 Welcome everyone. First of all, I hope that you and your loved ones are all safe and healthy. And welcome to the first event of the new webinar series, The Economics of COVID-19, co-organized by the Economics Department at SOS and the Open Economics Forum, which is a student association part of the Rethinking Economics Network that tries to promote plurality in the economic debate as well as introduce real-world issues. In this seminar series, we will try to frame and discuss the different implications and impacts that the ongoing pandemics of COVID-19 is having and will have on the economy and the overall world in the next few years. In today's seminar in particular, we will focus on the effects of the pandemics from the ongoing fight against climate change. To discuss such an important and interesting topic, we have with us Yanis da Fermos, lecturer of economics at SOS. He focuses and specializes on ecological macroeconomics, climate change, financial shadow banking, inequality and sort of. I'm Anna Verniano, I'm a master's student of economics at SOS and active member of the Open Economics Forum and I will moderate today's session. Before leaving the world to Yanis, I just wanted to tell you that today's talk will be divided in two parts. In the first part, Yanis will talk and give us his opinion. Whilst in the second part, we will try to have more interaction and have sort of like a Q&A session for which I strongly encourage everyone to make use of the live chat to ask questions or ask for clarifications and we will draw from there in the second half. That being said, I think Yanis, the floor is yours. Thank you Anna and many thanks to everyone who has joined us today. I would like to start by saying a few things about what the situation was with climate policies before COVID-19 and then I will turn to some lessons that I think we have to learn from what is happening right now. So if we look at what was happening with respect to climate policies before the COVID-19 crisis, I think it's very important to go back to 2015. This is when the Paris Agreement was signed by about 200 countries around the world and the main commitment that was made according to this agreement was that countries would make a lot of effort in order to restrict global warming to two degrees compared to the pre-industrial levels. Now the big question is, have we made enough progress over the last years in order to say that we are on a path that is in line with the Paris Agreement? And I suppose we all know that the answer is no. We haven't done enough things in order to say that we follow what the Paris Agreement has said. And first, the reason why I'm saying that is first we know that the carbon emissions have increased continuously over the last five years. This is not in line with what we need to do in order to address the climate problem. We need to reduce emissions extremely quickly in order to be able to achieve two degrees. And second, we have seen that many policies have been implemented with respect to climate and there are various initiatives and there is more awareness about climate change compared to what it was a case before 2015. But the main problem is that most of the climate policies that have been put in place are not ambitious enough. And I would like to explain that by referring to three specific exams, whether we had before 2020. And let me start with the first example, which is about the so-called European Green Deal. What is that? This is a deal that was launched in December 2019, a few months ago, by the European Union. And the main aim of this deal is to make European Union carbon neutral by 2050. So the target is to have zero net emissions by 2050. Now, what is the first problem with that? The problem is that 2050 is too late. If we're going to be in line with the Paris Agreement, we need to have carbon neutrality much earlier than that. Another problem is that despite the fact that there is a plan about having some green investments in the next few months or so, according to this European deal, the amount of money that is going to be spent on that is extremely low. So according to the current plans, the idea is to boost green investment by about one trillion cumulative between 2020 and 2030. Now, if we're going to be serious about climate change, this should be at least five times higher. So this European Green Deal sounds like something that is very much a progress compared to what was the case five years ago, but it's not ambitious enough. Now, two more things about this. First, European Union goes to target green growth by having this European Green Deal. And the problem with that is that we know that growth contributes a lot to the production of emissions. So instead of having growth as the main aim, it would be much better to focus on well-being, equality issues, employment issues, and not to say that we want to have growth in European Union in the next decades because we know that we cannot easily have continuous growth in a finite planet. And what is also important is that this European Green Deal tries to keep the status quo in the sense that there's a lot of emphasis on how finance, private finance, can actually help the European countries to achieve the climate target. So we don't see any redistribution of power as part of this deal. So this is one example of a policy that might in its sound as a policy that can contribute to the challenge of climate change, but it's not ambitious enough and it's not in line with the Paris Agreement. Now, a second initiative that has taken place over the last year or so is the so-called European Taxonomy. What is the European Taxonomy? The idea behind the European Taxonomy is to identify which activities should be considered as green and which activities should be considered as non-green. Now, this might sound like a good initiative and it's nice that we have now a public authority that identifies probably what is green and what is not. But there are two problems. First, we don't have a definition of what is brown. And if we want to be serious about climate change, we need to identify which are those activities that are very harmful for the