 For people that are coming from the mental landscape of austerity, the idea that you should be running fiscal surpluses or high deficits are bad. Obviously, we don't need to get into that too much. For a lot of people who've been sort of encumbered with that debate, they'll be thinking, wow, debt GDP 100%, deficit 14%, that's really, really bad. To what extent can all of Europe, for instance, and the United States and Japan run fiscal deficits and for how long? Is that a plausible thing? There are some people that think it is, but what's your view on that? No, absolutely. I mean, it's essential at this moment as well that they do. Anything else would be disastrous. We're seeing an absolutely catastrophic collapse in private demand. We're very likely to see a shocked reaction in which private investment and households who've suffered this epic shock retreat into high levels of saving and lower levels of consumption. Furthermore, we're going to see a classic downward spiral in which hundreds of millions, not millions or tens, but hundreds of millions of people have essentially been made unemployed in various different ways. It's novel forms of unemployment as well. Their consumption is going to be down. Against that backdrop, it's absolutely essential that governments make up the slack and provide demand for the economy. You could make the case for degrowth and people before the shock were making the argument for degrowth on grounds of climate sustainability. That's an argument that should be seriously entertained, but no one planned for it this way. The risk, of course, is that it will be profoundly inequitable. Folks like myself, and imagine you as well, who've got the resources of relative comfort and a nice place to live and can get through this crisis will, broadly speaking, be okay. There are hundreds of millions of people who are absolutely not in that condition. For them, it's essential that various types of bridging finance or just frankly grants are provided in this situation. Yes, that will increase government debt, but government debt's a problem for the aftermath. To my mind, it's really an open question whether it's a problem at all. It's a problem if you allow debt markets to exercise a veto over you, but all the major sovereign states, not all countries in the world, but all of the advanced economy states, have enough autonomy to maneuver their way through this without becoming the hostages of aggressive bond markets. Not true for emerging markets and developing states because the monetary system of the world is intensely hierarchical. The advanced economies have the capacity to manage this, and they also have the capacity to soften the trade-offs for the emerging markets and the poorer, the truly poor, the low-income countries around the world if they choose to do so. That's being debated in Washington as we speak, literally right now in these minutes and hours. That's a huge topic at the G20, G7 World Bank IMF meetings, which are happening virtually right now. You're of a position, as I think any reasonable or rational person is, with the exception perhaps of Arthur Laffer or Ian Duncan-Smith. Generally speaking, we want full demobilization of the economy. We're going to have to run deficits because of a downturn in demand. It's going to mean higher public debt, but we're also going to see private household debt because of course people are taking out loans to just tie themselves over. We may see higher rates of corporate debt, which is why it's so important to keep the financial system going, because it's not for its own sake. This isn't a crisis like 2008 where the banks were going to pull down. This is we need the credit system to operate, whether it's you continuing to pay, I don't know, your cleaner, even if they can't work for you because they need to continue their livelihood. You extending that private support, whether it's you borrowing on your credit card or whatever else, we all need to tide our way through this crisis through various types of credit, which is why maintaining that credit system is so crucial, particularly at this moment. How does this look? Say we have a vaccine in 12 months. Generally speaking, the long-term trends are no different to what they were, which weren't great before December, macroeconomic trends globally, global south, the US, Europe, and so on. What would a solution look like? Would you have to see a move to inflation to get rid of some of these debts? Would you have to have debt forgiveness, haircuts? Because even the idea of austerity, the idea of we would have further cuts, there would be so much debt held by so many different entities at so many different levels, it doesn't seem plausible solution. By far and away, the most attractive scenario would be the 1950s, 1960s scenario, which is responsible finance. In the 50s and 60s, we think of them as the Keynesian period. In fact, they were running surpluses of various types. I wouldn't advocate a surbit surface now, but by all means, obviously, run down the crisis level spending. But then on the other hand, rapid growth in nominal GDP, which is the combination of inflation and actual economic growth. That erodes the debt to GDP ratio and inflation bites away. It's essentially a tax on everyone holding a monetary claim on anyone else. That's only fair under the circumstances. It's equally distributed. It's silent and deadly nevertheless. It's a very effective way of dealing with a monetary debt overhang like this. The problem, and it's a huge problem, and it was a huge problem at the beginning of this year before the crisis hit and had preoccupied monetary policy makers for years now, is they can't get inflation to go. That begs questions then. The most obvious reason as to why it's difficult to make inflation go is there's no bargaining power in the economy right now. One of the reasons you have to remind people is that they did in fact quite deliberately crush the bargaining power of one of the most powerful groups, which was organized labor in the 70s and 80s. They shouldn't be surprised now that wages don't respond in the way that they used to. There's a real kind of forgetfulness on the part of people engaged in conventional policy making like, whoops, hang on, why is this dog dead? Why if we give it more leash does it not run? Well, you fundamentally change the balance of power and also by globalization, of course, increase the global labor supply spectacularly, so reduce people's bargaining power. In any sense, in any case, we were dealing with the problem of what folks had started calling low-flation. It will be wonderful if we could get to four or five percent inflation in the aftermath of this. That will be by far the way the easiest way of dealing with it. It's just unlikely that we will be able to engender that because the environment is quite likely to be deflationary because of the suppression of consumption and the shock to confidence. To my mind, by far, the easiest thing to do is to park this debt on the balance sheet of the central bank as much of it as you can and park it there. It begs the question of what it's doing there and how you unwind it from there, but it postpones the question and above all, what it means is the political system is not flooded with the toxic question of public finance, which did so much damage to the recovery after 2008. Paul Krugman has this great line. It all went wrong in 2010, which he means basically that the political system became overwhelmed by an argument that it's just proven most democratic systems incapable of resolving it in an intelligent way. The vast majority of economists will adopt the kind of functional finance view, which says the debt is largely neutral to indifferent with regard to the performance of the economy, as long as you can place it somewhere safe. Very few people would actually turn it into the Beall or Lendall of economic policy, but conservative politicians across the world did that. In the US, in Europe, in Britain, of course, with disastrous consequences for a bubble for public investment, but also for basic public services and for the welfare of the most vulnerable in society. That is what we want to avoid, because there is a distinct risk of the debts which were run up in this crisis being used essentially as a weapon against progressive policy of any kind for years to come.