As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc across the globe and the number of infected people continues to soar, the world leaders and the medical community are staring at an unprecedented health and economic crisis.
Many countries affected by the virus are now teetering on the brink of a recession and their economies are in peril. Recession and depression are now a certainty. Credit ratings agencies have continuously downgraded the ratings of countries and are continuing to revise growth estimates.
Since the situation is worsening every day, world leaders are still struggling to grapple with the magnitude of the crisis. The suspension of flights and the crash of the aviation sector, the closure of shopping centers, the shutting down of normal life and business due to the lockdown in several countries, which has crippled every sector of business, will have an impact on global economy for years to come. To make matters worse, oil prices crashed, falling to their lowest level in the past two decades.
The current situation indicates that the global government debt will rise by seven percent and exceed $ 280 trillion, and countries will be pushed to explore and focus on issuing government bonds. In short, it will cost governments more to raise money with loan asset sales to cover the budget deficit.
However, there is another issue that we need to address, which is of equal urgency. It’s about how some people are exploiting this crisis of extraordinary proportions for their own benefit, and how they are seeking a direct path to riches and letting go of principles and rules of governance in favour of benefits. They are in every field – insider traders who cheat by using information they are privy to; corrupt officials who siphon off corona funds; traders who hoard essential commodities for profit; vultures in the health sector who jack up prices of medicines, and traders who hike the prices of essential medical items like sanitizers and masks. We can call them ‘crisis traders’ and they are in every field.
Everyone knows that the first priority of governments all over the world is to guarantee health and safety, and they are fully focused on these efforts, but this has been providing an opportunity for unscrupulous elements to exploit this crisis.
Many governments rushed to allocate huge amounts of money to confront the coronavirus, for prevention, protection, treatment and quarantine of people, in addition to the huge financial incentives amounting to billions of dollars allocated to mitigate the economic impact.
In these circumstances, the crisis traders are now very active, and looking over their shoulders, they are seeing huge opportunities for exploitation, thus spoiling the huge national efforts. Unfortunately, their selfishness and greed are creating tragedies for others, and compounding the problems of governments. The ‘crisis traders’ are transforming all the grievances and tragedies into an increasingly fierce competition for amassing personal wealth and benefits, including in global markets. They exercise their authority for a specific purpose, and exploit their position to advance extraneous, personal agendas. As a result, they are seeing healthcare as a commodity and not as public good.
At a time when we find a large number of human endeavours which are aimed at reducing pain and healing wounds, unfortunately, we also find others who are very active in exploiting the crisis in its most horrific and terrible form.
As governments release billions into the economy, this has made the corrupt people, or the ‘crisis hunters’, more greedy. Unfortunately, some of these people are involved in the decisions-making process, making it easy for them to steal, creating fraudulent accounts in the names of their friends and relatives in order to get a bigger slice of this crisis cake. It’s this greed that leads to so much corruption in our societies.
This corrupt mindset affects several heads of state and heads of governments and senior officials as well, some of whom are using this crisis to strengthen their hold on power. They formulate and implement policies in the name of this crisis, but these policies are actually meant to serve their interests and guarantee their continuity in power, by helping their re-election possibilities, and by promoting and helping people who are close to them. They use even the media in their manipulation and promotion of selfish policies, which give priority to their short-term gains over the long-term health and stability of the state.
Such people are no less dangerous than the enemies and adversaries of the homeland, and they are everywhere. Power and wealth are their objectives. And they achieve their objectives under the cloak of false patriotism. The basest and meanest interests are hiding behind their noblest decisions and their bright appearances, and they misuse the media to mislead the public. They are just the unscrupulous ‘traders of crises’ and must be exposed and punished.
(The author is an economic research analyst)