Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient. - Ha-Joon Chang

[T]he few changes that this crisis has brought about... their consequences, and what countries do in order to deal with them will depend on how long this crisis continues, and how effective the solution[s]... are likely to be. These are things that I don't have the expertise to predict: ...When is the vaccine coming out ...if there will be an effective cure..? [I]s there going to be a similar outbreak? ...I'm just ...assuming that this crisis will probably last another two, three, maybe five years... [A] lot of society will try to go back to the pre-pandemic way as much as possible, but... if we are going to be—even if we wanted—able to go back to the old ways... it will take a few years.

Almost all of today's rich countries used protection and subsidies to develop their industries. Interestingly, Britain and the USA, the two countries that are supposed to have reached the summit of the world economy through their free-market, free-trade policy, are actually the ones that had most aggressively used protection and subsidies.

So... there will be only a limited degree of reorganization, but... in the long run countries and industries that do it in a more sustainable way, making the network more robust, more dispersed, more resilient, will reap the benefit. But let's not underestimate the... seduction of immediate gains. So... despite all this hullabalu the final reorganization will be rather limited. I'm not saying that it shouldn't be done, but my guess is that it will be done in a limited way, because every time there's some disaster... When there was the famous Fukushima earthquake, the problem with the nuclear reactor... there were some sectors that saw... the end of the supply for... intermediate materials because there was one Japanese company that was supplying 70% of the world... Every time that happens, like the earthquake in Taiwan... several years before, everyone says... we have to change the supply chain... make it less concentrated... less complicated, and then... 2 years later we are back to square one. So I'm not too sure about how much change will happen to the global value chains. ...[T]he taste for global free trade will be diminished somewhat, but... on that we should... change the conversation, because... we—especially those who are concerned with the fate of developing countries, like the people that source—we need to talk about intelligent trade in a completely different way. ...[I]t's not just a simple dichotomous problem of free trade versus . ...[T]here are many different ways of organizing . ...There are many ways of regulating trade. Protectionism is only one way. ...[W]e do it with ... with programs... with, in the case of the US, defense policy, so... we need to change the conversation in a more nuanced way...