SIAF: Pandemie und Politik

SIAF Bd. 48

Auch 2021 drehte sich wieder vieles in der Welt um das Thema Corona, in anderen Facetten, aber durchaus länger, als man gehofft hatte. Die Krise hat weiterhin Themen nationaler wie internationaler Politik und Wirtschaft beeinflusst, und entsprechend widmeten sich die Veranstaltungen und Gespräche den Themen «Pandemie und Politik». Das Jahrbuch präsentiert eine Rückschau auf unsere renommierten Rednerinnen und Redner sowie unseren Austausch mit ihnen.

Jahrbuch 2021

Pandemie und Politik

Gerhard Schwarz Die Schweiz hat Zukunft – Von der positiven Kraft der Eigenart

Herausgegeben von Martin Meyer und Sabine Sura

Christian Lindner Pandemie, Klima, Digitalisierung: die liberalen Gesellschaftsordnungen im globalen Systemwettbewerb Niall Ferguson The Great Disasters of the Past and Some Lessons for the Future Alain Berset Pandemie. Politik. Gesellschaft.

Anne Applebaum Old and New Dangers of Totalitarianism Sahra Wagenknecht Warum wir wieder mehr Zusammenhalt und Gemeinsinn brauchen Elif Shafak Politics – Society – Literature: Between East and West Bertrand Piccard Pioneering Spirit to Invent the Future

Martin Meyer, Sabine Sura (Hrsg.)

Ilaria Capua The Circular Nature of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Pandemie und Politik

Mervyn King Uncertainty, Disruption, Hope – How to Analyse the Current World of Economics and Politics

MIT BEITRÄGEN VON

Mervyn King, Gerhard Schwarz, Ilaria Capua, Christian Lindner, Niall Ferguson, Alain Berset, Anne Applebaum, Sahra Wagenknecht, Elif Shafak, Bertrand Piccard

I S B N 978-3-907396-11-7

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783907 396117

www.nzz-libro.ch

NZZ Libro

NZZLIBRO

SOZIALWISSENSCHAFTLICHE STUDIEN DES SCHWEIZERISCHEN INSTITUTS FÜR AUSLANDFORSCHUNG BAND 48 (NEUE FOLGE)

Begründet von Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Friedrich A. Lutz (†)

www.siaf.ch

Pandemie und Politik Herausgegeben von Martin Meyer und Sabine Sura

Mit Beiträgen von Mervyn King, Gerhard Schwarz, Ilaria Capua, Christian Lindner, Niall Ferguson, Alain Berset, Anne Applebaum, Sahra Wagenknecht, Elif Shafak, Bertrand Piccard

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Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar.

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Inhalt

Vorwort 7 Mervyn King Uncertainty, Disruption, Hope – How to Analyse the Current World of Economics and Politics 8 Gerhard Schwarz Die Schweiz hat Zukunft – Von der positiven Kraft der Eigenart 37 Ilaria Capua The Circular Nature of the COVID-19 Pandemic 53 Christian Lindner Pandemie, Klima, Digitalisierung: die liberalen Gesellschaftsordnungen im globalen Systemwettbewerb 85

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Inhalt

Niall Ferguson The Great Disasters of the Past and Some Lessons for the Future 98 Alain Berset Pandemie. Politik. Gesellschaft.

112 Anne Applebaum Old and New Dangers of Totalitarianism 119 Sahra Wagenknecht Warum wir wieder mehr Zusammenhalt und Gemeinsinn brauchen 133 Elif Shafak Politics - Society - Literature: Between East and West 153 Bertrand Piccard Pioneering Spirit to Invent the Future 161

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Vorwort Im erneut durch Covid geprägten Frühjahrssemester präsentierten wir handverlesene Gäste im Gespräch aus dem Studio sowie aus dem Literaturhaus und hoben dabei gleichzeitig ein neues Format aus der Taufe: Unsere «SIAF Talks» werden wir auch weiterhin als gute Diskussion vor die Kamera und zu Ihnen nach Hause bringen. Unsere klassischen Vorträge an der Universität dagegen ermöglichen neben dem zusätzlichen Livestreaming-Angebot wieder die persönliche Begegnung vor Ort – und im Herbst konnten wir hier eine nie dagewesene Anzahl und Vielfalt bieten.

Auch 2021 drehte sich wieder vieles in der Welt um das Thema Corona, in anderen Facetten, aber länger, als man gehofft hatte. Die Krise hat weiterhin Themen nationaler wie internationaler Politik und Wirtschaft beeinflusst, und unser Jahrbuch taufen wir entsprechend Pandemie und Politik. Wir freuen uns über diese Rückschau zu den spannenden Veranstaltungen und Gesprächen mit unseren Gästen.

Wir danken allen Partnern, den Referierenden und einer Öffentlichkeit, die uns die Treue hält, für die wertvolle Unterstützung, und freuen uns bereits darauf, Sie auch in den kommenden Semestern wieder begrüssen zu dürfen.

Zürich, im Frühjahr 2022 Dr. Martin Meyer, Präsident des Vorstands SIAF Sabine Sura, Leiterin der Geschäftsstelle

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Uncertainty, Disruption, Hope – How to Analyse the Current World of Economics and Politics Mervyn King Discussion of 31 March 2021

The former Governor of the Bank of England in conversation with Walter B. Kielholz, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Swiss Reinsurance Company, and Thomas Jordan, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Swiss National Bank.

Martin Meyer: A very warm welcome to our guests, especially to Mervyn King, Lord King of Lothbury, former Governor of the Bank of England, Professor at New York University and other eminent institutions – not to mention a former guest speaker at our institute, on an occasion that is very well remembered. Good evening, Lord King, from Zurich to London, from where we are ‘beaming’ you in. It is an honour and a joy to have you with us.

Mervyn King: And it’s my pleasure to join you.

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Martin Meyer: Wonderful, thank you. I hope you are in good health, and in good spirits.

Mervyn King: Absolutely. Sad only that I cannot be with you in person, in Zurich.

Martin Meyer: We will do that next March.That’s a promise.The same of course goes for our friends Thomas Jordan, Head of the Swiss National Bank, and Walter Kielholz, Chairman of Swiss Re. Thank you very much, gentlemen, for joining us for an interesting evening here at the Centre for Global Dialogue in Rüschlikon, near Zurich.

