Cuban calls coronavirus an ‘experiment’ of ‘how much in debt can we go’

Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks, said on Friday that the coronavirus pandemic presents a "great experiment” for the federal government to see “how much in debt” the country can go in order to solve its economic problems.

The billionaire "Shark Tank" investor predicted that he and other taxpayers “may find ourselves paying for a lot of people’s payrolls for a long time to come and then we’ll deal with the consequences” later.

Congress and President Trump have already passed and signed into law, respectively, three stimulus spending packages related to the virus, including the last one at roughly $2.2 trillion – with another already in the making. 

“Is that the right way?” Cuban said during an Axios live event. “I don’t know but that’s one of those things we’ll find out.”

Cuban said that “everyone” in the business community is “terrified” about an economic catastrophe due to coronavirus.

“Everybody is terrified. There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Everybody is completely afraid and I think the great experiment is going to be in fiscal policy. The government, I think, did the right thing with the paycheck protection plan, $500 billion for medium to larger size companies the don’t quality for the 500 and under employee program. I think that was smart but $2 trillion is not going to be enough,” Cuban said.

“The great experiment is how much in debt can we go? And when the options are putting people’s lives at risk or testing new monetary theory to see just how far — is it $6 trillion, is it $12 trillion, is it $20 trillion that we can go in debt? I think we’re going to find out that we’re going to test the monetary theory to see just how much money we can print and how much we can go in debt in order to solve this problem — that’s complete uncertainty,” he added.

The current national public debt is $17.5 trillion and the total debt, including intra-governmental holdings, is $23.5 trillion.

Cuban continued, “But you know what? The reality is, as leaders, as business people, when you deal with imperfect information, you make imperfect decisions but you can’t try to make the ultimate perfect decision.”