Many people think this way. It is intuitive. It is also mistaken.

It is simply not how this incredibly enormous, incredibly complex system has been set up. What is underappreciated is that in contrast to 2008, which was a financial system crisis- what we have now is implicitly a legal system crisis, on top of obviously a medical system crisis.

Why legal?

1. The flows of money are contractual

Every flow is a contract. Rent, mortgage, other kinds of loans, expenses for utilities, internet, the entire food supply chain, Whatever. All contracts. Nearly all are private contracts- person to person, person to business, business to business.

We are talking- hundreds of billions of individual contracts just in the US. At least.

2. Ending a flow means breaking a contract

Many of those contracts have termination conditions and remedies and so forth. Many of those conditions are bespoke. Various kinds of courts have authority to handle contract termination and enforcement. We are about a billion courts short of the number needed to deal with this at scale. And the court system simply does not scale- there are no procedures, no mechanisms to deal with these kinds of systemic consequences.

3. There is no legal authority to break them at scale

There is simply no legal authority by which those contracts can be terminated. Not Mayors, not Governors, not the President, not the Supreme Court, not Congress- can say- "rent is cancelled" at scale.

This is the absolute essence of the American system. It is a system of laws, not of men, our criminal President to the contrary.

That is why individual localities are passing "no eviction" laws and so forth that prevent certain kinds of remedies, without impacting the payment requirement itself.

4. There are almost no "terminal" transactions.

Even if there was some legal way to nullify those billions of contracts, and there was some way by which the entire legal system did not itself become compromised- so then those flows could be stopped- what then?

The reality is that there are no "terminal" transactions.

Most rent payments become mortgage payments. Most mortgage payments become interest payments to investors, around the world. Even money that "stops" to sit in a bank account is used as regulatory collateral by the bank in which it sits to create more money. If flows stop into those accounts, the bank falls out of regulatory compliance, has to stop doing its business.

Money is like oxygen, like blood. It HAS to circulate for this body public to survive. Stopping the flows means death.

The solution to this problem is what Japan is doing- maintain the legal fictions by which society operates using the financial machinery the Bank of Japan knows how to operate. Its balance sheet- which for all intents and purposes is an entity with infinite capacity- can maintain flows indefinitely until the medical system can master this enemy and then everyone can return to their regular business.

It is a leap for everyone to understand this- to appreciate this aspect of money that runs contrary to everything we have been told and experience on a personal level. It is not your money, or my money. It is not even our money.

For societies of humans, the flow of money is an ecological assumption that we created and have to maintain.

We are in need of the Einstein to write the Special Relativity paper that demonstrates that our Newtonian physics understanding of money, as an asset and so forth, while convenient in our ordinary every day lives, is wrong at societal scale.