Ask HN: Are we looking at a recession ahead? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are we looking at a recession ahead?

81 pointslewisjoe86 comments

Economics enthusiasts of HN: The Covid-19 crisis - when it settles down, what kind of economic impact can we expect? Especially in the tech sector?

1) In what scale can we expect the economic slowdown to be?

2) Will this be as bad as the 2008 recession?

3) What kind of economic climate can we expect for the next one year?

4) What will governemnts across the world do to overcome the crisis?

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It seems likely that it’ll be a V-shaped recession, sharp drop followed by sharp recovery, unless there’s a complete mess made of economic policy like when the Fed turned a normal economic contraction into the Great Depression. Lots of people getting temporarily sick and permanently dead doesn’t destroy much physical capital and the casualties are disproportionately borne by those least engaged in the workforce.

> The 1957 Asian Flu Pandemic killed around 70 to 100 thousand people in the United States (the 57 flu was not as infectious or deadly as COVID-19). In the last quarter of 1957 the growth rate (on an annualized basis) was -4% and in the first quarter of 1958, -10%, the largest such decline in post WWII history, bigger even than in the financial crisis. By the third and fourth quarters of 1958, however, the growth rate had surged back up to nearly 10% and for the year as a whole GDP declined by less than 1%–a bad recession, 3rd worst by depth in post WWII history, but not unprecedented.

https://marginalrevolution.com/?s=1957+flu

There is a lot more going on here than people getting termporarily sick and permanently dead. The economy is being transformed, in a not good way, in front of our eyes, and its only going to get worse over the next few months. 6.6 million new unemployment claims last week? How many restaurants & small business are going to be able to continue to pay their rent for the next 3+ months with next to no business? How many people are going to have their homes forclosed on them because they dont have a job and dont qualify for unemployment? The economic impact of what's happening right now is staggering, in a way that is not just going to fix itself once people stop being sick.

Agreed - it seems that if this goes on for more than a few weeks then we'll start to see "cascading failures", first in the form of higher default rates, then the banks creaking under the strain of broken assumptions.

>V-shaped recession

Some experts think otherwise:

"When the global economy recovery arrives, it may look more like a “swoosh” than a V, according to Davy, Ireland’s largest securities firm.

“It’s like a Nike-shaped swoosh,” Aidan Donnelly, head of equities at Davy’s private clients unit, said in an interview. The firm has assets worth over 14 billion euros ($15.4 billion) under management."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-31/get-ready...

In case anyone else didn't know what "swoosh-shaped" is supposed to mean: it seems to indicate a sharp drop, followed by a long, but steady, recovery.

"The virus won’t last forever, the global economy will recover,” said Donough Kilmurray, Chief Investment Officer at the Dublin-based firm’s wealth management business. “A V-shaped recovery feels too optimistic, but an L-shaped view is probably too pessimistic.”

Elevator down, Escalator up

Recoveries from slumps (business cycle down-turns) have been getting gradually slower over the decades for reasons not entirely understood. The cascading effect of job loss and purchase reductions causing each other to grow worse seems harder to undo these days.

We were overdue for a slump even without the virus such that we probably should assume it will progress (or not progress) like a typical modern slump, with its slow recovery.

Ideally we'd pay down the debt during the up times so that we can have big stimuluses during slumps. There's a lot of old infrastructure to be repaired in the US anyhow. Unfortunately Wash. DC lacks such discipline: they failed to save up for a rainy day, and it's pouring now.

Don't trust this source... the article sounds like a cheap plug for Nike particularly near the end where it oddly starts talking about how Nike is a great buy.

There is nothing in that article or that individuals opinions supporting such a claim with any form of evidence whatsoever. This is the sort of loose claim you can recall later on and regardless of what sort of recovery we see, still be able to tell everyone that you were right.

Your premise ignores weakness in the economy before the pandemic, like an over-reliance on low interest rates and tax cuts when things were already hot. The biggest factor will be the health and recovery of China's economy, which hasn't had a recession since 1990. And like this pandemic, if China's economy catches the flu, we might all get sick.

People with significant job experience might be okay overall, but if this is anything like 2008-2011 we're going to see a lot of people piling up at the career on-ramp. They call it the '08 global financial crisis, but unemployment did not peak until 2010 and for that entire period you had excess young jobseekers competing against laid off workers with more experience for the same positions. Unemployment was concentrated in the very young and very old, so the reported unemployment rate doesn't really tell the whole story. I recall most "entry level" openings wanting 3+ years experience.

Many people gave up, moved back home with Mom and Dad, and went off into very unexpected and disappointing career directions. Many hit the career snooze button by going to graduate school. I myself, a freshly minted MIT grad whose summer 2010 internship fell through at the last minute, found myself applying and being rejected from such emergency jobs as barista, pizza delivery person, target cashier, aquarium ticket salesperson, and SAT tutor. There was a period in the fall of 2010 where I became semi-homeless (sleeping in common areas at MIT and Harvard) and was stealing the bulk of my food from Harvard dining halls. I ended up going to graduate school and was extremely grateful to have a $25k/yr graduate stipend as income.

