Before the coronavirus pandemic began, we were in the longest-ever economic expansion. If you place the end of the expansion in February, it lasted a full 128 months. This means we were long due a recession. Even so, most experts were expecting a mere slowdown of growth in the economy. The pandemic has changed everything — we now could even be facing a full-blown depression.
How Does a Depression Differ from a Recession?
There is no technical definition of an economic depression. Simply put, it’s an extremely bad, prolonged recession.
Considering that many parts of the economy have had to shut down completely, it's not far fetched to think that what we are heading toward could be defined as a depression. In addition, there's the fact that nothing is fundamentally wrong with the economy — this purely a health-based crisis.
