 Senior fellow at the Peterson Institute at the moment, but most of you know and better is a former chief economist at the IMF and before that at MIT. So Olivier, I hope you can hear me. Very good. We hear you loud and clear. So thank you for agreeing to do this Olivier, these difficult times. I understand you will be talking about fiscal policy primarily and Anna will guide you through how to upload your presentation. So I hand over to Emma. And you're happy to do this. Olivier had asked me to talk about policy in general. I thought that given that I was talking to the ECB, we talked about fiscal and not much before us so that I have a slight comparative advantage. The third slide just has a number of caveats which are obvious but important. The first one is that as a economist we very much second fiddle. The whole issue is the dynamics of the pandemic and the effect of the measures that we take to slow it down. And we just have to respond to this and there's enormous uncertainty and we understand that. The second is that with all due respect to the ECB and the main tool is clearly fiscal policy. There are larger issues. I mean the world of the state versus markets I think in response to large shocks is kind of a meta issue that somebody hasn't needed so I hear a lot of background noise. Good. And then I think the whole issue of scaling up which we see in many, in many dimensions in this crisis which we have to think more about given that we may have to do it again. The focus of the talk will be mostly normative which is what fiscal policy should be. I find that in practice actual policies are fairly close to what I think they should be which is very good news. And then the last caveat is that at this stage I'm more or less a one-man team with a lot of interactions but no arrays so for days on which I had 200 people to help me are gone and therefore it is not as impressive at least visually as it would have been otherwise. Let's move on. Next slide then. Right because I don't have control of it. Okay. Three slides about the epidemic. I'm not in any way an specialist but everything we say depends on that. I think we all agree now that there are kind of two phases to the dynamics. Phase one is controlling and then decreasing the infection rate and then phase two which will last longer is how to keep it down. So on phase one I actually largely think that the story is largely in. There's a relatively little uncertainty about when we're going to have the infection rate stabilizing. It's around now in some countries we're just past it in some countries like the US with not yet there but we're very close. And then it's very likely going to decrease and based on what we know by June or July we should be a blue infection rate. I think on this clearly this is largely baked in and fiscal policy can have much effect on it. I think that's it could go wrong if confinement is stopped too early but that's I think a very likely outcome. Next slide. So this is phase two which is keeping the infection rate low for hopefully forever and on this is an enormous amount of uncertainty. There are good and bad news. The good news is something that you may have looked at that Tom Tom actually measures traffic in all major cities in the world early. And you can look at how it compares to what it was before the crisis. And this one gives you the traffic in Beijing. And if you can see the light blue line is kind of normal traffic in the past and the red line is traffic last week. And you can see that the red line is actually quite close to the blue line which is an indication and given that we don't believe Chinese statistics always. These I think are believable and they tell us that it looks like they have largely returned to normal not doing weekends which are the two days at the end but otherwise yes. Now how does this translate to us to advanced economies and basically we don't know it's going to depend very much on as we all know on the availability of tests. The true value of so-called are not the length of immunity. And we're just going to go at it slowly. All countries are basically putting in place various ways of doing it. We're going to need rankings of people of type of work of sectors. The last remark is here. I think there's some work for the economist. This is a bit of a joke but not entirely. Economists were very much involved in the Second World War in choosing bombing choices for Allied bombers. And the question was how to do maximum damage but needed to be destroyed first. And I think we're facing the opposite problem which is we can reopen schools, we can reopen manufacturing, we can reopen airlines and so on. What is the best way of doing it? And I think there we can probably contribute to it in a way which might be useful. Next slide. I've said so far is about advanced economies and it's completely different for developing and emerging market countries. They have as we know a very poor health system. Now on the other side they have a younger population so maybe less exposed. They have warmer weather but we have no clue as to how much it matters. It's very hard to impose lockdown in the cities, in the slums even more. I worked last week on Nigeria which at this date doesn't have many reported cases. There are probably many more than that. But if you look at the number of beds per thousand people it's one-fifth of the U.S. As of a few weeks ago maybe two weeks ago they had 169 ventilators for the states of Nigeria. We could get data on which is clearly nothing and they