Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman who served before and after the 2008 financial crisis, told CNBC on Wednesday the coronavirus economic halt is more like a “major snowstorm” than an economic depression.
“This is a very different animal than the Great Depression,” Bernanke stressed. “The Great Depression, for one thing, lasted for 12 years, and it came from human problems: monetary and financial shocks that hit the system.”
“This has some of the same feel of panic, some of the feel of volatility,” he said in a “Squawk Box” interview. “It’s really much closer to a major snowstorm or a natural disaster than it is to a classic 1930s-style depression...”
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