavirus outbreak, the economic impacts and policy responses in a wide-range database of selected sources and other articles.
The COVID-19 outbreak that began in Wuhan in December 2019 will not leave Southeast Asia unscathed. As of April 7, some 15,000 COVID-19 cases have been identified in the region, according to official measures. Many believe that underestimates the true spread of the virus.
A collection of various articles and commentary by philosophers and how their work relates to the pandemic
Beyond the immediate emergency, a radical change in European policies is needed. European fiscal policy should be based on a large common budget and greater autonomy for national governments.
As coronavirus spreads rapidly around the world, outpacing our capacity for testing, let alone treatment, the long-anticipated monster is finally at the door. And with global capitalism so impotent in the face of this biological crisis, our demands must be for properly international public-health infrastructure.
From the beginning, medical experts were clear that they simply did not know how bad or otherwise the virus was, yet many non-experts seemed to have an opinion.