had performed 600 tests which is clearly nothing. So I think there the dynamics of the epidemic are likely to be largely different. It's more likely to be of a herd immunity dynamics the ones that the U.K. thought about for a while and then wisely retreated from. Which means a very large number of deaths at the beginning maybe a smaller short-run cost. This was the case in the pandemic of 1918 where the economic cost in the short run was much smaller than anything we see today. But probably a larger long-run cost as has been confirmed in the number of papers since then. So that's the background and now we turn to fiscal policy. So the way I think about it and I don't think it's very controversial is that there are three rules for fiscal policy in advanced economies. Again I'll come back to the emerging markets developing economies at the end. The first one is infection fighting. Anything we can do to basically stop the spread of the virus. That's obvious. The second is disaster relief of people, of firms. And although it's not yet on the list in any obvious way of financial institutions because at some stage some of them will be in trouble. And then the third is aggregate demand management which is making sure that we try to operate the economies close to potential. Knowing that potential is lower. We're trying at least to get there. In a normal recession the only goal would be the third. But in this one clearly the first to dominate given the nature, the nature of the shock. I'm going to go through each of these insisting on what I see as the challenges, the intellectual challenges and therefore the policy challenges and the time dimension of each one. Okay infection fighting. So again go through phase one and phase two. Phase one fiscal is not central to it. It's basically how we can mobilize all the health resources we have. We clearly have to spend the money, but it's not, it's not much. It doesn't make a gigantic difference in what's essential is clearly lockdown and and doing everything we can in the health system. The phase two is much more interesting. Clearly there are enormous incentives from a social point of view to have tests to explore drugs to find vaccines. And then there's the issue of whether the private sector will do what we want it to do with our state intervention. And that's not obvious because it's a risky way in particular in case of vaccines and the development of tests. These are very risky ventures in which we have to spend a lot of money in order to get there. It's not clear, but they'll do it. There is the issue of what you do when a firm succeeds and has a patent and then sells it for a high price. You probably don't want this to happen. So there we have to think about how we do it and we can probably do better than just letting the market do it. We can probably have the state promise to buy the patents when firms find something rather than having the patents and making money out of it. We can think of a state giving grants now to firms which are trying with the grants being payable back if it works and not payable if they are not. I think there we have to do much more because as I'll argue in a minute, I think the scale of what needs to be done is gigantic. And the private sector is clearly doing a lot, but maybe we can help. There is a computation which is quite provocative by Paul Wommer who argues that if we had enough tests, these are virus tests, not antibody tests. If we basically did enough tests, we could actually get R or R not as it's known, the reproduction factor below 1 without confinement, without lockdown. And he makes some computations which I think one can argue with, but he concludes that if we could do daily tests of 7% of the population every day, which is 22 million tests in the U.S., then this would actually give us R not less than 1 and would limit the infection rate. I've done some computations. He did some. I did some by having information from producers and so on. And I'll just go to the bottom line, which is that machines probably producing the number of machines we would need would cost less than a billion. Here I have an estimate of 250 million, but 240 million, but I think it would probably cost more. But basically with a billion dollars, we would have the machines we need for the U.S. The production cost at this stage is about $35. It could probably go down if we did a much scale to 20. So the marginal cost daily would be about 0.4 billion, which is clearly a gigantic number for tests. But if you think about this allowing an increase in output of 20% or even 10%, 20% would be 10 billion a day, which is clearly orders of magnitude greater than the cost. And if it was 10%, it would be 5 billion, which still be 10 times. So there's the idea that if you could do it, it actually makes sense. It's kind of a gigantic moon landing or Earth landing project, but it is, it may be doable. And clearly we have to think about going in that direction. Bottom line in terms of fiscal is that if we did everything that we can do, it would still be a very small proportion of GDP. It's very hard when you put all these measures in to get numbers which are greater than 1% of GDP. So this needs to be done from a fiscal point of view. That's not where the money is going to be spent. Next slide. So the disaster relief, basically the idea is that you have a lot of people who basically don't have the cash to go on for, without revenues for a long time. Same thing with firms. And you have to help them. And then there is a