camille this fareed viewpoint is essential to youth development everywhere, not to mention our species- i dont have joannas email- can you pass it on?-
ccn's fareed was one of the main comperes of wise 2017 when patrick was the laureate-its critical next week's 2 days of virtual wise summit includes totally opposite scenarios of how long everyone will only be able to work and educate online in so called developed world as well as what consequences will be in developing world- i dont know who in wise or OSUN gets this but from the african and other lenses you care most about i suggest only patricks networks can linkin just in time (unless someone like jim kim is suddenly going to reconnect hos responsibilities to youth- it would seem to me a real unga 75th birthday in new york with nigerian host is as unlikely to happen as olympics- every real way youth had been promised olympics unga cop26 has been torn asunder by the usual big suspects)
just my 5 cents worths but so many tipping points including whether we can get back to climate and other sdgs as well as saving lives from ravaging viruses seem to me bang into each other- why finace has big bangs but much deeper applications of youth lives never do in policy makers processes is beyond my ken
chris washington dc whatsapp +1 240 316 8157
seachanges education http://www.masterclass100.com valuation http://www.valuetrue.com nations worldclassnations.com
----- Forwarded message -----
From: Fareed’s Global Briefing <globalbriefing@newsletters.cnn.com>
To: "chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk" <chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk>
Sent: Friday, 10 April 2020, 18:32:21 GMT-4
Subject: Fareed: An Urgent Call to Update Our Models
Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good
April 10, 2020
Fareed: An Urgent Call to Update Our Covid Models
“Something important is happening as the coronavirus crisis continues,” Fareed writes in his latest Washington Post column. “Estimates of its lethality keep going down.”
The US government’s prediction (of 100,000–240,000 American deaths) is poised for a downward revision, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, and a prominent University of Washington model has repeatedly shrunk its projection of US deaths, from 81,000 to 60,415, Fareed writes. Predictions of needed hospital beds by state, offered by the same model, have proven too high. Why? It may have something to do with the data, Fareed writes: Without widespread testing, epidemiologists may have overestimated Covid-19’s fatality rate. And as Stanford’s John Ioannidis tells Fareed, a small underlying flaw in an exponential model can lead to estimates that are off by many fold. “We have shut down the economy based on models, understandably worried about worst-case scenarios,” Fareed writes. “But models are only as good as the data that shapes them.”
The Steepest Free Fall Ever
The world is in its steepest economic free fall ever, Adam Tooze writes for Foreign Policy, and the economy as we knew it may not come back. The US economy is expected to shrink as much as it did during the Great Depression, he writes, but “whereas the contraction after 1929 stretched over a four-year period, the coronavirus implosion will happen over the next three months. There has never been a crash landing like this before.” The damage in large, developing China and India is difficult to measure, he writes. One estimate suggests as many as 205 million Chinese workers (more than a quarter of the country’s labor force) may be out of their jobs, as official data don’t cover 290 million migrant workers, the South China Morning Post reported recently. In India’s labor force of 471 million, 100 million are migrant workers, and many “have been sent in headlong flight back to their villages. There has been nothing like it since partition in 1947,” Tooze writes.
The change will be lasting, he suggests: Retail could be permanently swamped by online competitors, a lingering threat of infection will keep consumer activity down, households may save out of caution, and public debt will be rampant—which makes prolonged stagnation more likely than a “V-shaped” recovery. And the reaction, Tooze writes, is hard to predict: “It makes sense to call … for a more active, more visionary government to lead the way out of the crisis. But the question, of course, is what form that will take and which political forces will control it.”
The Opposite of Cooperation
Commentators (including Fareed) have noted that Covid-19 demands global coordination, but Kimberly Ann Elliott writes for the World Politics Review that the opposite is happening: “[A]s the virus spreads, so too are export restrictions, particularly on masks, gloves, gowns and other protective equipment. According to Global Trade Alert’s most recent report, 54 governments had imposed some form of export restrictions as of March 20, including the EU and India, a major exporter of many pharmaceuticals. By April 3, that number had risen to 69 countries with a total of 87 restrictive actions. Some major food-producing countries have also begun limiting exports of wheat and rice, including Russia, Ukraine and Vietnam.”
Elliott notes that last Friday, N95 mask maker 3M “revealed that the [Trump] administration had requested that it stop exporting the masks to Canada and Latin America. Trump followed by saying that he was going to sign a formal order prohibiting exports of masks and other medical supplies.” Brazil and France “claimed that orders they had placed had been redirected to the U.S. after Washington offered higher prices.” Elliott sees all of this as counterproductive, suggesting countries “focus on how to expand the pie, not fight over who gets the biggest slice.”
A Protectionist Wave to Follow?
At the Nikkei Asian Review, James Crabtree notes those trends and predicts a wave of protectionism: “Restrictions are unlikely to stop there,” he writes. “Previous slumps hit particular industries or countries harder than others. This one is global, in the sense that almost no sector will be spared. Calls for tariff protection from politically connected industries are inevitable.”
The cascade will be hard to stop, and poorer and more-trade-dependent nations will lose out, he writes, citing medical supplies as a particularly ominous example of protectionism’s ripples: “Just three countries, China, Germany and the U.S., export 40% of the world's medical personal protective equipment. A few restrictions in a handful of major exporting nations could therefore hit many others, just when they need supplies most.”
Is Printing Money the Answer?
In a recent editorial, the Financial Times suggests it might be. The Bank of England has offered to lend money directly to the UK government, Reuters reports, noting the practice is often derided as “printing money,” though the Bank insists it’s a short-term measure and that the loan will be repaid by year’s end. In the US, the Federal Reserve announced it will buy $2.3 trillion in bonds, injecting cash into the economy in exchange for them. (After the 2008 crash, three rounds of such asset purchases, known as “quantitative easing,” ran through 2014 and amounted to $4.48 trillion.) As The New York Times’ Neil Irwin put it, the Fed has signaled that “[t]here is a rapidly developing shortage of dollars across the economy. And the Fed will do anything it needs to, on any scale imaginable, to end this shortage.”
That may raise the specter of hyperinflation, as happened in 1920s Germany or Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe: When there’s more money in the economy, a single dollar (or pound or euro) is worth less. But the FT argues there’s precedent for it in a crisis, and that today, the possibility of direct central-bank loans—along with cash payments to the public—"should remain an option,” though they’ll require close coordination with responsible politicians and the strict maintenance of central-bank independence. And in recent years, some have argued the practice isn’t so radical: As John Cassidy wrote for The New Yorker in 2015, Adair Turner, House of Lords member and a former head of the UK’s Financial Services authority, made a compelling argument that money supply and inflation have been decoupled in today’s economy, and it may be better to stop dressing up monetary injections as bond purchases and just print the cash.
New Zealand Goes ‘Sharp and Short’
New Zealand appears to be among few bright spots in the global response to Covid-19, as The Washington Post’s Anna Fifield tells it, writing that daily confirmed cases had dipped to 54 in the country as of Tuesday, there’s little sign of community spread, and Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s decisive reaction seems to be paying off.
The heavily tourism-dependent country “did the unthinkable” and shut its borders on March 19, Fifield writes. “Two days later, Ardern delivered a televised address from her office—the first time since 1982 that an Oval Office-style speech had been given—announcing a coronavirus response alert plan involving four stages, with a full lockdown being Level 4. A group of influential leaders got on the phone with her the following day to urge moving to Level 4.” And with that, the country entered what Ardern has insisted on: a four-week lockdown, complete with calm and encouraging text communications from the government. As one business leader told Fifield, the goal was to “keep it sharp and short”; if it works, the strategy could result in less prolonged economic pain.
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