By Marc Jones
LONDON (Reuters) – More global coordination is necessary to fight the twin threat of the coronavirus crisis and climate change, a top official from central bank umbrella group, the Bank for International Settlements, said on Thursday.
Emergency measures such as dollar currency swap lines and cheap funding have “shown a promising degree of fiscal and monetary policy coordination at both local and global levels” BIS Deputy General Manager Luiz Pereira da Silva said, but more combined action will be needed.
“An even more encompassing approach is necessary,” da Silva said, and that “at a minimum, protectionist approaches need to be avoided.”
He also talked about the idea of a global safety insurance framework for pandemic risk.
“Having such resources as a global public good (or at least regional) could perhaps allow a rapid deployment of a massive public health response in the early phases of a disease to mitigate the risk of pandemics.”
It could also encourage countries to immediately disclose any severe epidemic outbreak and though such a set up would not be easy or cheap to build and maintain, the costs “would pale into insignificance beside that of the current global sudden stop.”
“Covid-19 is so overwhelming that it might just have produced this tipping-point where societies begin to fully internalise and understand the danger of complex global risks,” da Silva said.
(This story corrects throughout to show that BIS comments were in a speech by Deputy General Manager Luiz Pereira da Silva, not in a report)
(Reporting by Marc Jones; Editing by Saikat Chatterjee)
