Macroeconomics in the time of the coronavirus pandemic: alternative stances on government debt

This paper makes a reassessment of macroeconomic paradigms in the light of the Pandemic crisis, which has generated a great debate among economists on a number of issues. In particular, it focuses on how the key one of government debt is interpreted by three alternative macroeconomic approaches: namely, standard neoclassical macro, mainstream new Keynesians and economists closer to Keynes. In order to compare such approaches in a simple way, the chapter relies upon the ‘Ulysses’ journey home’ metaphor, which has been used recently to interpret Keynes’s General Theory.