Economics lessons from history: Don’t expect a post-Covid boom
Just over 200 years ago, the finances of the British government looked even more parlous than they do today. Since the mid-1790s, the country had been engaged in a titanic struggle with Napoleon’s France. To pay for the conflict, the government had borrowed on a massive scale. The cumulative financial deficit — the difference between […]
To pay for this crisis, the government must keep in mind Ricardian equivalence
John Maynard Keynes could certainly craft a neat phrase. In the Second World War, he wrote in his pamphlet How to Pay for the War: “It is only in a free community that the task of government is complicated by the cause of social justice.” The impact of the coronavirus pandemic is similar to a […]
