It is now quite widely assumed that it will be. I think that's a good thing for a whole variety of reasons.More generally, I have never been somebody who liked parties or crowded bars. Moreover, according to a new paper from the same team, America should have begun to see local generation of more than 50 infections per day sooner than Italy. Historian Niall Ferguson compares COVID-19 to past global sicknesses, likening it to a flu pandemic that hit in the 1950s. Yet we struggle to think clearly and to act consistently. From my vantage point, the world's going my way. So there are two things one has to take away from the economic history and the history of pandemics.One: pandemics take a while - typically two years. Monetary and fiscal stimulus is no more likely to halt the pandemic than a quarantine of Wall Street would have halted the great banking panic of September 2008. But you can't tell them: go out shopping, go to the movies.

Two weeks ago I argued that Covid-19 posed a mortal threat to his presidency. They therefore expect central bankers and finance ministers to deal with it, as they dealt with the last one. Briefings will include thoughtful and informed analysis from our top scholars. Is California — or New York state — Italy? There's no certainty that we will, although the chances are probably better than at any time in history, because of the sheer number of projects to find a vaccine.The second point is that any economic shock of this sort takes time to recover from. But that's not what pandemics are like. I don't think we should assume there'll be a post-COVID-19 era, any more than there's a post-influenza era, or a post-tuberculosis era, or a post-AIDS era. I was more of a “seldom Trumper” — someone who, with all due reservations about Donald Trump’s character and temperament, was prepared to acknowledge the ways this president, in his feral, instinctive way, had improved on the foreign and economic policies of his predecessor. But the pandemic's a real setback for globalization, because it exposed something I've been arguing about for a while, and most recently in my book If you build a highly integrated global network, then you are vulnerable, because highly integrated networks are great at spreading things like viruses.In the same way that highly integrated online networks can spread fake news and malware computer viruses, a transport network like the one we had built by the end of 2019 was perfectly designed to make sure that a virus like Sars-CoV-2 could spread to pretty much every country in the world, in an amazingly short space of time.We can't go back to the world of 2019, in a number of respects. Ferguson is currently the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford and Managing Director of Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm.We are now in the biggest economic shock since the Great Depression. No amount of quantitative easing and deficit spending can avert a recession in America if Covid-19 is spreading through the population at an exponential rate and if the combination of prudent cancellations and consumer panic will bring much economic activity to a halt. The first category error I observe today is that many investors, seeing the extraordinary market volatility of the past week — which rivals the financial spasms of 1987, 2001 and 2008 — conclude that they are in a financial crisis. Despite Friday afternoon’s whistling past the graveyard, US stocks are down 20% from their peak. Historian Niall Ferguson at the 2020 Annual Meeting in Davos. We no more have separate minds than a cricket team has a 12th player with the job of boosting the others’ morale. We are entering the panic phase of the pandemic. There are diseconomies of scale. But are we sure? The financial crisis dealt it a blow. Indeed, according to research by network scientists at Northeastern University in Massachusetts, America was the fifth most likely country to import Covid-19 from China, after Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea. It's better at this point to imagine a world with COVID-19, rather than a world after it.Small is beautiful in the pandemic. The big question is: can we get out of it quickly?A shock like this can inflict a very, very sharp decrease in economic activity, but you will not get an equally sharp recovery. Only a minority of them paid heed; as recently as 12 days ago, one was still mocking me as “a Debbie Downer, Fergie Frowner”. It's hard to keep a virus out of a country like the US. Just as it was underreaction to dismiss Covid-19 as “just the flu”, it is overreaction to think we are now in the film Contagion or the novel Station Eleven. Some have hypothesised that America is about 11 days behind Italy, so San Francisco will be where Milan is today by March 26. The puzzle is why this is not already happening. Quite the opposite - there's been a war of words.We won't go back to travelling around as much as we did for meetings. And although fiscal and monetary policy are being used on an impressive scale – in fact, on a scale we haven't seen since World War Two – a pandemic is not a war.In a war, you employ a lot of people, mostly men, to go and fight, and then you employ a lot of people, including women, to make things they can fight with. Nevertheless, I feel as if I have read Peter Wehner’s latest piece in The Atlantic — “The Trump presidency is over” — a few times before. I was always somebody who liked to live in a relatively isolated spot. Secondly, Cold War Two, between the US and China, is very clearly a reality.