尘土碗蹂躏了20世纪30年代美国。冠状病毒是今天的等价物。

The past few weeks have seen unprecedented changes in our lives as the coronavirus pandemic has brought the economy to a near standstill. The U.S. already leads the world in cases, with nearly 400,000 people diagnosed (although the numbers out of China should be taken with ahealthy dose of skepticismat this point).

即使是那些没有感觉说的影响ease firsthand — like my family and I, who have been on lockdown for more than two weeks — are struggling to adapt to the new paradigm of social distancing. Thankfully, my kids are able to join their classes and do homework online — and even their music lessons have gone virtual, with only a few minor glitches. And though I’m sure my wife is sick of hearing clichéd business lingo on call after conference call, I can research and write from my home office.

I’m one of the lucky ones, but it’s still no fun to watch my IRA and 401(k) funds crater as capital markets adjust to the economic fallout. Even as many people hope for a quick recovery and are already looking to snap up bargains in the stock market, panic buying of non-perishables and hourlong waits at the grocery store tell us that some are less optimistic about any sort of near-term return to normalcy. And as my friend and fellow columnistAngelo Calvello最近指出, certain segments of the economy, like restaurants, will indeed be decimated and may not recover at all, as millions of people have already lost their jobs.

经济和金融市场是高度复杂的系统。与物理科学不同，社会科学变量的引导滞后关系可以随着市场参与者学习和适应而随着时间的推移而变化。换句话说，在社会科学中，一个原因可以成为一种效果，反之亦然，就像有信心会增加技能，并且技能随后增加了信心。这样的自我加强循环部分是导致蓬勃发展的行为。价格上涨推动势头诱导的购买因为对失踪的恐惧带来了，并且价格下跌触发损失厌恶，因为卖家急于在他们可以。

因此，试图预测这种特殊危机如何发挥出去，旁边是不可能的，但有时知道我们如何在我们所在的位置，我们可以帮助我们了解我们要去哪里。看一些我们观察到的历史类似物表明我们可能会有一个粗略的道路。

ritholtz财富管理的本卡尔森已经编制了一些可怕的信息。他指出的第一件事是金融市场波动性的普遍性和严重程度，因为投资者实时尝试准确评估最近事件的经济影响。标准普尔500指数历史上的历史上最六大的日常抛售，其中一个是1987年10月19日的黑色星期一;三是1929年的;在过去的几周里发生了两次。2008年伟大的金融危机勉强偷偷潜入前十名。不好。

Early economic data is just as awful as the market convulsions. After hovering in the 200,000s for months, unemployment claims spiked to 6.6 million in the week ending March 28, up from 3.3 million the previous week, as the first waves of layoffs hit workers. The weekly number had never been higher than 700,000 or so since the Department of Labor began tracking it in 1967.Economists estimatethat total job losses could take the unemployment rate to anywhere from 15 to 40 percent before this is over. That’s a big range, but remember that unemployment in the most recent financial crisis topped out at 10 percent. During the Great Depression unemployment claimed one quarter of the workforce — a staggering number.

Although the current shutdown is more or less voluntary, it doesn’t mean we will simply be able to turn the economy back to full power when the pandemic is behind us. As a friend points out, people are unlikely to go to restaurants or the movies twice as often for a few months to make up for not having gotten out for a while, nor will they take two spring vacations in 2021. That spending is gone, and that doesn’t even account for the knock-on effects, such as the Uber home from the bar that you didn’t wind up needing or the spur-of-the-moment purchases from window shopping after the movie that didn’t happen.

The Institute for Supply Management announced better-than-expected3月的制造业活动, but still indicating contraction. The forward-looking new orders number plunged to the lowest reading in 11 years.

显然,我们已经在衰退,ly question is how deep and how long.

我所看到的一些更新的预测表明所有这些都有可能将GDP减少5％至20％。在最后一次经济衰退期间，国内生产总值下降了5％，而且由于第二次世界大战前，国家并没有经历过两位数的经济衰退。从1929年到1932年，GDP累计累积近30％，而两位数亏损年度差不多。现在可能是至少70年来最陡峭的经济衰退。

Though these comparisons are alarming, any time someone tries to draw analogies between the Great Depression and a current contraction, it usually proves to be an exercise in hyperbole. So let’s step back a bit and take a look at some other important factors.

愉快地，今天的央行干预远远不如那样的不同。在30年代的30多次资金供应期间，缩小了严重的通货紧缩，又担任需求威慑。再加上银行业的崩溃，因为众多过度覆盖的银行百现门，货币政策向火焰增加了燃料，因此延长了大萧条的持续时间。今天，美联储基本上有零利率为零，随着量化的宽松政策，包括开放式资产购买和货币交换方案，它首次占据了5万亿美元的资产负债表，仅举了12.5％星期。广泛的流动性问题不会加剧这一时期的问题。

And our social safety nets are far better today as well, with programs like Social Security and unemployment benefits — neither of which existed until the Social Security Act of 1935 — providing some income to the most at-risk members of the population. Additionally, the recently passed Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act brings an additional $2 trillion commitment from the federal government.

The twin bazookas of monetary and fiscal policy working in unison will certainly blunt the impact of the crisis and help bring a quicker recovery. However, I think there are a few structural similarities between now and the Great Depression worth considering as well.