This looks to be worse. I am very very worried for today's college-age population, as well as any career changers who have invested in that but not completed the transition. My wife just went through a year of self-studied bootcamp type work and now I'm not sure when, if ever, she'll be able to get a job.

Mentally, I have priced this in as approximately the same as The Great Depression. Vastly different causes and very different ways to get out of it, and different long-term repercussions, but either way it'll be bad and much worse than 2008. One way I've started thinking about is to mentally push back everything I thought about the future by about 3-5 years. I wanted to install a solar roof on my house in 3-5 years, so now that's like 5-8 years. I was considering a CyberTruck, but now I'm just gonna keep driving my car, etc etc.

We're gonna have massive unemployment that'll dwarf 2008. Some industries will come back relatively quickly (dine-in, coffee, etc), but others will take years (travel, hospitality). Government support will leave everything with massive debt, which doesn't seem like a problem now (money is on sale!), but the scale of it will eventually cause austerity. I think this will leave many people in a more prepper / saver / hoarder mindset, which will further slow down the recovery.

We'll hopefully start to see a recovery towards the end of next year and mostly recover within two years of that.

I'm sorry for your cyber truck loss

Yes, just like the great depression.

> I think this will leave many people in a more prepper / saver / hoarder mindset,

I think this is exactly right. It’s what happened to the generation that lived through the Great Depression (heard many stories from my Grandmother who lived through it).

Disclaimer: Thoroughly unqualified to answer this question

That said, no one knows what's going to happen so allow me to toss in my speculations

Bearish:

1), 2) It'll be worse than 2008 because a lot of people cannot work, and we run a consumption-based economy. People spend less during economic uncertainty (falling rates is an attempt to minimize this effect).

3) Cascading effects could be very bad (think 2+ months out). Everything was green and good and many businesses took on cheap debt to finance operations. When people aren't buying your products/services businesses will resort to layoff to minimize costs and when that doesn't magically go away because we're still quarantined and spending less, they'll have to slowly liquidate assets or default on their loans.

We've already seen a few corporate bonds downgraded and there will be more to come. Retail, Food, and Hospitality are going to have a very bad time lenders overexposed to those sectors will likely need a bailout and some consolidation.

4) Governments will keep printing money and will pass bills to provide hobbled safety nets for people all over the world. Many people will fight systems that attempt to provide financial safety nets the reduce the incentive to work so we'll end up with some crappy versions and a lot of QE. Federal reserves will buy some more corporate bonds because banks will be reluctant to touch them for a while. Long term effect of that is anyone's guess but expect some currency wonkiness

5) 2nd wave of this virus hits us shortly after we declare "everything is fine" and people freak out again

Bullish: We get very lucky and 1) Find a cure soon, and/or 2) It dies out after some herd immunity similar to SARS

Sars did not infect nearly enough people to die due to herd immunity. It was eradicated/contained through various public health interventions and possibly because it was so much more deadly than Sars Cov 2.

People were also contageous only when they started showing symptoms, but COV-2 is contageous in the pre-symptomatic phase.

Thanks for the insights!

Despite all the rhetoric, no country manufactures like the USA, and the USA was said to have been in 'manufacturing recessing' well before The Current Mess started. Now the price of oil has tanked (ha ha), real estate markets are beginning to groan as open houses are empty and purchase-money mortgages are down 24% from year-ago quarter, and of course an enormous percentage of Americans are unemployed, lacking both work and healthcare. Yes, yes there already is a sudden and deep recession, the scale of which seems likely to exceed 2008 in both speed of onset and depth of bottom.

I don't see government responses as being much different from 2008, ie bail out the large institutions and markets and leave average people in debt, and solutions like that tend to make for very gradual recoveries, barring a sudden attack of common sense, the window for which is already closing. I would therefore submit that we may expect the economic climate to take a year or more before government officials are able to lie believably about seeing promise on the horizon.

Everybody knows, recession is coming if not here already. Doubling the money supply will only exacerbate the problem long term, leading to greater unemployment when the dollar needs to be reigned in again like in the 1970's to avoid runaway inflation.

The FED's balance sheet now hold almost every asset imaginabe, interest rates are 0% and they are out of tools.

1. Globally? China's growth rate was faked for at least a decade, so if that comes out that the 6.8% rate was fake, that instantly drags the World's second largest economy down. [1]

2. It is already BY FAR worse than the 2008 recession in every way. This is a health, economic and societal issue.

3. Inflation is ugly and usually avoided at all costs. The world is diving head first into the shallow end of the pool by printing unlimited money. Over the next year prices will sky rocket and many will starve. E.g. Egg prices are at record levels [2].