Our topic tonight reads ‘Uncertainty, disruption, hope’: a subject that is perfectly appropriate not only to the current situation, but also to our highly accelerated times. The starting point for our discussion is even more fitting. Earlier last year, Mervyn King and the economist John Kay published a book which got a lot of attention.The book’s title is Radical Uncertainty, and the subtitle reads Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers. Now, we have to realise that the book was published only a few weeks before the corona pandemic emerged and then exploded – an almost magical, almost alchemistic coincidence. And an excellent occasion to invite Lord King here to Zurich to talk with us about our current problems and challenges. And, of course, to discuss them with two eminent scholars in their own fields, Walter Kielholz and Thomas Jordan, long-time friends of Mervyn King.

Mervyn King: Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be able to discuss the topic of uncertainty with my two distinguished colleagues on the podium. In our book, John Kay and I distinguish between resolvable uncertainty and what we call radical uncertainty. Resolvable uncertainty is the simple kind, the kind that you can describe in terms of probabilities, 9

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like tossing a coin that you know is a fair coin; there is a 50 percent chance that it will come down heads.

Radical uncertainty is different. Radical uncertainty is uncertainty that you cannot quantify. The best example of it is actually COVID-19, the challenge we’ve been facing now for over a year. And the reason why it’s so important, and why it’s such a good example, is that it is different from a Black Swan event, which is something you can’t conceivably imagine until you’ve seen it. Because while we knew that there were pandemics, we couldn’t possibly have said, in the middle of 2019, that the probability that a virus would come out of Wuhan in China in December 2019 was 17 percent, 27 percent, or any other number. That would have been a meaningless and distracting statement. Equally, with the banking crisis in 2008: we knew that banking crises existed; we’d been through many of them in several hundred years, in most advanced economies. But that did not enable anybody to say that the probability that Lehman Brothers would collapse in September 2008 was some particular number.

So, radical uncertainty is uncertainty that cannot be quantified.

Now, why does this matter? Well, I want to draw out four implications of radical uncertainty, and then to conclude with why we should nevertheless be hopeful.

The first implication of radical uncertainty is that there is no mathematical or objective way of quantifying all risks. We therefore cannot price such risks. If you know the probability of something happening is 50 percent, and you know what the consequences of the event will be, it’s possible – quite straightforwardly – to calibrate what the risk is. That’s what we tend to do with life insurance. But with radical uncertainty there are events where we don’t know what the probability is, and it requires tremendous judgement to be able to successfully quote prices for insurance against those risks. That is the skill of reinsurers, and, of course, especially of Swiss Re. It requires experience and judgement and a culture of understanding risks to be able to offer that kind of insurance. It’s not a simple mathematical calculation.

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The second implication is that the world is – in the technical jargon – non-stationary. What we see happening is not simply a random drawing from a known distribution.The world is continuously changing. And that means that we cannot even imagine a simple probability distribution informed by events from the past.

The third implication is that there is far too much bogus quantification in the world. We’ve seen that economic forecasts are typically very poor.The interesting thing in the past 12 months is that the same poor performance in terms of predictions is true of epidemiological models. Now, why is this the case? Models can be very helpful in understanding the nature of a problem. They enable us to simplify, and to focus on the factors that really matter in understanding what is likely to happen in the future. But the reason that economic forecasts and epidemiological forecasts are so poor is that we do not have the information required to judge the values of the key parameters that will determine the path of an epidemic or the path of the economy.

And this is important, because last March, what should have happened was that the epidemiologists should not have tried to make predictions about the path of COVID-19. They should instead have said: ‘These are the key parameters that we need to know and understand in order to judge the future paths’; and so, for example, governments should have been encouraged to carry out random samples of the population and test them, in order to determine the mortality rate of the virus. Because although we knew the numerator – the number of deaths – we didn’t know the denominator – the number of people in the population already infected.

The fourth and last implication I draw out is that there is a very important role for the question, ‘What is going on here?’ I suspect this question plays a prominent role in Swiss Re, and in almost all organisations that are successful in making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. ‘What is going on here?’ sounds like a rather trivial question, but it isn’t, because when we’re confronted with a unique event, an event that we haven’t seen before – we may have seen some11

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thing similar, but not exactly the same – we have to keep asking the question ‘What is going on here?’ in order to understand the nature of the problem we’re confronted with and then to think through the right answer.

This is particularly important because one of the big challenges for the future is how best to use artificial intelligence. There are many people, including the psychologist and economist Daniel Kahneman, who believe that decisions should be made by computers rather than humans, because humans make mistakes, but computers don’t make mistakes of mathematical reasoning. I think this idea is profoundly wrong. It relies on the assumption that the most important decisions we take are ones that can be solved purely by mathematical reasoning, and I don’t believe that’s true. When we’re faced with radical uncertainty, our judgement, experience, and ability to adapt to an unknown situation all matter, and we make use of them together.We do this not as individuals solving problems; rather, we work together to find the solutions to challenges of radical uncertainty.

Finally, we come to hope. There are two reasons why we should be hopeful now for the future. The first is that we’ve learned a great deal about the importance of resilience. After the financial crisis, we learned that it was important that the banking system be resilient, and we changed the regulations to ensure that banks had to issue more equity capital, had to have more liquid assets on their balance sheets, in order to be resilient to unknown disturbances occurring. Sadly, we didn’t apply that lesson to other parts of the economy, and we’ve now seen that we needed our health systems to be more resilient.

The two countries best prepared on paper for a pandemic were the United States and the United Kingdom. That turned out to be false, and the reason is that they had prepared for a pandemic caused by a particular kind of virus: a flu virus. What we got instead was a different kind of virus. We need to prepare for a generic virus. The resilience of our healthcare system is crucial. And resilience is also crucial for businesses. The just-in-time delivery model is bound to 12

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be rethought. People will undoubtedly now realise that continuous deliveries and movements of people across borders cannot be guaranteed. Everything we do needs to be resilient to major uncertainties and shocks.

