Debt-ridden countries such as Italy will come to rely more and more on Germans and other northern Europeans to finance their debt. This will require a more unified Europe. Or the whole thing may collapse.
It is fundamentally wrong to put the entire economy at the service of a single goal and to commit to a single solution. Human action always involves weighing up different goals and different means.
If we're serious about maximizing the resources needed to combat COVID-19, we need an economy that is deregulated and flexible.
From New York to London to Brussels to Tokyo, central banks in the last two weeks have embraced a wide variety of extraordinary inflationary measures to prop up insolvent banks and governments.
The popular narrative is that demographics are driving Japan's declining worker productivity. But the real culprit is government regulations and a lack of entrepreneurship.
Central banks have created a brittle economy without real savings and without much room to maneuver. Central banks now want more of the same in a bid to fix what they broke.
The Greeks haven't saved or produced enough to justify their high standard of living compared to other countries of the world. This is a fragile bubble economy made possible by European central bankers.
Every crisis caused by the unbacked paper money system expands the power of the states over economic and social life, and unfortunately, once the state has expanded its power, it is unlikely the trend will be reversed.
Between 1909 and 1913, Keynes was the most important defender of British monetary imperialism in India. His faithful defense of the British Empire in those early years allowed him to become the century’s most influential economist after the war.
Printing up paper money—which is the Fed's solution to nearly everything—will not bring about a miraculous replacement of the lost goods and services or repair broken supply chains.
