Honestly, I'm not an expert. But before coronavirus, the wild growth in the markets seemed--to me--out of line with the realities of the economy.
But this is nothing like that at all. A stock market crash takes months to move through the economy.
A big crash means things like 700,000 new unemployment claims (2008 had that many at its peak).
The US just had 6 million new unemployment claims.
It's a whole new level.
Yes we intentionally stopped things, but that would have happened either way as the disease spread and people got sick.
Look at the meat packing plant in SD where 1 case turned into ~300 and they had to shut down [1]. If we had not shut down things, that would be the story at workplaces across the country. Think about schools and universities throughout the country. If they had not shut down as the pandemic was ramping up, they would have become breeding grounds for the disease and would have had to shut down anyway as students and teachers fell ill.
Yes we shut down things intentionally but our hand was forced. The flip side of this is we cannot re-open things just as intentionally because the result will be a flare-up of cases. So while it may seem like we have control over when we start/stop the economy here, really the virus is controlling the timeline.
[1] https://abc7news.com/smithfied-foods-coronavirus-meat-packin...
I wonder if lack of public health infrastructure in the us will come to haunt it in the coming months as other countries recover faster and get a head start. That sort of economic opportunity cost from not having more public health infrastructure tends to have been left out of past discussions completely.
There have been national strikes in some countries before - perhaps we should be looking at the impact of them to try to understand this.
That's a take that is gained from reading two many doom and gloom writers and not looking at the data.
The data shows that economies - on average - expand and have done consistently, long term since the renaissance.
Once you look at that, you see recessions as mistakes. Most large ones since the start of the 20th century have been caused by errors in the capital markets (1929, 1987, 2008) or commodity price shocks (1970s).
Perhaps the run up in stock prices should have been corrected. But that would have been a recession caused by a financial market correction, so another 2001 "dot com crash" style thing. Nothing like this.
is there any merit towards my naive optimism
By most measurements this is the biggest economic shock since 1929 (and possibly larger). It's the first time we've have economic activity stop this quickly across so many industries all across the world ever (perhaps the black death in the 1300s was similar because many farms went unharvested because of the lack of labor - up to 80% of people died in some areas[1]).
It's possible this will turn around quickly. We certainly stopped things quicker than I would have believed was possible a 4 months ago.
But provided you understand that is an optimistic view and isn't really supported by history it's ok.
[1] https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-impact-of-the-black...