I keep trying to wrap my head around what the economy will look like a year, two, three from now, and...

We're in for something, is all I can think to say.

It basically took ten years for the US economy to go from 4.4% unemployment, in mid-2007, back to 4.4% in early 2017. A lot of hardship was packed into the decade between those figures.

Joblessness in 2020 will hit a level far more severe than we saw at any point during the global financial crisis. It won't come down quickly, or perhaps much at all, while lots of people remain vulnerable to the virus.

Whenever there is an all clear, if that's what we get, so much damage will have been done to household balance sheets, to connections to the labor force, to business, to state and local government budgets.

The economy is going to need unprecedented levels of policy help.

And I just keep trying to imagine what sort of political place we'll need to be in to craft the policy response that's required, and what the consequences of us failing to get there might look like...

There's so much uncertainty around *everything* to do with the pandemic. But as useful as short-term planning (around flattening the curve, etc) is, we're going to need some longer term thinking too, not about reopening but about rebuilding. B/c that's what we're looking at.