Stan Veuger: The Economic Fallout from Covid-19

Conversations with Bill Kristol

News, Society & Culture, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2020

⏱️ 75 minutes

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Summary

What is the current economic situation of the US in light of the ongoing public health crisis? How successful have policies been in addressing the economic crisis? What are possible paths forward for the American economy in the short and medium term? In this Conversation, Stan Veuger of the American Enterprise Institute shares his perspective on the serious economic challenges we face. Veuger argues that the fiscal and monetary policies so far have averted the worst possibilities for the economy. However, the sheer number of lost jobs and productivity, along with the still unfolding future of the health crisis, means the economic pain likely will continue in the short and medium term. According to Veuger, there are reasons for concern about the pace of recovery—which ultimately will depend on how quickly America can overcome, or at least contain, the public health crisis.

Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to Conversations. I'm very glad to be joined today
0:19.0	by my friend Stan Voiger, a research scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, very distinguished,
0:24.1	young economist, very distinguished for his youth and very young for his distinction, I would say,
0:29.8	visiting lecturer at Harvard, where I think in the past you've taught with your late teacher,
0:34.7	unfortunately passed away. What about a year ago, Marty Feldstein, with whom we had an excellent conversation,
0:39.5	I'm going to say what, three years ago or so, which I still recommend to people.
0:44.4	We've done one conversation before on Europe but today we're going to talk about
0:48.6	the economy.
0:49.6	Like where do we stand here three months and was it about three months? We're on June 10th.
0:53.8	So but three months into the coronavirus induced economic crisis and so welcome.
1:01.0	Thank you Bill. Glad to be back.
1:03.0	So I thought, we'll just, let's try to lay out, obviously we can't predict everything perfectly
1:06.8	or even maybe imperfectly, but let's lay out how to think about the kind of the
1:11.0	economic situation, the economic forecast, the key decisions coming up,
1:15.4	key inflection points and so forth.
1:16.7	So where do we stand?
1:18.2	I mean, how deep a hole are we in?
1:21.8	How long lasting a one do you think it is?
1:24.0	So the whole we're in is fairly deep I'd say. The current unemployment rate is a little
1:29.4	over 13% and if anything that's an that's an under estimate and so that's a very very bad
1:37.9	state for labor market to be in it's worse in fact than at any point during the Great Recession.
1:45.4	Now the I guess most optimistic way of looking at this is that it's in large part this damage was a choice driven by by the public health situation.
	...

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