Get ready for the New Normal 2.0 -- or, more appropriately, 2-point awful.
The U.S. economy post-Covid-19 will look a lot like the one that struggled to recover from the 2008-09 financial crisis –- only in some ways worse.
Growth will be disappointingly tepid after an initial rebound and, for a time at least, inflation dangerously lower and unemployment heartbreakingly higher than they were back then. Government debt -– and the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet -– will be much bigger, while interest rates stay low.
“Our economy will have lost something of value,” said Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. “We will be scarred, and the recovery will be slow.”
The New Normal 2.0 will be a just-in-case economy of diminished demand and paltry productivity as consumers and companies emerge from this crisis gingerly and build buffers against the next.
Households worried about their health and finances will save more and spend less. Companies will be less efficient and less global as they rearrange supply lines and bring production back to the U.S. to improve resiliency rather than to cut costs. Government involvement in the economy will be greater as officials place a premium on domestic supplies of medical equipment and other products deemed essential.
“Everybody is going to be more insecure, more cautious,” investment strategist Ed Yardeni said.
It will be an economy marred by yawning gaps in income and wealth –- the same as New Normal mark one after Bloomberg News coined the concept and Pacific Investment Management Co. popularized it a dozen years ago.
That’s already evident as investors benefit from a resurgent stock market thanks to large dollops of Fed liquidity, while low-wage service workers struggle to sign up for unemployment benefits. An unprecedented 20.5 million Americans were thrown out of work in April as joblessness tripled to 14.7%, the highest since the Great Depression.
The coronavirus “has been pouring gasoline on existing inequities,” New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told National Public Radio May 7.