At the end of March, the Council on Economic Policies (a Zurich based think tank) posted this piece written by William White. White identifies the many challenges, actual and emerging, threatening the future of our democratic, market based systems and indeed of mankind itself. Our economic, political, environmental and health systems are all showing increased signs of stress and any one of them might “stop”. Since all of these systems are interrelated, problems that emerge in one system will threaten the other systems as well. White describes the key characteristics of more sustainable systems, and suggests policies that might be required to move from the unsustainable path we are on currently to a path that would actually leads us to where we want to go.

A book with this title, edited by Per Nymand-Andersen and published by Risk Books, became available on 23 March. William White wrote an endorsement, praising the book for its comprehensive approach to the subject (20 chapters written by authors with different specialities) and its willingness to address both the opportunities and the practical challenges offered by new techniques for data collection and  analysis.

On 17 March, INET published on its website a blog note (summary) and  Working Paper by William White. The Working Paper argues that, by encouraging the issue of debt, often for unproductive purposes, monetary stimulus becomes increasingly ineffective with time. Worse, it has a number of side effects that become increasingly burdensome over time. It threatens financial instability in a number of ways, leads to real resource misallocations that lower potential growth, and finally produces a policy “debt trap” that cannot be escaped without significant economic costs.

https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/the-full-case-against-ultra-low-and-negative-interest-rates

https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/research-papers/its-worse-than-reverse-the-full-case-against-ultra-low-and-negative-interest-rates