Covid and the crisis of neoliberalism | Coronavirus

If one phrase may sum up the expertise of 2020, it might be disbelief. Between Xi Jinping’s public acknowledgment of the coronavirus outbreak on 20 January 2020, and Joe Biden’s inauguration because the forty sixth president of the US exactly a yr later, the world was shaken by a illness that within the area of 12 months killed greater than 2.2 million folks and rendered tens of hundreds of thousands severely unwell. Right now the official dying tolls stands at 4.51 million. The possible determine for extra deaths is greater than twice that quantity. The virus disrupted the each day routine of nearly everybody on the planet, stopped a lot of public life, closed faculties, separated households, interrupted journey and upended the world economic system.

To comprise the fallout, authorities assist for households, companies and markets took on dimensions not seen exterior wartime. It was not simply by far the sharpest financial recession skilled because the second world struggle, it was qualitatively distinctive. By no means earlier than had there been a collective resolution, nevertheless haphazard and uneven, to close giant elements of the world’s economic system down. It was, because the Worldwide Financial Fund (IMF) put it, “a crisis like no other”.

Even earlier than we knew what would hit us, there was each purpose to assume that 2020 could be tumultuous. The battle between China and the US was boiling up. A “new chilly struggle” was within the air. International development had slowed critically in 2019. The IMF fearful in regards to the destabilising impact that geopolitical pressure may need on a world economic system that was already piled excessive with debt. Economists cooked up new statistical indicators to trace the uncertainty that was dogging funding. The info strongly recommended that the supply of the difficulty was within the White Home. The US’s forty fifth president, Donald Trump, had succeeded in turning himself into an unhealthy international obsession. He was up for reelection in November and appeared bent on discrediting the electoral course of even when it yielded a win. Not for nothing, the slogan of the 2020 version of the Munich Safety Convention – the Davos for nationwide safety varieties – was “Westlessness”.

Aside from the concerns about Washington, the clock on the Brexit negotiations was operating out. Much more alarming for Europe as 2020 started was the prospect of a brand new refugee disaster. Within the background lurked each the specter of a remaining grisly escalation in Syria’s civil struggle and the power drawback of underdevelopment. The one strategy to treatment that was to energise funding and development within the international south. The circulation of capital, nevertheless, was unstable and unequal. On the finish of 2019, half the lowest-income debtors in sub-Saharan Africa had been already approaching the purpose at which they might not service their money owed.

The pervasive sense of threat and anxiousness that hung world wide economic system was a outstanding reversal. Not so lengthy earlier than, the west’s obvious triumph within the chilly struggle, the rise of market finance, the miracles of data expertise, and the widening orbit of financial development appeared to cement the capitalist economic system because the all-conquering driver of contemporary historical past. Within the Nineties, the reply to most political questions had appeared easy: “It’s the economic system, silly.” As financial development remodeled the lives of billions, there was, Margaret Thatcher appreciated to say, “no various”. That’s, there was no various to an order primarily based on privatisation, light-touch regulation and the liberty of motion of capital and items. As just lately as 2005, Britain’s centrist prime minister Tony Blair may declare that to argue about globalisation made as a lot sense as arguing about whether or not autumn ought to comply with summer season.

By 2020, globalisation and the seasons had been very a lot in query. The economic system had morphed from being the reply to being the query. A collection of deep crises – starting in Asia within the late 90s and transferring to the Atlantic monetary system in 2008, the eurozone in 2010 and international commodity producers in 2014 – had shaken confidence in market economics. All these crises had been overcome, however by authorities spending and central financial institution interventions that drove a coach and horses by way of firmly held precepts about “small authorities” and “impartial” central banks. The crises had been introduced on by hypothesis, and the size of the interventions essential to stabilise them had been historic. But the wealth of the worldwide elite continued to develop. Whereas income had been non-public, losses had been socialised. Who could possibly be shocked, many now requested, if surging inequality led to populist disruption? In the meantime, with China’s spectacular ascent, it was not clear that the nice gods of development had been on the aspect of the west.

