Of unemployment, fiscal deficits and the testing times to come

In the past five weeks since lockdown, jobless claims in the USA have risen to 26.5 million. Put another way, the total claims since mid March have now erased the number of jobs created since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008-09. Fiscal stimulus has rightly been applied to cushion the blow and help people through an expected short down-time. But what if the economy doesn’t have a V-shaped recovery?