Interview with James K. Galbraith via New York Magazine: “…Why do you think a mass debt forgiveness is going to be necessary to facilitate recovery after the pandemic? There’s a certain presumption that what can be shut down can be reopened—that the natural course of events is a rapid economic recovery. And that’s what I’m taking issue with. Every business and household has assets and liabilities. And what’s happened is that their assets have been diminished but their liabilities have not. Unless the liabilities are somehow taken care of, they’re going to be burdened by their debts for a long time to come. At best, that debt burden will slow recovery, even assuming the best conditions. But I’m inclined to think things will be considerably worse than that. This is similar to what happened after 1929. There’s very little economic activity. And the reason for that is that once certain kinds of activity go down, investment in the durable goods necessary for those activities falls to zero. Take aircraft. Why would anyone buy a new one? Half of all the existing airplanes are sitting on the ground someplace. Who needs a new aircraft? Now you can think of ways you could destroy the existing ones in order to keep the aircraft producers going, but that’s probably not going to happen…”