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To stem a public health emergency we have shut down over one-third of the economy, creating an economic emergency. To lessen the blow, governments have attempted to ‘freeze’ the economy. This has included: wage subsidies, furlough schemes, business interruption loans, subsidies and welfare payments.

The aim of these policies is to provide a stopgap for individuals and allow businesses to survive. But economies are not machines that can be simply switched ‘on’ and ‘off’ at the will of central planners.

Economies are complex social organisms, involving billions of relationships. Many of these networks are now fraying. Businesses in a variety of sectors now have little to no revenue or cash reserves, cannot pay their suppliers across the economy who also in turn cannot pay their suppliers, and on it goes. Millions of jobs are being lost. Millions more are on the brink.

In addition to the epidemiological puzzle, the challenge ahead is to safely ‘unfreeze’. This is unlikely to be an easy task.

This panel will discuss how to bring the economy back to life.

Panellists:

Matthew Lesh is the Head of Research at the Adam Smith Institute and co-author of the ASI’s recent paper ‘Reopening Britain: The economic urgency’.

Deirdre McCloskey is Professor Emerita at the University of Illinois at Chicago. McCloskey is the author of dozens of books and articles including Bourgeois Equality and Why Liberalism Works. She recently wrote in The Spectator about the need to maintain our liberties during coronavirus.

Martin Wolf CBE is the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times. Wolf, who began his career at the World Bank, has called the current crisis the “biggest economic disaster since the Depression of the 1930s".

Chris Berg is a Senior Research Fellow at the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub at the RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He is the author of nine books, and co-author of the forthcoming book Cryoeconomics: How to Unfreeze an Economy (2020).

Schedule:

The webinar will begin at 6.00pm, with an audience Q&A session taking place afterwards at approximately 6:45pm.