After which, in January 2020, the information broke from Beijing. China was dealing with a full-blown epidemic of a novel coronavirus. This was the pure “blowback” that environmental campaigners had lengthy warned us about, however whereas the local weather disaster brought about us to stretch our minds to a planetary scale and set a timetable by way of a long time, the virus was microscopic and all-pervasive, and was transferring at a tempo of days and weeks. It affected not glaciers and ocean tides, however our our bodies. It was carried on our breath. It will put not simply particular person nationwide economies however the world’s economic system in query.

As it emerged from the shadows, Sars-CoV-2 had the look about it of a disaster foretold. It was exactly the type of extremely contagious, flu-like an infection that virologists had predicted. It got here from one of many locations they anticipated it to return from – the area of dense interplay between wildlife, agriculture and concrete populations sprawled throughout east Asia. It unfold, predictably, by way of the channels of worldwide transport and communication. It had, frankly, been some time coming.

There have been much more deadly pandemics. What was dramatically new about coronavirus in 2020 was the size of the response. It was not simply wealthy nations that spent monumental sums to assist residents and companies – poor and middle-income nations had been keen to pay an enormous worth, too. By early April, the overwhelming majority of the world exterior China, the place it had already been contained, was concerned in an unprecedented effort to cease the virus. “That is the true first world struggle,” mentioned Lenín Moreno, president of Ecuador, one of many hardest-hit nations. “The opposite world wars had been localised in [some] continents with little or no participation from different continents … however this impacts everybody. It’s not localised. It’s not a struggle from which you’ll be able to escape.”

Lockdown is the phrase that has come into widespread use to explain our collective response. The very phrase is contentious. Lockdown suggests compulsion. Earlier than 2020, it was a time period related to collective punishment in prisons. There have been moments and locations the place that may be a becoming description for the response to Covid. In Delhi, Durban and Paris, armed police patrolled the streets, took names and numbers, and punished those that violated curfews. Within the Dominican Republic, an astonishing 85,000 folks, virtually 1% of the inhabitants, had been arrested for violating the lockdown.

Even when no violence was concerned, a government-mandated closure of all eateries and bars may really feel repressive to their homeowners and purchasers. However lockdown appears a one-sided approach of describing the financial response to the coronavirus. Mobility fell precipitately, nicely earlier than authorities orders had been issued. The flight to security in monetary markets started in late February. There was no jailer slamming the door and turning the important thing; somewhat, traders had been operating for canopy. Customers had been staying at residence. Companies had been closing or shifting to residence working. By mid-March, shutting down grew to become the norm. Those that had been exterior nationwide territorial area, like a whole lot of 1000’s of seafarers, discovered themselves banished to a floating limbo.

The widespread adoption of the time period “lockdown” is an index of how contentious the politics of the virus would transform. Societies, communities and households quarrelled bitterly over face masks, social distancing and quarantine. Your complete expertise was an instance on the grandest scale of what the German sociologist Ulrich Beck within the 80s dubbed “threat society”. On account of the event of contemporary society, we discovered ourselves collectively haunted by an unseen risk, seen solely to science, a threat that remained summary and immaterial till you fell sick, and the unfortunate ones discovered themselves slowly drowning within the fluid accumulating of their lungs.

One strategy to react to such a state of affairs of threat is to retreat into denial. That will work. It will be naive to think about in any other case. Many pervasive diseases and social ills, together with many who trigger lack of life on a big scale, are ignored and naturalised, handled as “info of life”. With regard to the biggest environmental dangers, notably the local weather disaster, one would possibly say that our regular mode of operation is denial and willful ignorance on a grand scale.

Dealing with as much as the pandemic was what the overwhelming majority of individuals everywhere in the world tried to do. However the issue, as Beck mentioned, is that attending to grips with the actually large-scale, all-pervasive dangers that trendy society generates is less complicated mentioned than performed. It requires settlement on what the chance is. It additionally requires vital engagement with our personal behaviour, and with the social order to which it belongs. It requires a willingness to make political decisions about useful resource distribution and priorities at each stage. Such decisions conflict with the prevalent want of the final 40 years to depoliticise, to make use of markets or the legislation to keep away from such selections. That is the essential thrust behind neoliberalism, or the market revolution – to depoliticise distributional points, together with the very unequal penalties of societal dangers, whether or not these be resulting from structural change within the international division of labour, environmental injury, or illness.

