Pyrrhic Victory
Two parts of this short and powerful piece really leapt out at me:<p>> all under the auspices of a hard line Republican administration<p>> Washington under any administration will have no choice but to bail out all the state and local agencies and every insolvent pension scheme wholesale<p>There are underlying problems being forced to the surface by COVID that go deeper than political parties. Somewhere between the 1970s and 2000s American politicians as a class (and possibly a supermajority of voters too) have accepted that running up debt literally does not matter.<p>The economy is brutal. It is a fabricated social concept built on trust right up until the moment it breaks out into the physical world and things that desperately need to happen stop happening because it doesn't make any economic sense.<p>The persistent bailouts are making losers of people who make good long term decisions. Sooner or later, nobody will be left who makes good long term decisions. Such people have been exorcised from the financial industry.