And lastly, we shouldn’t be frightened of uncertainty; we should actually embrace it. Because uncertainty is actually the source of almost all good things in life. When Frank Knight wrote his famous book Risk, Uncertainty and Profit exactly 100 years ago, he believed that radical uncertainty was the source of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs come up with new products and new processes; they don’t just turn a handle on a computer, plug in probabilities and outcomes, and look at the maximising solution that results. Uncertainty generates entrepreneurship, and it’s also the source of great happiness in our personal, business and collective lives. Students often say to me when they leave university that they’re very frightened of the uncertainty about their future lives. And I say to them, ‘You shouldn’t be. You don’t want to know today who you will marry and when; you don’t want to know what jobs you will have during your career; you don’t really want to know which countries you might live in, or visit, or travel through; or which restaurants you might go to in the next year.’The excitement in life stems from coming across new and unexpected outcomes, things that you can’t quantify, things that you don’t know in advance. That is radical uncertainty, and that, really, in the English phrase, is the spice of life. So, embrace uncertainty. And let me now hand back to our distinguished panel.

Martin Meyer: Thank you very much, Lord King. I couldn’t agree more. How boring a world without uncertainties would be. You mentioned the importance of the human factor in all of these areas: economics, politics, and other fields. You also built a bridge, mentioning Swiss Re twice, so I now ask Walter Kielholz to present his statement.

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Walter Kielholz: Well, Martin Meyer, I have to say, after 25 years in the reinsurance business and 45 years in business generally, I was really hoping for a very, very boring year – and I am still hoping for that. But I don’t seem to be in that position. Confusion or uncertainty – uncertainty in the real world usually leads to confusion at the decision-making level of a company. It’s really the same word, just another connotation of it. And I would like to point out two or three exceptional characteristics of this particular uncertainty. At Swiss Re we had always given pandemic risk enormous prominence; after financial market risk, it was always our second most important risk. By the way, the Swiss Confederation also had it as its number two risk; after the collapse of the electric grid, I think in Switzerland the second most dangerous risk was actually also that of a pandemic. However, there were two things that I think we misunderstood, or were just unprepared for. One was the length of this event. We thought a pandemic would come, and in a couple of months, it would be over. And now it’s turning into at least two years: two years, at least, from when it started to when it might be declared defeated. It’s an uncertain process. It’s taken twists and turns, and this adds to the confusion at the decision-making level. It’s completely up and down, hope and despair, and activity, and so on. That’s one.

The second thing is, strangely enough, that while we had defined the event, we completely misunderstood where the financial loss would come from. We thought it would come from the life insurance book. People would pass away, and we would have to pay a lot. Or they would be sick, and we would have to pay a lot in healthcare costs.

But the biggest cost was actually due to business interruption, and the cancellation of large events.Why? Because all over the world, virtually within two months, all governments actually reacted pretty much the same way: closing down all activities, or certain activities, and making certain big events virtually impossible. So, we knew that the losses were coming, but that they were coming from left field, from business interruption, was a real surprise to us.

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There have been other such events that have surprised us, even though we knew that they were there – for example, terrorist risks.

Before the attack on the World Trade Center, we had paid out several claims linked to terror-related property damage, and loss of life, and so on. But the sheer size of the World Trade Center risk was a surprise to us – it was just beyond our imagination. Not that the terrorist risk existed, but that there could be a terrorist attack of that size. At that time our company paid out six and a half billion Swiss francs in damages, due to something that only lasted two hours – don’t forget, it lasted two hours. The pandemic will have lasted two years.

Another thing that I would say is interesting to compare is that from 1945 to 1975, or somewhere around there, not a single heavy hurricane hit the East Coast of the United States – or maybe one, Betsy. From 1976 onwards, and especially from 1980 onwards, there has been a large number every year. Something had changed in the parameters of that risk and the explanation was by no means clear.

We only knew that Florida, say, looked completely different in 1945 than it did in 1976. In 1945, Miami Beach was just donkeys and palm trees. So that is something where you can actually then say, ‘Yeah we understand, that is the mistake we made in actually assessing that risk.’

Another example is provided by earthquakes. We understand earthquakes very well; we know where the earthquake zones are. We know that Taiwan, California and Japan are dangerous, as are Italy and Turkey, and so on. And we can say, ‘Okay, we ought to have an earthquake in Turkey, because there is a seismic gap, and an earthquake in Turkey, or wherever, is overdue.’ But if we compare the decisionmaking time frame of a human being with geological time, it’s only a matter of geological seconds. I mean, we think in terms of a 100 years, and whether this earthquake comes a 100 years earlier or a 100 years later simply cannot be reasonably determined. So, these are all cases in which the limitations of making risk models are very apparent.

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Now, just to make a remark on the pandemic as we go forward. I think, slowly, it’s becoming clear who the losers and the winners are, and the measures which are now being taken will make other losers, and other winners. And I’m a little bit afraid because after a pandemic, there comes a political showdown. In the past, kingdoms have collapsed. Chinese emperors, and whole dynasties, have collapsed, and so on. And the political debate which will follow COVID is already becoming extremely aggressive. The losers are slowly realising that they are the losers. And after the fear is over, the last phase of such an event comes, and that is the assignment of guilt, the assignment of blame.

The politicians, the institutions, the system, the epidemiologists, the people who think the earth is flat: everybody will assign blame to the others. I was already afraid in 2009, after the financial crisis, that we would see a political impact that we would not be able to control, and this time will be worse, in my view. So efforts must be made to ensure that liberal Western democracies can deal with the political impact, so that they are not seen by the people as the losers when compared to authoritarian regimes, which, backed by their own propaganda, can show the world that the centralised authoritarian system has a structural advantage over liberal democracy. That is my worst fear, at the present point.

And I have a lot of hope. Don’t forget that the annual excess mortality in the United States in January was about 4,000 people. It’s now down to less than 500. There is hope. Thank you.

Martin Meyer: Thank you, Walter. They corrected it very quickly in America. Surprising, and not, because we know that this great nation is capable of many things. And, as you say, it’s also too early to say what the final or even the medium-term impact of the corona pandemic will be.

Hopefully, it will not be as gloomy as one scenario mentioned in your introduction. Thomas Jordan, please, your statement.

