Financial crisis and the pandemic: is it time for international money?

The pandemic and its economic repercussions promise to be with us for some time. Canada should support a new issuance of SDRs as the case in favour of using them to assist the poorest countries strengthens over the next year.

In March, Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the IMF, pictured, floated the idea of an SDR issuance of $500-billion to the G20 countries. Former U.K. prime minister Gordon Brown and former U.S. treasury secretary Lawrence Summers have called for $1-trillion or more in new SDRs. Other high-profile individuals, including financier George Soros and rock star Bono, have become SDR advocates. Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney has also spoken about the need for a new international currency.Photograph courtesy of Commons Wikimedia

Opinion

BY Roy Culpeper, Laura Macdonald, and Sam Van Oort

May 15, 2020

OTTAWA—The devastating global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a number of unprecedented emergency measures launched to fight the disease, to combat the deepening recession, and to lay the groundwork for economic recovery. The challenge for the world’s p...

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