environment. If we do not have a taxonomy about that, we cannot make significant progress. And another problem is that the European Union through this taxonomy tries to identify green activities in a very broad way. So we can find in this taxonomy activities that actually produce a lot of emissions, but they are still considered to be green. And this is a problem because it means that we might have a significant issue with greenwashing if we use that taxonomy. And let me say that this taxonomy is important because the plan is to be used as part of the European Green Deal. And the target is also for this taxonomy to be used at the global level at some point. So it's important to understand what has happened and why this is not in line with the Paris Agreement. And let me also say quickly a few things about what settled banks used to do in the previous years in order to address the climate problem. I mean, traditionally banks, settled banks didn't care about climate change. Over the last three years, things have changed a bit. So in 2017, the network for greening the financial system was developed. And the idea behind that network is to create a kind of a platform that allows settled banks to work together in order to address climate problems. Now, this might sound like a good initiative. What is the problem with that? We haven't seen any specific measure to be taken by settled banks after this initiative. There are some discussions about the so-called climate stress test. There are some discussions about disclosures related to climate risks. But we haven't seen something very specific. Now, if we get back to the Paris Agreement and we look at these initiatives, it's clear that we do not have now a climate policy in place that allows us to avoid three or four degrees at the end of the century. Because if we take into account what has happened with the US since 2016, if we consider the emissions, for example, of China, which are going to increase in the next decade, it's very clear that we are very far from achieving the climate targets. So we are in a climate crisis and this was the situation before COVID-19 started. And the problem is that we need a very, very different approach in order to be able to potentially address the climate crisis. Now, the question is how things are probably changing now that we have COVID-19. And I would like to point out that, of course, now most of our efforts are placed on dealing with this unprecedented crisis. And of course, it makes sense to do that. We need to support people. We need to support our health care systems. But this doesn't mean that we have to forget completely the climate crisis. And one reason why I think this is important is because we can learn a lot of lessons from the current COVID-19 crisis. And in my view, there are at least three or four lessons that we can learn from it. And let me refer to these lessons. So the first one is that when we have a global crisis, it's very important to deal with this crisis at the early stages and not to allow this crisis to evolve and try to deal with it when it is too late. So if we look at the COVID-19 crisis, we know that in January, three months ago, there were a lot of concerns from scientists about what was happening in China. And we knew that there was a possibility for the virus to spread around the world. What did we do in order to protect people from that? Did we have any specific interventions? I mean, in most countries, there was no preparation in terms of the health care systems. There was no specific measure in order to restrict the spread of the virus at the initial stage. For example, we could have that traveling from and to China could be restricted a lot in the first month. So we didn't have that. And we didn't take seriously the fact that we were at the beginning of the crisis. And now that we are in April, I suppose if we asked ourselves if we would like to have seen more in January, I think everyone would say that it would be much better to have addressed the problem in January than trying to deal now with that whereby it is extremely difficult to deal with all this chaos. Now, why am I saying that? Because if we look at the climate crisis, we have a kind of a similar problem. Right now, we are probably at the beginning of the climate crisis in the sense that the atmospheric temperature is more or less one degree compared to the pre-industrial level. Now, what is the conversional wisdom about the climate crisis so far? If we look at the policies that I described before, the idea is not to do so much to postpone things and to wait and have a transition that will take place gradually to a low-carbon economy. But in two or three decades, people will say that we could have done lots of things at the early stage of the climate crisis because after two or three decades, it will be too late. And the problem is that then it would be very difficult to deal with all the climate-related events and we will have a kind of a chaos around the world. So what should we do and what do we learn from the COVID-19 crisis? We learn that it's much better to implement radical policies at the beginning of the crisis instead of waiting and see what is going to happen. And in economics and in other sciences, the way that we approach this problem is by referring to the so-called pre-cosonary principle. What does it mean? It means that when you know that there's a possibility of having catastrophic effects, it's better to implement policies as a precaution to the possibility of having something like that. We didn't do that with the COVID-19 crisis, but we can do that for the climate crisis. But we need to accept that the policies that should be in place will be radical and will be unprecedented. We need to implement all these policies right now instead of waiting. So I think this is one important lesson from the COVID-19 crisis. Now let me turn to another one that has to do with all these economic policies that have been implemented around the world over the last few weeks. So we have, that many governments have decided to spend a lot of money in order to provide income to people, in order to cover wages, in order to