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Thomas Jordan: Thank you, Martin, for the invitation. It’s really a pleasure to be on the same panel as my friends Sir Mervyn and Walter. Clearly, uncertainty and disruption are among the key issues, not only for the world but also specifically for us central bankers. Uncertainty is part of our daily business, we have to live with it all the time. Sometimes it’s larger and sometimes it’s smaller, but we always have to make decisions under conditions of uncertainty. And of course, if we look back at the last 15 years, we see that our forecasts have often been wrong. And it was sometimes very difficult to produce these forecasts. But it’s not only about the forecast itself – it’s sometimes genuinely difficult to know exactly what the state of the economy is at a given moment in time and to construct a so-called ‘nowcast’ of business activity. As Martin said before, it’s often unclear. What’s also uncertain is the impact of our measures – what is the impact of changing interest rates in a specific situation? Of having QE programmes, etc? And having answers to these questions is very important for conducting monetary policy.

So, as Mervyn mentioned, we are more or less in a situation of radical uncertainty. We cannot know the distribution of events with any exactitude. It would be far preferable to be in a situation of resolvable uncertainty – but, of course, we do not choose the world we’re in.

Instead, we live in a world where completely new events sometimes arise out of the blue. When this happens, our existing models are of little use, and do not give us the guidance we need.

Now, it’s exactly in these situations that we have to make the most important and far-reaching decisions. We cannot say, ‘Well, the uncertainty is too high, we won’t make any decisions today.’ We are forced to make decisions in these very difficult moments. And then of course we cannot rely only on the models.

Let me briefly explain our approach at the SNB. As I stated, we cannot rely exclusively on models, but nevertheless, models do remain very important. We have to have a structured discussion, a picture of the functioning of the world, even if our forecast may be wrong. So 17

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we use these models. They are tools for us. And we don’t use just one, but rather a variety of models to get a better picture of the world. In line with Mervyn’s advice, the Governing Board of the SNB does not use a computer to make its decisions. Instead, our decisions are reached in part through intensive discussions. Furthermore, these discussions do not take place solely between the members of the Governing Board, but rather include a broad range of experts on our staff.

We conduct a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of the situation in order to understand the range of options at our disposal. And often it’s not black and white, so there is a certain range of options available to us.The goal is always to make a robust decision. Given the uncertainty surrounding these events, we know that it will probably not be the optimal one, but nevertheless, we try to make a robust decision that is sufficiently good, and that fulfils our mandate. What we try to avoid is fine-tuning, which is invariably problematic, because when your ambition is to find the absolute best solution, you frequently end up with a very bad solution.

Circumstances often change quickly, in which case we reanalyse the situation in light of the new information, we redo the cost-benefit analysis and we adjust our measures accordingly. Over the past couple of years, we have experienced this many times. Let me cite just one example, which has already been mentioned: the COVID-19 crisis.

We realised in late February or early March of last year that global conditions had changed substantially and that we could no longer rely on the forecast we had produced in December 2019. Furthermore, we had no models that could really capture the pandemic situation. So our experts had to create a new forecast – based on scenarios – that then became the basis for our judgement and our decisions. And that was very helpful. We need these experts in order to better understand the world. It was then possible to make reliable decisions and rapidly introduce new facilities. I’ll just mention here the refinancing facility that we use to provide the liquidity for the COVID-19 programme in Switzerland, but also the decision we made to attempt to absorb most 18

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of the pressure on the Swiss franc produced by this crisis, which is the greatest crisis of this century.

I would also like to end by saying a few words about hope. Like Mervyn, I was surprised by the resilience demonstrated by a large part of our economy. That has been really positive. And I’m also very hopeful that our vaccination programme will continue to improve the situation. So I remain an optimist, and I hope for more normal times.

Thank you, Martin.

Martin Meyer: Thank you very much,Thomas.To be an optimist is always good, even if the Swiss sometimes have an inclination towards pessimism, or at least scepticism. But these times present a very challenging situation for our National Bank, and I think the impact of your human competence, as opposed to artificial intelligence, should be highly esteemed.

So, we are fully in agreement.

Now, I have another question for Lord King. In view of the current political and economic challenges, where do you see the greatest risks, and where do you see the opportunities right now?

Mervyn King: I think the greatest risk is that the amount of debt in the world economy has risen to levels above those attained in 2007. That was already true in 2019, and it’s gone even further during the pandemic. So, my worry would be that over the next three to five years we will see significant debt restructurings in several areas. I think we’ll see it in sovereign debt in low-income countries, where the G20 have already stated that some help is needed, but I think a lot more needs to be done. I think there will be serious sovereign debt problems in some emerging market economies. And I think business debt across the world will also involve significant debt restructurings, as the zombie companies that have developed over the past decade are now augmented by companies that have had to borrow to try to survive COVID-19, 19

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and either can’t repay those loans, or find that, in the new world after COVID-19, the pattern of demand and spending has changed and there isn’t really a demand for their services. So I think we will see quite significant changes in the pattern of spending and output. And that will go hand in hand with quite significant debt restructurings and insolvencies. And although we in the world economy are used to dealing with sovereign-debt problems in one or two large economies, and dealing with business defaults in one or two economies, the trouble is that if this becomes a global phenomenon, I’m not sure that we have the resources or the mechanisms for dealing with the scale of the debt restructurings that could occur.

Martin Meyer: Do you think that governments, societies and politicians are not fully aware of the problem, or do they just not want to face it? I think we still have a high level of confidence, and we really should be a little bit more alarmed. This is a question for you, but also for Thomas.

Mervyn King: I think it is difficult to get people to confront these risks.When Walter was speaking about the risks that he’d seen, and the challenges to Swiss Re, what comes across so clearly is the depth of his knowledge and experience. You do not see that in the political debates. I’ll give you one example that worries me: at some point in the next year, governments are going to declare victory over COVID-19. And they will say that we’re now coming out into a wonderful new world again. But what we have to recognise is that there is a risk of another pandemic at some point in the future. It will happen. And there are other risks, as Walter described them – whether it’s cybersecurity or a terrorist attack on our electricity supply grid, which could devastate our economies and make it difficult for governments to contact us. There are a number of very big risks that people tend to ignore, and I think my concern about the focus on climate change is not that climate change 20

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isn’t important. It clearly is. It’s just that it’s not the only risk facing societies. And when it comes to assessing risk, climate change is one risk, and it may be the most important one, but it’s not the only risk we face. And it’s very important that we don’t ignore the other ones.

Martin Meyer: Thank you. Thomas.

Thomas Jordan: Well, it’s clear that during a crisis, debt has to increase. Governments need money in order to fight the crisis, so the level of debt will climb.

