A sobering headline and an instructive study reported in this WSJ article from yesterday (behind paywall, but may be worth paying a low cost two month initial subscription to read)
This figure is based on a WSJ comissioned analysis from Moody’s Analytics. They look at the economic impact of the country wide lock downs on a county by county basis across the US. They compute lost “daily output” directly triggered by business closures, compared with output in the first two weeks of March before lock downs began. Seem to make sensible imposed assumptions. Find that 90% of hotel industry is shut down nationwide but 10% of financial services. Nationwide a 29% fall in economic output (for comparison the fall in US output in the Great Depression 1929-1932 was 26%), larger in worst hit metropolitan areas e.g. 35% in Los Angeles county.
Not sustainable, at least not without even more resources to support the economy. Keep this up for six months and the 11% of GDP in the $2trn economic stimulus package is clearly insufficient …. (and much of that is mis-targeted, not much of it going where the economic costs are largest)