In a word, historic, but returns are almost certain to improve over the longer term despite the current pain, if history is any guide.

Indeed, it has been punishing for investors, as the market went into a coronavirus-sparked free fall that so far has the 124-year-old Dow Jones Industrial Average on pace to register its worst quarterly loss since the fourth quarter of 1987. The three-month skid also would represent the steepest first-quarter drop, from January through the end of March, in the index’s history, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

The dizzying equity meltdown has amounted to a more than 21% quarterly skid thus far for the Dow industrials DJIA, -1.412%, while the S&P 500 SPX, -1.382% has declined more than 18% over the quarter, which would mark the broad-market index’s sharpest such decline since the 2008 financial crisis.

Check out the table below, as of late morning on Tuesday:

INDEX QUARTERLY % CHANGE BEST/WORST SINCE
Dow -21.5% Q4 1987
S&P 500 -18.4% Q4 2008
Nasdaq Composite Index -12.6% Q4 2018
Source: Dow Jones Market Data

The GOP’s official 2020 slogan is “It’s EconoME, Not Us.”

CBS News obtained audio of a call Monday between Pres. Trump and rural state governors about coronavirus. After Montana Gov. Steve Bullock discusses difficulty getting testing equipment, Trump says, "I haven't heard anything about testing being a problem" https://cbsn.ws/2wGVqRQ

If anyone's still wondering why we weren't this concerned with the H1N1 pandemic, here's a comparison of confirmed (laboratory tested & presumed positive) deaths in the US between the H1N1 pandemic & COVID-19:

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) is expected to resign from Congress on Monday as he heads over to the White House to become President Trump's next chief of staff, a Meadows aide told The Hill.

A letter announcing his departure from Capitol Hill is expected to be released later Monday, the aide said.

After five terms in the House, Meadows will replace his former colleague and Freedom Caucus member, Mick Mulvaney, who served as Trump's acting chief of staff for a little more than a year. Trump had two other chief of staffs before Mulvaney took on the interim role.

Meadows will be coming into the high-profile role as the White House is grappling with the coronavirus pandemic, which has reached more than 140,000 cases in the U.S. as of Monday morning, according to a New York Times database. Trump has come under scrutiny for initially downplaying the outbreak at a time when the administration could've been preparing for the pandemic, by seeking key equipment and supplies.

...

"We have taken very aggressive steps to try to stop or limit the spread of the coronavirus to try to protect our people," Beshear said. "But our neighbors from the south, in many instances, are not."

"If you are a Kentuckian living on that border, I need you to not go to Tennessee for anything other than work or helping a loved one or maybe the grocery, if it is there closer," he continued. "If you ultimately go down over that border and go to a restaurant or something that's not open in Kentucky, what you do is you bring the coronavirus back here in Kentucky."

Kentucky has 302 confirmed cases of COVID-19 as of Friday evening, Beshear said. Meanwhile, Tennessee has more than 1,200 confirmed cases, according to the state's health department website.

...

Beshear, who said he hasn't spoken with Lee, added that it wouldn't be fair to consider ordering to close the border between the two states.

“We consider different options every single day," Beshear said. "I’m not there yet.”