The problem arises if, following the crisis, the debt level does not decrease again. We had an increase in the period from 2008 to 2010, and we have it again, but in the meantime, the level of debt has not declined. I think this is a problem. The main issue in my view is that we never address the serious lack of structural reforms. We need more growth.We need higher potential growth in most economies, and that cannot be achieved purely through an expansion in monetary and fiscal policy. Instead, what we need are structural reforms. But this is politically very difficult, because governments that try to implement structural reforms are typically not re-elected; the appetite for committing to structural reforms is therefore very low. It’s as if there’s an inherent risk that we won’t do the right things as regards structural reforms, and from crisis to crisis, it gets worse. There is a certain risk that there is too much debt. And if interest rates increase, it becomes very difficult to repay that debt.

Martin Meyer: And it accumulates constantly, more and more, compensated by socalled quantitative easing. We well remember Mario Draghi’s famous phrase, ‘Whatever it takes’, but today it’s still ‘Whatever it takes’, and it takes even more and more and more, and we don’t see an end to it.

Walter: structural reforms is a very important keyword.

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Walter Kielholz: To a certain extent I see the problem that when this victory is declared – and whether it’s been a true victory or whether it’s too early, it doesn’t even much matter, there’s in any case a lot of pent-up consumption out there in the world – people will rush out and have a heyday, in the restaurants and elsewhere, doing whatever they were not able to do, and consuming. And at that point this consumption will be reinforced by the stimulus programmes from governments aiming to increase consumption. And in my view – but I’m always a bit paranoid about this – this makes for a real likelihood of inflation. Now, very few politicians in the Western world remember real inflation. I have always felt that it represents an easy way out for governments. Governments’ tax income is dependent on nominal values: turnover in the economy for value added tax, and the personal income tax, which is even progressive. Thus, if we do have a devaluation, it leads to a dramatic acceleration in debt reduction. We recently calculated it and saw that the difference is huge.

In a couple of years, even in Switzerland, if we had 4.5 or 5 percent inflation, there would be an enormous growth in tax income.

Thomas Jordan: Absolutely.

Walter Kielholz: At somebody’s expense.

Thomas Jordan: Of course.

Walter Kielholz: And we know at whose expense: the owners of nominal assets. And this is therefore a political issue. I’m a little bit afraid of that, but I was already afraid of it ten years ago, and I was wrong.

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Martin Meyer: Yes, that’s an interesting point.We talked about inflation five years ago, or maybe more. Until now, it hasn’t happened, but there are still fears – growing fears – that it will come, and possibly in a dramatic way.

Lord King, what are your thoughts on this? I mean, we won’t quote to investors what you say tonight, but we would be very interested in how you see the problem, because, as I say, it’s a topic that’s been on the table for a long time.

Mervyn King: Well, I do think we should be concerned about the possible inflationary risk today. And I want to explain why I think it’s different from ten years ago. Central banks create money through quantitative easing; they buy assets, and create money electronically through that process.

But when we did that in 2009 and 2010, we were simply offsetting the contraction in the money supply created by the commercial banks reducing the size of their balance sheets. Most money exists in the form of bank deposits, and as commercial banks wanted to reduce the size of their balance sheets in the aftermath of the financial crisis in order to reduce leverage, that created downward pressure on the money supply. Central banks printed money to offset that. So, the total money supply did not grow rapidly in the post-financial crisis period.

Think now about 2020: while the central banks were printing a great deal more money, commercial banks were in a perfectly reasonable position.They were not contracting their balance sheets. So what we now see is that monetary growth rates are at record post-war levels in the United States, and at double-digit levels in the euro area and in the United Kingdom. Now, there’s no mechanical consequence of that, but it certainly ought to worry people, and it certainly should lead central banks to say, ‘We need to be ready to deal with it if it happens.’

The Federal Reserve in particular has been making statements that imply that they’re very confident that they won’t be raising in23

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terest rates for several years. And I think it’s very difficult to make statements like that. We just don’t know. And I think, and I’ve always thought, that one of the biggest mistakes that experts make when they’re called upon to give advice to politicians and others is to claim to know more than they in fact do. Expert knowledge is very important, but it gets devalued when experts make predictions or say they know what’s going to happen. So, I always trust an expert when they’re prepared to answer a question with ‘I don’t know.’ That’s the most important answer to be able to give: to be honest and humble about what we know and what we don’t know.

Martin Meyer: Absolutely. I have another question about the topic of uncertainty, which forms the subject of your book. What distinguishes today’s uncertainty – and also radical uncertainty – from earlier forms? I remember one of your predecessors, John Maynard Keynes, the eminent economist – maybe the most important economist of the 20th century – and he dealt with uncertainty a lot in his books and in his thoughts, but that was 70 years ago. So, what’s the difference in the notion and the reality of uncertainty between then and now? Are we living with radical uncertainty in a more dramatic way? And again, how can we cope with it?

Mervyn King: I think it’s very similar to the issues that Keynes wrote about. It’s very striking that when he was producing his general theory and trying to argue that a market economy isn’t automatically self-stabilising, and you can get periods – either a depression, which is what he was concerned with, or an inflationary boom – when there is uncertainty about the future, and markets can’t effectively convert that uncertainty into something that can be turned in terms of probabilities and priced and traded. Some uncertainties simply can’t easily be traded. From Keynes’s point of view, this was a very obvious point. There’s nothing 24

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deep and fundamental about it.Well, it’s fundamental, but it’s not deep and difficult to understand.

Keynes wrote in his preface that the great difficulty is to get people to give up old ways of thinking. Economists up until that point had assumed that, as long as there were no obstacles to competition, demand and supply would become equalised in every market, and hence overall in the economy. And it doesn’t take long to realise that that isn’t true, because many of the investments that businesses make are for products that will be sold 5, 10, 15, 20 years down the road.

They can’t sell those products today; they have to wait; they have to speculate and anticipate, make judgements, take risks. These are the things that make the economy go through cycles and move up and down, but it was very hard to get people out of the old mindset.

So, one of the reasons we wrote this book was to get people to understand that radical uncertainty is just as important as it was when Keynes, and Frank Knight before him, were writing about it, and it does alter the way we should think about uncertainty. It means that models, as Thomas said, are very important, and expert knowledge is very important – but while they’re necessary, they’re not sufficient.We have to use our judgement when confronting individual cases.

