Medically-Induced Coma

I don't think there's any question that we're going to have something that meets the technical definition of a recession.  But I am not sure that a recession is the best framework for thinking about this from a policy perspective or from understanding the economy.  Right, this is not a case where some part of the economy got out of control and, you know, we kind of needed it to reset itself in some way, you know we didn't have a housing bubble or a dot-com bubble or anything like that.  And it's not a situation again where we need people to rush out and spend to try to get the economy going again.  Somebody described it to me yesterday as a need to put the economy in a medically-induced coma, you know, we need to calm things for a period, so that then it can pick back up quickly, and hopefully be in the best shape possible once we come back.  That's a very different circumstance from kind of what we traditionally think of in a recession.

--  Economics reporter Ben Casselman on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, "COVID-19 Broke The Jobless Claims Chart" @11:39, 26 March 2020