gigantic trade-off between speed and targeting. You really have to do it quickly within a few weeks, a month or two at the most. And targeting is very, very hard to do, given the tools we have. So I think we've done maybe the best we could do, but clearly as time goes, that's where economies can come in. We probably can do better in getting kind of better targeting, maybe for less money. We spent, we basically are going to spend a lot of money because of the bad targeting. And so it makes sense to actually think of which programs develop, you know, thinking about it now and implementing them at the time. There are basically two approaches conceptually. The first one is in the U.S. You let people be laid off. And then the unemployment offices do the best they can. And then the state sends checks and gives tax breaks or tax deferrals. That is not working very well because of the information, again, the scaling up for the unemployment offices, the addresses for the checks. France has taken a different approach, which I think is better, which is to do it through firms. And basically tell the firms, well, you continue to pay wages. Basically you pay 80% of the old wage. And you'll get automatic credit from banks. And so banks have to be ready to extend credit for this amount and a bit more. And then the banks are going to be backstoped by the fiscal authorities. So they lose money on the credit and then they'll be reimbursed. And then again a series of tax breaks. I think it's substantially better because at least in the first step, you get people to get the checks. Unless the firms really don't have a penny and the banks take time. It's more likely that money will be delivered. Now, it's turning out to be difficult for the banks to actually extend credit to firms even knowing that they are fully backed. But I still think it's better. It keeps the link between workers and firms so they can be re-employed fairly quickly. But I think we're all trying different things. Well, in the end, no, what works better. It's very clear that one has to, on the very generous side, you know, the cash payments in the US are going to many people that truly don't need the cash. And the replacement rate in France of 80% is very high and basically may well deter some people from going back to work and things like this. Should it be grants or should it be loans? That's a complicated issue. I think grants is probably the way to go if you do loans. People are never sure that they'll be able to actually repay their ambiguities. And I think it's going to lead people to be too careful. Can we do better? Yes, I think we can do better at the time. An issue which I don't have on the slide because I didn't send you the latest version of the slide is the exit strategy. And I think that very soon we have to think about it and think about restaurants. As long as they are on lockdown, then it's clear that you basically have to give them enough cash to survive. Right, so you have to pay the workers and so on. But some stage, lockdown is going to be relaxed and restaurants are going to be allowed to open under some conditions. It's very likely that for a while, both because of the recession in general and because people will not want to go there, traffic is going to be very low. And even eventually it's very likely that the number of restaurants which have to close is fairly high. So at what point do you basically take the plug away and that restaurants do it on their own? Clearly you don't want to do it at the very beginning because at the beginning people are just not going back, they will eventually and the economy is very poor so laying off workers is probably not a great time to do it. But you have to do it all the time. My sense is we have to think about this as economists and maybe limit the amount of backstop of bags all the time as a function of both the economy and maybe the sector that we're dealing with. But that's I think one of the challenges which is coming. Upper bound on the cost. This was a computation I made. It gives an interesting number which is the question is how big is the decrease in potential output and therefore in output because this is a hard constraint under strict lockdown so you basically don't allow non-essential firms to operate. And there is now a good now cast estimate for March in France and basically the conclusion is 35% decline relative to baseline. So if you assume that we have two months of complete lockdown and six months at half lockdown as the economy goes back to something like normal. If you assume that the proportion of liquidity constraint firms and workers is 40% you can be much more refined but that's a simple computation. If you assume that the replacement rate for workers and for firms is 80% that turns out to be 5% of GDP and I've made fairly generous assumptions. Now what's interesting is that the US program is already twice that and I think this says that it really is not very well targeted and it's giving money to people and firms which probably don't need it. I think there is an interesting issue there as well to explore. The other programs in the rest of the world are closer to 5% that doesn't include the automatic stabilizers. So in that case the automatic stabilizers would probably add about 5% and so you basically have numbers about the deficit of about 10% of GDP for disaster relief. Next. Okay so the third one is kind of a standard one in normal recessions but here it's only third and I think we have to distinguish between phase one and