How the Covid-19 recession could become a depression

Coronavirus is a global economic catastrophe.

As the Covid-19 pandemic worsens, it’s hard to decide which are scarier: the conversations I’m having with epidemiologists or the conversations I’m having with economists.

“This is an economic tsunami,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. Social distancing is economic distancing. We are telling people to cease going to stores, to restaurants, to workplaces. We are insisting they stop supplying their labor, making their goods. To slow a pandemic, we are forcing a recession, perhaps a depression.

It was common, in...