and prevent a new Depression in recent weeks, introducing round after round of new spending and loan guarantees to the tune of trillions of dollars.
Amid the crisis, federal spending is expected to hit almost $4 trillion more in 2020 than the government collects in revenues, with the deficit’s size calculated to be twice as large relative to the size of the US economy in any year since 1945, when America was involved in a World War. In previous crises, the United States has depended on the dollar’s status as the world’s de-facto reserve currency, racking up debts and engaging in quantitative easing without fear that investors could someday conclude that the state can’t pay its debts and dump US treasuries, resulting in soaring inflation and skyrocketing interest rates.