phase two and again there are interesting issues here. Phase one you know if output is down by 35% take the number of previous slide there is no way you can get above that. You can increase demand as much as you want it's just not going to help. And so there is the question of well could it be that disaster relief which needs to be done is actually going to lead to too much demand. And the answer is that it well could. You can think that basically replacing the income of the workers and they're going to keep demanding more or less the same and that's going to be too much given the constraint. I don't think it's a major issue it's something we have to think about because people are going to probably spend largely on food on repaying mortgages not on trying to buy things which are no longer produced. So I don't think it's a major issue if it turns out to be an issue and there's rationing and there's some inflation. Well rationing is not bad rationing actually would kind of lead to distribution in which people have more time to actually queue or do whatever it takes. I like to get it as opposed to the rich which we think is probably a good thing and then some inflation would do good things to a real rate. I don't think it would be a major but would not hurt very much would not be a major issue. The phase two issue is again interesting which is as the lockdown is relaxed will private demand go up or down. And I think there are two things that work. They spent up demand it's very clear that we see it in the desegregated data and people are not buying all kinds of things that in normal times they would and eventually will. So I think at the beginning it's probably going to play a role. But behind that my sense is that there's so much uncertainty about how we go back to normal that it's going to lead to precautionary saving. And it's probably going to lead to low investment as well because of the option value of waiting. So I have a sense that it may be complicated that after a burst we may actually have low demand and then a need for further fiscal fiscal help if what is in place is not is not enough. I think the implication in terms of policy is that we should not commit to things which imply large public spending or low taxes before we actually know what we need to do. And so here a remark which is going to displease some people probably not at DCB but elsewhere which is this is not the time to plan a major green investment plan for example. I'm all in favor of it. I've argued for it. I've said public investment is of the essence but for this particular purpose that's not what you want to do. You probably want to think about putting it in place at some point maybe later hopefully later but not now. Good. Let's move on. Okay. We come to the somehow maybe the big issue which is that sustainability. So is that sustainable? You know how much will the debt increase? If you're optimistic maybe 20% of GDP if you're pessimistic 30 to 40% if you're incredibly pessimistic and you think the virus will not be eliminated. Thank God knows what happens but in that case you know it's a different world and that doesn't much matter. The debt issue doesn't much matter. There are much more worrisome things to think about. So my sense is a fairly unambiguous yes for advanced economies. I think that is sustainable. And then goes back to what I had been obsessed about for the last year and a half which is you know the comparison of our safe rate and G the growth rate. I think I now realize that they are too competing ours. There is the R not the epidemiologist and then there is the R star of the economies that both are very relevant in this case. As you know R star and therefore R was very low before the crisis. If you looked at the yield curve there were flat all the way to more or less infinity. And I have a sense that it's going to be the more the case now precautionary saving is going to be higher if anything. Investment probably is going to be lower for some time. So I have a sense that we're going to have very low R star and therefore very low R for a long time. Now going against that you have the effect that you know higher debt probably increases the underlying R star. If you think that the increase will be 30 to 40% GDP then you have to assume something about the effect of this on R star. We basically have no clue somebody has to mute again maybe. The estimates that we use that I really we have to be realistic about the fact that we don't know somebody has to mute again. This is 2 to 4 basis points per percent of that GDP ratio. Many machines this is 20% so 20% in Calcutt. Sorry is this a question or is this is an on mute thing. Somebody asked about 30 to 40% but I can't decide whether that's because of on mute or because it was a question. Luke tell me. Okay good anyway so the bottom line is in the worst case I think this would lead to an increase of 160 basis points. Other things equal which is not nothing but I assume that the other effects would still dominate which still remain with a very low R. The other part of the equation is G the growth rate. There is no reason to think that it's going to be lower after 2020 2021. So my guess is that that is sustainable but that comes the next slide. Where you guys come in which is I think that it is sustainable but to make sure that it is the central banks really have to do a lot. And here I want to take two themes. The first one is this discussion about monetization of deficits which I think is largely confused. I had a short piece