Household debt to make virus much worse

Extend and pretend, at Bloomie:

“There’s no doubt that we’re going into the greatest job destruction period ever,” said Bob Gregory, a professor at Australian National University in Canberra who specializes in the labor market and has studied the economy for more than half a century. “This looks like the most serious recession-depression we’ve had since the 1930s, and there’s going to be a big income loss in the next six months.”

…“Australia’s high household debt was never going to be a cause of a recession, but it would quite possibly magnify the impact of anything else that caused a recession,” said Saul Eslake, an independent economist who has analyzed the Australian economy for 40 years.