You know, it’s very interesting to think about how we make progress as the human race. If thinking like a computer was the answer to solving difficult problems, we would have evolved to think like computers. But we haven’t.What we have evolved to do is to confront unexpected situations, to be rather good at adapting to them, and to work with other people to create solutions to these problems. As individual humans, we can’t run as fast as many other species, and we certainly can’t fly. But working together with other people, we can build a jumbo jet that will fly from Europe to Australia, nonstop. No other species can do that. It’s that collective intelligence, as others have described it, which gives us our ability to adapt. And those are the things we should treasure and prize.

I’ve got a question for Walter, because obviously he uses expert 25

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knowledge and models and data to assess what’s going on. But in the end, there is the example he gave of the geologists trying to assess the likelihood of an earthquake: the geologists’ expert knowledge stops at a certain point. It can’t tell you whether there will or will not be an earthquake in the next six months in any one particular place. So I’d like to ask Walter to say a little bit about the kinds of people he brings together in order to help the company make a judgement about the uncertainty. And Thomas is in the same position. Both of you are running organisations where you have to make decisions about uncertainty that cannot easily be quantified or expressed in the form of a probability.

Walter Kielholz: Of course. First of all, we have to make decisions whether we are certain or uncertain – we have to make decisions anyway, and that’s a problem. Because even if you don’t make a decision, you make a decision not to make a decision. So we have no option – we have to actually come out with decision-making. And we know very little.

Let me take the example of value at risk. This is a mathematical concept designed to measure the probability of loss for a financial position. Let’s define it this way. The value-at-risk model makes certain assumptions, and it gives people a good feeling. They say, ‘Oh well, you know, the likelihood that we will lose here is 1 in 1,000. Hahaha.’

On the other hand, if you know the total value of all the positions, that is what you maximally can lose. So we do both.We actually count up the positions, try to make sure what the total amount at risk is, and then ask, what is the likelihood? But the less we know about the likelihood, the more we direct our attention to the positions. So, we add them all up together, because they can be lost all together. And whenever an industry – insurance industry, banking industry – wants to feel safe, they take a model, and then they feel better. They feel much better. ‘The model says…’Then, unfortunately, the next day the model is proven wrong.

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So, it’s all about the position. Expert knowledge is all about having a process in place – a think tank, in a way – to ask, ‘What could happen? What could happen?’ And we have come up with ideas which never happen, but we try. One tool we use to try to identify emerging risks – risks which we don’t yet know – is called SONAR [Systematic Observation of Notions Associated with Risk]. So, we try very hard to be smart. But of course, business people then sometimes say to us,‘You are overly complicated, you are paranoiac.You actually are standing in the way of every business proposition that we have – and also, by the way, in the way of my bonus.’ And so, the question here is always a little bit, who has the power in an organisation to make these decisions?

Martin Meyer: Very well. One short estimate on the future of the world economy. In one sentence. Thomas?

Thomas Jordan: Well, we will probably have relatively high growth rates, because we are coming from a situation in which the so-called output gap is negative.The catch-up of economic activity is then usually quite strong. So we assume, like everybody else, that this year’s and next year’s growth rates will be substantial in order to get back to a more normal level.

But Martin, let me just make one remark, going back to the previous topic. In my view, one big problem is that we do not accept the consequences of major shocks. After such a shock, we usually need an adjustment of so-called relative prices. So, we have a new equilibrium. But often, politics – from fiscal policy to monetary policy, to other policies – tries to avoid this adjustment. Thus the necessary and unavoidable adjustment takes more time, with the result that when the next shock happens, we may well not yet have reached the new equilibrium.

This is something which is almost schizophrenic, because we know exactly that there need to be certain adjustments of relative 27

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prices, but because these adjustments are painful, we do everything we can to avoid them. Certain firms will just not be sustainable in the long term, and we know that. But the policy is to give them enough oxygen to keep them alive for a very long time, even though we know full well that, in the end, they will have to disappear from the landscape.

Martin Meyer: True enough. Walter, a short estimate of the world economy – you are an optimist?

Walter Kielholz: No estimates about the future from my side.

Martin Meyer: Lord King, also not? A bit?

Mervyn King: We have spent a lot of time in the last year looking back on previous pandemics, particularly the Spanish flu of 100 years ago. No one has suggested that the level and growth of GDP today was permanently affected by that episode. So, my guess is that 50 years from now, people will look back, and they’ll want to either remember or commemorate these events. But they won’t think of the pandemic as something that transformed the world in which they lived.

Martin Meyer: Very good. In 50 years, anyway, we’ll meet again here, and see if we can comment on the outcome of what you said just now. That would be very interesting.

Walter Kielholz: That would be an interesting test of probability.

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Martin Meyer: It would also change some perceptions of risk and long vitality. So, let’s see what kind of questions from viewers we have here on my iPad. I think we have to ask this question – somehow it’s in the air.

‘Brexit – how would you estimate the United Kingdom’s economic performance for the coming five years?’ The more specific, the better.

Mervyn King: I should take Walter’s advice here and not make any forecasts for the immediate future. But what I would say is that this whole Brexit debate has been confounded by the phrase I used earlier: bogus quantification. In the referendum, both sides made strong numerical claims about the costs or benefits of leaving the European Union. And I was struck by the fact that most normal people I met said, ‘How can they possibly know?’ And the answer was, they didn’t; they made the numbers up to bolster their case. And that was one reason, I think, why the government lost the referendum campaign: because their own position became literally incredible. So, we don’t know what will happen.

But I do think that if you take a longer-term view, you know, 20 or 30 years, it’s not at all obvious that Brexit is going to have a significant impact on the level or growth rates of UK GDP. The actual impact on costs of doing trade is small. There may be political consequences.We’ll see how those work out. But I don’t believe that joining the Common Market, as it was in the 1970s, led to a transformation of the British economy. I think the transformation that took place, if any, was in terms of macroeconomic policy, where both major political parties realised the importance of monetary and fiscal stability, and in the enormous switch to denationalised, privatised companies and increased competition in the economy under Mrs Thatcher. Those were the big changes. But I don’t think joining the European Union transformed our position. It had a bigger effect on New Zealand than it did on us, but the New Zealand economy is thriving today.

