A crisis is always an opportunity and whatever happens, someone benefits from it. John Maynard Keynes pointed out long ago that rapid inflation always puts the financial boot on different feet: creditors lose and debtors gain. This in turn can have profound social and cultural consequences. Conduct that was once deemed prudent becomes imprudent, and vice versa. Whole virtues can disappear because of inflation. When the COVID-19 crisis struck, governments that were already highly indebted found themselves constrained to expand their debt as rapidly as during a world war. To be fair to them (and it does not come naturally to anyone to be fair to governments) it is difficult to see what else they could have done. They could hardly have left businesses go bankrupt en masse, or millions unemployed without an income. Needless to say, government largesse was not invariably well-directed: it was often more like a blunderbuss …