4. Stop printing money to help the short term. Build hospitals, NOW and Return to a sane monetary policy (will never happen).

[1] https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/new-study-shin...

[2] https://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/pybshellegg.pdf

There's a lot of misinformation going around on the internet, and one of the ones I keep seeing over and over is the idea that the Fed is buying stocks (which it is not).

The Fed's balance sheet only holds US treasuries, and a small amount of high quality corporate bonds. They are considering purchasing municipal bonds (i.e., local government debt) but I don't think that's happened yet.

The Fed primarily provides liquidity, and it does that by purchasing bonds (aka debt) that nobody else wants to buy, but it's primarily US treasuries (i.e., US government debt).

Yes this will lead to inflation (if you look at real numbers, not the shady official CPI numbers), but the USD is also the world's reserve currency, so the US will probably come out mostly unscathed as other countries look to horde USD.

Im not an economist, but doesn’t the value destruction even this out?

If your houses and stocks are worth half what they were, isn’t the money printing offset?

If nobody is spending, doesn’t that offset price rises?

I think when we return to good times, the extra money splashing around is inflationary. But it doesn’t feel like we need to personally be concerned with inflation for the next few years at least?

People in the market aren't expecting inflation:

https://www.clevelandfed.org/our-research/indicators-and-dat...

So I don't know why people on HN so often are.

There are a lot of goldbugs/bitbugs/Austrians here for some reason.

Probably because of a misunderstanding of QE. At first glance it seems obvious that it would cause excess inflation (more money==less value) but that's not generally the case (at least not to the extent that one would assume).

Inexplicably, I'm not entirely reassured.

Official economic dogma is that inflation is caused by pay rises. This has always been self-serving nonsense, but it's particularly unhelpful now because it disguises the real causes of commodity inflation - which is a combination of supply/demand shocks that spike the prices of essential commodities, combined with loss of trust in national currencies, often made worse by foreign debt obligations.

(Asset price inflation is a different thing, and is caused by too much cheap money pumping up the cost of rent-seeking assets - which happened after 2008. If you're on the wrong end of the rent-seeking process it's still price inflation, but it's usually considered a good thing rather than a bad thing in official figures.)

It should be obvious that there's a danger of at least some of the above. Down-to-the-bone commodities like food and medical supplies will become more expensive, and there may be some spill-over into industrial commodities.

Luxury and "entertainment" commodities - which have driven the Chinese economy - are going to take a severe hit, because part of their customer base is going to be wiped out financially.

Rent-seeking assets are probably going to have a bad time too. As is bricks and mortar retail. I'd expect a wave of bankruptcies and default among landlords at all level. Even those who own property free and clear may struggle.

tl;dr: A rebalancing away from luxury/investment/speculation towards basic essentials, which will spike in price, with a lot of collateral damage at all levels.

One of these days the chickens are gonna come home to roost.

There's a difference in time scales.

In the short run, while everything is locked down, there's been a near total destruction of demand and (generally) a fall in prices. Businesses are not making any revenue, they can't afford to pay workers, the workers are being laid off, and nobody can afford to buy anything even if they were allowed to go outside anyway. That's deflationary.

The Fed's monetary policy response has been to pull out all the stops to reverse that. There'll be trillions of dollars injected directly into the economy within the next month.

The problem comes when lockdown ends and people start buying things and going out again. That should be right around when the supply chain impacts of the virus hit (there's usually about 1-2 quarters worth of product buffered in various stages of the supply chain). High demand + low supply + basically free money = lots of inflation.

It's also hard to eliminate inflation from the economy once it starts, because the Fed's primary tool is interest rates and you have to get ahead of the inflation rate. The real interest rate = nominal rates - inflation, so if inflation is running at 20%, then to raise real interest rates to just 10%, you need nominal rates of 30%. Particularly if inflationary expectations are increasing, your policy tools may not be sufficient to temper those expectations.

A recession is technically two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. If we're able to beat this thing by June, we might be able to beat a "technical" recession. Something like -10% GDPg/quarter followed by 1% GDPg/quarter. Not technically a recession!

1) We can expect unemployment in the teen %s. Some economists think we can get as high as 30%.

2) It will be worse

3) Consensus is a big V-shaped dip, assuming that the virus is contained, managed, tested and tracked.

4) Stimulus bills, debt relief-- things they've all, for the most part, already done.

There is no "technical" definition of a recession. The "two consecutive quarters" thing is just one, among many hotly debated, ways to try to define it. Among other economists, a recession is defined by unemployment rate, while others like the IMF define it more broadly as just an arbitrary period of bad macroeconomics.

The NBER, which is the main US body that previously used the "two consecutive quarters" definition, no longer uses that definition and now says a recession is defined as "a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales."