with Jean-Pierre yesterday about that. The point is yes we actually see a very large increase in central bank balance sheets at this stage. And people are very worried and some people are very worried about this. I think the point is that monetization today which is an increase in central banks holdings of other things and an increase in central bank money has to a first order zero effect and you're basically exchanging two assets. They both pay zero. Now if you look at the details it's clearly not exactly upsetting but it's very close. So it really doesn't make any difference. For some reason and I think it's fairly far in the future the R star, the neutral rate must become positive because then it's the responsibility of the central bank to increase R and so to basically make sure that they do what they need to do from an economic point of view. And then they'll have a choice which is they can do what the Fed did until the crisis which is that they increase R and they pay interest on money and then money is just like that. So again it doesn't make much difference whether the central bank bought a lot or not. Basically they have to pay interest on money so it doesn't make much difference and we don't have to worry. The case in which it matters is that for political reasons or other reasons they decide that they really cannot increase R and they keep R at zero so that they don't have to pay interest on money. And then it's very likely that if R star was positive and you keep the rate at zero then the economy is going to overheat. There's going to be inflation and in the worst possible case maybe high inflation and that's clearly the way things started in Germany and doing the great hyperinflations. This may happen. We have no clue. I think it's a very, very unlikely outcome but it is not a zero probability outcome for the moment. I think we should not worry. Now where central banks are very important role now is in avoiding multiple equilibria. So in many markets including southern bond markets they are typically not typically but they often are two equilibria. There's a good equilibrium at the safe rate that that service is reasonable, that is sustainable and therefore the safe rate is the right one. And then there's a bad equilibrium which is the investors start wearing a whole lot. They ask for a spread and that service becomes very large and that becomes unsustainable which self-fulfills the worries of the investors in the first place. We have all seen these models but they actually correspond to reality. And in this case it's clear that what the central bank has to do is to make sure that we don't get the bad equilibrium. So how does it do it? Basically it basically commits to keeping the rate. If not at the safe rate there might be some very small probability of default but at a very low level. The extreme case is yield curve control which is what the Bank of Japan is doing. You just say 10 year old at zero and I'll just intervene and that surely eliminates the bad equilibrium. It also deters investors from trying because they know that the Bank of Japan will be on the other side. Now that's relevant for the ECB. Let me just say a word about this. I wish the ECB did yield curve control but it cannot and I think for a number of reasons to do it. They have done the next best thing which is to say we have a lot of money and we'll basically make sure things are okay. And that is very likely to work. It's likely that's good and it may lead you to actually spend more because investors may think that's not enough money and they may try to actually go above the limit and win. I think in this case the ECB would probably increase the amount of money they are willing to put in so not too worried. There is a very interesting issue which clearly is central for you which is the discussion which is taking place about whether the ECB commitment is enough or you need the ESM-OMT or you need Corona bonds or Euro bonds or whatever you want to call them. And I think the discussion is again muddled. It seems to me the important question is do you think that is sustainable at a safe rate or at a low rate? If you think so and then what the ECB is doing is fine. If you don't think so, if you think that that is actually not sustainable in Italy, then the ECB cannot do the job because the good equilibrium is not so good and trying to maintain a very low rate is a recipe for disaster, for taking credit risk and the ECB should not do it. So I think the people that think that that may not be sustainable clearly must want something stronger than what the ECB is doing in either just the ESM program or Euro bonds for mutualization of risk. I would feel much better if, I mean I think the ECB is probably enough but I'm not absolutely sure and therefore I would like to see more in case that turns out not to be sustainable. Again, I don't think that's the case but let us save them starting. Let's move on. Okay, so the last slide is about emerging markets and developing economies and then the scope for international institutions and coordination. And the situation, you've heard this but it's really true. It's a situation for many of these countries is terrible. And there are some similarities with advanced economies and they are fighting the same virus. Fiscal policy should have the same three goals but there are major differences that are just not equipped to fight the virus. I've talked about this. They have large capital outflows, not so much due to worries about them but the need to