Try to compare this sort of logic with what we already know happened with the last financial crisis. Before that crisis, banks lent out a lot of dud loans and p

Try to compare this sort of logic with what we already know happened with the last financial crisis. Before that crisis, banks lent out a lot of dud loans and people bought too many expensive houses. A lot of the people who ended up being unemployed afterwards were not the people who made bad financial decisions, they were just a regular part of the economy, and the damage lasted for many years. I think if you tried to carry through with the "average of normal + lockdown" logic for the financial crisis, you'd get an unrealistic result: you'd expect the economy to be back to normal fairly soon because all those people who could be working the way they were before the crisis could just show up to work (they can do that work just as well as they could before the crisis, obviously). None of this has anything to do with "fear", this is just what recessions look like. Just because the system could go back to normal in no way shows that it will, or even that it is likely to, and that's a fundamental feature of recessions. It's like the system as a whole has multiple equilibriums, and which equilibrium it ends up in depends on the history leading up to it: the "average of normal + lockdown" only tries to show that a desirable equilibrium exists and vaguely implies that that's the equilibrium it will end up in. My understanding is that conventional economics and past experience both say that it is far more likely that it won't and that the recession will be as genuine as any other.