Coming Next: The Greater Recession
The suspension of federal benefits would create damage almost as terrifying as the economic effects of the coronavirus.
One pretty good forecasting rule for the coronavirus era has been to take whatever Trump administration officials are saying and assume that the opposite will happen. When President Trump declared in February that the number of cases would soon go close to zero, you knew that a huge pandemic was coming. When Vice President Mike Pence insisted in mid-June that there isnt a coronavirus second wave, a giant surge in new cases and deaths was clearly imminent.
And when Larry Kudlow, the administrations chief economist, declared just last week that a V-shaped recovery was still on track, it was predictable that the economy would stall.
On Friday, well get an official employment report for July. But a variety of private indicators, like the monthly report from the data-processing firm ADP, already suggest that the rapid employment gains of May and June were a dead-cat bounce and that job growth has at best slowed to a crawl.
ADPs number was at least positive some other indicators suggest that employment is actually falling. But even if the small reported job gains were right, at this rate we wont be back to precoronavirus employment until
2027.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/opinion/coronavirus-us-recession.html