“The Financial System Will Have To Be Reset”: How The World’s Most Powerful And Influential People See The World After The Pandemic

• “The Financial System Will Have To Be Reset”: How The World’s Most Powerful And Influential People See The World After The Pandemic
  by Tyler Durden, https://www.zerohedge.com/
  While nobody really knows what the world will look like on the other side of of the coronavirus pandemic, everyone has an opinion from economists, financiers, executives, all the way to policymakers? Bloomberg asked a variety of leaders from around the world for their best guess on how our lives will be fundamentally changed.
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  The Economists: While some forecasters say a bottom is near in the greatest economic recession since the Great Depression, few expect the economy to snap back to the way it was before the pandemic. Get ready for massive debt relief, more government intervention, heightened China-U.S. tensions, and more women in the workforce.
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  Chen Zhiwu: Director of the Asia Global Institute, economics professor at the University of Hong Kong, and a former adviser to China’s cabinet.
  After the pandemic stabilizes, the New Cold War will be more visible between China and the U.S.-led West. The blame game has already started. But it will get worse once the economic hardship from the pandemic materializes in the coming months or years, to decouple China further from the developed West. As a result of the crisis, China will shift further back to its Communist roots and the Maoist era in terms of worldview and policy mindset.
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  James Galbraith: Professor of government at the University of Texas
  There will be a vast tangle of unpaid debts that cannot be cleared, and—what is different from 2008 and 2009—the model of foreclosures, evictions, and repossessions to deal with them is going to be absolutely unacceptable. People sheltering at home without income are in no way responsible for their circumstances and will refuse to accept the terms of those contracts. So the contracts will have to be suspended, and the debts cleared away, or there will be a confrontation on a vast scale. This is similar to the farm foreclosure confrontations of the 1890s and 1930s in this country, but on a much larger scale, and in many cases urban and suburban. The right model is that of the treatment of inter-allied war debts after World War II: They were canceled, because dealing with the common enemy was a common effort. So the whole financial system will have to be reset. This is not an ideological point but a practical necessity for reestablishing a functioning economic system.
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