As the COVID-19 pandemic rages across the US and the Globe, I often ask myself, what is happening in the real world outside of what FOX, CNN and MSNBC are spewing. How have we as a Country and a People come to view increased death rates among our population as the cost of doing business for stimulating our economy? In order to gain insight into this dilemma, I went back to my old Economic Text Books from Business School to search for answers. Our current predicament sounds amazingly like a Liquidity Trap locked in by a quarantine.
A Liquidity Trap is a Keynesian Economic Theory that postulates a situation wherein interest rates reach near zero (zero interest-rate policy) yet do not effectively stimulate the economy. In theory, near-zero interest rates should encourage firms and consumers to borrow and spend. However, as in the case of the COVID-19 Pandemic, if too many individuals or corporations focus on survival or failure, rather than prosperity and spending, lower interest rates have less effect on investment and consumption behavior.
In conventional times, one remedy to a liquidity trap is expanding the money supply via quantitative easing or other techniques in which money is effectively printed to purchase assets, thereby creating inflationary expectations that cause savers to begin spending again. This is what the Government is currently doing, but due to various stay at home orders, social distancing policies and job losses, the engine of discretionary spending has been sidelined. This closing of our economy for public health concerns is causing frustration among those citizens that require current income to survive. No wonder near 0% interest rates are not having a material effect on economic activity.
This brief analysis gives us a glimpse into how we have come to a place where we are contemplating “the acceptable death rate to economic activity ratio.” How much risk are we each willing to take? How much death are we willing to endure as some States shift their focus from the public physical health to the public economic health?
I believe this way of thinking is a moral wound inflicted by a false choice brought about by a deeply held sense of separation. The misguided expectation that life is a Zero Sum game wherein prosperity is finite commodity and there are winners and losers independent from each other.
In Zen we proport to practice realizing our essential nature in the myriad forms and people of the phenomenal world. To awaken to the total interpenetrating reality beyond separation of self and other. To remind us of our need to repent from this self-inflicted separation, we chant:
Releasing all harmful Karma,
Ever created by me since of old
On account of my beginningless
Greed, Anger and Ignorance
Born of my Conduct, Speech and Thought
Now I return to Oneness
Maybe viewing this pandemic as an opportunity to unify rather than to continue our culture of separation could be a gateway into liberating us from this diabolical thinking that my prosperity is contingent on someone else’s hardship and death.