By that definition, we may already be in a recession.

It will be technically a recession, due to the current timing. March in Q1 and April in Q2, which means both quarters will see negative growth. We might still bounce back relatively soon, but yeah, it will be a recession no matter what.

Not to be a downer, but what would beating this thing by x look like? Perhaps a drug combination that prevents COVID turning into ARDS, so it becomes a confluence of nasty flu symptoms rather than a silent killer?

Otherwise it seems the only way we beat this thing is with a vaccine, and that means a series of consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth... like 4 ~ 8 of them, at best.

Is there consensus on when we might see the bottom of the V?

I'm not qualified to give a long answer, but short answer (as far as I can tell): no

Nobody knows. I would say the main factors seem to be:

The COVID events are so sudden a way that doesn't seem to fit any real good pattern to look for in the past.

Even with that from my understanding since 2008 a lot of fundamental economic beliefs / predictions haven't really played out as folks would expect. Or at least the data available seems to not provide much in the way of ... understanding / predictability based on the past. (this is not my area of expertise)

Politically things seems fairly unpredictable even pre COVID ... toss in some economic / health crises and I don't know how anyone could feel they know anything.

It seems like it is the unknown layered on the unknown here. I'd be highly skeptical of anyone making anything other than a very general prediction.

> Nobody knows.

10 mill unemployed in the US in two weeks is a pretty good signal if you ask me ;D. That is something like 6% of the total work force.

But how quickly will those "unemployed" be back in the work force again once this all lifts? We're used to the unemployment rate signaling a lot about how many "jobs" there are at all, in a steady-state "normal" economy. But with this shock, that's no longer what it means. We've never seen anything like this with a modern economy. What does it mean?

The only real answer is, nobody knows. By the time anyone could collect enough data to even have a real guess, we'll already be running the natural experiment directly to see how many people get back to work.

One thing I will predict with confidence though is that the result will not be exactly the same as if the "normal economy" had produced a 30% unemployment number. Straight-line projections of that nature are useless.

I think this is yet another place where there's a fundamental lack of leadership. The Federal government should be looking for ways to allow businesses to suspend operations and make whole landlords and banks where possible. No business should be shut down permanently because of this but unfortunately, we have a massive lack of vision at the Federal level at this point.

> But how quickly will those "unemployed" be back in the work force again once this all lifts?

Businesses are closing permanently in Seattle. It may take some time for these jobs to rematerialize.

Usually, when a small business closes, it's often a sign that the niche it was trying to fill didn't exist, or that the business person is not skilled enough to make it work. A lot of these businesses permanently closing probably represent niches that may re-open relatively quickly, and had people skilled enough to keep it going. Restaurants may not bounce back 100%, but it's not like the market for restaurants is going to be indefinitely 10% of what it was in 2019.

We just don't know. We've never seen anything like this in the modern era.

I do suspect that we're going to see one of those generational shifts like the Great Depression, and a lot more businesses are going to start thinking in terms of "runway", and trying to keep around a few months of "runway" in the future.

Brick and mortar retail was already hard pressed by Amazon and co., this virus has shut most of them down while Amazon is still going. Yes, the internet companies will do fine, but everyone else...is in huge trouble. This virus speeds up a transition well underway, and we might not be ready for the shock of that speed.

Or extremely razor thin margins.

Even when they return, they’ll be under more debt, and their disposable income will be lower.

Banks might benefit from that, but they’re simultaneously getting hammered by low interest stimulus loans.

In addition, how long will there be a trickle effect of people too afraid of a Covid comeback to return to the workforce.

I mean beyond the general idea that "things are not looking good".

Yes

1) The immediate impact is the retail and entertainment sectors, which employ a large amount of the population. The loss of incomes and consumer confidence from those people will cascade. They'll buy less cars and appliances. Car companies will in turn buy less [everything else]; anecdotally one of the world's largest automakers has called a worldwide stop to new purchases - of anything. This cascade will affect a majority of the economy. What made the 2001 tech crash bad was that all the startups that had other startups as their customers saw their revenues evaporate. Think about the 1000 variants of MarTech tools today.

2) More 1930s than 2008 unless governments act in a hyper competent manner. Ray Dalio has been writing about how the next recession will not be solvable through QE: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raydalio/detail/recent-activity/...

3) No one knows

4) Currently: print money and worry about the consequences later. It's novel to see them "helicopter drop" cash directly to consumers. It's much more fair than just buying financial assets, which enriches investors first. (They're still doing lots of that, just not exclusively)

I'm not sure that the retail sector will be hit as hard as some expect. We have had home delivery of good taking off in the last decade and it's allowed a lot of commerce that otherwise wouldn't occur to continue for the most part.

