How can we pay off the global coronavirus debts? Tackle the powerful
Covid-19 has hit the global economy hard. Governments around the world have already injected $11tn in fiscal measures to keep the economy afloat, and the United Nations’ conference on trade and development (Unctad) calculates that lowincome countries will require an extra $2.5tn immediately to prevent economic collapse. Failure to address the economic fallout will have devastating consequences.
In answer to the big question, how are we going to pay for this, I say: we need a global response and it needs to be progressive. I recently outlined 10 possible ways to raise $9.457tn a year over the next decade, enough to not only cover the costs of the pandemic but also to meet the investments required to address the other social and environmental crises we face.
Before introducing some of these proposals, it’s worth addressing the question of whether the debts need to be paid back at all. Even the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – the chief architect of austerity – is making noises that rich governments can afford to accumulate high debts without negative consequences. Just as a household can manage a bigger mortgage when the interest rate is small, it is argued that a government will have no problem servicing its repayments because rates are at a historic low. Moreover, as these governments can repay their debts in their own currency, they always have the option to print money. This is a privilege not available to any household with their mortgage. This is a welcome departure from the austerity narrative preached by governments around the world in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. But to deal with the scale and global reach of the economic crisis we face, we need more progressive proposals to raise funds than simply “getting into more debt”.
Most importantly, many poorer countries already face dangerous amounts of indebtedness, with 64 countries currently paying more on debt servicing than on healthcare. This is not the fault of the countries themselves, but the legacy of decades of neoliberal policies and the longer history of colonial inequality. As this debt is increasingly owed in foreign currencies, these countries do not have the privilege of printing money to repay their creditors.
To deal with this, low-income countries immediately require their debts to be cancelled and money injected into their economies. Following the call of Unctad and Progressive International, the international community should cancel $1tn of the debts of low-income countries and issue $2.5tn of special drawing rights (SDRs) – the IMF’s own international currency. Just as a gift voucher frees up money to spend on other things, a country that receives SDRs can trade them for real currencies to repay foreign debts, freeing up money for healthcare and poverty reduction.
The international community is slowly coming round to these ideas. Kristalina Georgieva, the managing director of the IMF, has claimed that issuing new SDRs“isn’t off the table”, while the G20 just this month has agreed to cancel some of the debts of the poorest countries in the world. However, the G20’s plans have been criticised for not including private creditors, who increasingly hold poor countries to ransom in what David Malpass, president of the World Bank, has called “the modern equivalent of debtor’s prison”.
Debt cancellation and issuing SDRs are just two possible financing mechanisms that can support low-income countries specifically. But there are other policies that can raise money for all countries, while simultaneously tackling inequality and promoting peace. We need to realise that the question, how are we going to pay for this, should be, who is going to pay for this?
Arguing for progressive taxation will be key to winning this debate. There is a strong case for the UK chancellor, Rishi Sunak, to implement new taxes on the companies and wealthy individuals who have benefited during the pandemic. But this approach should not be limited to the UK. If implemented across the globe, an excess profit tax could raise $104bn annually and a new wealth tax $4.4tn annually – theoretically, enough to pay for all the Covid-19 spending in just a couple of years.
Global coordination can also help ensure that corporations and the wealthy do not hide their wealth in tax havens. According to the IMF, shutting down tax havens (and taxing corporate profits and hidden individual wealth at current rates in the countries where they live and sell their products) would raise $200-$600bn a year.
Clearly this will require enormous international cooperation – but there is a precedent. In 2010, President Obama passed into law the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act which imposes automatic exchange of data between foreign banks and the US’s Internal Revenue Service. A similar exchange scheme was implemented across the world by the G20 and OECD in 2014 with a common reporting standard. While these reforms exclude low-income countries and leave considerable wealth and profits still hidden offshore, they show that public pressure, scrutiny and political will can deliver change.
Reclaiming 10% of global military spending, as called for by global campaign groups and US Senator Bernie Sanders, is another key tool which could raise $191.7bn a year globally – enough to fund 43 more World Health Organizations. If this seems utopian, consider the fact that South Korea has said that it will trim next year’s defence budget by 2% ($738m) and Thailand by 8% ($557m), with the money going instead to a disaster-relief fund and a stimulus package respectively.
The pandemic has simultaneously exposed the costs of a deeply unequal world and shown the possibilities for radical action. Political action can be mustered in a matter of weeks, if political leaders deem it necessary. However, as Gus O’Donnell, the former head of the British civil service noted, “The iron law of tax changes is that the losers scream.” Shutting down tax havens, redirecting military spending and cancelling debts will face strong resistance from the most powerful people in the world. But there is perhaps an opening in which a strong movement could give us the just recovery we need and the chance to really “build back better”.
• Ben Tippet is a researcher and author of Split: Class Divides Uncovered
ter who invented conceptual art to hide his lack of ability. And she puts that belief into practice. In the last few years, Emin has been painting like a person possessed. A lot of this has been done at her mountain estate in Provence, where she can work in splendid isolation in a low, modest studio nestling in a little valley where there’s little to disturb her but the chirping of cicadas.
When I visited her there a few years ago, she rolled out some of her latest canvases on the parched late-summer grass beneath the olive trees. I was electrified. The freedom in the way she smacks paint on to canvas, the raw violence of real life she manages to keep in her colours – both are a wonder. What puzzled me was how she got here, how an artist who made her name with conceptual work had transformed herself into a thrilling painter.
And here now, on that rainy day in her London studio, was the answer. Her creative manager Harry Weller pulled early work after early work up on screen: women alone in bedrooms, Christ on the cross, a harbour full of sailing ships, an enigmatic love triangle, friends sharing wine on the beach. In fierce monochrome and punchy colour, I saw that Emin was always a painter and a printmaker. Where she is now is where she started out, in front of a blank sheet or canvas. She filled it then, as she does now, with untamed life.
