Everybody wants to know how low the economy will sink, said Robert J. Barro in The Wall Street Journal. Will this be the worst recession in decades? “The bottom line is that there is ample reason to worry about slipping into a depression.” There's probably a 1 in 5 chance that per-person gross domestic product will fall by 10 percent, which hasn’t happened since the 1930s.
Only “monetary shock and awe” can keep us out of a depression now, said Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in Britain’s The Telegraph. Fiscal stimulus won’t be enough. It may be that to prevent the Dow from crashing to 4,000 by summer the Federal Reserve might have to engineer a “quantum reduction” in mortgage rates, to 2.5 percent.
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