The stimulus package that passed recently as the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act carried with it an assumption that “we’ll see a rapid economic recovery in the next 4 to 6 months,” says Narayana Kocherlakota, the Lionel W. McKenzie Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester. “My own forecast is that the downturn will be severe and last much longer.”
One reason for that prediction is that to resume economic activity, we need “mass testing, tracing, and quarantining.” And, Kocherlakota, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, says, “I do not see enough leadership at the federal level to make that happen.”