For example, I can't go to my mechanic to swap off my winter wheels and tires so I bought so new equipment to do it myself

Anecdotally a sensor manufacturer we supply is making sure its supply chain is still alive after all this, so I'm wondering about your anecdote... Maybe everything they source is OTS so they don't need to worry about the availability of their products?

I think the best way to prevent a great depression 2.0 is to build massive infrastructure projects. Green jobs, trains, highway updates, bridge repairs, electrification, grid modernization, IMO these are best to both kill unemployment and decarbonize for an efficient 21st century economy.

Not a terrible idea, but these all take years to design. We tried the "shovel ready" approach in 2008. What they found was that there were few projects fully designed and ready to go. Producing construction ready engineering documents is one of the last steps in the design process.

Trains, maybe. Bridge repairs, maybe. Highway updates, probably.

But the others, in the current (and last 20-40 year) political climate are a no go, I bet. Some will die because "green" is anathema to half the population. Others will die because they are not proper earmark-able vanity projects that you can stamp a rich person's name on (grid modernization, I'm looking at you).

Overall, and maybe I'm pessimistic, I would bet absolutely none of the things on your list will happen. I used to say that they wouldn't happen until something catastrophic occurred, but now that we're here, I don't buy that anymore.

They'll be called socialism, or a waste of time, or outright called lies from the left/right/wherever. But I am not, and may not be able to be convinced that the US can accomplish anything positive and productive, at all, for the foreseeable future.

And a pony!

Borrowing money at cheap interest rates to build things that keep us competitive for the next century isn't a horrible idea but glad that you're completely dismissing it.

But we can't even get people to do that when they have toilet paper.

Seems likely it will be far worse and more widespread than 2008, but perhaps will come back faster. Why faster? Because govt may have a policy to fund reconstruction. There are many policies that could make this better but to get into them invites flame wars. Certainly the US is much more poorly positioned for sustainable recovery so its relative importance to the world economy will decline (will probably remain the largest economy). China's relative strength may increase but it also has serious structural weaknesses so I don't think it will be by that much if any.

When you think of the tech sector, remember that big companies tend to weather downturns like this better than medium sized companies. Big companies they may lay off people, have reduced earnings, but they can survive. There's hysteresis in the system: perhaps fewer aircraft are bought, but engines are still needed for the ones in the pipeline. Only if that pipeline dries up and related lines of business can't carry it will such a company fail. Sure there are exceptions (Lehman, Enron, etc) but this isn't a bad rule of thumb. One relative advantage the US will have is that the average age of its population will drop over the next 3-8 years, which is a major driver of economic growth.

Very small companies can survive these events both due to some support from the the new bailout bill and because if you have one or two key customers (or a toehold in a viable sector, say games) it can be enough. tighten the belt a bit, focus on profitability, and you can survive and be positioned for growth when the time comes. A mouse needs much less to survive than a hippo.

Medium sized companies are the most at risk as they need that revenue and typically have a smaller margin for error.

As for the tech implications, it's hard to say. Today VCs are really happy with certain consumer companies (delivery, games, video) in their portfolio and feeling pain for their enterprise-focused portfolio companies. That can change as the market dynamic shifts: if we do see growth and you have an enterprise product that can drive top line growth you'll be in a pretty good position; once people are no longer locked up they'll be eager to spend their money on things they couldn't while locked up.

Looking for "where the puck will be": since there will be a log of "reboots" (people looking for new jobs, many empty storefronts and closed businesses): look for structural and secular shifts in how both the macroeconomy and macroeconomy shifts: the same businesses won't be back in all those empty storefronts. Many will remain empty for a long time, but not all. The things to look for are: when someone new starts a new business what will they need? Can you help them out? At the macro scale this has modulated (not completely changed) the attitude to remote work (for jobs where that is possible): what can you provide to take advantage of that? There will be a flood of office space on the market; will companies consider going away from "open plan" bullpens? They were common until the 60s and then came roaring back in the 00s. So times can change.

etc

The only key to understand the situation is the famous quote from Warren Buffett: "Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked."

2008: A "few broke homeowners" in the USA brought down over leveraged Wall Street. The financial system "contaminated" almost the whole planet.

2020: A few weeks ago, a lot of investors had to face margin calls. Petrol is worth nothing. Now the whole European and US economy are down. Almost everybody is over leveraged (private investor in reale estate, stocks, pension funds, etc). All the companies are loaded with "free" debts. With falling stock and maybe real estate values and the increase risk on company debts, when will the banks knock on the doors and start the margin calls on "smaller fishes"? If too many are naked, it may also "contaminate" the financial system...

People with a lot of cash (who have been punished for 2 decades) will finally have lots of opportunities (and a financial security pillow to survive).

