- After the shocks of Brexit and Donald Trump’s election, there was a lot of talk about the unpredictable politics of populism. Trump’s aggressive trade policy and the escalation into geopolitical rivalry with China shook conventional assumptions about the future of globalization. By 2019, that uncertainty had mounted to the point at which it was affecting investment and risking a recession. Central banks, which had thought they were on a path to normalization and unwinding the dramatic interventions that followed 2008, were forced to reverse course and resume a policy of ultra-low interest rates. That, in turn, engendered hand-wringing about a new era of dependence on central banks. Would we ever return to “normal” times, with markets broken of their addiction to monetary stimulus and business and trade unmolested by unpredictable elections?
After the coronavirus pandemic, such pleas can only seem quaint. We now know what truly radical uncertainty looks like. A huge part of the world’s population has had the basic functioning of its life radically disrupted. None of us can confidently predict when we will be able to return to our pre-coronavirus lives. We may hope that things will “return to normal.” But how will we tell? After all, things seemed normal in January, just weeks before the world stopped. If radical uncertainty was a concern before, it will now be an ever present reality. Every flu season will be anxiously watched. To mix medical metaphors, how long will it be before we can declare ourselves in remission?
Yeah. The level of fucked we are people have not even begun to fathom. The best-case scenarios put forth by all of the thinktanks that do this kind of work is a bigger-than-the Great Depression economic collapse (80% of current value), 45-days to 3 months of lock-ins, 22 million COVID-19 tests a day (and re-testing every two weeks) and everyone that is tested is GPS tracked with their phone... or they get cut off from services. "Normal" is over.