repatriate liquidity they have effects denominated debt, fairly steeped the manker for government bonds that limits very much what they can do. They have a very large drop in commodity prices, there's this stupid oil price war which is really happening at the wrong time. Tourism has disappeared. So they're in terrible shape and they don't have fiscal space. And so it's very clear that existing debt, they have become unsustainable and then they just don't have additional private borrowing available. So I think for many of these countries, there is a liquidity issue right now. And then there's clearly a solvency issue for many, many countries already now. Next slide. All of central banks, international institutions. So in the short run, it's liquidity, right? So swap lines, size and reach. I don't need to discuss it. I think it's obvious. It's happening probably not quite on the scale I would like. There's an issue of allowing private creditors out and therefore having capital controls on outflows right now. There's a trade off. I think debt restructuring is the solution. But in the short run, this may have to be done. Next point is also an obvious one, which is the financing of the infection fighting should be full grants of a concessionary loan. That's already happening. Not on the scale which is sufficient. And therefore things like SDR locations or even if there are no SDR locations, the gift or lending of the SDR location by which countries to poor countries could go a long way. I think something like this is needed. It's needed right now. I know it's being discussed at the IMF this week. I think it's important. The medium run. Clearly this is the solvency issue. I think in some cases it's obvious that that is not sustainable. But in many cases it depends. You can't quite tell. So that stands still as much as it can be done is the way to go. But for those of you who have worked on these issues and I'm thinking of look here, you know, there are so many types of creditors that coordination is a big issue. But something like this has to be done. How much conditionality to impose on programs. It seems to me that again, conditionality should be very limited. It should be allowed to fight the virus and not do anything crazy, obviously, but this is really special. One issue here, which is not on this slide is that there is debt restructuring. This means that creditors are going to have to accept big haircut. And for official creditors, they can. But for private creditors, that might be an issue. And we should already be thinking about the effects of that restructuring on the advanced economies financial system to make sure that it can act. Handle it. It's not completely obvious. And I think there has to be work and haven't seen it yet. Last slide. Coordination. Now, you know, it's standard that any G20 meeting or G7 meeting to have to involve the need for coordination. And I'm not so sure that there is a gigantic role for coordination is for fiscal coordination. We can discuss the others. You clearly have to have coordination in mobilizing and getting funds to emerging markets and developing economies. That's very clear. Whether you call this coordination of gift giving, I don't know, but it's essential. There has to be coordination in sharing information because both on the pandemic side and the fiscal side, we train new things and countries are going at it in different ways. So that a place like the IMF or the CB or for Europe physically has to show how each country is doing and what the results are. I think that's very important. Coordination in determining the size of fiscal programs. My sense is no. In 2009, I was a fairly strong advocate of coordination because the issue was moving aggregate demand. And when you have economies which are very open, when you increase aggregate demand, a lot of it spills over to other countries and you may not want to help them. You want to help yourself. So I think when it's a standard recession, it makes a lot of sense to have coordination to basically increase fiscal policy in each country. It's not obvious that in this case it's very relevant. If you think about the two goals of fiscal policy, the first two, infection fighting, disaster relief, you basically do whatever it takes for your country and you don't care. So I don't think that spillovers are very relevant here. So I'm happy we talked about fiscal programs, but I don't see any need for coordination in the usual sense. The last point, and this will end, an issue which is likely to really play big and be very difficult to solve is that there's going to be a need for a lot of tests, a lot of vaccines, and there's going to be fighting. And you already see the fighting for the masks today, which is a much smaller issue. The U.S. is stealing or bidding and getting the mask and other countries wanted to have and so on. It's already early, but it's going to be much worse. If you let markets decide, then the rich countries will basically buy the test machines, the vaccines and so on. And then within the rich countries, the rich people will get them. So you don't want that. You want some agreement, both to subsidize, and I go back to one of the early slides, subsidize research and production and development. And then you also want the states to allocate it. You want some allocation across countries and within countries. I think it's, you know, it would be dreaming to think it will actually happen at the world level. It should, but it can probably happen at the European level. And