Ask HN: How bad will the 2020 economic crisis be?
I've heard economic forecasters predict that the economy will spring back once the crisis is over.  Their reasoning is that the crisis is an external issue, not a problem with the economy itself, as with the housing crisis.  Once it becomes more contained and controlled, there will be work for people to do, and people available to do that work, and the economy will just start humming along again.<p>I'm more pessimistic.  The extent of the layoffs, even if temporary, is just too large to not have a lasting impact.  What happens when people with inadequate emergency savings get laid off and can't pay their bills?  There's a cascading effect.  Maybe they owe a landlord with inadequate emergency savings who now can't pay his mortgage.  Maybe they owe a bill to a small business operating on small margins that can't stay afloat.  Maybe they owe a corporate behemoth that has aggressively taken on debt and now needs to lay off a bunch more people to be able to pay off that debt.  The federal government's mortgage deferral solution might help homeowners, but it's not going to solve the problem that people are going to continue to need to buy things and not have the money to buy them.  Even those of us who are fortunate to have some emergency savings will see those savings dwindle down if we're laid off.<p>And keep in mind that in a lot of cases, when people lose their jobs in the U.S., they also lose their health insurance.  Not a great position to be in during a public-health crisis.