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Martin Meyer: Right. We could also mention that Trump used ‘creative destruction’ as a kind of a starting point for undertaking reforms, and who knows how this will develop?

Another question: ‘Please voice your views on pandemic catastrophes as a catalyst of lasting innovation for your areas. Example: improving decision-making, new real-time monitoring and action options.’ Thomas, would you like to answer that?

Thomas Jordan: It’s a very, very difficult question. But no, I agree. Every time we have a crisis, it makes way for improvements in certain areas. I think we have to make good use of all the insights we’ve gained. In Switzerland, for example, we have realised that we are much weaker with respect to digitalisation than we had hoped or expected to be. We have to improve there. And we also have to prepare for the next pandemic.

We don’t know exactly whether this will be in three, five or ten years, but when you look at the consequences of the current pandemic, at the sheer cost, it’s absolutely clear that we have to be prepared for the next one. In this context, it’s also very important that we figure out how to live with a virus. Repeatedly shutting down the economy is very problematic. The costs are staggering. When the next pandemic happens, we need to know what targeted measures to use, so that the economy can continue to run. We need to have a certain balance between the costs and benefits of containment measures in our analyses and decisions. I think it’s a very important question. And there’s no trivial answer to it.

Martin Meyer: Absolutely, and I really hope we have learned our lesson a bit, and will build on what we’ve learned for the next time. Because the next time will happen. Walter?

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Walter Kielholz: Yes, it will happen. But I assure you: it will be different. That’s the unfair thing in life, that every challenge is different. We have had pandemics – we had HIV/AIDS, for example. It was a big pandemic, and it hit a certain sector of society, and had an impact on the lifestyles of the time. Every year we have the influenza, but we can deal with it.

We have had others, like Ebola – highly deadly, but also very, very slow and limited in its spread. And so, the next one will be different again.

I think if we have learned one thing, it is that multilateralism, in particular the World Health Organization, is not a luxury and is not a bureaucratic disaster. And we should take better care of such multilateral organisations, care that they are actually efficient, and that they are not politically manipulated exactly at the wrong time.They should actually act independently. But it was a very bad time. The Americans were already more or less out, the Chinese didn’t care, the organisation in Geneva was in bad shape, and so on and so on. So, from that point of view, I think we see a reborn need for multilateralism in solving global problems – or problems that can spread, virtually within days, over the whole globe. These things shouldn’t come as a surprise.

They’re there.

Martin Meyer: They’re there; they’re definitely there. A last question, and an important one: ‘The ongoing pandemic may deepen the gap between the haves and the have-nots – countries, societies, individuals. What is your view on that development? And what should governments do to maintain the social contract rule in societies, given sovereign debt levels?’ Thank you for your views, Lord King.

Mervyn King: Well, there are no simple answers. It will require a large number of different policy measures. I think, in the short run, that it’s going to be 31

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increasingly important that the rich countries make vaccines available to the less rich countries around the world, because we’ll only be able to claim that we’re out of this when all countries around the world have vaccination programmes. And my guess is that we will need vaccinations not only this year. In the UK, we’re already planning on a booster vaccination in the autumn, and we may well need regular annual vaccinations, as we do against the flu virus.

I think there’s no doubt that events like this demonstrate very clearly that although multilateralism is very important – as Walter said – national governments, and the decisions taken by national governments, are also very important. National governments are the bodies that have democratic legitimacy; you can throw out your own government in a democratic country, in a way that you can’t do easily in other countries or in multilateral organisations or groupings like the EU. So, I think restoring the legitimacy and credibility of national governments is going to be important.

Walter hinted that this may be difficult, because governments haven’t found it easy to cope with COVID-19. No government can claim that they’ve been entirely successful. Maybe Taiwan has been more successful than others, but even Australia and New Zealand, which were lauded initially, now have massive challenges, because they can’t easily end their border controls and quarantine restrictions anytime soon, and these basically prohibit travel to those countries. That isn’t true of countries in Europe, where we can look forward to a time in which we can travel again. But within each country, the question of inequality will come to the fore again; it did after the banking crisis, and I was surprised that it didn’t have a bigger impact. In the 1930s, after the Great Depression, there was a great wave of political and intellectual turmoil, with people asking, ‘Can capitalism deliver the goods? Shouldn’t we switch to communism?’ There were lots of ideas floating around in a way we haven’t really seen in the past decade, and maybe we’ll see more of them in the next decade.

I think that, in terms of wealth, it’s going to be important to 32

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get interest rates – real interest rates – back to more normal levels. I think that will unwind the increases in wealth inequality that we’ve seen growing over the last 20 years or so. But in terms of income inequalities, I think it’s important not to generalise too much. In the US, which many people focus on, there’s no doubt that there’s been a big fall in the share of incomes of the people in the bottom half, but that isn’t quite so true in Europe. And the ratio of earnings of graduates to non-graduates has not moved in the way it has in some other countries where inequality has risen.

It’s going to be a political challenge to ensure that our system can respond to concerns of democratic voters. That, I think, is the most important thing. What we do in terms of policy is going to be very difficult, because I think we will have to devote more resources to making our economies and health systems more resilient. I think that’s a big lesson from this pandemic. And that will probably require more expenditure at the public sector level. And the question is, can we find ways of economising on other kinds of public expenditure to avoid significant rises in tax rates, which may or may not generate higher revenue?

Martin Meyer: Absolutely. Thank you. Thomas, would you agree with Lord King?

Thomas Jordan: Always. Of course. I think it’s a very important question, but also a very difficult one to answer. With regard to Switzerland, we were fortunate to have many programmes that assisted those who were affected most. Short-time work schemes were very helpful in this respect, as was support by the government. Nevertheless, there were certain sectors that were hit much more severely than others – mainly restaurants, event management, and so on. In my view, it’s not only a question of providing funds at this moment. I think it’s very important that you get rid of the distortions as soon as possible – so that you have 33

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competition again, and that you allow the economy to provide jobs and opportunities.With a strong, competitive economy, we give hope; but we also create the chance for everybody to participate. The Swiss economy provides opportunities to many people, because we have an education system that includes vocational training and apprenticeships. This is something that is extremely important for enabling a more equal economy, and we should make sure that after the crisis we do not lose out here; on the contrary, we should strengthen it.

