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Comment by jpxw | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately this isn’t true. A massive amount of debt is going to be racked up in this time. The economic impacts are not immediate, but they will come.

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Debt is just consuming now what we will produce later. That means that later we will have less. Luckily, the number which tells us how much it costs to shift production temporally: the real interest rate, is low. As a result, we can deal with the impact over the course of decades.

As long as there is no crisis of confidence in the ability to repay that debt, it will not be an issue.

> Luckily, the number which tells us how much it costs to shift production temporally: the real interest rate, is low.

That measure has been meaningless for a long time now since the central banks manipulate it for whatever goal they are currently trying to achieve.

With the amount of uncertainty in the current economic climate if interest rates were set by the market they would be skyhigh as nobody would risk loaning money.

And that's where free market as an institution would get us all killed.

The government recognises that we can easily keep essential supplies going with only a fraction of the population working. Most people who are not working now were doing make-work jobs anyway. There's easily enough to go around. The government just has to do what it can to convince us we're not missing out to our neighbours.

Theoretically, it’s less than the cost of letting everything fall apart for 2 months of pausing business.

2 months seems optimistic ... SARS died out all by itself but I don't think this one will so a vaccine which is a few months off will be critical for folks to go back to "normal".

Vaccine estimate is 18 months according to the Imperial College:

https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...

Vaccines in human trials in the US now need to go through a 14 month observation period to understand effectiveness and side effects.

Influenza vaccines, if they are any guide, are only 50-70% effective and need to be renewed annually.

Ask people if they are willing to sacrifice 18 months of their life so that someone with an average age of 79 and existing health complications can live another couple of years and you will start to deal with the problem honestly.

By my calculations for every 1 year of saved life (average age 79) we are paying for it with 10 years of lockdown life (average age 35-40).

I wonder if the global debt levels will start the next wars. At some point one of the bigger countries will not be able or willing to serve its debt and who knows what will happen then?

If you can print money, you can always service the debt. The only problem is will the demand for your money keep up? That depends on what alternatives people have.

Is it feasible to go to war with a country to collect on debts, though? If they're already having trouble paying, and the creditor is successful in its war, the debtor's economy will be so deep in shambles that repayment will be next to impossible.

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