New York has roughly 5% of coronavirus cases worldwide. That figure is expected to rise this week. New York state has more coronavirus cases than France or South Korea as infections soar to nearly 16,000 on Sunday March 22nd, 2020.

New York City is also in many ways the center of economic activity in the United States. New York now has more COVID-19 cases than several countries struggling to manage their own caseloads, including France, South Korea, Switzerland and the U.K., according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

So what does it mean economically? We’re expecting in April and May perhaps the greatest job losses of the century, where up to 3 to 5 million could lose their jobs.

Leaders of government will likely get infected, and some will die. But it’s the pandemic depression on the economy that could haunt this generation. The airlines are telling Congress they need $29 billion to survive, but that’s only the beginning. Everyone from hospitality to retail will need to be bailed out, and then there are the small businesses, the self-employed and vulnerable individuals.

How do you quantity the economic impact? Q2 of 2020 is a dead zone.

Up to 67 million Americans will likely have trouble paying credit card bills. Credit card debt will skyrocket.

Corporate debt and bankruptcies will also skyrocket.

Medical shortages are likely to occur in the coming weeks as the coronavirus puts pressure on healthcare systems.

Some are floating the idea of a basic income of $2,000 per household to survive the financial crisis.

But the truth is, we don’t know how bad the financial crisis of the pandemic could really be.

The Federal Reserve and Treasury are working on financing programs that could be worth $4 trillion. The stockmarket is already down 31.9% from its peak in February, 2020. As the health crisis ramps up, there’s no reason why it won’t go down another 20%.

This is because the bull market was very extreme before the pandemic hit. Consumer confidence is plummeting, because consumer sentiment is on pause with retail, restaurants and non-essential businesses closed or about to close.

As for stocks, the banks and financial sector should be next, as retail, hospitality and travel are all plummeting, not to mention the energy sector with a doom’s day drop in oil prices amid price wars between leaders in Saudi Arabia and Russia.

The brutality of the equity market sell-off has been so extreme and rare in its breadth and velocity, in fact, that no one would dare have predicted it in detail. A liquidity crisis of such generational magnitude is beyond a bailout.

Things like payroll tax cuts benefit the rich. Wealth inequality is about to get more extreme in America. The companies that survive the crisis will become even more dominant monopolies. Imagine a world in retail where Amazon, Walmart and Costco have an even more dominant hold on retail than smaller retailers and indie retailers, many of which will no longer exist.

The death of retail and an SMB purge is a sharp increase in wealth inequality and a state-backed capitalism where corporations become so dominant, it won’t feel like a free market democracy anymore. What is happening now in NYC will be one for the history books.

Goldman Sachs is forecasting a 24% decline in economic activity next quarter, compared to their previous forecast for a 5% decline. But I think even that is optimistic. Every week we are re-estimating the impact of the crisis downwards. We aren’t just in a recession, we are most likely at the beginning of an economic depression.

If Goldman’s economists are right, that means the U.S. is approaching the sharpest single-quarter decline in gross domestic product since the U.S. started measuring GDP in its current form. These are the world’s best analysts we are talking about.

In terms of job losses, we’ve never seen anything like what is happening today at the end of March, 2020. The record for one week is 695,000 in 1982, and there’s talk that this could set a new standard. We are going to crush that record in 2020. We could lose up to 4 million jobs just in May, 2020 and it could go on for a long time. This is because the pandemic will likely have many waves.

Most people on Wall Street realized this is worse than the great recession of 2008, about two or three weeks ago. However politicians haven’t been open about that situation economically, and what we will witness in NYC will tell a true story of the economic toll of the pandemic. NYC is the center also because it will soon be the only place in North America where we will start to get an accurate picture as to the community spread of the virus.

New York is testing more people than any state in the country and, per capita, more than any country on the globe. But that distinction is just a new situation which we will have to monitor closely. It’s highly likely New York State becomes as Lombardi region is now in Italy or how Hubei province was in China a few weeks ago.

