The meteorite: Health crisis and contingency policies

Abstract

"We were hit by a meteorite," said Brazilian Economy Minister Paulo Guedes in May of this year, when the consequences of the pandemic could no longer be ignored or reduced to those of a "simple flu". It is not new to use a natural disaster as an image to describe economic disruption. On the contrary, this image reappears in every crisis of capitalism, as if only through a metaphorical deviation, a projected exteriority, it were possible to describe the unforeseen character of this event without shaking confidence in the rationality of the economic models that generated it.