The next few months will be terrible, politically and economically, and a lot of people will be impoverished and die unnecessarily. But vaccination is coming — and when it does, I suspect we'll recover much faster than people expect 1/

Recovery from the financial crisis was slow and grudging, and many expect the same to be true this time 2/

But that isn't always the case after a severe recession. Pre-1990, recoveries tended to be rapid and V-shaped 3/

I've been arguing for a while that the Covid slump is more like 79-82 than 2007-9, when recovery was held back by severely impaired household balance sheets 4/

This time balance sheets were back by the middle of the year, and have surely improved since then 5/

Partly that's because people did a lot of saving in quarantine 6/

And they've accumulated a LOT of liquid assets 7/

So Biden will inherit a horrible situation once they carry Trump out of the White House. But he has a good chance of presiding over an impressive 2021-2 boom 8/