Coronavirus obviously uncovered our institutional lack of preparation, what Beck known as our “organised irresponsibility”. It revealed the weak spot of fundamental apparatuses of state administration, like up-to-date authorities databases. To face the disaster, we wanted a society that gave far better precedence to care. Loud calls issued from unlikely locations for a “new social contract” that may correctly worth important staff and take account of the dangers generated by the globalised existence loved by essentially the most lucky.

It fell to governments primarily of the centre and the proper to satisfy the disaster. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump within the US experimented with denial. In Mexico, the notionally leftwing authorities of Andrés Manuel López Obrador additionally pursued a maverick path, refusing to take drastic motion. Nationalist strongmen reminiscent of Rodrigo Duterte within the Philippines, Narendra Modi in India, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey didn’t deny the virus, however relied on their patriotic attraction and bullying techniques to see them by way of.

It was the managerial centrist varieties who had been beneath most stress. Figures like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer within the US, or Sebastián Piñperiod in Chile, Cyril Ramaphosa in South Africa, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Ursula von der Leyen and their ilk in Europe. They accepted the science. Denial was not an possibility. They had been determined to exhibit that they had been higher than the “populists”.

To satisfy the disaster, very middle-of-the-road politicians ended up doing very radical issues. Most of it was improvisation and compromise, however insofar as they managed to place a programmatic gloss on their responses – whether or not within the type of the EU’s Subsequent Technology programme or Biden’s Construct Again Higher programme in 2020 – it got here from the repertoire of inexperienced modernisation, sustainable improvement and the Inexperienced New Deal.

The outcome was a bitter historic irony. Even because the advocates of the Inexperienced New Deal, reminiscent of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, had gone all the way down to political defeat, 2020 resoundingly confirmed the realism of their prognosis. It was the Inexperienced New Deal that had squarely addressed the urgency of environmental challenges and linked it to questions of utmost social inequality. It was the Inexperienced New Deal that had insisted that in assembly these challenges, democracies couldn’t enable themselves to be hamstrung by conservative financial doctrines inherited from the bygone battles of the 70s and discredited by the monetary disaster of 2008. It was the Inexperienced New Deal that had mobilised engaged younger residents on whom democracy, if it was to have a hopeful future, clearly depended.

The Inexperienced New Deal had additionally, after all, demanded that somewhat than endlessly patching a system that produced and reproduced inequality, instability and disaster, it ought to be radically reformed. That was difficult for centrists. However one of many sights of a disaster was that questions of the long-term future could possibly be put aside. The yr 2020 was all about survival.

The instant financial coverage response to the coronavirus shock drew instantly on the teachings of 2008. Authorities spending and tax cuts to assist the economic system had been much more immediate. Central financial institution interventions had been even more spectacular. These fiscal and financial insurance policies collectively confirmed the important insights of financial doctrines as soon as advocated by radical Keynesians and made newly modern by doctrines reminiscent of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). State funds are usually not restricted like these of a family. If a financial sovereign treats the query of find out how to organise financing as something greater than a technical matter, that’s itself a political alternative. As John Maynard Keynes as soon as reminded his readers within the midst of the second world struggle: “Something we are able to truly do we are able to afford.” The true problem, the really political query, was to agree what we needed to do and to determine find out how to do it.

Experiments in financial coverage in 2020 weren’t confined to the wealthy nations. Enabled by the abundance of {dollars} unleashed by the Fed, however drawing on a long time of expertise with fluctuating international capital flows, many rising market governments, in Indonesia and Brazil as an example, displayed outstanding initiative in response to the disaster. They put to work a toolkit of insurance policies that enabled them to hedge the dangers of worldwide monetary integration. Mockingly, not like in 2008, China’s better success in virus management left its financial coverage trying comparatively conservative. Nations reminiscent of Mexico and India, the place the pandemic unfold quickly however governments failed to reply with large-scale financial coverage, appeared more and more out of step with the occasions. The yr would witness the head-turning spectacle of the IMF scolding a notionally leftwing Mexican authorities for failing to run a big sufficient price range deficit.

It was exhausting to keep away from the sense {that a} turning level had been reached. Was this, lastly, the dying of the orthodoxy that had prevailed in financial coverage because the 80s? Was this the dying knell of neoliberalism? As a coherent ideology of presidency, maybe. The concept the pure envelope of financial exercise – whether or not the illness atmosphere or local weather situations – could possibly be ignored or left to markets to manage was clearly out of contact with actuality. So, too, was the concept markets may self-regulate in relation to all conceivable social and financial shocks. Much more urgently than in 2008, survival dictated interventions on a scale final seen within the second world struggle.

