Here is a great blog post by Harvard University’s economist Greg Mankiw about the scale of the current crisis. Using a chart by Georgetown Public Policy Institute’s economist Donald Marron, he writes:
But a very standard metric is the peak-to-trough decline in real GDP. The chart above, from Donald Marron, shows that by this measure, the current recession is the worst since the Great Depression, as as long as you exclude the return to trend after the World War II boom.
Note that the phrase the worst since the Great Depression may inadvertently lead the reader to think that we are somehow getting close to the Great Depression in severity. As the chart shows, that is not at all the case.
Here is the chart. But the whole thing is worth reading.
