Having largely ignored Covid-19 as it spread across China, global financial markets reacted strongly last week when the virus spread to Europe and the Middle East, stoking fears of a global pandemic. Since then, Covid-19 risks have been priced so aggressively across various asset classes that some fear a recession in the global economy may be a foregone conclusion.

In our conversations, business leaders are asking whether the market drawdown truly signals a recession, how bad a Covid-19 recession would be, what the scenarios are for growth and recovery, and whether there will be any lasting structural impact from the unfolding crisis.

In truth, projections and indices won’t answer these questions. Hardly reliable in the calmest of times, a GDP forecast is dubious when the virus trajectory is unknowable, as are the effectiveness of containment efforts, and consumers’ and firms’ reactions. There is no single number that credibly captures or foresees Covid-19’s economic impact.

Instead, we must take a careful look at market signals across asset classes, recession and recovery patterns, as well as the history of epidemics and shocks, to glean insights into the path ahead.

What Markets are Telling Us

Last week’s brutal drawdown in global financial markets might seem to indicate that the world economy is on a path to recession. Valuations of safe assets have spiked sharply, with the term premium on long-dated U.S. government bonds falling to near record lows at negative 116 basis points — that’s how much investors are willing to pay for the safe harbor of U.S. government debt. As a result, mechanical models of recession risk have ticked higher.

Yet, a closer look reveals that a recession should not be seen as a foregone conclusion.

First, take valuations of risk assets, where the impact of Covid-19 has not been uniform. On the benign end, credit spreads have risen remarkably little, suggesting that credit markets do not yet foresee funding and financing problems. Equity valuations have conspicuously fallen from recent highs, but it should be noted that they are still elevated relative to their longer-term history. On the opposite end of the spectrum, volatility has signaled the greatest strain, intermittently putting implied next-month volatility on par with any of the major dislocations of the past 30 years, outside of the global financial crisis.

Second, while financial markets are a relevant recession indicator (not least because they can also cause them), history shows that bear markets and recessions should not be automatically conflated. In reality, the overlap is only about two out of every three U.S. bear markets — in other words, one out of every three bear markets is non-recessionary. Over the last 100 years, we counted seven such instances where bear markets did not coincide with recessions.

There is no doubt that financial markets now ascribe significant disruptive potential to Covid-19, and those risks are real. But the variations in asset valuations underline the significant uncertainty surrounding this epidemic, and history cautions us against drawing a straight line between financial market sell-offs and the real economy.

What Would a Covid-19-Induced Recession Look Like?

Though market sentiment can be misleading, recessionary risk is real. The vulnerability of major economies, including the U.S. economy, has risen as growth has slowed and the expansions of various countries are now less able to absorb shocks. In fact, an exogenous shock hitting the U.S. economy at a time of vulnerability has been the most plausible recessionary scenario for some time.

Recessions typically fall into one of three categories:

Looking at this taxonomy, and again at history, there is some good news in the “real economy” classification. Though idiosyncratic, real recessions tend to be more benign than either policy recessions or those induced by financial crisis, as they represent potentially severe but essentially transient demand (or supply) shocks. Policy recessions, by contrast, can be, depending on the size of the error, severe. In fact, the Great Depression was induced by perhaps the largest policy error ever. And financial crises are the most pernicious kind, since they introduce structural problems into the economy that can take a long time to be corrected.

What is the Likely Recovery Path?

Whether economies can avoid the recession or not, the path back to growth under Covid-19 will depend on a range of drivers, such as the degree to which demand will be delayed or foregone, whether the shock is truly a spike or lasts, or whether there is structural damage, among other factors. It’s reasonable to sketch three broad scenarios, which we described as V-U-L.

Will There be Any Lasting Economic Consequences of Covid-19?

To understand this, we need to examine the transmission mechanism through which the health crisis infects the economy.

If the taxonomy of recessions tells us where the virus likely attacks the economy, transmission channels tell us how the virus takes control of its host. This is important since it implies different impacts and remedies. There are three plausible transmission channels:

Recessions are predominantly cyclical, not structural, events. And yet the boundary can be blurred. To illustrate, the global financial crisis was a (very bad) cyclical event in the U.S., but it had a structural overhang. The economy rebounded, yet household deleveraging is an ongoing secular phenomenon — household willingness (and ability) to borrow is structurally impaired, and the collateral damage, structurally, is that policy makers find it much harder to push the cycle just by managing short-term interest rates today.

Could Covid-19 create its own structural legacy? History suggests that the global economy after a major crisis like Covid-19 will likely be different in a number of significant ways.

What Should Leaders Do in Relation to Economic Risks?

The insights from financial markets and the history of analogous shocks can be operationalized as follows: