If there was no Coronavirus, then maybe.
With Coronavirus it is just as likely that the economy is going to rebound once the worst of the virus passes. People stopped buying stuff but rest assured, they will make up for it when they finally can.
When things recover, a lot of people will be sinking money into late rent payments and credit card bills, not spending.
A lot of people cleared off their credit cards of anything not critical. Will I go back to the gym? Maybe. Will I turn back on Amazon Prime or half the other subscriptions I cancelled? Nope. Will I eat out as much now that I've had a month and a half of eating healthy at home. Probably not.
I cringe when I think about how much money I'm spending on food and how unhealthy I'm eating. But I can't stop, I'm addicted to food delivery wtf.
Apart from the people who were laid off, or spent their savings because they had no income, or lost their businesses because they couldn't pay their debts, or ... well, it's a long list.
People who think the world is just on pause and everything will bounce back to normal in a few months need to look outside of their filter bubbles.
I am also putting off repairing my car until after all this passes. Yes, car repair shops may be at loss now because I decided not to do business with them, but my car is still broken and I will probably have to pay premium to get my favorite mechanic to take a look.
This is "economy" we are talking about. It is an average over a lot of individual cases. It does not care that a lot of companies will die if the ones that survive get more business.
We're a massively long way from that, plus the contrarian ignorance embedded in GOP politics now that are allowing / half demanding their cities open back up for business are going to all but ensure the USA has the biggest death / infection / economic hit of all of the countries in the world.
Will people resist sheltering in place until the end of the year? I for sure won't. (and I'm not in the USA).
However, I think two factors make that unlikely now. One is the inadequate, spotty government intervention. They should have strongly pressured banks and landlords to just extend mortgages and defer or suspend rent. They should have encouraged utilities and other large, stable suppliers to stretch bills. And then they should have paid workers to mostly stay the fuck home.
The other is inadequate, spotty government response to the virus. When you look at SF and Seattle vs NYC, it's pretty obvious that strong, early government intervention can make a huge difference. And when you look at S Korea vs the US, it's even clearer. If we'd had good test-and-trace capacity ready, or if we'd locked down while quickly developing it, we'd be done with things by now. But governmental half-assing of this means that we're looking at a much larger impact than is necessary.
I think the first failure means that both businesses and consumer spending will be slow to recover once the crisis is past. And I think the second failure means it's going to be a much larger crisis. So I'm now expecting a much more significant reaction than I was 6 weeks ago.
If as looks likely they trail on for months, the second order effects will mean that unemployment and misery spread from industries like travel to every other industry (for example no airlines means no advertising on travel, which means Google takes a huge hit on profits Q2, which means they freeze acquisitions, which means funds are reluctant to invest in startups as there are no exits, which means startups in every industry stop advertising, which means Google suffers more).
So recovery may not be quick unfortunately, even well after Coronavirus is mostly over.
Maybe pump up the economy with trillions of dollars in credit but doesn't this sound like a bubble waiting to pop?
But I bet you are wrong. The destruction of the energy industry will last into 2021 and that alone will drag the economy down. There are also 26 million people who have been out of work and some non-zero percentage of those people won't be able to find work when or if the national economy is full reopened. Then there is the phenomenon of people retracting from spending after big financial events.
...and people are going to be scared for a long time, probably until there is a vaccine. I saw Reuters poll yesterday that indicated 40-60% of people would not go to the movies, a concert, sporting event, conference, or other large gathering until there was a vaccine. To expect that there won't be a trickle down impact from people retreating into their homes is... optimistic.
...but I hope you're right. The pessimists (me) dominate the headlines but the optimists are right more often.
I think people underestimate how difficult it is going to be to fight the virus. I think it is pretty much too late now. Only early and very decisive moves would have been able to stop it, the way China did, but it is way past that point.
But, I think we underestimate how people can learn to live the new normal. There will be people hit very profoundly, but overwhelming majority will adjust. We have maybe stopped spending for a bit fearing the worst, but now it seems we already reached the worst and so people are going to learn and resume their lives.
If the future is bleak, they won't have confidence, and cuts their spending, which reinforces the prophecy.
There's no way out of this loop except by massive government intervention. The great depression only ended because of WWII. Now, hopefully we don't go to war this time, maybe try going back to moon?