Goldman Sachs attracted a lot of attention with its forecast that the United States’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will be off 34% in the second quarter of this year. That is a very big number. It’s three-and-a-half times the worst quarter in US economic history since quarterly GDP stats began in 1947. (That quarter, by the way, was the first of 1958, the onset of a sharp recession, which featured, among other things, an “Asian flu.”) Here’s a little perspective on that number.

That 34% figure is annualized, meaning it’s what the total decline would amount to if the quarter’s rate were sustained for a full year. A 34% annualized decline works out to a 9.9% decline for the quarter alone. Big, but at least it’s not a third.

Unless you’re a connoisseur of these things, though, you probably don’t know that we never fully recovered from the 2008–9 recession. That point is made in the graph below. The line marked “trend” is based on the 2.1% average growth rate from 1970 to 2007, the year just before the Great Recession hit. The “actual” line is, as the name suggests, reported GDP per capita. The Goldman Sachs estimate for the second quarter is marked with the dot. If something like that forecast comes to pass, we will have undone the entire 2009–2019 recovery/expansion cycle in a matter of months.