'Time Suspended' A Self-Organizing Solution to Ensure the Economic Recovery

Abstract

The crisis has affected different kinds of economic agents unequally: production engine businesses (those that deliver goods and services) have been affected much more than passive holders of financial or real capital assets. Economic time has essentially been “stopped” – with many businesses unable to collect revenues but still saddled with large time-based expenses that stress their liquidity jeopardizing their survival. We suggest declaring Time as Suspended and setting all interest rates on all financial assets and on all unproductive business real assets to 0% while the crisis perdures and concomitantly setting a grace period for any installment, while accordingly extending all contracts by the same amount of time – throughout the entire economy chains. In this paper we analyze the costs and benefits on various economy agents and the government and argue that everyone will be better off if an avalanche of closures, bankruptcies and legal expenses can be prevented.