When the world economy has finally recovered from the coronavirus pandemic, the question expected to divide politicians, economists and market operators will be a familiar one, as if nothing fundamental had changed with the outbreak: how to pay down the debt acquired by governments to pay for the hundreds of billions they are throwing at the crisis?

The dispute has already started. It is a familiar one for Olivier Blanchard, who served as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund from 2008 to 2015 and is now a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has not only worked and written profusely on the topic, but he was instrumental, while at the IMF, in steering the organisation away from the policies of the “Washington consensus” it then forced on the countries needing its help — strict fiscal policies coupled with the mantra “privatise and liberalise”.