Things are going to be bad until people can go back to work, that much is certain. Whether there is a speedy bounce back after things are back to normal, or if we experience economic stagnation, is anyones guess. The metric to watch is m2, the federal reserve's measure of the velocity of money. Basically, a healthy economy in our system is one where money changes hands quickly. Saving money is bad for the economy, which is why the federal reserve has the mandate of maintaining steady positive inflation. Unfortunately, this availability of this measure is lagged a month or two. It could be that when people go back to work, they go on a spending spree after being cooped up for months, or it could be that pandemic scares people into being more fiscally conservative.

M2 is a measure of money supply. To get velocity you also need nominal GDP. M2 says nothing about velocity without taking into account the inevitable GDP changes. If you're looking for a googlable metric to look for, M2V is the Fed's calculated velocity of M2.

1) Very hard to say. As others have commented, we have not seen anything of this nature before, where governments have essentially made it illegal for perhaps ~40% of the workforce to work with no end in sight. 2) One thing that keeps occurring to me over the last few weeks are the parallels to war. It seems like people are always obsessed with "fighting the last war" and when usually the current war is really nothing like the last war. The truth is, the current situation is not really comparable to 2008 due to its causes and in my mind the severity and length of recovery will highly depend on how long it continues.

At least in the US, governments seem to be stringing the country along with "just a little longer" promises, but as the virus continues to explode despite unprecedented restrictions it seems increasingly unlikely that we're going to see a return to normal any time in 2020. Businesses and individuals who could have easily survived a month of shutdown are going to be unable to survive for 6-9 months of shutdown and things are going to start getting very chaotic.

3) Weird. Some sectors of the economy are going redline as demand surges, but others are going to flatline.

4) They'll print money and pray that we can pull out of the dive. This is going to be much easier for some countries (US) than others (Euro zone). It will be very interesting to see how quickly politicians are willing to acknowledge that they're not facing a short-term issue, but rather a long term issue with a ton of uncertainty.

These are all good questions. However distant it will be, and no matter the suffering the world will face, the Corona epidemic will pass at some point that those that survive will experience. I wonder what kind if celebrations we will see. Like when WW2 ended? Will it be a distinct event, or gradual? Will other side effects have become so grave so the actual epidemic has moved to the background? I hate this situation but it will surely be something to remember...

I was wondering if there might be a baby boom. There are a lot of couples, inside the house together for a long time, wanting productive ways to pass the time... ;)

Lotta people are saying that, but the post-WW2 baby boom was in the days before birth control. Plenty of productive ways to pass the time without actually producing anything now.

Most families of childbearing age are pretty terrified about bringing a child into this world in this particular time, anyway. One of my wife's friends just gave birth a couple days ago and reported that there were COVID patients on either side of her delivery room. My wife's first comment was "I'm really glad that I'm not pregnant right now."

Sadly having the opposite effect on my relationship

This matches with the divorce rate shooting up in China after some married couples couldn't stand spending so much time together, see https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-31/divorces-... .

You’re eating babies together?!

jk, hope you figure things out.

What a disgusting joke! And yet, I chuckled ...

When Sars ended Toronto had a concert, they called it "sarsstock". Maybe we can call this one Coronachella?

Definitely better than calling it Coronabury or Coronapalooza.

There probably won't be much of a celebration. This is nowhere near as catastrophic as WWII (it doesn't even alter how most people live their lives, unlike WWII, let alone death counts). Life will probably go on as normal.

A recession is already guaranteed as it by definition is 2 consecutive quarters of contractionary gdp. Q1 and Q2 will both see negative growth. The real question here is when it will bottom and how quick the bounce back will be. So far the means of production have not been affected in manner that will permanently reduce their productivity. However the longer this healthcare crisis goes on the more likely that is to change. Right now it looks very likely that we are able to get people back to work fairly soon, especially now that testing capacity is ramping up so that resources are more efficiently allocated to mitigate the spread and mortality rate of this disease. Note this does not require a cure, but rather a rate of infection that does not overwhelm our healthcare systems, which is near term very solvable.

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-03-16/us-economi...

> Forget predictions that the U.S. economy will enter a recession this year due to the coronavirus pandemic — the UCLA Anderson Forecast says it has happened already.

> On Monday, the school revised a forecast it issued just last week that stopped short of predicting a recession. The revised version says the economy has already stopped growing and will remain in recession through the end of September.

Chamath Palihapitiya spent an hour answering all your questions. Worth a listen!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/chamath-palihapitiya-i...

Beyond what is obvious (airlines, restaurants, hotels, retail etc are not contributing to the economy at the moment) I don’t think there will be a broader recession.

The bailout packages may lead to higher interest rates due to government borrowing but inflation is probably in check due to low demand.

It is not clear and this depends on the government's response and financial procedures

https://www.megdexchange.com/jump/next.php?r=3079247

1) In what scale can we expect the economic slowdown to be?

In the 2 digits. A working day weights between around .2% and .5% of annual GDP.

