Author, macroeconomist and strategy consultant Dr. Daniel Stelter presented this year’s keynote speech to commence MuMAC 2020. He delivered a comprehensive overview on the status of our economy as affected by the current pandemic, as well as trends prevailing before the pandemic and those most effected by the resulting economic crisis.

Dr. Stelter insists that before COVID-19 a long-standing financial crisis was not even close to being over and that even in Germany there had been only the impression of having overcome it; all of that in spite of “having the lowest interest rates in 5,000 years.” He believes that the cheap money, especially amid the economic crisis, will eventually lead to serious problems. He continues to expand his estimation and evaluation concerning the status of our current economy and financial markets, especially focusing on problems: those existing prepandemic, those existing currently and those ahead. Dr. Stelter’s main statement within his remarks, however, is that our current economic problems are the result of not having dealt with our ongoing financial crisis before COVID-19. Because of this, in his opinion, all the money that is being spent to fix or better our economy is not able to reach the real economy, but always only the economic problems of the past.

He goes on to state that “it’s no wonder we have all this debt, but the spending financed by this debt has less and less impact on the real economy.” In the past, one euro of new debt in the eurozone created 46 cents in new GDP; today, it’s only 38 cents. He concludes that we’d have to incur much more debt today to have an impact. In Dr. Stelter’s opinion our current economic problems are a combination of too-high debt levels and our economy not flourishing in general; he then further concludes that the combination of all the problems our economy was facing even before COVID-19 has the potential of putting the world into another great depression.

Mr Stelter discussed in particular the past and current financial and debt-related problems within the eurozone, especially concentrating on a few examples in Italy, France and Germany. As his solution, Dr. Stelter discribed his proposal to pool all existing debt from all existing governments on a European level, then freeze that level and refinance all of it. Apart from all the existing economic problems, Dr. Stelter believes that innovation still is and can be a great sourced growth even when, on the other hand, the eurozone is not even close to being stabilized.