increase spending related with the healthcare systems. And in many countries, the amount is unprecedented. I mean, we are talking about 5 to 10% of GDP in countries like the UK, the US, and Germany, for example. At the same time, we have that central banks have decided to implement lots of measures in order to support the financial system and the economy. For example, the European central bank has decided to implement this emergency pandemic asset purchase program. And the amount that corresponds to that program is 750 billion euros. We are talking about a lot of money. If we look at the Bank of England, we see something similar. The Bank of England intends to increase the assets that correspond to the quantitative easing program by about 200 billion. And in the US, we have even more, we have that the balance sheet of the Fed is likely to increase from 5 trillion to about 9 trillion dollars. So what is the question that is important for us with respect to these measures? When there is political will and there is a belief that the society needs radical measures, then we can find the money in order to support these measures. In the past, many people used to say that there is no magic money tree. But what we see right now is that actually there is a magic money tree. We have the ability to create money in order to support our societies if there is political will. And why am I saying that? Because if we look at the debates about the climate crisis before COVID-19, many people used to say that we cannot achieve a quick transition to a low-carbon economy because we don't have enough money in order to find this transition. So the question is, now that we have this emergency and it's possible to find money quite quickly, why people insist on saying that it's not possible to find money in order to find this transition to a low-carbon economy? And I think we need to learn that lesson that actually this has to do with the political will, not with the fact that we do not have enough money. Now another lesson that I think is important is that when we have a global crisis, we need to act in a collective way as societies, but also at the global level. And we know for example that we are not going to deal with the spread of the virus if we do not have collaboration, if not all countries try to implement measures that will restrict the spread. We know that we have a similar challenge with climate change. It's not enough for a country to reduce emissions in order to deal with the climate problem. We have to do this around the world. And we also know that when we have global crisis, some countries and poor people are affected much more than this crisis. And we know for example with respect to the virus that in the global south the effects might be much more severe. And in the case of the climate crisis, we know that despite the fact that the global north has created this climate crisis, the climate-related events will be much more severe in the global south. So the question is how do we organize our collective effort in order to support the countries in the global south that need to be protected from this crisis? And I think now we have all these interesting discussions about the cancellation of debt, about ways through which money could go quickly to countries that need this money in order to take measures against the virus. And I think we can learn from this discussion in order to develop new systems that allow these countries to first, adapt climate to the climate crisis, and second to also contribute to the process of decarbonization. And the final thing that I would like to say, and in my view is important with respect to what we have seen so far, has to do with, I suppose most of you know that there has been a significant decline in emissions over the last months or so. Where do we have that? This has basically to do with transportation. People don't use their cars, we have very few flights, and as a result of that emissions have declined. Now what this shows is that there are ways for emissions to go down rapidly. Of course we don't want to do that as it has been done over the last few months, but this shows that probably we have to rethink our way of living. It's not probably so necessary to travel so much. In the case of academics it's not so necessary to have so many conferences, we can have online conferences, we can have webinars instead of traveling so much. And it might be possible to reconsider how we work. If people are able and happy to work from home, they might be allowed to do so. And we have to think overall about our way of living. If there are activities that are very bad for the environment, we have to reduce them. And potentially we have to think about using environmental regulation in order to address the fact that many of the things that we do are very bad for the environment. And my people might not like that, but we have to get back to the fact that we have a crisis and we have to address it right now. So to summarize, in terms of what we are learning now from COVID-19, I think it's important to see this as an opportunity to change the mainstream thinking about the climate problem. And we have to understand that we still have time to deal with the climate crisis. If we don't do that, we will regret it a lot in the future. Now, does it mean that we have to wait until we have a recovery in order to change our approach to climate policy? Is there anything that we can do right now in order to address climate problems? And I think we have to think again about the way that economic policies are implemented. Because we have that there is now a lot of interventions from several banks. What is the problem with some of these interventions? Let me refer to quantitative easing. Quantitative easing is when several banks buy bonds in order to support the liquidity in the financial markets and in order to reduce interest rates for companies. Now, if someone analyzes the quantitative easing programs that have been implemented over the last years, it's quite clear that we have a kind of carbon bias in these programs. Why is that the case? This is because several banks tend to buy more bonds that have been