All this left doctrinaire economists gasping for breath. That in itself is no surprise. The orthodox understanding of financial coverage was all the time unrealistic. In actuality, neoliberalism had all the time been radically pragmatic. Its actual historical past was that of a collection of state interventions within the pursuits of capital accumulation, together with the forceful deployment of state violence to bulldoze opposition. Regardless of the doctrinal twists and turns, the social realities with which the market revolution had been entwined because the Nineteen Seventies all endured till 2020. The historic power that lastly burst the dykes of the neoliberal order was not radical populism or the revival of sophistication wrestle – it was a plague unleashed by heedless international development and the large flywheel of monetary accumulation.

In 2008, the disaster had been introduced on by the overexpansion of the banks and the excesses of mortgage securitisation. In 2020, the coronavirus hit the monetary system from the surface, however the fragility that this shock uncovered was internally generated. This time it was not banks that had been the weak hyperlink, however the asset markets themselves. The shock went to the very coronary heart of the system, the marketplace for American Treasuries, the supposedly secure belongings on which your complete pyramid of credit score is predicated. If that had melted down, it might have taken the remainder of the world with it.

The dimensions of stabilising interventions in 2020 was spectacular. It confirmed the essential insistence of the Inexperienced New Deal that if the desire was there, democratic states did have the instruments they wanted to train management over the economic system. This was, nevertheless, a double-edged realisation, as a result of if these interventions had been an assertion of sovereign energy, they had been pushed by disaster. As in 2008, they served the pursuits of those that had essentially the most to lose. This time, not simply particular person banks however whole markets had been declared too huge to fail. To interrupt that cycle of disaster and stabilising, and to make financial coverage into a real train in democratic sovereignty, would require root-and-branch reform. That might require an actual energy shift, and the chances had been stacked in opposition to that.

The huge financial coverage interventions of 2020, like these of 2008, had been Janus-faced. On the one hand, their scale exploded the bounds of neoliberal restraint and their financial logic confirmed the essential prognosis of interventionist macroeconomics again to Keynes. When an economic system was spiralling into recession, one didn’t have to simply accept the catastrophe as a pure remedy, an invigorating purge. As a substitute, immediate and decisive authorities financial coverage may forestall the collapse and forestall pointless unemployment, waste and social struggling.

These interventions couldn’t however seem as harbingers of a brand new regime past neoliberalism. Alternatively, they had been constructed from the highest down. They had been politically thinkable solely as a result of there was no problem from the left and their urgency was impelled by the necessity to stabilise the monetary system. And so they delivered. Over the course of 2020, family web value within the US elevated by greater than $15tn. But that overwhelmingly benefited the highest 1%, who owned virtually 40% of all shares. The highest 10%, between them, owned 84%. If this was certainly a “new social contract”, it was an alarmingly one-sided affair.

Nonetheless, 2020 was a second not simply of plunder, however of reformist experimentation. In response to the specter of social disaster, new modes of welfare provision had been tried out in Europe, the US and plenty of rising market economies. And looking for a optimistic agenda, centrists embraced environmental coverage and the difficulty of the local weather disaster as by no means earlier than. Opposite to the concern that Covid-19 would distract from different priorities, the political economic system of the Inexperienced New Deal went mainstream. “Inexperienced Progress”, “Construct Again Higher”, “Inexperienced Deal” – the slogans different, however all of them expressed inexperienced modernisation because the widespread centrist response to the disaster.

Seeing 2020 as a complete disaster of the neoliberal period – with regard to its environmental, social, financial and political underpinnings – helps us discover our historic bearings. Seen in these phrases, the coronavirus disaster marks the top of an arc whose origin is to be discovered within the 70s. It may also be seen as the primary complete disaster of the age of the Anthropocene – an period outlined by the blowback from our unbalanced relationship to nature.

