To me, context is about pattern recognition.

It's connecting the dots.

It's giving readers an ability to synthesize

a number of different perspectives

so they can understand how the greater whole works,

because nothing really occurs in isolation anymore.

I'm Tim O'Brien and I'm the senior executive editor at Bloomberg Opinion.

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I'm Tracy Alleway.

And I'm Joe Wiesenthal.

So Joe, one of the really interesting things about our current economic situation is that we basically have a recession that's been induced by policy, albeit not necessarily economic policy, but by policy in general.

This fact makes understanding this moment in the economy very bizarre. It's not like anything that we've ever seen before in part because of exactly what you just identified which is that a lot of the slowdown that we've seen in economic activity was completely by design and it's hard to think of any previous comparison that really works as an analogy.

Yeah, exactly. So, along with this policy-induced recession,

we also have the fact that the economic contraction has been much, much stronger or darker than we've seen in recent years.

Like I think plenty of people have pointed out at this point that it's probably the biggest stop to economic activity that we've seen

either since World War II or the Great Depression so eclipsing the great financial

crisis of 2008. Definitely.

But the other thing that goes along with that, and I guess this is what we're going to talk about,

is because so much of the slowdown was by design, and obviously it wasn't all done by law. I mean people naturally change

their behavior in response to the virus but so many policy changes were by

designed to slow the spread of the virus. We also saw a sort of near real-time policy response

...