Monday 20 April 2020

Who will pay for this Covid catastrophe?

Unherd

Magic money trees do exist but their fruit is poisonous

This year it’s projected that the US Treasury department will issue $3 trillion (i.e. three thousand billion dollars) of new bonds (a bond, by the way, is basically an IOU).
In the UK it’ll be hundreds and hundreds of billions of extra borrowing.
In the EU things are horrendously complicated by the single currency, but there’ll be colossal borrowing requirements there too — and across the world.Interest rates are at record lows right now, but economic recovery implies that that they will at some point come back off the floor. So how will governments cope then? Will public finances be chewed up by the cost of servicing these loans? What if multiple countries default, sending the global financial system into meltdown? One way or another, the recovery could be crushed by the sheer weight of debt.
However, there is a way out: monetisation. This means that central banks, like the Bank of England, will be the biggest buyers of the extra debt. They will simply create new money (by electronic means rather than physically printing banknotes) and use it to buy government bonds.
Given that a central bank is owned by the state, the state effectively borrows money from itself and owes it to itself. So no sovereign debt crisis.
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That’s how western governments get out of the economic frying pan, but in doing so will they plunge into a political fire?

 

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