2) Will this be as bad as the 2008 recession?

No. Entirely different. Both supply and demand contraction are implied by the rational choice of social distancing.

In principle, there is no reason, other than mental habit, to think that a GDP loss would be a bad thing in itself.

The overall effect could be much worse depending on the death and sickness toll.

3) What kind of economic climate can we expect for the next one year?

Economic climate would improve with:

- a quick inexpensive testing solution, which would hopefully allow immune workers to resume activity - an effective therapy, which would allow working age population to resume social interaction and working - a vaccine (probably not a relevant condition for the coming year)

So the answer depends on any of these happening during the coming year.

4) What will governemnts across the world do to overcome the crisis?

Very difficult to predict, not even knowing who will be the President of the US.

Writing from a European perspective, I hope the current talks of a common unemployment insurance would spark a common fiscal policy in the aftermath, but I would not bet much on it.

The proposal that I find the most convincing for a here and now policy to pave the way to recovery is ‘helicopter money’ as articulated, for instance, by Jordi Galì:

https://voxeu.org/article/helicopter-money-time-now

You're looking at a recession right now. Everything else is pure speculation. Buckle up, you're going for a ride.

It will be much worse than ‘08. It already is; it just hasn’t hit tech yet. (I’d guess that will take about a year — that’s how long it took for the dot com crash to spread to the rest of the economy.)

The question is whether it will be worse than the Great Depression, when there were two follow on crashes of similar magnitude. The stimulus is trying to prevent the last crash from growing into a second crash.

The main thing governments can do to overcome the economic crisis is to admit defeat and get it over with. Delaying gives time to build hospital space and improve treatment regimes, but, at best, that halves the death toll. (Unless we find a cure for the common cold this year.)

Putting it in perspective, getting COVID-19 roughly doubles your chance of dying this year, regardless of your age (except kids, which are much better off). If 100% of the population catches it tomorrow, it will reduce average life expectancy in the US by about a month (at most). If we rationally allocated the $10T’s the COVID-19 response is costing, we could end global warming and also increase life expectancies by way more than a month. Doing that would be political suicide.

Speaking of which, the lockdown does have one other benefit: it lets politicians time the collapse of the hospital system until after the next election. This seems to be exactly what the US is planning to do (the second peak of deaths is scheduled for late November / December). Also, making big sacrifices gives people an impression of strong leadership.

So far this strategy is working well for the politicians. Trump’s approval ratings are at an all time high, despite the fact that he repeatedly mismanaged the crisis. So are Cuomo’s, even though Newsom’s (California’s) handling of the crisis was much more decisive and successful so far.

It reminds me of the effect where you have an incompetent “firefighter” software developer that causes a string of crises, and then heroically “saves” the company over and over, gets promoted for it, and then promotes more fire fighters.

Guesses:

1) This will be a function of how long the average person has to be out of work.

2) Honestly they seem like different beasts. An economic slowdown like this is more easily understood (imho) than the last one. This graph gives me great pause: https://www.visualcapitalist.com/worlds-money-markets-one-vi...

Look at the size of the derivatives!

3. I think this will be a function of how long we're inside. I don't think it will be good, but I'm an optimist and I think the world economy will roar back into life once we're through it. I'm already craving a few things, like going to a restaurant.

4.Print money and enact measures (some authoritarian). The big players might make some power moves.

The size of the derivatives market is misleading. The figures represent notional amounts that means these amounts are not paid for in cash. A big share of these derivatives are likely to be interest rate swaps where one counterparty receives a fixed interest rate and the other a floating one. The notional value of these contracts can easily go into the billions but the USD value which is settled each day (and effectively transferred between the counterparties) might only be about 100k (a one basis point change on 1 billion).

One thing to note is that even without this virus many economics still thought we would be heading into a recession this year. The underlying causes of that prediction would still exist (if not worsen) after we have hit the peak of this virus.

And the whole world needs to re-open. Our economy would still take a hit in the hypothetical event where our epidemic peaks without a vaccine or treatment (so if ~50% become infected with the live virus) yet China continues to deal with suppression efforts due to their order of magnitude larger population.

1) This is not something to be predicted in absolute fashion, because it is dependent on government action. I think the best guess can be on the immediate trend, which indicates deep depression and inflation graduating to hyperinflation, but it is important to revisit should government actions change. The scale will be record-breaking in the time frame of all civilizations that have ever existed.

2) It will be far worse.

3) Initially, it will be massive job losses, massive spending, and massive regulations. There will be an apparent bump whenever the lockdowns are relaxed. The bump will likely be smaller than expected, but any bump may initiate a strong market response. Since this is an election year, there will be no stop to the handing out of money to nearly every sector of the economy. This will be followed by increases in CPI, which will further accelerate.