The artist Billy Childish, her then boyfriend, appears in one of her powerful early woodcuts as an almost Frankensteinian character: big, brutish and hyper-masculine. It’s called Billy, Drunk, Learing With a Drink in His Hand and captures him lurching about a nautical, half-timbered pub with an anchor on the wall. It’s a great example of what might be labelled Emin’s seaside expressionist phase.
In a whole series of similarly roughedged woodcuts, she creates a romantic vision of her hometown Margate and the seaswept Kent vista: yet more desperate lovers, adrift between fishing boats and boozers. The content may be local, but the inspiration is German, as she translates the style of such expressionists as Ludwig Kirchner, Käthe Kollwitz and Oskar Kokoschka into a myth of her own life. Her tempestuous relationship with Childish haunts these works. One is that woodcut for her degree show. It is called, with a weirdly poetic ring, Jaw Wrestling.
Emin effectively left school at 13 and spent her teenage years hanging around Margate’s more dubious haunts. All this is recorded in her storytelling artworks, such as Why I Never Became a Dancer. But there was another side to her story: she had a born artistic talent. She still owns a clay model of a fruit stall she made on one of her rare visits to school, a beautifully crafted object, like a piece of painted terracotta you might see in a Christmas crib in Naples.
It’s clear why Emin got into Maidstone to study printmaking – and her woodcuts show why she was awarded a first-class degree. She hasn’t just mastered this medium, she also uses it to convey an original vision of life as an extreme drama of loneliness and love, with people whose mask-like faces are hewn from pain. From there, in 1987, she got on to the prestigious painting course at the Royal College of Art in London.
Emin says that, when she was at the RCA, she got interested in the abstract expressionist painter Cy Twombly, thinking the artist was a woman. But, too driven by her own life, she had not yet ventured into abstraction. Emin’s father, Enver, was Turkish Cypriot and, in the mid-80s, she went off to explore Turkey for herself. A lovely series of watercolours records this search for her heritage, which resulted in a love affair with a fisherman.
A sense of adventure echoes through these works, with their bright colours sometimes flowing over newsprint borders. Istanbul seems at first glance a charming cityscape, almost a tourist view – but look closer and you see inside the city, glimpsing a woman in bed and an old-fashioned kitchen. Other scenes home in on traditionally dressed women in rooms with antiquated wood stoves. Their inner space is explored as evocatively as their outward demeanour.
Other works glorify a man and woman making love with Lawrentian intensity in the open air. A narrative seems to emerge of illicit love and rivalry, a tangled emotional soap opera. It is the beginning of the abandonment that runs through Emin’s art, from that detritus-strewn bed up to her latest paintings.
In truth, Emin never stopped making pictures. The passion for drawing and painting, so evident in these early works, meant she could never become a purely conceptual artist. Some of her most compelling prints are harshly scratched images of funfairs and graveyards – and they all date from her Young British Artist years.
When she started drawing birds, she remembers, people thought she was making some ironic point. “But I wasn’t. I was just drawing birds.”
Actually, Emin even claims her bed is “a painting”. It’s true that when I watched her put it together at Tate Liverpool a few years ago, she laid on the decaying condoms as if putting the final touches to a canvas. She even flicked on the wrinkly tights like an action painter. Emin’s real artistic evolution is not from readymades to painting, but from expressionism to abstract expressionism. I can’t wait to see what she paints next.
• Tracey Emin by Jonathan Jones is published by Laurence King books on 26 November, price £14.99.
he says. “But I don’t think I’ve got what it takes to work to a daily deadline and make work that has a subtext so it is visually interesting.” Hovey is disarmingly self-deprecating, envious of contemporaries who’ve made it illustrating albums for the likes of Metallica.
He is planning projects unrelated to Bake Off that he doesn’t want to detail yet – because he knows that, like Iain’s infamous baked alaska from 2014, the show will one day get binned. “Don’t get me wrong. I love this and I never look back with regret. I’ve become obsessed with illustrating food. I look at Cézanne with renewed awe and Dalí too.”
Two years ago, Hovey’s work was shown in an exhibition of cookery illustration at Leeds University. It made him realise he was part of a long tradition that predates food photography.
“I’m passionate about food illustration and can keep developing it afresh. But eating cakes is not for me, which is just as well for my waistline. In restaurants, I’m the guy ordering two starters and skipping dessert. I don’t want to eat cakes. I just want to draw them.”
• The Great British Bake off is on
Channel 4 tomorrow.
• This article was amended on 22 November 2020 because Kim-Joy reached the 2018 final but did not win as an earlier version said, and Iain’s “infamous Arctic Roll from series one” was in fact a baked alaska from series five.
Again, there was no benefit, and actually, the placebo proved more effective.
When asked whether the development of more sophisticated extraction methods would sway opinion, Dr Hopp said he understood the premise but, “Better extraction methods of an inactive substance does not make a better substance.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it, but we have not found any that have been effective as they’re marketed,” Dr Hopp said of the broader marketplace. Those studies spanned echinacea, cranberry, elderberry, St John’s wort, and ginkgo biloba among others. “In none of them have we found a substantial benefit above and beyond the placebo.”
Even in the face of rigorously designed trials that revealed their inefficacy, people continue to utilize dietary supplements widely in the United States. Sales dry up temporarily in the wake of studies that show no benefit but quickly rebound as the studies grow distant.
This year in Florida, the harvest drew to a close marred by drought and then by a few storms that pushed harvesting crews again into new territory – alluding to the effect climate change might have on this industry. But as summer returns next year, white flowers will bloom, followed by the berries, and again, this intricate dance will continue. For now, palmetto berries are just one among many exports leaving the state uninterrupted.