What a Time to Be Governed by Callous Morons
The latest economic numbers are dismal: GDP is projected to be down 33 percent from the first to second quarter of 2020. Even if we see some recovery soon, the long-term damage — people unemployed, businesses shuttered, confidence hammered — will be massive and lingering.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin at the US Capitol in May, 2020. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
Even non-connoisseurs are reeling from the miserable second-quarter GDP numbers released this morning. Between the first and second quarters of this year, GDP was off 33 percent after adjustment for inflation. That’s by far the biggest decline since quarterly numbers began in 1947.
That 33 percent figure is at an annualized rate, meaning GDP would be off by a third if it declined at the second-quarter rate for a full year. The United States is unusual in annualizing the data; most other countries report the quarter-to-quarter change without annualizing it.
If we did that, it would have been off a mere 9.5 percent. But no matter how you slice it, it’s awful: more than three times as bad as the previous record, the first quarter of 1958 (a recession that helped elect JFK), and four times as bad as the worst quarter of the 2008–9 recession, the fourth of 2008.
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