When Does the Economy Return to Normal?

The COVID-19 pandemic has a long and unprecedented tail 

The COVID-19 crisis has broken all the rules. What the world is facing is something economist David McWilliams likes to call a “pandession” or a combination of a pandemic and recession. “We are at this extraordinary, one-off moment where the global economy is in a tailspin, and the timing of when we get out of that is not going to be dictated by anything we understand in economics,” he says. 

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The COVID-19 recession is different from other recessions in how quickly the U.S. government intervened, says Kanlaya Barr, senior economist with John Deere. 

“The last time the consumer sector saw this kind of recession, it took us 2.5 years to get us back to where it was before,” she says. “This time the government put more than $2 trillion into the economy through the CARES Act to offset the impact of COVID-19.” 

Barr says the U.S. general economy could rebound by 2022.