I would hope that there would be an agreement as to how, you know, tests and vaccines are distributed. There are not enough of that. So let me stop here. Sorry about the delay at the beginning and the small problems along the way. But I show you that time for a few questions. So please go ahead. Many thanks for the views. So everyone that still wants to ask questions can add them to the, is on the material that you presented on the lockdown. So Alberto Martin, you know, Alberto, well, of course. So he's asking, do you see any role for the price system in choosing which sectors to open up first? So, I mean, you mentioned the role of economists in deciding which sectors should exit the lockdown. And this may be hard to do top down. So do you see any role for the price system in this process, for instance? Would you want to let sectors of people purchase permits to exit the lockdown? Could the state maybe decide on the overall speed of them? The price system by a market on which sectors should exit? I think the answer isn't on the, I had not thought about the issue. It's a fun question. It's an interesting question. Do you still hear me because I seem to have disconnected? Absolutely. Yeah, it's just a presentation slide when it's gone. Okay. So just thinking in real time, I had not thought about it before. The answer is absolutely not. I mean, unambiguously because of the externalities. It's absolutely obvious. But there's still something very interesting to do, which is basically to think about the marginal cost of a marginal benefit of opening different sectors. So in the privacy of our offices, in the privacy of Alberto's office, I think that looking at what the marginal benefit of opening social marginal benefit of opening this sector rather than that sector is something that maybe we should be doing, but allowing the price system to play any role into who gets back to work and things like this strikes me as politically unwise and economically unwise. And that is welcome to come back with a rejoinder, but maybe they should be bilateral. Yeah, it's an interesting issue. Okay, then there are a series of questions, not surprisingly on the fiscal role of central banks. The first question is whether you are, since you're not, you don't seem to be worried about that sustainability, are you still, since the conditions vary widely across your area countries and the ECB seems to each time have to kind of make up for this promise, are you not concerned about the risk of rollover crisis? So will it become increasingly difficult for the ECB to support the good equilibrium and will the ECB be tested? So clearly I had in mind Italy. So yes, my statement is I think that that is sustainable with very high probability in all countries, including Italy. About two or three weeks ago, I had a long thread and then a slightly more serious paper on the issue. I think it's perfectly doable and Italy can run, you know, they hide that GDP ratio and still run a primary deficit. So there's no need for something crazy to be done. So I think can be done all of the crisis. That's very much what I talked about. And basically, I think that's the case in which you have control is the way. And you basically say, well, you know, I'm just going to go in. Now, investors, some investors may want to get out, in which case indeed the ECB will be holding some of the bag, but much of the idea is to basically prevent kind of the self-fulfilling all of the crisis. It may be that some investors will just not want to buy Italy, it may be. But I think the main issue is that they may get scared, in which case, you know, self-fulfilling. So yes, I think there is a risk that some of it, you know, that in the ideal case, you don't spend a penny, investors stay in and it's all fine. In reality, you probably have to spend more than a penny and go above the capital key, but that doesn't worry me too much. And it's an investor of last resort. A related question is, I mean, so far the ECB has intervened on a large scale, like other central banks. Would it be more desirable for European countries to support each other first at the fiscal level? And then this would be followed by ECB support. So this speaks to this question on, should it be ECB intervention or corona bonds? Yes, I mean, I think that, again, if I was 100% sure that that was sustainable in Italy, I would say, why, you know, why have corona bonds? And just, you know, no need. But I'm not, you know, I'm 98% sure, something like this, right? So it's clear that anything we can do to mutualize some of the risk and make the percentage go from 98 to 100 is worth it. So yes, I would much prefer to have seen your bonds in the past, to see them now, to see corona bonds, and then the ECB kind of plays, you know, the role of eliminating the bad equilibrium. And yes, mutualization is clearly desirable, but we know the political constraints. So what I'm saying is the ECB intervention is second best. It may be sufficient. It may not. I think that that's the best which could be done under the circumstances. I hope that doesn't need the, you know, the Europeans not to be more ambitious. There's always a risk that when you basically, you know, kind of repair something, it leads to less pressure to do more. But maybe it may be that the ECB could have kind of bluffed, you know, say, sorry, guys, we can do it. And then I suspect we would have seen corona bonds. We would also have seen spreads in Italy going to, you know, to many hundreds. That was the other way of