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Making policies during the COVID-19 pandemic

John Boulton considers the policy response to COVID-19.

PolicySometimes it seems like decades of change are concentrated into a few weeks and that certainly looks to hold true for the recent extraordinary period. While we may have spent much of the last 12 years preparing for the next crisis, when it arrived it turned out to be a different crisis to the one we expected.

The response to the 2008 financial crisis centred on moral hazard and minimising the misuse of taxpayer money. The crisis related to COVID-19, however, is all about liquidity; getting money out as quickly as possible to help businesses make it through. Innovation and speed of delivery are the order of the day.