Repayability of government debt has already passed it's point of no return.
This is plainly not true. firstly, countries have handled 150% GDP debt before, and can do again. Japan is already upwards of 200% right now. Secondly, with a balanced budget, 2% GDP growth and 2% inflation will decrease national debt about 4% a year. That would mean most countries could be well out of danger in ten years (even with a recession) and looking pretty healthy in twenty. I also would not underestimate the ability of countries to simply print money to pay off national debt (although really that ends up just a form of inflation). Of course, I'm not sure countries can even manage that, which is why I think they'll need to tax.
The decision to suppress the interest rates into negative numbers is a political decision because it allows governments to earn money from these astronomical loans and government bonds turns these into a collective debt. At what cause? Most of these loans are for corporations who threaten governments with mass lay-offs. But what happens when the well dries up? Those people will get fired anyway and all of that money will be gone. It is completely pointless and only digs a country further into a hole. What happens when a country's liquidity depends on the degree of trust the capital markets have in them? It's simple, they have pretty much gotten dominion.
Official government interest rates are not negative. Through various jiggery-pokery, however, we are however at the point where investors are pretty much paying the government to borrow.
Many economies are largely a closed system; as every seller must have a buyer and every lender a borrower, the key to reducing government debt is really for other parts of the economy to spend: so, businesses and households. Obviously, mid-covid, this isn't happening. But prop the companies up during the squeeze, they'll spend again on the other side. One might note that substantial sections of the population (like me) have stored up lots of money because there's so little to spend it on. A chunk of it pays down my debts, and when the clouds clear I'll spend a chunk of it. So also it theoretically should be with companies.
In terms of high net worth individuals, I think they need to be squeezed so the trillions and trillions of assets that they've parked around the globe are redistributed into something more useful than Tesla's obscene overvaluation. Although honestly, I think the tech firms are currently a bubble, and that'll burst soon enough anyway. It partly reflects the fact there's so little else to do with the money, given so much economic activity has paused or shrunk.
There is no point pulling on a dead horse or delaying the inevatible. People who lost their job or small company could have gotten a form of basic income for a year or whatever time and it could have been accomplished for chump change. I guarantee you all those billions that governments loaned are wasted. What point is it to make people lose on their savings when there is already so much money in circulation that even large investors say that it is more than enough? That banks have to stash money at the central banks at huge costs? The central banks are completely out of touch. They are wasting all that money in an economy that no longer exists. I'm not surprised bitcoins are so expensive because the monetary policy is complete whack.
All that the suppression of interest rates have done is make housing costs ridiculously expensive and unaffordable for most. The excess money has to find a destination and a lot of that is in inflated property prices. How can people lose their jobs yet living costs and housing costs continue to increase exponentially? How can the economy tank yet speculation at the stock exchange is at an all time high? It is simple, the economy is mostly independent from the workforce or people's spending habits. The sad thing is that those who suffer the most from the coronavirus; small business, the unemployed and people searching for housing actually benefit the least from all those government loans.
I partially disagree. Take hotels.
Covid kills tourism, and let's imagine the hotels are left to die. Then, when covid ends, people want to go on holiday: and there are no hotels. So tourism is still dead until new hotels are set up: but this takes time. Paperwork, buying equipment, hiring staff, training, etc. Things recover much faster if the hotels are not left to go bust in the first place with everything in place to pick up and carry on. The same applies to pretty much any industry. There is clearly a logic to propping firms up as well as welfare.
But I agree that the current cheap credit model is a bust, and a tactic dying even as it's still staggering along. It is undoubtedly true that cheap interest rates encourage some less constructive use of cheap credit: property is one, but also pouring money into stock acquisitions. One might note that after the big crash in 2007, some of the banks which had managed to escape the carnage took loads of the government's money to buy back their own shares or go on an acquisition spree of other institutions instead of pumping it into the economy. I think we have to say they cannot be trusted to do what is in the interest of the wider economy, so they should not be the main vehicles of a recovery plan. But in large part this is really about wealth gap: money flooding into the hands of people who don't really need it more than it goes to the people who do. So tax it back off them. Redistribute. Metaphorically raid their many trillions in offshore bank accounts and send it back somewhere more societally useful.
www.smh.com.au
And now they’re going to sending more police out... which I could imagine isn’t going to inflame 
www.reuters.com