issued by carbon-intensive companies. Now, we are going to have that several banks will print now money in order to have more quantitative easing programs. And the question is, shall we keep this carbon bias? Could we just simply say that it will not be possible for banks, for several banks to buy bonds that come from carbon-intensive companies and buy more bonds that are related with energy efficiency, renewables and so on? This is one way to adjust a current policy. With respect to fiscal policy, I mentioned before that there are so many transfers that go to companies. There are so many money that is received because they have liquidity problems. But there's no conditionality. And in the case of climate change, this is important because if we have money received from fossil fuel companies and these companies actually do not make any commitment to change the way that they produce to commit, for example, that they are going to have a very rapid decarbonization of their production in the next two or three years, then we lose the opportunity to address, to some extent, the climate problem. And also in the case of banks, banks now receive a lot of money. But we know that banks provide a lot of finance to carbon-intensive sectors. So would it make sense to put restrictions on that and not allow banks to continue financing these carbon-intensive sectors? So I think there are ways to adjust what we have right now. Of course, the emphasis is to keep the economy alive and to support people. But this doesn't mean that there are no ways to think also at the same time about the climate problem. But let me get back to what could happen if we have, at some point, a recovery. Because there is not a lot of discussion about that. And the question is, are we going to learn from what is happening with COVID-19? Are we going to have a change in the distribution of power as a result of what we see right now? And I think there is a quite pessimistic scenario, and many people discuss that, which is that we now see an increase in public debt in various countries. And if at some point we have a recovery, emphasis will be placed on what? On austerity. We saw that a few years ago with the global financial crisis. Initially, there was a response to this crisis based on the idea that it was an emergency. There was a lot of government spending. But very quickly, in 2009 and 2010, austerity started to be implementing around the world. And we might see something similar with COVID-19 if the ideas about the way that we should manage our economies do not change. Now, this would be extremely harmful for the climate policies, because we might again have the argument that we need to implement austerity so we don't have money to spend on achieving decarbonisation. So I think this is a quite bad scenario. Now, what is going to happen depends, of course, on various things. It depends on political processes. It depends on how long the crisis will be. And it also depends on how people will rethink or note what's going on based on the COVID-19 crisis. And I think there is another more positive scenario with respect to climate policies. Before COVID-19, there was a very interesting discussion about the so-called Green New Deal. Let me explain the distinction between the Green New Deal and the European Green Deal. Actually, they have lots of differences. The European Green Deal doesn't try to change the distribution of power, as I said before. It just tries to make some adjustments in order to be possible for the European Union overall to argue that there are some climate targets that can't be achieved. The Green New Deal has the new in front of deal, which means that it requires redistribution of power and much more radical policies. Now, if we learn the lessons from the COVID-19 crisis, and if we're going to be serious about the climate crisis, we might see more radical policies to be implemented in the next years. And this could include what some people call, for example, monetary financing, which has to do with the collaboration of governments and federal banks in order to finance, in our case, the transition to a low-carbon economy. It could include debt cancellation for the countries of the Global South in order for them to be possible to protect themselves from climate change and to participate in the decarbonisation process. It could, of course, include the redistribution of power. Now we know that global finance is everywhere and it's very powerful. You cannot have a serious transition to a low-carbon economy if this doesn't change. And we might see that brown finance, brown finance refers to finance that goes to carbon-induced companies, might be penalised and might be restricted a lot. And we might see, at the same time, more public banking. Because when we have public banks, it's much easier to implement the targets with respect to decarbonisation. So if we learn the lessons from COVID-19, if we understand that we have a climate emergency and if there is a redistribution of power as a result of what we are seeing right now, we might have a scenario whereby the Green New Deal will be implemented in many countries. So this would be an optimist scenario for the climate policies. But I think I could stop here and probably try to have more interactions and respond to some of your questions. Okay, I was thinking, maybe I will ask you a question. So we give some time to the audience to write them down and then we go back to the chat. So right now everyone, whoever has questions, please ask them in the chat. I wanted to ask you, to which extent do you see the possibility of a shortening of global supply chains happening? In the sense that this virus, of course, has shown the limits that such extensive global supply chains have. And of course they have a big impact on climate change and pollution. What do you think? I mean, this is now a very big challenge and a very big issue because as you mentioned first, we have that the global supply chains have been disrupted a lot. And this in many cases comes also at the expense of countries in the global south. We also know that international trade contributes a lot to emissions. We need