The yr 2020 uncovered how dependent financial exercise was on the steadiness of the pure atmosphere. A tiny virus mutation in a microbe may threaten your complete world’s economic system. It additionally uncovered how, in extremis, your complete financial and monetary system could possibly be directed towards supporting markets and livelihoods. This compelled the query of who was supported and the way – which staff, which companies would obtain what advantages or which tax break? These developments tore down partitions that had been basic to the political economic system of the final half-century – strains that divided the economic system from nature, economics from social coverage and from politics per se. On prime of that, there was one other main shift, which in 2020 lastly dissolved the underlying assumptions of the period of neoliberalism: the rise of China.

When in 2005 Tony Blair scoffed at critics of globalisation, it was their fears that he mocked. He contrasted their parochial anxieties to the modernising power of Asian nations, for which globalisation supplied a brilliant horizon. The worldwide safety threats that Blair recognised, reminiscent of Islamic terrorism, had been nasty. However they’d no hope of really altering the established order. Therein lay their suicidal, otherworldly irrationality. Within the decade after 2008, it was that confidence within the robustness of the established order that was misplaced.

Russia was the primary to reveal the truth that international financial development would possibly shift the steadiness of energy. Fuelled by exports of oil and gasoline, Moscow re-emerged as a problem to US hegemony. Putin’s risk, nevertheless, was restricted. China’s was not. In December 2017, the US issued its new Nationwide Safety Technique, which for the primary time designated the Indo-Pacific because the decisive enviornment of nice energy competitors. In March 2019, the EU issued a method doc to the identical impact. The UK, in the meantime, carried out a rare about-face, from celebrating a brand new “golden period” of Sino-UK relations in 2015 to deploying an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea.

The army logic was acquainted. All nice powers are rivals, or not less than so goes the logic of “realist” pondering. Within the case of China, there was the added issue of ideology. In 2021, the CCP did one thing its Soviet counterpart by no means acquired to do: it celebrated its centenary. Whereas because the 80s it had permitted market-driven development and personal capital accumulation, Beijing made no secret of its adherence to an ideological heritage that ran by means of Marx and Engels to Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Xi Jinping may hardly have been extra emphatic about the necessity to cleave to this custom, and no clearer in his condemnation of Mikhail Gorbachev for shedding maintain of the Soviet Union’s ideological compass. So the “new” chilly struggle was actually the “previous” chilly struggle revived, the chilly struggle in Asia, the one which the west had in reality by no means gained.

There have been, nevertheless, two main variations dividing the previous from the current. The primary was the economic system. China posed a risk because of the best financial increase in historical past. That had harm some staff within the west in manufacturing, however companies and customers throughout the western world and past had profited immensely from China’s improvement, and stood to revenue much more in future. That created a quandary. A revived chilly struggle with China made sense from each vantage level besides “the economic system, silly”.

The second basic novelty was the worldwide environmental drawback, and the position of financial development in accelerating it. When international local weather politics first emerged in its trendy type within the 90s, the US was the biggest and most recalcitrant polluter. China was poor and its emissions barely figured within the international steadiness. By 2020, China emitted extra carbon dioxide than the US and Europe put together, and the hole was poised to widen not less than for an additional decade. You could possibly no extra envision an answer to the local weather drawback with out China than you can think about a response to the chance of rising infectious illnesses. China was essentially the most highly effective incubator of each.

In 2020, the inexperienced modernisers of the EU had been nonetheless making an attempt to resolve this double dilemma of their strategic paperwork by defining China all concurrently a systemic rival, a strategic competitor and a companion in coping with the local weather disaster. The Trump administration made life simpler for itself by denying the local weather drawback. However Washington, too, was impaled on the horns of the financial dilemma – between ideological denunciation of Beijing, strategic calculation, long-term company investments in China and the president’s want to strike a fast deal. This was an unstable mixture, and in 2020 it tipped. China was redefined as a risk to the US, strategically and economically. In response, the intelligence, safety and judicial branches of the American authorities declared financial struggle on China. By closing markets and blocking the export of microchips and the gear to make microchips, they got down to sabotage the event of China’s hi-tech sector, the guts of any trendy economic system.

It was to a level unintentional that this escalation came about when it did. China’s rise was a long-term world historic shift. However Beijing’s success in dealing with the coronavirus and the assertiveness that it unleashed had been a pink flag to the Trump administration. In the meantime, it was rising more and more clear that the US’s continued international energy in finance, tech and army energy rested on home toes of clay. As Covid-19 painfully uncovered, the US well being system was ramshackle and its home social security web left tens of hundreds of thousands susceptible to poverty. If Xi’s “China dream” got here by way of 2020 intact, the identical can’t be mentioned for its American counterpart.