bringing it to risky for me. I'm happy that the ECB did it. But it's not first best. So you tackled kind of three areas. From Florian Haider, he was wondering whether, especially for Europe, we should also worry about a fourth dimension, which is cross-country divergences in terms of solidarity. How concerned are you about solidarity kind of not coming together around this problem? Again, I think Italy can do it without either euro bonds or straight transfers from other countries. I, you know, most countries are affected, but it's true that Germany is less affected than Italy, right? So even there we get the old asymmetry. I'm all in favor of transfers, gifts, help. The point is, I think Italy can make it with very limited transfers, very limited help. And again, anything that Europe can do to make sure that the weakest are helped is good. That's a political issue. I think the only thing I can say is I think Italy can do it without and rather have it do it with. I think there's a larger issue, which is the general issue of solidarity in the European Union. If the European Union doesn't show solidarity in this case, then people will go back to why are we belonging to the European Union. So I think there's another dimension, which is much larger, and that clearly is important. Yes, so maybe this was the fourth dimension, which was in the question. We're looking forward. So, and then from my end, sort of also looking forward, once we hopefully make this crisis, I remember when you came to the IMF, you draw a long list of tongue questions on the wall. These are sort of the big questions for the future, and I still remember some of those. What are the big questions for the economists going forward? I mean, this crisis is going to, is it going to change your textbook and in which way? No, I don't think so. I mean, you know, in the textbook, there have to be, basically, the textbook was very much written, having either demand shocks, kind of the standard ones, or supply shocks, but supply shocks, which did something to potential, but didn't prevent the economy to exceed potential. So it was not a major change, right? It was another price change. We can continue to operate at the same level, and it may create inflation, and that's a job of the central bank, but it's not fundamentally different from, you know, just to shift in the natural rate of unemployment. But what we have learned is that we can have these shocks, which are basically heart constraints on potential, right, and heart constraints on actual. And I think that, you know, I have to have a chapter or a section. Beyond this, I'm not so sure. What I think is, and I've just started basically organizing something on that, which is that all these big challenges that we were talking about before, global warming, aging, inequality, which we didn't take, you know, we took seriously as economists, but policy makers didn't take seriously enough. I think there'll be a sense that if you wait for the last minute, then there's a big issue. And I'm hoping that when the smoke clears, we'll basically kind of go further on, you know, the carbon tax on inequality. I mean, this crisis showed, you know, that inequality can show up in many ways. I mean, basically, the people are dying now. People who basically were forced to work. People like you and me, you know, have stayed home, are probably free for the time being. So I hope that it's more that, that basically we're more forward-looking and being willing to take hard measures to basically deal with the future. I mean, this one is interesting, which is how do we basically prepare for the pandemic? And yeah, we can have more masks, but it's clear that we collaborate hospitals at half capacity, normal times, just to have the margin, right? So the whole issue of, and this is kind of a micro-macro issue, the whole issue of scaling up, which we see in all dimensions, you know, and the time it takes for food to come to your place when you order it, because we are completely overwhelmed. And so scaling up at all dimensions is a big issue. And maybe we have to think about, you know, our ability to scale up when there is a shock of that type. And I think that's a very interesting issue. And, you know, again, we can't be completely prepared is the point. I mean, even if we had known the pandemic was coming, maybe we would have had more masks that we would not have had all the ventilators, because they would have been waiting, you know, in some storage room and probably becoming obsolete. So we have to admit that there are going to be shocks where the scaling up is very hard, but maybe we can do better. But beyond this, whether we're going to be changed human beings or not, I'm a bit skeptical. I feel that I have not changed very much yet. Maybe I will. Maybe once we get outside. Well, Olivier, thank you very much for this interesting presentation. Okay. Let me just say I'm happy to have bilateral interactions with anybody who didn't get an opportunity to ask a question. It's not that my email inbox is empty, but, you know, I'm happy to answer interesting questions. Okay. Yeah, there are 40 people on the line and we will upload your presentation now for everyone else in the city. There's also a videotape for the colleagues who could not. It was an over demand, but thank you very much. Okay. So those that are interested in the webinars tomorrow, Daryl Duffy will speak on financial system issues. So Olivier, with that, goodbye and stay healthy. Same to you. Same to you all. Bye. Bye now.