to rethink that and there are ideas about having more local production. The question is whether this is going to happen. And I think this again depends on how things will evolve from a political point of view. Globalization has been useful in terms, in some sense, but very harmful in other terms. And the challenge is to keep this part of globalization that is good for people. Now we need to have more rules with respect to global trade and we need to implement more strict regulation with respect to that. But I cannot easily see a scenario whereby things change so much unless the crisis lasts for many months and then many countries reconsider completely how they deal with the global supply chains. So despite the fact that I think that it is necessary to reconsider the way that these supply chains are organized I don't think that it is very likely to see a very big change with respect to that. Okay, we have a question from Natasha who's asking for your thoughts on green stimulus. So what do you think this will look like in a developed economy and developing economy context? Okay, so the idea behind the green stimulus is that, for example, we have primarily fiscal policies or sometimes also monetary policies can support that in order to finance, for example, low carbon transportation to insulate buildings, to change the power sector in order to produce based on renewables. Now the challenge with that is that if we're going to be serious about climate change, as I said before this should correspond to a significant amount of money in terms of creating new green investment. But I think that we need to be careful with the word stimulus for two reasons. First, when we have a stimulus and we have just more green investment, we have what we call when we talk about environment and economics the rebound effects. So if we decide to build to support energy efficiency and more people are going to walk because of that we know that these people will consume and this consumption might create more carbon emissions. So if we have a green stimulus and we have a lot of increase in economic activity then this might not contribute so much as we initially expected to the reduction of emissions. And I think we have to be careful with that and we also have to take into account that it is necessary to think about those sectors in the economy that are very harmful for the environment and to find ways to make a transition that protects the people who are working in these sectors but do not allow these sectors to continue producing so many emissions. So I think the green stimulus should be accompanied by regulation with respect to what is happening with carbon-intensive companies and it might require a significant redistribution, a significant change in the structure of our economy. This is in the context of let's say a developed country. In the case of low-income countries the challenge is that they don't in most cases have the money in order to make this green investment. And this is why I mentioned before that we have to learn from what is happening right now in the discussion about the Global South. And we have to seriously consider the possibility of having debt cancellations and liquidity support for these countries in order for them to be able to implement green projects. Otherwise for these countries it will not be possible to do that. I think we have many other questions. There are a couple of questions that do some comparisons with the global financial crisis and austerity and to them maybe I would say to stick around because we're going to have an event just on austerity and COVID-19. So today we can focus more on climate change in particular. So we have Isabel who's asking for clarification. What do we mean when we talk about distribution of power in the Green New Deal? What power do you mean? Yeah. Okay. I mean in order to understand that we probably have to go back to what has happened over the last decades. If we look at the global economy in 1960 for example, global finance was not powerful. We had the burden of goods system. We have fixed exchange rate regimes and we didn't have that finance was so powerful. After the 1970s the power of labor has declined overall. This is translated into labor institutions that do not allow workers to achieve high wages. For example, it is also translated in the so-called flexibility in the labor market. So we have seen the distribution of power from labor to finance. And this is important because in many cases what governments do is to try to implement measures through finance. For example, the European Green Deal that I mentioned before includes a lot of measures that have as a purpose to use private finance in order to support new investments related to renewable energy efficiency. So finance now plays a very significant role, not only because it is too large and is a significant part of our economy, but also because it is related a lot with the decisions that are taken by governments. So when I'm talking about the distribution of power, I'm talking about ways through which workers will become more powerful again in terms of their rights, in terms of the institutions that protect them. And finance will be regulated much more in order to reduce the role that it plays in policy decisions. And I'm saying that this is important because without having this distribution of power it might not be easy, for example, to do things that will reduce the finance that goes to a carbon investment sector. Because finance will not be willing to do that and there are many links between fossil fuel companies and big financial institutions. So the Green Deal should actually deal with that and we need to have this distribution of power. This is more or less what I mean. Then we have Marianne Conner who is asking similar questions on the role of economists and activists in making climate change like a pressuring issue for politics so that there is actual political will and how to therefore centre the transition from this moment of crisis to the next period. Hopefully a better one. A transition which is the Green one. How can economists help in that? I think what is important for economists is