COVID breaks Value Exchange Systems

COVID-19 with its silent, yet warlike (unguibus et rostro) mode of transmission with deadly outcomes has managed to lockdown the entire world. Here, we are not examining the deficiencies in the responses of almost all countries’ health systems to the crisis. The overall impacts are too extensive to focus on them alone. We do not even want to analyse all alternatives adopted. Instead we are going to concentrate on the macroscopic results of the lockdown.

By initially closing ourselves down into our own small units, we contemporaneously isolated ourselves from all the other units. We were forced to suspend, perhaps permanently, all or almost all exchanges. Yet, some exchanges did break free. We did not stop exchanging food and pharmaceutical products for money. We did not stop buying news and technologically advanced pastimes for amusement or education. Now, many businesses are learning to trust employees' self management capabilities by allowing them to operate from home. And for this reason, businesses such as these thrive whilst most others find themselves in a really bad state. By this forced breakage of value exchanges, the economy fails. When value exchange systems are disrupted, the economy does not function.

There is no stronger demonstration of how value exchange systems are running the world from its smallest systems to its largest. When value is not exchanged, the whole system collapses and we notice what is already largely analysed by everyone - we could very easily slip into global bankruptcy.

Christie Sarri and David Meggitt