The destruction of the old world order

philmullan Covid-19, Politics, Rivalries

It is often said that everything changes in a major crisis. But this is not quite right. The changes that happen seldom derive from the crisis itself, but from the acceleration of existing trends. So far, Covid-19 has similarly sped up and crystallised earlier tendencies. As a result, it is helping make the true state of affairs clearer. As the Economist Intelligence Unit concluded, the ‘coronavirus pandemic will not usher in an entirely new global order, but it will change things in … important ways … [and] bring to the surface developments that had previously gone largely unnoticed’.

In particular, three pre-pandemic features of international relations are being amplified and brought to the surface: the changing economic balance in the world; the unraveling of the post-1945 world order; and tensions between the advanced industrial nations.

Read the full article here.

After the pandemic: whither capitalism?

philmullan capitalism, Covid-19, State intervention, The longest depression

To understand what will happen to capitalism after this crisis, one needs to understand capitalism before it.

One of the catchphrases of the pandemic so far is that ‘crises change everything’. Of course, lots will change because of the precipitous economic disruption of the shutdown. Thousands of smaller businesses are already going under and may not return, and this could rise to hundreds of thousands unless the government acts immediately to deliver on its business-support pledges. If the government fails to support businesses and workers, in the same way it has been failing with virus testing and health workers’ protective equipment, millions of individuals and families will endure great hardship. Many may not get their old jobs back. Over the medium term, this can be a bad or a good change, depending on the quantity and especially the quality of new post-recession job opportunities.

However, despite the changes brought about by the economic dislocations, at this stage it is likely that much economic policymaking from the past will endure. This is because crises tend to change things only to the extent to which they draw extant socio-economic features to the surface and speed up pre-existing trends.

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The coronavirus cash crunch

philmullan Covid-19, Creative destruction, Debt, Economic policy, Zombie economy

The UK Treasury’s number one priority, with support from the Bank of England, must be to get unlimited money swiftly to businesses and individuals who are losing income because of the government’s coronavirus containment measures. This applies both to providing firms with cash to avoid bankruptcy as well as to ensuring that all their staff – employed, self-employed and gig workers – continue to be paid when they go into unpaid quarantine or are laid off either temporarily or permanently.

But however successful the government is in this vital support task, the British economy is already in recession. And the more extensive the lockdowns are, the deeper the immediate falls in economic activity will be. Long before the Covid-19 outbreak many economists had been correctly anticipating another downturn. Britain, like most other advanced industrial countries, has been in a state of precarious sclerosis ever since the stabilisation which followed the financial crisis. Western economies have been producing too little new wealth for decades. They were only functioning as well as they have been by borrowing from the future. Now this precarious, debt-dependent economic life has suffered a sharp and unexpected disruption. The collapse is largely due to a cash crunch.

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Break free of the fiscal rules

philmullan Economic policy, State intervention, Zombie economy

In pre-coronavirus days, immediately following the Tories’ huge election victory in December, this Budget was trailed as the thing that would tell us what the ‘levelling up’ mantra really meant. Things haven’t quite worked out that way. Maybe because of the necessary focus on the coronavirus impact, we learnt little new about what ‘levelling up’ means. Or possibly that was because the government is also still not quite sure what the phrase stands for. Sunak was clearly getting a little carried away by his rhetoric when he claimed that this Budget had already delivered – got done – the election promise to ‘level up’.

The government this week flunked one budgetary issue that could have pointed in the desired political direction. No doubt drawing on his hedge-fund experience, Sunak hedged a decision on what to do about the fiscal rules, after much speculation that he would address them in the Budget.

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If another crash comes, don’t blame coronavirus

philmullan Covid-19, Creative destruction, Debt, The longest depression

Institutions are starting to draw attention to the potential economic effects of the coronavirus outbreak. However Covid-19 is not the cause of our economic malaise. Forecasters should be careful in presenting new economic releases on coronavirus and now allow this health matter to become an occasion for economic scaremongering.

Playing up the economic costs of Covid-19 could exacerbate fearful responses, as well as distract from the much longer-lasting sources of economic sickliness. Global growth and, especially, advanced-economy growth are already dismal, and have been for many years. Forecasts for this year were already pretty downbeat before most people were aware of the word coronavirus. The danger is that this acute health disease gets blamed for our economic troubles, while the chronic economic disease remains undiagnosed and untreated.

Read the full article here.