first to point out that we have to talk about political economy. I don't think that it is useful when economists just say that we do a kind of technocratic analysis and then politicians decide because we know that there are a lot of links between political issues and economic issues. But in terms of what I said about how governments can finance spending and why this is important for decarbonisation, I think it's important that economists can point out that we have the ability to create money without restrictions if we have the political will to do so. And if we see for example what is happening with the Eurozone, the Eurozone in theory could use directly the European still bank in order to finance government spending in various countries right now that have so many problems. But there is no political will to do that. Economists can emphasise the fact that money is a kind of a social institution and if we decide a society to use that in a specific way then there is no restriction in terms of that. So I think the role of economists is both to emphasise how the system works and not to rely on the traditional ideology about the free markets and second to be honest about the links between politics and economics. Okay, we then have a clarification from Edward who asks to expand a bit more on the conditionalities attached to loans in order to make the transition less carbon intensive. Okay, so just to give you an example, there are some measures that have been taken for central banks according to which commercial banks get access to money, to central bank money and then the condition is that they will have a lower interest rate when they take this money if they provide this money to the real economy. So the central banks try to provide and through that way try to provide an incentive to the banking sector to give more money to the economy. Now when I'm talking about conditionalities, I'm talking more in terms of saying that banks can have access to this liquidity but then they have to change the way that they provide loans to the economy. And to have a commitment that within the next one or two years they will give money to approaches related to renewables, for example, instead of providing money to low-carbon activities. And technically there are ways to do that. There is also the financial regulation that can play a role. There is a discussion about what is called the brown penalising factor. I'm not going to go into the details of that but there are ways to adjust the requirements from the financial regulation about the capital of banks in order to penalise those that provide a lot of finance to brown sectors. Okay, so this is just an example of how we can introduce conditionalities in the banking sector. Then we have a couple of questions. I think you already touched on this but maybe you can expand a bit more. How can countries in the global south finance their green new deals if they don't have the ability to borrow in their own currency? Yeah, I mean this is the big problem that these countries face and this is why there are two ways to deal with that. One way is, for example, to use the special drawing rights of IMF which is a way through which these countries can have access to liquidity. And then based on this liquidity they can actually support their economy. The problem with that is that they have to pay an interest on this and I don't think that this is good from a financial stability point of view. And this is why I pointed out more the idea of having a cancellation of debt for these countries because when debt is cancelled it means that there is more space for these countries to spend money in order to support their own economy. And this is a problem with liquidity. We deal with that in the short run but if we do not provide transfers to these countries directly or if we do not cancel debt then the problem will remain. So I think this is the best way to address that issue. Okay, trade, I think we already answered that question. There are a lot of questions. Yeah, I'm trying to read some of them but it's not so easy. May I say something quickly about, I think there was a comment on that, about the links between climate change and COVID-19 if I'm right. I didn't talk about that because many people are discussing if climate change has to also contribute to the emergence of viruses. And of course I'm not an expert on that and I don't know if there is a direct link between climate change and new viruses. What I can say is that both climate change and everything that has to do with the emergence of viruses has a common cause which is the fact that people tend to forget the fact that we have a finite planet. So there is some evidence that with the direction of biodiversity with deforestation with the way that we produce food, this increases the risk of having new viruses and I think we should carefully take that into account. In the case of climate change we know that for example malaria is linked with global warming and is a disease that has to do with climate change. So there are some links between these two but irrespective of what is happening with that, I think the key message is that we have to respect our planet and I think this is what we have to learn from this crisis. Okay but as I said I cannot comment specifically on the links between climate change and viruses. Okay there are two questions that I think that can be kind of linked together. So the first one is from Andrea who asks, which consumer trend recently emerged due to the corona situation? Do you think it's particularly resilient and will likely become more widespread and accepted than before, shaping the new normal? And the other question asks whether do you think that decarbonisation could be used as an excuse for labour rights being cut even more? So for example the fact that working from home has class implications and privilege. Okay I mean this is a very big issue. Of course now we have a problem, let me start with the last point. There are a lot of issues with labour rights and of course now we also have concerns about the introduction of surveillance related to the COVID-19 crisis. And the question then is how do we