The decline in the price of oil also really impacts the stock market which impacts the economy. Oil is getting hit on both the supply and the demand side. A slowdown in worldwide travel and business activity is weighing on demand, just as powerhouse producers Saudi Arabia and Russia prepare to ramp up production. So rising unemployment and lower prices of oil will keep the economy depressed until the health crisis flattens the curve at some point in the weeks ahead.

Unlike prior periods of economic turmoil, including the financial crisis of 2008, the long-term impact of the coronavirus is still very much unknown. The uncertainty and death toll will impact the fear that is putting economic sentiment in ruins. This means a U-shaped recovery is more likely with an uncertain timeline.

How NYC responds to the health crisis will be peak in the media as the economic sacrifice of social distancing becomes clearer as it is now a global event. Pandemics such as the 1918 influenza offer one key takeaway: Clear communication from the federal government is key. Unfortunately in the U.S. we did not have this, with massive unpreparedness and the failure of the CDC to act. This is a fact, it’s not an opinion.

The President can point fingers at the Fed or the Media, but governors are pointing fingers at the Federal leadership. This shows you how confused and fragmented the response of the U.S. has been, which is an ominous sign for its economy. If the U.S. is in recession, the rest of the world will likely be even worse off. We could witness a breakdown of social cohesion and social stability in 2020 as this drags on.

What an exponential curve of Covid-19 could do to the global economy is not widely understood. What we do know is it’s already bad as retail, hospitality, travel and small businesses will be leveled. How many businesses will be able to survive the shutdown? Even with significant bailouts and state ownership, companies without great balance sheets are all vulnerable. Only the giants can survive.

Even the billionaires are raising the alarm bells. But even this profits them. If America “ends as we know it”, those monopoly companies and billionaires are likely to gain power, not lose it. Capitalism hasn’t been a meritocracy for quite some time already, but after this it will be considerably worse as potentially millions of people fall out of the middle class in the shock to the system.

Corporate losses due to the pandemic could easily top $4 Billion. So why would we bail out businesses ahead of people? Because people rely on those businesses and it’s all about mitigating the job losses. But it all happens too fast. Millions of Americans will be out of work in the next 8 to 12 weeks. How to bail them out becomes the question.

Capitalism does not work in an 18-month shutdown, capitalism can work in a 30-day shutdown. But the pandemic isn’t a month long event. It’s a crisis that will escalate. The impact on the global economy will be profound and take years to recover from.

Globally, the outbreak will cost corporations $12 trillion. How many jobs will social distancing cost the world? That’s beyond the scope of this article, but it will likely skyrocket unemployment to new highs. A recovery from that sort of crisis would take many months and perhaps never occur (like we saw with 2008).

The economic tsunami that is coming will be witnessed in New York City, the economic hub of America. NY state has about half of reported Covid-19 cases in the United States as of the end of March, 2020. According to Google Trends we can tell the job losses in the week of April 23rd, 2020 are likely nearing 1 million.

I like New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo in how he addresses the health crisis, but what can he say about the financial crisis that it entails? The testing crisis in America will significantly augment the economic crisis in America. The United States is likely to deal with the virus worse than China did, because of the lack of a unified leadership before it was too late.

There are ‘insurmountable obstacles’ for retail, supply chains, hospitality, travel, entertainment, startups, small businesses, small to medium enterprises and for jobs to survive. Millions of people are likely to get the Covid-19 disease and at least hundreds of thousands will die. We have to prepare for what this could mean for the breakdown of society on a temporary basis, and that means economically.

This will transform capitalism, not for the better. Economically this is not a recession, it’s likely a depression. The stock market, oil prices and global panic are telling us this. Will we listen? How can we respond? We can’t live in quasi-quarantine forever. Life must go on, but at what price?

What’s happening has not happened in our lifetime and instead of watching for deaths by the coronavirus, we need to think and plan as businesses and individuals about the economic consequences. The News doesn’t cover this well. But as people we must be aware of the economic reality. A Bill Ackman can survive, but can we?