The last time the world seized with panic over an economic catastrophe, those given the job of limiting the damage knew what to do. The global financial crisis of 2008 presented a textbook case of what happens when people lose faith in the banking system all at once. World leaders could rely on lessons gleaned from history to forge a plan: They flooded the markets with money and waited for calm to return.

But this time, as economic overseers confront a pandemic that has sent stock markets hurtling downward while provoking talk of a global recession, their tools appear impotent. The disaster feels eerily familiar, with trillions of dollars in wealth annihilated near-daily and deepening fears that businesses will fail. Yet the traditional policy prescriptions seem no match for the affliction at hand.

“In many ways it’s far worse than 2008,” said Joseph E. Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate economist. “There was a sense that 2008 was a show that we had seen before — the panic of 1907, the Great Depression. We know about financial crises. We knew that it was just money, and that one way or the other the government would step in and save the bankers from their folly.”

This time, Mr. Stiglitz added, the cause of the emergency is not bankers and their exotic and dangerous creations but the natural sphere — a less predictable realm. The fundamental threat to the global economy is the spread of the coronavirus. Yet the means of containing its spread entail worsening the economic pain by keeping workers home, limiting travel and disrupting commerce.