Comments by German finance minister, Olaf Scholz
- We still have fiscal room to do more in case of second virus wave
I’ve made mention to this a few times already. For all countries around the world, the threshold to reinforce such strict lockdown measures back in March to April may only happen if the secondary outbreak threatens to be much, much worse than the initial one.
Otherwise, it is going to be the case of putting the fire out whenever there is one because the economic and social damage is just too heavy a burden to bear for governments.
The issue with the initial lockdown measures is that once they committed to it, they have to stick it all the way through if not it would have been for naught. Not to mention that there was a case in point when looking at China and the political pressures were overbearing.
Going out to four to five years from now, you can expect the next set of lawmakers to deem all these lockdown measures as being a big mistake in their political campaigning.