deal with that? I have some concerns that probably if we do not have a distribution of power that I mentioned before, it's very likely that because of the fact that now we have to deal with the possibility of having new pandemics, the new normal might be quite bad for workers in a sense that workers will be asked to do things that are considered to be good in order to protect our societies from pandemics. And this is why it is necessary to ensure that people will participate in the political process that is going to determine the new normal. And if we don't have this participation, I think that globalization might worse things even more. We have seen that people lost their labour rights in the past because of globalization. Things can become even worse if only a few people decide about what has to happen in order to protect the societies from pandemics. So my general comment on that is that I have a lot of concerns and this is why we need a completely different distribution of power. So yeah, the second part was about the consumer trends that you noticed. So whether the consumer trend will change or not is that the question? Yeah, it was about whether the consumer trends that we are seeing right now will likely be more widespread and accepted even in the future after this crisis is gone hopefully. Yeah, I mean one concern that I have is that once we have the recovery people will just going to get back to their previous life quite quickly. And this is a bad scenario of course and it will also be very bad for the environment. But at the same time I think it's good that during that period we have the opportunity to reflect on our lifestyle. And this is why I mentioned before that since we now realize that we are not so much protected from a global crisis that has to do with nature, maybe many people will realize that we have to respect that more. If people accept that and they are willing to make changes then the experience that we have right now might be a good starting point in order to reconsider our life. But I'm not sure how many people we think in that way and I'm not sure whether overall the political processes will support the idea that we have to reconsider our way of life. But I see this as a kind of a new experience that could be very positive hopefully. Okay, so we have another question about nationalization of companies in key economic sectors and how these can help in the need of decarbonization of those sectors in particular. Yeah, actually I wanted to mention that when I talked about conditionalities. If now at some point for example it becomes clear that both financial and non-financial companies need support from the government, then what the government can do is to actually buy shares of these companies and then we have a kind of nationalization. And to be honest, the private sector has not so far taken into account seriously the climate crisis. And of course we have that the government decides about how production will be overall organized in order to achieve the transition to a low-carbon economy. I think this makes our life probably easier because if we think about public banks for example, we know that public banks can more explicitly have targets about the way that they support low-carbon sectors. And if we think about the power sector, of course right now most of this sector around the world is private, but if we're going to make significant progress and if now it is necessary for these countries to receive a lot of money from the government sector, it's necessary to think again about the possibility of having nationalization at least for some period in order to ensure that decarbonization will take place. So I think this would be part of the policies that we have to consider right now as part of the COVID-19 measures. Okay, then we have a question on your opinion about degrowth and the degrowth movement. Actually, I think I mentioned before that a problem with the European Green Deal is that it focuses so much on green growth. And I think all the arguments about degrowth should be taken a lot into account in all these debates about the Green New Deal. And I think that degrowth talks both about the level of economic activity and the fact that we now have a lot of economic growth which contributes to climate change. And at the same time it talks about the need to change the way that the system works. So let me say two things on the economic activity. I think that in the next years it's necessary to increase both government spending and investment related to renewable energy efficiency. If we do that, this will contribute to economic growth. But I think this is an economic growth that is necessary to take place in order to replace our very carbon-dense infrastructure with a new infrastructure that is climate friendly. And I think that the growth argument is particularly important when we are talking about consumption. I said before that we have to reconsider our lifestyle, which means that we have to reconsider how we consume. And we need to consume less. It's not only to change what we consume, but also to consume less. And I think that from the degrowth movement, for me it is important to take this argument about the level of consumption. And we also need to take into account that it is necessary to have a redistribution of wealth. It is necessary to have new structures that support workers more. On that note, there is a question on your views on our universal basic income as a strategy to protect individuals through any future problems as a part of the Green New Deal. Okay, I think what we have seen over the last two or three decades is that the social protection systems that we're in place in many countries, and I'm talking primarily about countries in Europe in the 1960s or the 1970s, have been destroyed to a great extent. So we need to have a strong social protection system. Now, the universal basic income provides income to many people, and this might be very useful, for example. If we have carbon taxes that might affect poor people who rely a lot on energy, we might have all these policies that will restrict carbon intensive sectors, and people who work there might