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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

That's not the whole calculation. For one, big corps are much more tolerant of the social distancing rules. Small businesses are getting crushed, but publicly-traded corps are just asking people to WFH. The stock market is all big corps. I think the other big factor is that this recession is 100% exogenous in nature. There is no major correction or uncertainty about the long-term viability of any industries. So long as big companies can dip into cash reserves and stimulus funds, they just need to weather the next 6 months and it's likely that we can return to business as usual. This is completely different from the financial meltdown of 2007 or the dotcom bubble of 2001 where entire verticals of industry were called into question and underwent sea changes in culture.

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There are major unknowns about the long-term viability of everything from airlines, hotels to ice cream parlors. Consumer behavior will change as a result of this, and more so when the second (and third...) waves of the virus start to hit in the fall. Even if the orders are lifted, a good chunk of the population is not going to venture out but take a lets-see approach.

Also even at the end of the current quarantine period, companies are not going to pop out and be ready to go just as they were before. The economic landscape will look like after a hurricane has hit, companies that have laid off people are not going to be in a hurry to rehire them in my opinion. Companies are in general unlikely to rehire previously reduced folks (and reduced folks are likewise unlikely to want to return to previous employers), and are instead going to look for new candidates. What we typically see after recessions is massive movements of people between the sectors. The recovery will be a long hard slog. I'd love to share your optimism, but I think the hurricane analogy is apt, even after the sun starts to shine we'll be living in the aftermath of unprecedented economic destruction.

Previous pandemics of comparable severity haven't affected the long-term viability of hotels and ice cream parlors. It's unrealistic to expect that people won't want to travel or eat out.

Airplanes I'll grant you - I can definitely see a world where flights swing closer to a luxury good like they were decades ago.

Previous pandemics?!?

Which previous pandemic of this scale are you using as an example?

Swine flu killed a couple hundred thousand only 10 years ago or so. There were a pair of flu pandemics each lasting about a year, one in the 1950s, and one in the 60s. Each of those killed a million.

The Spanish flu killed like ?? tens of millions, also in a year or two.

There was a more protracted pandemic that killed a million around 1910-1920, but it wasn't a flu.

> It's unrealistic to expect that people won't want to travel or eat out.

Yes, people will want to eat out. But it will be fewer than a few months ago because a) layoffs, b) less disposable income, c) the fear of less/no income soon, d) the fear/risk of getting sick, and other reasons I can't guess.

Whether that is -10%, -50% or -95% has yet to be seen and near impossible to predict usefully right now.

Seems like the negative effects on companies could be longer than 6 months.

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