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This is Intelligence Matters with former acting director of the CIA, Michael Morrell.

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You've looked at a lot of economic history in your career, and I'm just wondering if you've ever seen anything

like this from the perspective of the speed of the decline, the depth of the decline, and the breadth of the decline.

Is this unprecedented from your perspective, even throwing the Great Depression in there?

I think it's completely unprecedented. I mean, again, what you had is an overnight forced decrease in production of 35%.

I cannot think of any episode in history going back centuries on millennia, in which something happened that speed up that magnitude.

You clearly have had periods in history when output was decreased by a whole lot, and that's shown during the Black playing and times like that.

But nothing would happen within a few weeks, so this is completely unprecedented.

My sense of Olivier is there's this idea out there that you can just kind of flip the switch on an economy.

How do you think about that? I mean, once we're ready to, for people to go back to work, how quickly would things go back to normal,

and the longer we're on lockdown and the longer the economy is significantly below its potential, how will that affect the eventual recovery?

So I think you can flick the switch off there easily, and that's what we did. Flicking it on is much, much, much harder, and that's basically what we'll just have to see.

I think we're just going to see what happens.

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Olivier Blanchard served as the chief economist at the International Monetary Fund from 2008 to 2015. He has taught economics at both Harvard and MIT, and he has served as the president of the American Economic Association.

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