The severity of the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the United States is dependent upon “the psychology and how long this lasts,” according to former US Naval Intelligence Officer John Jordan.
The US has reached the highest level of unemployment since The Great Depression – with one in seven Americans now out of work. Mr Jordan told Sky News “hopefully this is just temporary, this isn’t driven by anything internal to financial markets or the economy, this is an exogenous or externally driven event”.
“This is without precedent, this has never been done before but what is being attempted by American policy makers is trying to keep the economy in suspended animation for a period of time and then to reanimate it, kind of like in a science fiction movie, as some unknown period,” he said. “But markets like certainty, they like to know when something is going to happen or sentiment changes, and economies are all about sentiment or animal spirits and people’s behaviour.
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