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Insights, analysis and must reads from CNN's Fareed Zakaria and the Global Public Square team, compiled by Global Briefing editor Chris Good

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March 11, 2021

Biden’s Big Bet

In signing a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, President Joe Biden has increased “to nearly $3trn (14% of pre-crisis GDP) the amount of pandemic-related spending passed since December, and to about $6trn the total paid out since the start of the crisis,” The Economist writes. “For a decade after the global financial crisis of 2007-09 America’s economic policymakers were too timid. Today they are letting rip.”

When Biden addresses the nation in his first prime-time presidential speech Thursday night, laying out America’s next steps through the pandemic, the fiscal side of things will have been buttoned up.

The Economist points to the risk of Biden’s approach, including that such grand spending will prompt undesirable inflation. (In December, the magazine noted concerns among a “small but vocal band of economists and investors” that inflation will soon return, after falling off the radar of economic worries for decades. Earlier this week, the Financial Times’ editorial board suggested we keep an eye on signs of inflation to judge the success or failure of Biden’s bill. At Project Syndicate, Nouriel Roubini finds inflation improbable in the near term, arguing many Americans will likely spend their stimulus checks making up payments and getting out of the red—not buying the store and causing prices to rise problematically against the value of the dollar.) The Economist also notes the risk inherent in big deficits, although not everyone is concerned about them, with low global interest rates making it cheap to service government debt, as The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey recently explained on GPS.

In sizing up the $1.9 trillion bill, The Economist calls it “a big gamble. If it pays off, America will avoid the miserable low-inflation, low-[interest] rate trap in which Japan and Europe look stuck. Other central banks may copy the Fed’s new target. Massive fiscal stimulus may become the normal response to recessions. The risk, however, is that America is left with rising debts, an inflation problem and a central bank facing a test of its credibility.”

Hong Kong Clampdown

At China’s annual “two sessions” this week, its National Party Congress (known for rubber-stamping Communist Party initiatives), approved changes to Hong Kong’s electoral system, including an expanded committee to vet candidates, an expansion of the city’s Legislative Council (expected to be filled with loyalists to Beijing), and a new imperative to have “patriots” fill the city’s legislative and bureaucratic posts. As CNN’s James Griffiths writes, the moves are expected to solidify mainland control over the city—which already has few “figures left to challenge Beijing,” with 47 activists being tried under the security law instituted last year.

At Project Syndicate, Minxin Pei warns that Beijing will pay a price. Clamping down on Hong Kong further, “coupled with a lack of goodwill gestures,” will likely “harden” US President Joe Biden’s stance toward China at a time when he’s seeking “to avoid a frontal collision.” The move “will undermine advocates of a more nuanced and less confrontational US approach” and make US allies more likely to sign up for multilateral anti-China efforts, Pei predicts.

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The State of Nuclear, 10 Years After Fukushima

Ten years ago today, an earthquake and tsunami in Fukushima, Japan, caused a disaster that rated as a 7 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale—the only nuclear catastrophe in history besides Chernobyl to occupy that most-serious category.

At Nature, Aditi Verma, Ali Ahmad, and Francesca Giovanni note that nuclear power suffered a global setback after Fukushima, which combined “with other economic and political factors to prompt the disbandment of the nuclear-industrial complex in many nations. Four months after the reactor failure, the German parliament voted to phase out nuclear energy altogether by 2022. The Swiss cabinet followed suit, calling for the decommissioning of the country’s five nuclear-power reactors. In Japan, out of the 54 reactors operational at the time of the accident, 12 were subsequently permanently closed and 24 remain—at least for now—shuttered.”

Some say nuclear energy will need to play a critical role in limiting carbon emissions and meeting the crisis of global warming. Biofuels and other renewables account for 13.9% of world energy production, per the International Energy Agency’s latest-available statistics (from 2018), while nuclear only accounts for 4.9%. Bill Gates, for instance, advises betting on nuclear-power technology in his new book on averting a climate disaster. The Nature authors write that 10 years after Fukushima, nuclear still suffers problems that include a lack of public engagement that leaves planning to “a small circle of the political elite,” uranium’s sourcing to mines in Indigenous communities, and the “still highly contentious” question of where to put waste.

“If nuclear energy is to have a meaningful role in deep decarbonization,” they write, “perspectives that up to now have been excluded from the design, development and policymaking process must have a seat at the table.”

Two Ideas to Counteract Vaccine ‘Hoarding’: Dose Donations and Increased Capacity

In a Guardian op-ed, World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warns that although vaccine shipments have reached African countries via the COVAX vaccine-distribution initiative, “of the 225m vaccine doses that have been administered so far, the vast majority have been in a handful of rich and vaccine-producing countries, while most low- and middle-income countries watch and wait.”

With vaccine hoarding still a problem, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Cécile Fabre, Daniel Halliday, R. J. Leland, Allen Buchanan, Kok-Chor Tan, and Shuk Ying Chan propose a solution in a Foreign Affairs essay: “to allow countries to secure enough doses for their populations to reach herd immunity but require them to donate any excess doses to COVAX for redistribution to countries where the virus is still circulating.” They argue for setting a “threshold” that would prompt dose donations once the virus poses mortality risks more in line with the seasonal flu, in a given country.

Also at Foreign Affairs, Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker echo a recommendation recently made by Matthew M. Kavanagh, Mara Pillinger, Renu Singh, and Katherine Ginsbach at Foreign Policy: to scale up production as quickly as possible, setting up manufacturing wherever we can. Osterholm and Olshaker argue that “the WHO, governments, nongovernmental organizations, and pharmaceutical companies should scour the entire world for additional production capability to increase the manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines and the necessary supplies to administer them.”