4) Institutional investors and then governments around the world will begin to sell their USD reserves as CPI rate of increase goes up. When they see that there is no counter-response to selling of USD reserves, the rate of liquidation will increase, yet further increasing the rate of CPI increase, though this may be a few years out. The onset of hyperinflation in Wiemar Republic Germany was preceded by a few years of high inflation, but the actual hyper-inflationary period was less than one year and set in within a month or two. This isn't to suggest that conditions in the U.S. are identical or even similar to conditions in Germany, but to demonstrate that hyperinflation onset is far more rapid than most realize.

As a side note, many people are not aware of the concept of Cantillon effects (including most of the popular Austrians and monetarists), which economists use to describe how money flows through an economy. In effect, newly created money does not instantly flow throughout the economy, and in many cases may only flow in very narrow sectors. For example, the bulk of money created over the last decade remained in non-consumer sectors and thus minimally impacted CPI. Further, even within something such as CPI, things may fall precipitously in price, such as airline tickets and gasoline, while other things experience dramatic increases, such as eggs and bread.

I observe there to be a handwavey treatment of anyone discussing inflation. I find across popular personalities, social media, and various forum comments that inflation is some relic of the past, but the only evidence provided is the lack of CPI increase in recent years, which cannot be held up as relevant given the current government activity is very different as it includes creation of money likely to flow directly into the consumer sectors while there is a forced reduction in production (i.e., yet more dollars chasing yet fewer products). Also, I'm not that great on the technical explanations, but I know that the way the QE was performed it created a very high demand for dollars, sending the USD very high. But the velocity of M2 was also very high, and that is largely what has been fueling the apparent boom, but I admit I'm a poor source for these more technical aspects.

I hope I am wrong.

Yes.

Recession was here long before the virus. Recession is by definition 2 quarters of negative gdp growth.

https://tradingeconomics.com/saudi-arabia/gdp-growth

Saudi arabia has been in recession all of 2019. Russia has nothing to do with why they arent cutting production.

https://tradingeconomics.com/mexico/gdp-growth

Mexico as well. All of 2019.

https://tradingeconomics.com/japan/gdp-growth

Japan technically hasn't joined the recession game but there's no chance they don't announce recession in May.

https://tradingeconomics.com/france/gdp-growth

France announces recession May 1st. Their martial law and banning of basic human rights will have to end.

Now comes the big question; how much debt is the world governments putting on? Canada's private debt to GDP: https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/private-debt-to-gdp 266% debt is insanity.

https://tradingeconomics.com/canada/households-debt-to-incom...

Debt to income >100% means you cant pay your bills. Canada is above 170%. Canada cant take on any new debt. Bank of Canada has been writing papers on how the debt level is so tremendously high that we could never take an economic slowdown. That's certainly here due to the virus.

So the better question is not that it's a recession. Recession was already happening; it's certainty. The better question is if it's a depression.

US unemployment numbers are out. It's peak great depression numbers; though this is solely due to virus. Mind you also, this great depression number is France's status quo numbers.

There's also an analysis to be done, one of the unique things about depressions vs recessions is social tensions. Right before depressions, there's always an unusual amount of social tensions. Which if you're reading this site or just watching what's going on with world politics. That's certainly unusual. This may be a depression. Which yes, this will be worse than 2008 if that's the case.

The bigger issue with these problems. How much quantitative easing is happening? How much money is being printed to stem the crash. Unprecedented amounts of money is coming to the markets. The fed is buying so many bonds right now that they are artificially keeping the crash from happening. The bond market is about to explode. The fed cant keep this up. They haven't paid back the $4 trillion from the financial crisis.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/monetarypolicy/bst_recenttren...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_debt_of_the_United_St...

Eventually they money tree dies OR you have to print so much money to balance the books that your people become tremendously poorer. Japan is already at 250% debt to gdp. USA is around 100%. China has done this multiple times over the last 10 years. Greece was around 200% when they stopped reporting their debt a couple years ago. Good for them, they are down to around 15% unemployment in Greece. Disaster.

The house of cards aka debt will come calling soon. Everyone exclaims 'china owns all the debt' that's the wrong way to think about it. The debt is owned by Pensioners or more specifically pension funds. Boomers are retiring over the next 10 years. The worker shortage of 2030 just got much less severe because the coronavirus is killing off boomers; but the inflation is coming. That money will be spread around and be spent by the unemployed. This will cause inflation to go along with this recession/depression.

What will the governments do?

There will be 2 things primarily. Bankruptcy and decreasing of managerialism. This is because we are a post-communism and post-capitalism world now. The new world order is the tech revolution. Google's freemium model has unlocked and/or broken the world. Bastions of capitalism/communism will go to war with tech revolution. France will probably lead the fight and lose horribly because of it. USA will start this battle years from now.

Want to know what the future looks like? Google https://rework.withgoogle.com/

You best start believing in recessions.

You're in one.

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