by Rich Miller
Yahoo! Finance
(Bloomberg) — The world economy will be exiting the pandemic weighed down by much bigger debts and increased inequality that could hobble growth in the longer term.
That was one of the memes making the rounds at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association that winds up on Tuesday.
While global growth is widely expected to strengthen as more people are vaccinated, top economists at the virtual three-day conference focused on the glaring inequities that the pandemic had exposed and the fall-out from the efforts to cope with and combat Covid-19.
“We have met every crisis in the recent past with yet more aggressive central bank accommodation and yet more leverage, both public as well as private,” said former Reserve Bank of India Governor Raghuram Rajan. “The real question is: Is this a doom loop? Does it keep going until it is forced to stop?”