What Went Down On Night 2 Of The RNC

Kudlow has been talking about a “v-shaped” recovery since the pandemic began. Pretty much no economist — including the 30-odd leading economists we survey every other week — thinks this is plausible. In the most recent edition of the survey, the economists told us that even if 75 percent of Americans became immune to COVID-19 tomorrow, which is obviously a wildly unrealistic scenario, we’re unlikely to return to pre-pandemic GDP until sometime next year.

Without getting into TOO many debates about the use of economic priors in forecasting models, this recession certainly hasn’t been typical of past ones in terms of the speed of the recovery, the stock market remaining fairly buoyant, etc. — and Trump’s approval ratings for his handling of the economy remain pretty decent.