NERB: Some people holds the view that weare now suffering a new round of Great Depression, which will be even worse than 1930s. Do you agree with this comment? How do you evaluate the influence of coronavirus on world economy?

Michele Wucker: The Great Depression is an appropriate analogy, I am sad to say. The global economic outlook already was slowing, as a long expansion matured, before the coronavirus hit. So we already were hitting headwinds, which made us that much more vulnerable to the economic slowdown caused by the pandemic. Unemployment has already risen dramatically, but despite that I think we are still numb and that there is much, much more pain to come. Until we have a vaccine and better understanding of how to treat COVID-19, the economy will not be able to fully spring back to life. We still don't know how long that will be -and the longer it takes, the more economic dominoes will fall.

Debt is a big, big one. The International Monetary Fund and smart analysts whose views I respect have already been warning that record global debt levels have left the world extremely vulnerable to a recession. Falling revenues mean that more and more companies will have a hard time keeping up with their debt obligations. Nearly $11 trillion in corporate debt around the world matures over the next four years --roughly $2 trillion a year-- and will be much harder to refinance in this environment. We are likely to see a spike in corporate debt defaults as well as distressed consumer lending. As long as consumers are struggling, businesses, landlords, and creditors will too. So policy makers need to be working now to restructure and forgive some of that debt, because the longer they wait, the bigger the cost will be and the more chaotic things will be as businesses fail, taking banks down with them.