During the depths of lockdown, I recalled Franklin D Roosevelt’s famous exhortation to his fellow Americans at the nadir of the Great Depression: “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.” To my surprise, during a recent call to an anxiety helpline, the kind man on the other end of the phone quoted words he attributed to FDR’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt: “The future is a mystery, today is a gift, which is why we call it the present.” Stop worrying about tomorrow, seemed to be the message, and root yourself in the moment.
One man who is paid to demystify the future, though, is Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times. He joined me for the first in a mini-series of “At home with” Zoom interviews for the How To Academy. As we emerge from lockdown, public events remain a distant prospect, and there is still an appetite for virtual gatherings. Wolf described what we are about to encounter in economic terms as another Great Depression. But we aren’t feeling it like the financial crisis of 2007-08 because the government is borrowing like mad and we haven’t been able to spend during lockdown.
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