Yes, we’ll have to wait and see, but the end here is surely only temporary. Everything’s in place for the economies to start up again and to work as they did, except that the governments will have to spend a lot of money to bail out various parties, and some businesses will have gone bankrupt in the interim. It also depends on how long the social distancing is in effect.

I believe it was WWI that got the world out of the Great Depression. We may need a similar overriding job to do to bail us all out of this one; hopefully it won’t be WWIII.

One thing to watch out for is what Naomi Klein called “disaster capitalism” and the “shock doctrine,” since radical capitalists have a habit of exploiting natural disasters to impose their libertarian, free-market experiments.