Several economists have predicted where the U.S. economy is heading. One said it would take a miracle to keep the recession from turning into another Great Depression. Some believe that a fast or V-shaped recovery is unlikely. Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly told President Trump the opposite, predicting that the U.S. economy will have a V-shaped recovery.
Great Depression II
A number of strategists and economists have predicted a gloomy outlook for the U.S. economy as unemployment swells to unseen levels since the Great Depression. Data released last week shows that one in six Americans are out of a job as the coronavirus crisis deepens; approximately 26 million people have filed for jobless aid in five weeks. Chris Rupkey, managing director and chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank, was quoted by Yahoo Finance as saying:
At this point it would take a miracle to keep this recession from turning into the Great Depression II.
On Sunday, White House economic advisor Kevin Hassett told the media: “We see an unemployment rate that approaches rates we saw during the Great Depression … During the Great Recession we lost 8.7 million jobs in the whole thing. Now we’re losing that many every 10 days.” At the worst point during the 2008 financial crisis, 15.35 million people were unemployed.
“It is going to take years not months to put these pandemic jobless workers back to work at the shops and malls and factories and restaurants across the country,” Rupkey opined, noting that the job losses in the last five reports were “more than the entire Great Recession a decade ago.”