suffer. So universal basic income can provide that. Now, my personal view is that we need to have a system that provides a lot of social transfers. These social transfers could be designed based on what we know from the social democratic welfare states in the past, which means that we have generous social transfers provided to people based on their needs or have to do with childcare and based on all their other needs. This is necessary, and universal basic income can do that, but I also think it's important to talk about universal basic services at the same time, because it's important to have a public sector like education, the education sector or the health sector that can provide services to people. It's not only about giving income, but also to have a serious public sector that can do that. So I think we have to combine both of them, and I think that for each country, things might work a little bit differently. So I prefer to talk about a strong social protection system that relies on generous transfers in combination with a strong public sector, than just saying to implement everywhere universal basic income. Because also from a political point of view, the equation is always what the level of this income will be, and my concern is that in many countries, probably there will be a pressure for this income not to be very high, and we have to be careful with that. So this is my sort of response to this. I could say more, but I don't think we have time. Yeah, I think like we are about to reach the end. Gina is asking, how can we ensure policy effect of effectiveness when such a huge portion of finance is shadow or beyond the regulatory reach? Okay, yeah, okay. I need some time in order to respond to that, but let me say a couple of things. Of course, right now the shadow banking system probably corresponds to about 50% of the global financial system, and we know that this is dominant in terms of decisions that are made about finance and macroeconomic policies. Now, how can we deal with that? If a short run is very difficult to change the fact that we have a very large shadow banking system. When we worked on some proposals about how to green the finance system, there are ways to include shadow banking into what is happening with respect to green finance. Those of you who are familiar with shadow banking, you might know that we have a lot of report transactions, and these report transactions rely a lot on what we know as Hercas. I don't have time to explain this right now, but there are ways to include penalties for report transactions related with brown finance. So we can do various things in order to try to control what is happening with brown shadow banking. But I think the broader problem with shadow banking is that it doesn't allow us to introduce financial regulation so easily. And this is why I said before that the best solution would be to have a very big change in the way that finance is overall organized, and this is why we need this redistribution of power. So in the short run, I would suggest that we reduce a lot of regulation as much as we can with respect to the shadow banking activities. In the medium to the long run, we really need to reduce the size of this shadow banking system. Okay, there are like two minutes left. What do you think? Do you want to pick a question yourself? Yeah, it's very difficult to read all of them, and we have even more. So I'm happy to respond to most of them, but let me have a look. I can pick one for you if you want. Yeah, please, because I cannot read all of them right now. Okay, there's a question of Global Green New Deal and whether that requires some sort of Bretton Woods 2.0, and if so what that could look like. Right. Okay, so I think, as I said before, that we need to change completely the way that global institutions work. And this has become clear, for example, with what IMF does right now. There's a lot of pressure on IMF to change completely the way that tries to support low-income countries. So, yes, I think that we need to have a system that relies first on coordination, on support of countries that have problems, and a new role for finance. Now, with the Bretton Woods systems, we had fixed exchange rates, and this was good because there was no point of having so much speculation in the financial markets. It's not so easy now to describe how a new Bretton Woods would look like, because we cannot just copy and paste what was the situation in the 1960s and the 1970s, and how the Bretton Woods system was developed in order to say that this is what we need right now. But we need a new contract about the way that we work collectively and about the role of global finance. So, yes, we need to think about that. We have learned a lot from our recent experience with COVID-19, and we have to work in this direction. I don't have time to give more details about that story. I think we reached an end. Sorry for not answering all of your questions. They were, like, definitely too many, but that's a good sign. That's exciting. And thank you, Jannex. Thanks, everyone. Before you all disconnect, I just wanted to remind everyone that this is just the first event of a series which is expanding by today. I think we have, like, now we have, like, events scheduled, like, at least until the end of May. And so the next one is going to be on the 16th of April with Sara Stefano, who will talk about the feminist economics of COVID-19. And then there's going to be another one on the 22nd of April, which is Wednesday, with Tobias Franz, about COVID-19 and economic development in Latin America. But again, keep checking the source website for the upcoming events. Yeah, we're going to cover a lot of geographical areas. We're going to talk about Latin America, Africa, and different topics, like shadow banking, austerity, housing, debt crisis, which are topics that you also raised in the questions today. So if you're interested, please don't disappear. Come back and hopefully find some answers. And many thanks to everyone for all of these very interesting questions and sorry that I didn't have time to answer all of them. And many thanks for joining us. Thank you, everyone.