大规则地说，20世纪初的经济正在经历极端的结构变化，因为它从主要是一个农业社会转移到工业一方。据估计，1900年，41％的美国人在农业上努力，但到1929年，这一数字几乎已切成一半，因为农业工人占劳动力的21％。亚慱体育app怎么下载这是在相对较短的时间内需要重新存款的人口的一个非常大的人口。

Further, the rise of manufacturing created opportunities for the entrepreneurially minded to build huge businesses leveraging mass production and assembly line technologies for the first time, benefiting from economies of scale. Industrialists such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Andrew Mellon, and William Randolph Hearst consolidated interests in oil, steel, coal, transportation, paper, and finance to build massive enterprises. The分享制造资产由100大公司拥有的公司从20世纪20年代之前的20％上升到30岁以下的42％。五到七家公司主导大多数部门。

这种浓度在生产手段导致全国财富分布的显着差异。由此维护的数据世界不等式数据库shows that in 1929 the top 1 percent of the country took home 21 percent of the total income, whereas the bottom half collectively accounted for only 14 percent. Decades of increasing egalitarianism after World War II saw the top 1 percent of incomes drop to just 10 percent collectively, with the bottom half rising to 20 percent by the mid-1970s.

But those trends have reversed since 1980. Today the top 1 percent again earns more than 20 percent of the total pretax national income and the bottom half is down to roughly 12.5 percent — disparity not seen since the ’20s.

虽然整个故事的简化,these facts paint a picture of a concentrated and fragile economy undergoing serious structural changes in the early part of the 20th century. Certainly, actions taken by the Federal Reserve then did not help, but it’s hard to imagine how such significant economic and demographic factors could not lead to financial dislocation and economic unrest.

Fast-forward to today, and we see some interesting parallels.

As mentioned earlier, wealth inequality has returned to levels last seen in the 1920s. Andrecent research表明，75％的美国行业经历了显着集中的市场力量。在过去的二十年中，赫芬拉 - 赫希克曼指数衡量的平均产业集中程度升高了90％，最多在近一个世纪。再次五到七家公司控制了至少四个季度的许多部门。

This is thanks in no small part to rampant consolidation. According to the Federal Trade Commission, mergers spiked from 300 a year in 1922 to more than 1,200 by 1929. More recently, the average number of mergers has surged from 2,000 or so per year in the 1980s to 12,000 each year currently.

As the number of nodes in a network shrinks, that network becomes more fragile. The loss of a specific node in a concentrated network is more damaging, as it propagates cascading failure faster throughout the network. Similarly, industry and wealth concentration increases systemic risk, making both an economy and a society more fragile.

And today we are also in the midst of an ongoing transformation from an industrial economy to an information economy, with all the structural upheaval that entails. Since the ’80s, information sectors — like professional services, finance, and information technology — have become a far larger percentage of total U.S. gross domestic output than old-world industrial companies, such as those in manufacturing, mining, and utilities. Along the way millions of Americans have struggled to adapt to changing skill demands from the shifting economy.

系统风险，单点失败，市场集中和工作/技能不匹配在迅速发展的经济之上，再次意味着急性冲击对系统的影响可能比其他方式更加延长和更深。

Returning to the 1930s, a series of severe droughts and dust storms swept across the heartland, blowing the dry and eroded topsoil into huge clouds that blackened the skies. The Dust Bowl period, which lasted about eight years in total, was not the most important causal factor in the Great Depression, but it contributed greatly to the problems. The phenomenon devastated 100 million acres of cropland across the South and the Midwest, and tens of thousands of farmers were forced to abandon their farms in search of a means of survival. This exodus served only to hasten the demise of the family-owned farm, as well as of the agricultural sector as a whole, and by increasing the supply of unemployed laborers, it further decreased the return to labor, expanding the market power of industries.

The extent of the Covid-19 pandemic is unknown, but one thing is for sure. It is hitting some sectors of the economy far harder than others. As manufacturing and processing plants close, restaurants shut down, and many elements of the transportation and distribution networks grind to a halt, workers in these industries disproportionately find themselves unable to support their families. (Business for Amazon is booming, however.)

On the other hand, many employees of the information economy — like computer programmers, researchers, lawyers, teachers, and, thankfully, writers and investors like me — have been able to remain productive working from home, albeit with a few accommodations.

Perhaps this pandemic will catalyze positive changes to our economy. Unfortunately, mom-and-pop restaurants and small stores — like family farms in the Dust Bowl — will fare the worst, likely giving rise to more market power for chains and larger franchises. Fortunately, the CARES Act should give some direct fiscal relief.

I think these events may also hasten automation and instrumentation of production processes within manufacturing industries. Just as the industrial farms brought scale efficiencies and technological innovations to agriculture, information technology will continue to improve the productivity and efficiency of industrial sectors. Robots cannot get sick.

Similarly, we may see an acceleration of the rise of the information sectors relative to GDP and a decline in the share of the industrial sector. Compared with our historical example, agriculture today sits at a mere 1.2 percent of U.S. GDP, despite being critical for our survival. And even more workers will need retraining than in the 1930s.

I don’t think things are likely to be as bad for as long as in the Depression — we have too many policy advantages working in our favor, and the average American is still far better off today than then. But I do think it’s prudent to price in uncertainty around return assumptions and to extend hold periods in investment underwriting base cases.

如果有的话，如果有了这项银色的衬里，则恰好是生产和过度消费的下降作为经济的基础。

Just as the Depression caused a generation of Americans to become frugal with food, maybe the coronavirus crisis can be the trigger to cause us as a society to reevaluate our desire for more and more stuff. We should all now be acutely aware that there are far more important things in life than the accumulation of material things — even when they’re on sale.

照顾彼此。