German government ...so famous for fiscal conservatism, basically abolished this law that put the ceiling on public debt because... the German government realized that they... cannot manage this... in compliance with that law... Many governments are... subsidizing, and lending at subsidized interest rates... [to] many many companies. Some governments are talking about issuing government bond[s] with the negative interest rate... Every conventional wisdom in the neoliberal playbook has been... destroyed." - Meaning and context.">
Also see List of countries by government debt (as a percentage of GDP).

[N]ow the UK government is... paying 80% of salaries of millions of workers, although this is supposed to wind down over time. ...[T]he German government ...so famous for fiscal conservatism, basically abolished this law that put the ceiling on public debt because... the German government realized that they... cannot manage this... in compliance with that law... Many governments are... subsidizing, and lending at subsidized interest rates... [to] many many companies. Some governments are talking about issuing government bond[s] with the negative interest rate... Every conventional wisdom in the neoliberal playbook has been... destroyed.

— Ha-Joon Chang

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "[N]ow the UK government is... paying 80% of salaries of millions of workers, although this is supposed to wind down over time. ...[T]he German government ...so famous for fiscal conservatism, basically abolished this law that put the ceiling on public debt because... the German government realized that they... cannot manage this... in compliance with that law... Many governments are... subsidizing, and lending at subsidized interest rates... [to] many many companies. Some governments are talking about issuing government bond[s] with the negative interest rate... Every conventional wisdom in the neoliberal playbook has been... destroyed." in the context of "Also see List of countries by government debt (as a percentage of GDP)." to mean that wisdom is timeless.

Quote Image
Source: Wikiquote: "Ha-Joon Chang" (Quotes, How to build a new society after the Covid 19 crisis (June 24, 2020): | SOAS University of London. A Creative Commons License video source posted (July 17, 2020) for the earlier virtual webinar.Also see: COVID-19 pandemic by country and territory) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Ha-Joon Chang

About Ha-Joon Chang

Ha-Joon Chang (Hangul: 장하준; hanja: 張夏准; born 7 October 1963) is a South Korean institutional economist specialising in development economics. Currently a reader in the Political Economy of Development at the University of Cambridge, Chang is the author of several widely discussed policy books, most notably Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective (2002). In 2013 Prospect magazine ranked Chang as one of the top 20 World Thinkers.