The common disaster of neoliberalism in 2020 thus had a particular and traumatic significance for the US – and for one a part of the American political spectrum particularly. The Republican social gathering and its nationalist and conservative constituencies suffered in 2020 what can greatest be described as an existential disaster, with profoundly damaging penalties for the American authorities, for the American structure and for America’s relations with the broader world. This culminated within the extraordinary interval between 3 November 2020 and 6 January 2021, during which Trump refused to concede electoral defeat, a big a part of the Republican social gathering actively supported an effort to overturn the election, the social disaster and the pandemic had been left unattended to, and at last, on 6 January, the president and different main figures in his social gathering inspired a mob invasion of the Capitol.

For good purpose, this raises deep issues about the way forward for American democracy. And there are parts on the far proper of American politics that may pretty be described as fascistoid. However two fundamental parts had been lacking from the unique fascist equation within the US in 2020. One is whole struggle. Individuals bear in mind the civil struggle and picture future civil wars to return. They’ve just lately engaged in expeditionary wars which have blown again on American society in militarised policing and paramilitary fantasies. However whole struggle reconfigures society in fairly a unique approach. It constitutes a mass physique, not the individualised commandos of 2020.

The opposite lacking ingredient within the traditional fascist equation is social antagonism – a risk from the left, whether or not imagined or actual, to the social and financial establishment. Because the constitutional storm clouds gathered in 2020, American enterprise aligned massively and squarely in opposition to Trump. Nor had been the most important voices of company America afraid to spell out the enterprise case for doing so, together with shareholder worth, the issues of operating corporations with politically divided workforces, the financial significance of the rule of legislation and, astonishingly, the losses in gross sales to be anticipated within the occasion of a civil struggle.

This alignment of cash with democracy within the US in 2020 ought to be reassuring, however solely up to some extent. Think about for a second an alternate situation. What if the virus had arrived within the US a couple of weeks sooner, the spreading pandemic had rallied mass assist for Bernie Sanders and his name for common well being care, and the Democratic primaries had swept an avowed socialist to the pinnacle of the ticket somewhat than Joe Biden? It’s not troublesome to think about a situation during which the total weight of American enterprise was thrown the opposite approach, for all the identical causes, backing Trump as a way to be certain that Sanders was not elected. And what if Sanders had in reality gained a majority? Then we might have had a real check of the American structure and the loyalty of essentially the most highly effective social pursuits to it. The truth that we’ve got to ponder such eventualities is indicative of the extremity of the polycrisis of 2020.

The election of Joe Biden and the truth that his inauguration came about on the appointed time on 21 January 2021 restored a way of calm. However when Biden boldly declares that “America is again”, it has turn out to be more and more clear that the subsequent query we have to ask is: which America? And again to what? The great disaster of neoliberalism might have unleashed artistic mental power even on the once-dead centre of politics. However an mental disaster doesn’t a brand new period make. Whether it is energising to find that we are able to afford something we are able to truly do, it additionally places us on the spot. What can and may we truly do? Who, in reality, is the we?

As Britain, the US and Brazil exhibit, democratic politics is taking over unusual and unfamiliar new kinds. Social inequalities are extra, not much less excessive. A minimum of within the wealthy nations, there isn’t any collective countervailing power. Capitalist accumulation continues in channels that repeatedly multiply dangers. The principal use to which our newfound monetary freedom has been put are an increasing number of grotesque efforts at monetary stabilisation. The antagonism between the west and China divides enormous chunks of the world, as not because the chilly struggle. And now, within the type of Covid, the monster has arrived. The Anthropocene has proven its fangs – on an as but modest scale. Covid is much from being the worst of what we must always count on – 2020 was not the total alert. If we’re dusting ourselves off and having fun with the restoration, we must always mirror. All over the world the useless are unnumbered, however our greatest guess places the determine at 10 million. Hundreds are dying each day. And 2020 was a wake-up name.

Tailored from Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economic system by Adam Tooze, printed by Allen Lane on 7 September. To purchase a duplicate, go to guardianbookshop.com