Martin Meyer: Absolutely. Walter, you have the last word.

Walter Kielholz: I come now with a very bad message. I am convinced that the great wealth that has been created over the last 20 years – mostly in technology – and which has become relatively concentrated in a small number of individuals and companies, will have to contribute more to solving crises. And this will be the political topic of the future.

Don’t forget that Switzerland is one of the very few countries in the world that actually has a wealth tax. Most countries don’t have one. So wealth, great wealth, will have to contribute more.There’s no question about that. And it’s only by doing that in a smart way – not in a silly way – that we will be able to once again bridge the differences in our societies. If we fail, I think we will have much more radical outcomes in certain countries in the future. I’m worried about that, and I think that people should recognise that they have a duty to contribute.

Martin Meyer: Absolutely. That’s why we all work together in a good and competent and intelligent way. That’s important. Distribution is also a question of intelligence and not of bureaucracy.

Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you very much for joining us for this highly interesting evening with Lord King and Thomas Jordan 34

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and Walter Kielholz. I would like to say goodbye with a quote. Chapter 23 of Lord King’s wonderful book is called ‘Embracing Uncertainty’. We embraced it tonight, in a good sense. In this chapter there’s a wonderful quote by Oscar Wilde, which reads, ‘Knowledge would be fatal. It is the uncertainty that charms one. A mist makes things beautiful.’

Foto: © The National Gallery, London

Mervyn King, Lord King of Lothbury Mervyn King served as Governor of the Bank of England from 2003 to June 2013. He was knighted (GBE) in 2011, made a life peer in 2013, and appointed by The Queen to be a Knight of the Garter in 2014.

Lord King is the Alan Greenspan Professor of Economics and Professor of Law at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics.

In 2016 he published The End of Alchemy. With a new preface, it appeared in paperback in 2017, and has been translated into many languages. His new book (with John Kay) Radical Uncertainty was published in March 2020.

Born in 1948, Mervyn King studied at King’s College, Cambridge, and taught at Cambridge and Birmingham Universities before spells as Visiting Professor at both Harvard University and MIT. From October 1984 he was Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, where he founded the Financial Markets Group. He is Chair of the Philharmonia Orchestra and a member of the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee.

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Foto: © Swiss Re

Walter B. Kielholz Walter B. Kielholz was elected to the Board of Directors of Swiss Reinsurance Company Ltd in 1998 and to the Board of Directors of Swiss Re Ltd in connection with its formation in 2011. He was Vice Chairman from 2003 to April 2009 and has been Chairman of the

Foto: © SNB / D. Büttner

Board of Directors since May 2009. He chairs the Chairman’s and Governance Committee.

Walter B. Kielholz began his career at the General Reinsurance Corporation, Zurich, in 1976, where he held several positions in the US, in the UK and Italy before assuming responsibility for the company’s European marketing. In 1986, he joined Credit Suisse, where he was responsible for relationships with large insurance groups. He joined Swiss Re in 1989, where he became an Executive Board member in 1993 and was Chief Executive Officer from 1997 to 2002. He was also a member of the Board of Directors of Credit Suisse Group Ltd from 1999 to 2014 and served as Chairman from 2003 to 2009.

Prof. Dr. Thomas J. Jordan

Thomas J. Jordan studied economics and business studies at the University of Berne, completing his degree in 1989 and his doctorate in 1993. He wrote his post-doctoral thesis (Habilitation) during a threeyear post-doctoral research period at the Department of Economics at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. The University of Berne appointed him lecturer (Privatdozent) in 1998 and honorary professor in 2003. He lectures there in monetary theory and policy.

In 1997, Thomas J. Jordan joined the Swiss National Bank (SNB) in Zurich as an Economic Advisor in Department I. With effect from mid-2004, the Swiss Federal Council appointed him an Alternate Member of the Governing Board. Effective May 2007, he was appointed Member of the Governing Board by the Federal Council. At the same time, he became Head of Department III (Financial Markets, Banking Operations and Information Technology). With effect from the beginning of 2010, the Federal Council appointed him Vice-Chairman of the Governing Board and he took over management of Department II in Berne (Financial Stability, Cash, Finance and Risk). On 18 April 2012, Thomas J. Jordan was appointed Chairman of the Governing Board by the Federal Council and thereby also Head of Department I in Zurich (Economic Affairs, International Monetary Cooperation, Legal and Property Services, Secretariat General).

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SIAF Bd. 48

Auch 2021 drehte sich wieder vieles in der Welt um das Thema Corona, in anderen Facetten, aber durchaus länger, als man gehofft hatte. Die Krise hat weiterhin Themen nationaler wie internationaler Politik und Wirtschaft beeinflusst, und entsprechend widmeten sich die Veranstaltungen und Gespräche den Themen «Pandemie und Politik». Das Jahrbuch präsentiert eine Rückschau auf unsere renommierten Rednerinnen und Redner sowie unseren Austausch mit ihnen.

Jahrbuch 2021

Pandemie und Politik

Gerhard Schwarz Die Schweiz hat Zukunft – Von der positiven Kraft der Eigenart

Herausgegeben von Martin Meyer und Sabine Sura

Christian Lindner Pandemie, Klima, Digitalisierung: die liberalen Gesellschaftsordnungen im globalen Systemwettbewerb Niall Ferguson The Great Disasters of the Past and Some Lessons for the Future Alain Berset Pandemie. Politik. Gesellschaft.

Anne Applebaum Old and New Dangers of Totalitarianism Sahra Wagenknecht Warum wir wieder mehr Zusammenhalt und Gemeinsinn brauchen Elif Shafak Politics – Society – Literature: Between East and West Bertrand Piccard Pioneering Spirit to Invent the Future

Martin Meyer, Sabine Sura (Hrsg.)

Ilaria Capua The Circular Nature of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Pandemie und Politik

Mervyn King Uncertainty, Disruption, Hope – How to Analyse the Current World of Economics and Politics

MIT BEITRÄGEN VON

Mervyn King, Gerhard Schwarz, Ilaria Capua, Christian Lindner, Niall Ferguson, Alain Berset, Anne Applebaum, Sahra Wagenknecht, Elif Shafak, Bertrand Piccard

I S B N 978-3-907396-11-7

9

783907 396117

www.nzz-libro.ch

NZZ Libro