Politics

Economist Stephen Moore warns US could be headed toward a Great Depression

Economist Stephen Moore warned that the US is barreling headlong toward a Great Depression if the economy isn’t revived by next month because of the damage caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

“At some point soon, we’re going to have to make some real decisions about what kind of a calamity we are causing through the lock-down of our economy. I’m not saying we should be inattentive to the public health concern … But at some point, we have to worry about what we’re doing to our society, and what kind of economy we’re going to have after this is all over,” Moore, who has advised President Trump on the economy, told host John Catsimatidis on his AM-970 radio show “The Cats Roundtable” in an interview that aired Sunday.

“If we go much past May 1, we are facing a potential Great Depression scenario,” Moore said.

Wall Street markets plummeted on Friday after the feds released the March jobs report that showed the US economy lost 701,000 jobs last month, ending a nine-year hiring streak.

Moore said the country’s unemployment rate could get worse as the coronavirus spreads, rising as high as 23 percent.

The rate hit 24.9 percent in 1933 during the Great Depression.

The president said during a White House coronavirus task force briefing Saturday that hard decisions must be made on the economy.

“Because you know, at a certain point, you’ll lose more people this way through all of the problems caused, than you will with what we’re doing right now,” Trump said of the stay-at-home orders issued by governors across the country.

“What we’re doing right now, I think is going to be very successful, but you know what? I don’t know. We have a big decision to make at a certain point. OK? We have a big decision to make. We went this extra period of time, but I said it from the beginning, the cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.”

Stephen Moore
Stephen MooreGetty Images

“We have to open our country again,” Trump continued. “We don’t want to be doing this for months and months and months.”

Trump had called for opening up the economy by April 12, Easter Sunday, but reversed himself and extended the restrictions until April 30.