Like most economic downturns, it’s purely psychological at this point.
Rat Party: Mission Accomplished
Now on to permanent poverty with World Socialism
Stay in your houses, Proles, only We Chosen Few are allowed out to riot
Economics is a social sciece. It attempts to quantify and sometimes predict the sum totals of human activity. If for whatever reason people stop socializing, working and fail to venture far beyond their homes, voluntariy limit their creative impulses and the seeking if pleasure or happiness, then there is little surprise that the “GNP” or other commonly used economic parameters will decline steeply. If a definitive cure, a safe and effective vaccine of more likely widespread “herd immunity” develops then the “economy”,absent the implementation of wrongheaded marxist/socialist policies will rebound.
I very seriously doubt that, given all the ravages that have occurred in European History: the Black Plague or the 30 years war or WWII [unless you count soldiering and making and blowing up munitions, planes, tanks and ships as GDP], or WWI and the disappearance of the flower of European youth.
All the vaccines likely to see use have been created.
Once Phase II(safety) testing is done, real world use should begin. Let you and your doctor decide on vaccination.
About a thousand people a day are dying of Covid in the USA. Waiting on FDA for 180 more days means 180000 needlessly dead.
I don’t expect a vaccine. I expect everyone to be exposed. It’s why I was all for flattening the curve at first and then getting on to business as usual. But politicians had different ideas.
People think the Great Depression started with the 1929 crash. Maybe, but the 1932 crash is what really did everyone in.
We are in the beginning stages of Great Depression II and this time it will be much worse. For starters, there was not the debt back then that there is now. Secondly, this time it is suicide.
Other reasons too, but I don’t need to tell a terminal patient about the tons of things that made him terminal. This video explains it well enough. The response to the virus is just what sped up the timeline (and made it much worse):
It’s also funny...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlN28DoL5qA&t=54s
US contraction was 33%. Eurozone was 40%. What that tells me, but not the media, is that they guy running the US economy is doing a better job at managing this economic crisis than the lemmings running the Euro economy